Death and the Olive Grove Read online

  On the desk was a brand-new report: during the night a prominent businessman had caught a burglar in the act of robbing his villa at Bellosguardo and shot him with his hunting rifle, gravely wounding him. Self-defence, the businessman had called it. Bordelli knew the burglar well: Bernardo, an unlucky wretch who had never harmed a fly. He had simply gone to pick up a crumb of prosperity in an Italy with a few very rich people and a great deal of poverty, and for this he was shot with a hunting rifle. There was something about this that didn’t make sense. Bordelli finished reading the report, shaking his head. He rang Mugnai on the internal line.

  ‘Send me Piras, please.’

  At that moment there was a knock at the door, and Piras poked his head inside.

  ‘Mugnai, don’t bother. He’s already here,’ said Bordelli.

  He set down the phone and stood up, looking the young Sardinian in the eye.

  ‘You know what Casimiro had in his stomach, Piras?’ And he told him everything Diotivede had told him about the little man’s last supper. Piras scratched his head.

  ‘What a stinking mess,’ he said.

  Bordelli huffed, then picked up the bottle of de Maricourt cognac and started staring at it as if trying to read the truth in it.

  That same night Bordelli returned alone to the olive grove in Fiesole. The sky was clear and full of stars. As it was almost the new moon, he’d brought along a torch. But he knew the place well by now, and managed not to turn it on.

  He didn’t really know what he’d come looking for. He wanted only to poke about a bit, in the hope of discovering something. He could have asked Judge Ginzillo for a warrant to search the villa, but for the moment he preferred to proceed with caution. He still had no idea who he was dealing with, and was afraid to make a wrong move. Anyway, Ginzillo was too timid, always clinging to legal quibbles like a vine, terrified of wrecking his judicial career with a single mistake. For the moment it was best to forget about Ginzillo, who would only waste a great deal of his time, as usual.

  At last he came to a stop, at a spot from where he had a good view of the villa. As usual, the shutters were all closed and no light was visible. The air was still. There was deep silence. He leaned back against the trunk of a great, leafy olive tree and lit a cigarette, taking care to hide the flame of the match. On so dark a night, he risked being seen. He smoked with his hand cupped round the burning cigarette-end, the way he used to do in the war.

  All at once he saw a window light up in the villa, but a few seconds later it was dark again. He tossed the butt to the ground and snuffed it out with his shoe. He suddenly felt like imposing on Miss Olga. He was about to return to the car when he noticed something. Turning round, he glimpsed a human silhouette in the distance, walking through the olive trees. He crouched instinctively and held still. He was almost certain he hadn’t been seen. The man was strolling casually through the trees, as if he could see quite well in the darkness. The inspector waited for him to draw near, then popped out and came towards the man, shining the torch and pointing his pistol at him.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. The man quickly sidestepped and stopped. Bordelli lit up his face, and for a moment he thought he was looking at a mask. The face was full of wrinkles, with two powerful eyes that seemed to belong to a wounded animal.

  ‘Good evening,’ said the man, body relaxing. Bordelli lowered the beam of light to the stranger’s clothes. He clearly was not a vagrant, and actually seemed rather well dressed. Bordelli raised the torch again to the man’s face.

  ‘Were you looking for something?’

  ‘Who are you, if I may ask?’ the man said innocuously. He had the accent of a foreigner who had lived for a long time in Italy.

  ‘Police,’ said Bordelli. The man didn’t seem the least bit surprised.

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’ he asked.

  The inspector took a step forward.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was out for a stroll.’

  ‘At one o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘At one o’clock in the morning,’ said the man, unflinching.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me your name, for starters?’ said Bordelli, making the mistake of lowering his gun. The man muttered something in a strange language, then bounded forward and, before the inspector realised what was happening, punched him in the stomach. Bordelli fell to his knees, the wind knocked out of him, and the torch slipped from his hand. With some effort he raised his head, then saw the man’s black silhouette running like a rhinoceros towards the wood. He took aim with his pistol and was about to fire but decided against it. What sort of bloody language was the big ape speaking, anyway? It sounded like something Slavic, or Arabic.

  When he had regained his breath, he stood up, reeling, and with one hand on his liver, he staggered back to the Beetle. He felt like an ass. He sat inside the car for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette under the moon, which that night was as slender as the stroke of a pen. Tossing the butt out the window, he started the engine. He climbed up the Via del Bargellino and a moment later stopped in front of the villa’s entrance. He got out of the car and went up to the gate. All was dark. He pulled on the bell insistently, not giving a damn that it was the middle of the night. Lights came on on the first floor, and then on the ground floor. A moment later the door opened, and Miss Olga appeared in silhouette in the lighted doorway.

  ‘Miss Olga, please forgive me for coming at this time of the night,’ he shouted. ‘It’s me again, Inspector Bordelli.’

  The woman wrapped her shawl about her neck and came forward through the garden. She stopped a step away from the gate and did not open it. This time she was in a dressing gown, and her eyes looked very angry.

  ‘I vas asleep,’ she said, annoyed.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you for a minute.’

  ‘Then talk.’

  ‘Has the baron returned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Africa, I think.’

  ‘And you don’t know when he’ll be back?’

  ‘Nein.’ Uttered drily by the puckered mouth of Fraulein Olga, that word brought Bordelli back to the war days. He stared at the woman, imagining her in an SS uniform.

  ‘Does the villa belong to the baron?’

  ‘Ja … Yes.’

  ‘When did he buy it?’

  ‘You can research zese things by yourself.’

  ‘If you tell me now you’ll save me a lot of time.’

  ‘After the war,’ the woman said with a sigh, increasingly irritated.

  ‘Forgive me for asking, signorina, but does the baron by any chance have a large black spot on his neck?’

  ‘I really sink you mistake him for anozzer persson.’

  ‘And one last thing. Have you noticed anything strange around here lately?’

  ‘If dare was somesing strange I call the police,’ said Olga, staring at him. Bordelli tried to smile.

  ‘When the baron returns, would you be so good as to tell him to come and see me?’

  ‘Baron stays away long time, maybe months.’

  ‘Well, if you’re in touch with him by telephone, please tell him to give me a ring at police headquarters.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Thank you, and sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘Good night,’ said Miss Olga. She did an about-face, marched to the house and closed the great door behind her with a thud. You certainly couldn’t call her hospitable.

  One evening in January 1944, in a little town in the south, Bordelli and Gavino Piras, the father of Bordelli’s young assistant, had gone out for a walk along the roads. They had put civilian coats over their uniforms. The 8th of September was still a recent memory,7 and the area was still full of Nazis. It was foolhardy to be out like that, and they knew it. Round a bend they were stopped by a German military lorry and forced at gunpoint to climb aboard the flatbed, where there were other men, old and young, with fear in their eyes. They were all bro
ught to a farmstead just outside the town and forced to dig a large pit in the muddy ground, perhaps to bury their dead. Bordelli and Piras were in a cold sweat. If the Germans ever discovered that they were with the San Marco Battalion, they would have them shot as traitors. And so they shovelled earth and mud with the others for almost three hours, with nobody opening his mouth, and then they were all released. Once they were round the corner, Piras and Bordelli burst out laughing. Not from amusement, but from the tension accumulated in their guts, which demanded release. It seemed almost impossible that they’d come out alive. They returned to camp and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. They spent the night awake, smoking like chimneys.

  Bordelli got up out of bed at six, without having slept. He still had that chilling adventure with Gavino on his mind. The ashtray emitted a nasty, sickly-sweet smell. He went and emptied it in the dustbin in the kitchen, then returned to the bedroom. He opened the window and looked out, shivering from the cold. It was still dark outside. A very light rain was falling, tiny little drops that glittered like diamonds in the light of the street lamps. He lit a cigarette and rested his elbows on the sill, thinking of the monster who had killed Valentina. Maybe the killer, too, was awake and looking at the same low sky, the same blanket of dark clouds. He tried to imagine the man. Perhaps he was lonely, rejected by all, half mad, and had killed on impulse, for reasons only God knew. And now he carried that horrible secret inside, crushed by guilt, unable to understand the monstrous force that welled up in him at certain moments. Or perhaps not. Maybe he was pleased with what he had done and was already planning another murder. Or maybe he was neither devastated by guilt nor pleased with himself, and simply carried on with his life, indifferent to everything. It was anybody’s guess.

  The inspector blew his smoke against the sky and ran a hand over his face. His brain was weary. He wished he could detach his head in order to stop thinking. He flicked the butt into the street below and lit another. It was disgusting and tasted like metal. Leaving the window open, he went and lay down in bed. To distract himself, he started studying the details of the room. He knew intimately every crack and stain in the plaster, the areas where the paint was flaking off the shutters, the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, the cardboard wedges under the bookcase, the worn-out spines of his books, which never changed place over the years. Sometimes he liked seeing everything stay the same; at other times he couldn’t stand it. He blew the smoke forcefully out of his mouth …

  The desire to kill … Perhaps it had deep roots in the heart of every man. An irrational force, an ancestral legacy that smacked of the survival instinct. Or perhaps it was the wish to learn something about death, to see it with one’s own two eyes …

  He remembered the time he had killed a lizard as a little boy. He may have killed many more, but that was the one he remembered. It was summertime. The lizard was a few yards away from him, immobile at the foot of a pine tree, peacefully sunning itself. It was nice and big, and very green. He had taken aim with his slingshot, driven by a will he didn’t understand. He had let the elastic band go, and the stone had struck the lizard on the head, making it jump in the air. He had approached to look at it. The lizard lay on its back, a line of blood round its neck. Its belly was white and scaly, and its tail was still moving, as if it refused to die. He stood and watched it for several minutes, horrified and fascinated by that pointless death. The decision to kill had been entirely his own, and now he felt all the weight of that irremediable act on his shoulders, unable to understand why he had done it …

  In the two years of war following the Armistice, he had killed many Nazis, but at least he knew why. He had wanted to fight them face to face. That was why he had asked to join the San Marco Battalion after spending three years on boats and submarines. When April 1945 arrived, he had twenty-four notches carved in the butt of his machine gun, and they were only for SS men that he was certain he had personally killed. Looking at those dead bodies, he had felt something entirely different. Mostly nausea. Nausea for all those dead, for himself, for war.

  He snuffed out the fag-end and put his hands behind his head. He half-closed his eyes, to rest them. No, maybe the monster wasn’t awake after all. Maybe he was sleeping as he did every other night, normally, like one who has come home tired from work, disappointed and resigned, or melancholy, depending on the day. And he was curled up in bed, clutching the pillow, as he himself often did. If he lived in Florence, he breathed the same air as Bordelli, walked the same streets, saw the same buildings, the same churches, was one of the many on whom he happened to rest his gaze for a second. Perhaps they had even looked each other in the eye once or twice in the street, or brushed shoulders, as so often happened with so many people.

  He sat up to look at the alarm clock. Quarter to seven. He switched off the light and turned on to his side. It was almost dawn. His head felt heavy, enveloped in the vapours of a sleepiness that clouded his vision without ever delivering the coup de grâce. A cold breeze blew in through the open window. He didn’t feel like getting up, and wrapped the covers round himself, clutching the pillow tightly to his chest. His bronchial tubes were inflamed from the cigarettes. He felt more numb than ever, but couldn’t stop thinking. It was as though someone were ceaselessly turning a crank connected to his brain. He thought about the war, childhood, the fact of being fifty-four years old, Rosa’s massages, Casimiro balled up inside the suitcase … He thought about the absurd, wrongful death of Valentina, and her mother sleeping in a hospital, pumped full of sedatives … He thought about the time that—

  The telephone rang, and in the darkness his hand found the receiver.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Is that you, Marshal?’

  ‘What is it, Signora Capecchi?’

  The old lady seemed quite agitated.

  ‘Things are going from bad to worse here. Zillo has disappeared!’ she said.

  ‘Who is Zillo?’

  ‘My canary … He’s gone! The cage is empty! He’s been kidnapped! And I think I know who did it …’

  ‘Nocentini?’

  ‘That hooligan wants to frighten me! He wants to make me die … Ohhh!’

  ‘What’s happening, signora?’

  ‘Buricchio … he’s got feathers in his mouth …’

  ‘Who is Buricchio?’

  ‘My cat …’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘Buricchio, come here!… you naughty, wicked cat … What have you done with Zillo?’

  He got to the office at about ten o’clock, pumped full of coffee, after leaving the Beetle at the police department’s garage for a check-up. He had slept barely two hours. His ears were ringing. He put out the cigarette he had just lit and went to see Porcinai in Archives.

  The archivist raised his powerful head and rubbed his eyes, two big, round, gentle eyes like a sheep’s.

  ‘Hello, Bordelli.’

  ‘What are you eating?’

  ‘Sommommoli.8 Want one?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Porcinai lived in the darkness of the archive from morning to evening, always sitting. He didn’t even get up to eat. It was too much of an effort. He would bring mysterious packages from home, stick them in a drawer and then nibble a bit of everything all day long, getting his fingers greasy and wiping them on his trousers. A bright white lamp lit up the desktop, which was littered with papers and folders. The rest of the large room remained almost always in darkness.

  ‘What do you need, Bordelli?’

  ‘I can manage by myself, thanks. Just turn on the light for me.’

  Porcinai flipped a switch he’d had installed under the desk, and the fluorescent tubes came on, one after another. The inspector made his way through the stacks, which stretched to the ceiling, looking for the records of criminal offenders. He pulled out a folder from the shelf marked ABA-CES. It was full to bursting. He brought it over to a table and started thumbing through it listlessly. It was just a way for him to feel as if he was doing something.
He was thinking about the man at the villa with the bloody black spot on his neck. He read the names and looked at the faces: Abitanti, Vito; Abbate, Angelo; Abelamenti, Nicola; Abissino, Giuseppe; Accursio, Tommaso … but he felt that he wasn’t going to find anything of interest in these files, only the normal faces of normal criminals. In the end he gave up. He put the folder back in its place and stopped for a few minutes to chat with Porcinai, sitting down on a corner of the desk. Then he patted him on the back and went back to his office.

  He collapsed into his chair, sighing. He hadn’t made an inch of progress on either of the two murders and felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

  It was almost noon. A steely sky weighed down upon the city, the cold air pressing against the windowpanes, steaming them up. And yet it was mid-April.

  He reread the reports on the little girl for the thousandth time. He looked at the photos, thinking that the killer, too, had witnessed that scene. This gave him an unpleasant feeling, as if a very fine thread linked him directly with the killer. If only he could follow that thread, inch by inch, without ever pulling on it, all the way to the culprit …

  He jotted something down on a notepad, hoping this might grant him some sort of foothold for moving forward. But after a few minutes, he crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it into the waste basket.

  He picked up the telephone receiver and asked Mugnai to go and get him another coffee at the bar in Via San Gallo.

  ‘Drink whatever you like and have them put it on my tab,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Inspector.’

  While waiting for his coffee, he was summoned by the commissioner. And so he went upstairs one floor, with no desire whatsoever to do so. Knocking faintly, he pushed the door open without waiting. Commissioner Inzipone greeted him properly and offered him a cigarette.

  ‘Thanks, I’ve got my own,’ the inspector said, sitting down. The commissioner looked at him with concern.

  ‘Did you want to talk about the round-up?’ Bordelli asked provocatively.