Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
The only one wearing a jacket was Davide, and maybe he was the only other thing that was working apart from the air conditioning: suddenly in his life he had encountered beer, it had been an abrupt, passionate encounter, which greatly accelerated the detoxifying therapy, beer might be fattening, but someone like Davide would need a whole barrel of it before he got fat. As his alcohol intake decreased, Davide was slowly regaining the power of speech and a kind of masculine energy. Just then, he said, with a glass coaster in his hand, ‘Doesn’t anybody want the pâté?’ and offered it around.
Mascaranti shook his head, and so did Carrua, because he was there, too, also without a jacket, chewing rather than smoking his cigarette. And Duca also shook his head, and looked tenderly at Davide as he spread pâté on a small slice of bread. Ten more days, more or less, and his patient would be able to live happily on mineral water and milk.
‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Carrua said, putting the cigarette down in the saucer of his filter coffee. ‘With the photographer.’
Mascaranti still had his little notebook in his hand. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘There was nothing left at 78 Via Farini the day before Alberta Radelli’s death, it was all above board. The two rooms had been rented by a German more than a year earlier, but the landlord and caretaker of the building
had seen this German only a couple of times, the only person working in the studio was a young man, a friend of the German, who told the caretaker his name was Caserli, or Caselli, but he’s not sure, because he didn’t see him often. Both the young man and the other man vanished into thin air a year ago.’
‘We should be able to track down the German,’ Carrua said, ‘you can’t rent premises without giving your particulars.’
‘Of course he gave them, here they are,’ and Mascaranti read, with a vague southern accent, a series of syllables coming from thousands of years back in the Black Forest, which his accent made a little genteel. ‘It’s an invented name and address, at least the police in Bonn, where this guy was supposed to be living, say there’s no name like it either in the official register of the city or in their own records.’
All that effort on the part of Mascaranti to find the studio, knowing nothing but the number, 78, and then when he had found it, there hadn’t been anybody or anything there for a year, nor had any trace been left behind.
‘One thing is clear,’ Duca said, mainly to Carrua, but also to Mascaranti, ‘to have rented those rooms using a false name, and then to have unfurnished it so quickly in the days after Alberta Radelli’s death, they must have considered the work they were doing there very important, and if the work consisted of taking photographs of naked women the caretaker must have seen girls going in and out.’
‘Yes, I questioned the caretaker’s wife, too,’ Mascaranti said. ‘Girls did pass through every now and again, but not very often, and she even told me what they were doing, she
and her husband had gone a couple of times to see, the young man had invited them up. They were photographing little model cars, trucks, harvesters, she told me, and sometimes the girls were there as background, they use women to advertise all kinds of things these days.’
A cover: industrial photos meaning nude photos. It had stood up very well, for more than a year, under the eyes of the police, and it had stood up even after they disappeared, so that Mascaranti had spent all evening seething with anger.
‘Now let’s talk about the other girl,’ Carrua said.
The police often succeed through repetition, by repeating that two plus two equals four in the end you discover something more, but there wasn’t anything more to be discovered about Maurilia.
‘Maurilia Arbati,’ Mascaranti read in the notebook, ‘twenty-seven years old, worked at La Rinascente, in the department selling fabrics, towels, that kind of thing.’
Twenty-seven: in the Minox photos she didn’t look it, she had reached the age of twenty-seven as a nice, hard-working girl, the personnel department at the store had never had to reprimand her, and suddenly at that relatively advanced age, she enters the dark world of adventure.
So Mascaranti goes to La Rinascente and gets to talk to the right manager.
‘Impossible, do you know how many girls there are here?’ the manager says. ‘How are we going to find her knowing only that her first name is Maurilia?’
‘With that,’ Mascaranti says, pointing to the telephone that connects to the store’s loudspeakers. ‘You put out this
message, for example:
Signorina Maurilia is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately
. Or even better:
Signorina Maurilia, or any of her workmates who knows her, is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately.’
The manager calls a female clerk, she comes in, writes down the message and puts it out, once, twice, three times in succession, then waits three minutes and puts it out again, to all floors, to every corner of the store, through dozens of loudspeakers, so that it’s heard by all the people buying feeding bottles, Marie Therese chandeliers, flippers, ties for daddy, they hear the call, soft, not loud, but clear, the name Maurilia perfectly pronounced. As the clerk is just about to put the message out for the third time, the secretary admits a very short fair-haired girl, she doesn’t look much more than a child, although there are a number of things to indicate that she isn’t.
‘Maurilia?’ Mascaranti asks.
‘No, I’m a friend of hers.’
‘This gentleman is from the police,’ the manager says sternly. ‘Try to answer his questions as accurately as you can.’
‘What’s Maurilia’s surname?’ Mascaranti asks.
‘Arbati,’ the fair-haired girl says.
Triumphantly, Mascaranti writes the name in the little notebook, in three minutes he’s tracked down the blonde from the photograph, he’s home and dry. ‘Where does she live?’
The fair-haired girl hesitates, she’s about to say something, and he insists, he’s getting impatient: we’ll go to where this Maurilia Arbati lives, pick her up, and I’ll take her to
Headquarters and there we’ll be able to sort this thing out, she posed for the photographs, she’ll know who, how, why. ‘Where does she live?’ he asks curtly.
The girl gets scared and says, ‘12 Via Nino Bixio,’ as accurately as the manager asked.
‘You’re good friends, right?’ Mascaranti asks: to know the address, like that, by heart, they must be good friends. The little fair-haired girl doesn’t reply, but it doesn’t matter, he has another question to ask: ‘Why didn’t Maurilia come up here herself? She’s the one we called for.’
‘Maybe she’s off sick,’ the manager says.
‘She’s dead,’ the little fair-haired girl says, turning pale, and they make her sit down.
‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’ Mascaranti wilts: if she’s dead he can’t question her, and if he can’t question her he won’t be able to sort anything out at all.
‘She died a year ago,’ the little fair-haired girl says, ‘poor thing, when I heard her name over the loudspeaker just now I felt really bad, after all this time, hearing that they wanted her in the manager’s office as if she was still alive.’
She had died very simply, she had left her work without saying anything, even to her, and had gone to Rome, probably with someone—a boyfriend, the little fair-haired girl said, modestly—she had wanted to take a swim, maybe she had been taken ill, and the next day they had found her by the Tiber, just outside Rome, washed up on the river bank like an abandoned boat, in her swimming costume, her clothes in the bushes almost a kilometre further down. The little fair-haired girl had found out from Maurilia’s parents when
she had phoned them nearly a week later for news of her friend.
So that was the story and Mascaranti had immediately understood. ‘What’s your name?’ he had asked the little fair-haired girl, he had taken all her particulars, then had gone back to Headquarters and phoned Rome. Maurilia Arbati, death by drowning, found in the Tiber at such and such a spot, at such and such a time, by Signor such and such. From the archive he had even had somebody fetch him the Rome newspapers from that date, and read all the items about her he could find, most of which asked the question: Accident or crime? Did she drown or was she killed? You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant: in four days the two girls who had posed for the photographs on that Minox film had died, the blonde on the first day, the brunette on the fourth. One on the outskirts of Milan, in Metanopoli, the other near Rome, drowned in the Tiber. Both deaths were curiously ambiguous, one a not entirely convincing suicide, the other an accident that aroused everyone’s suspicions.
Now the ambiguity was over, they had died because they had been killed. With a bit of skill the perpetrators had staged Alberta’s suicide, she even had a letter in her handbag for her sister in which she asked forgiveness for killing herself—had they forced her to write it, or had she written it earlier, really intending to kill herself? And then a kind of accident for the other girl, Maurilia, an unlikely accident: a young Milanese woman who suddenly goes off to Rome to swim in the Tiber and drowns.
The silent Davide who was getting his voice back even
asked a question: ‘But why did they kill one in Milan and one in Rome?’ He was a little naïve.
Duca, his doctor, explained it to him, patiently: he was the one person he was patient with. ‘Because if in the space of four days, a blonde girl was found drowned here in Milan, in the Lambro, let’s say, and then a brunette with her wrists slashed in Metanopoli, the police might link these two rather mysterious deaths and suspect from the start that there was a connection with something bigger. Whereas this way, the dead girl found drowned in Rome couldn’t possibly have anything to do, at least for the moment, with the dead girl in Metanopoli. The Rome police investigate their drowned girl and the Milan police their suicide, but they don’t find anything because they don’t know there’s any connection. You were the one who uncovered the connection by handing over that film, you were the one who was with Alberta the day before they killed her.’
‘So,’ said Davide—some people go from silence to being unable to stop talking—’if I’d handed over that film to the police immediately and told them everything that Alberta had told me, the culprits might have been found immediately.’
‘Maybe,’ Duca, his clandestine doctor, said. His patient had every possible guilt complex, not a single one escaped him. ‘Except that you’d have had to know that the thing Alberta left in your car along with her handkerchief was a cartridge and contained exposed film. But you didn’t know that. And your father would have broken your bones one by one as soon as he found out you’d got involved in something
like this.’ A little laugh from Carrua who knew his powerful friend, Engineer Pietro Auseri, and a knowing smile from Mascaranti. ‘You’re not guilty of anything. So calm down and pour us some beer.’
‘I think we can draw a few conclusions,’ Carrua said. ‘First point: white slave trade. I don’t think there’s any doubt.’
No, there wasn’t any doubt. Even though he was a doctor and an apostle, he was hungry and finished the few remaining canapés.
‘Second point: white slave trade on a large scale. We aren’t dealing with a couple of shabby local pimps who’ve made contact with a couple of shabby pimps from some other country, to exchange a few unfortunate girls. We’re dealing with an organised gang of people who’ll stop at nothing, who are prepared to kill to prevent their activities getting out. I think that, too, is clear.’
Fairly clear, even though Duca, as an apostle, did not believe in big organisations. There may well be a few rogues here, but good ones, and he already knew where Carrua was going with this. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you want to inform Interpol, that’s perfectly fine. In the end you’ll discover everything, but it’s going to take a long time because you don’t have a lead. These two girls weren’t professionals, they were amateurs, two girls working for themselves, two unfortunate girls, but of good family. Every now and again they went out on the streets, but they had no links to the world of prostitution, they didn’t have pimps. Their parents, their relatives, their friends don’t know anything about their activity, these were girls with jobs and even in the places where they
worked everybody talks well of them: serious girls, decent, punctual, in fact they’d have had to have been that way or they’d have been found out after a few weeks. The only lead we have is that film, but we don’t know who the photographer was, he’s vanished into thin air, and the girls who posed for those photographs are dead. Yes, of course, you’ll get these people in the end, but it’s going to take a long time. I can’t wait that long.’
Another little laugh from Carrua. ‘Really? So how would you suggest we hurry things up?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure yet, but I’d like to start with a hypothesis.’
‘What hypothesis?’
‘That these men have started their work again. They got scared when the film went missing, killed the two girls, then probably laid low for about three or four months. Then, once it was obvious the police believed the brunette had killed herself and the blonde had had an accident, they started moving again. Milan must be very lucrative, you’d start again, too, if you were in their place.’
‘I’m not sure I like you associating me with that kind of work,’ Carrua said: being in a hotel, he was trying hard not to shout. ‘But yes, I’d start again.’
‘If you start working again,’ Duca went on, ‘even though he was sure Carrua had already understood, ‘you do the same things you did a year ago, the same things that proved to be very lucrative, that is, you go in search of new girls, who are only just entering the circuit, and you make them enter your circuit before the competition gets them. So we
can start from that hypothesis: the men we’re interested in are working again, here in Milan, even now, this evening.’
Carrua was motionless, as if turned to wood, that was how he was when he concentrated. ‘All right, if we assume they are working again, we set the usual trap. We take a girl, send her out on the streets to do what the girls in the photographs were doing and at some point she’ll be picked up by one of these men, and once we’ve caught one, we’ll catch them all. It’s worth a try. What do we have to lose?’