I looked at Anna again. There was something cold and calculating about her. I had noticed it when I had mentioned inheritance.
‘Those months before Ricky went missing, anything happen?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Any unusual behaviour? New friendships?’
‘Unusual behaviour was all there was in Ricky’s life.’
‘You make him sound pretty shallow.’
‘No,’ she fixed me. ‘No, he wasn’t. He was unpredictable. He did unexpected things. If he won a lot of money he couldn’t sit on it. He would have to invite everyone around, have a big party, show he wasn’t a loser.’
‘And that summer he went missing. 1995. Anyone new in his life?’
She looked at me with tired eyes. ‘I don’t suppose he was any more faithful than other men. But I didn’t ask and he didn’t say. I would see him getting all dressed up to go out and put two and two together. But there was nothing new about that. He had been doing that ever since I was pregnant.’
‘Was he asking for money at the time?’
She closed her eyes, as if this were the first question she had thought about. ‘No, no he wasn’t.’
‘Wasn’t that unusual?’
‘Yes, I suppose it was. I didn’t think much about it because he was always saying that he was turning the corner, that this time it was for real. That he had everything sorted out. I didn’t listen to him because I had heard it all before. I recognised that excitement in his voice. It was all self-deception. We always had more money in the summer anyway. It was the only season we had regular work at the hotel. And he was a master at soliciting tips. He didn’t have time to gamble. He had even given me back some of the stuff I had lent him.’
‘How did he manage to do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How much?’
‘Small change. A few million lire.’
‘And that day he went back to the city for San Giovanni. Where were you?’
‘I was in the caravan. He left early morning, before I was even awake. I was here all weekend.’
‘On your own?’
‘With Elisabetta.’
‘Your girl?’
‘Sure.’
‘Who was how old?’
‘Two.’
‘Not much of a witness.’
She looked at me with a sour look. ‘I’ve been through all this before. He got on a train that Saturday morning and I never saw him again.’
‘He never came back?’
‘When he wasn’t home that night, I assumed he had stayed with his mother. It happened often enough.’
‘He didn’t call?’
‘No. And I wasn’t going to call her house.’
‘And when did you report him missing?’
‘On the Monday night. He missed a shift at the hotel. He didn’t always come home, but he never missed a shift at the Palace. He was due to do the Monday night, and he didn’t show. They called me and—’
‘What did you do?’
‘I called his mother.’
‘I thought you didn’t do that kind of thing.’
She stared at me through her thick eyelashes.
‘What did she say?’ I asked.
‘That she had dropped him at the station on the Saturday night.’
Her eyes had filled up and were about to overflow. As she blinked tears fell on to her cheeks, bringing with them burnt matchsticks of mascara. ‘That’s when it all started. She made all manner of accusations.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She thought I had failed to look after him. Umberto was coming round here every other night. So was Tonin.’
‘Who?’
‘Some old guy. Massimo Tonin.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Same as all the others. Wanted to know where Ricky was.’
‘Who was he?’
She laughed. ‘Ricky used to call any new friends investors. He was probably in on some project or other. He was from one of those tiny villages near the Po. He came round here demanding to know where Ricky was.’
‘When?’
‘The first week after he disappeared. Made the same sort of accusations that everyone else has made, said I must have seen him, must know something.’
‘Why?’
‘I assume he thought I was to blame.’
‘When was this?’
‘Towards the end of that week. Once it had been made public that Ricky was missing. He seemed desperate to get hold of him.’
‘And where will I find this Massimo Tonin?’
‘He lived somewhere near the city. La Bassa I think. They had only met a few months before.’
‘Come here,’ I said, taking hold of her upper arm. She tried to shrug off my grip, but I tightened it and she stamped her heels. I walked her towards the car. I opened the door and pushed her into the passenger seat. ‘Don’t move,’ I said, walking round to the boot. I pulled out the camera, switched it on and sat behind the wheel. I held the thing towards her. She looked at the images: mourners in black walking towards the cemetery.
I flicked through the photographs and she started naming them. ‘There’s Umberto and Roberta. The boys. I haven’t seen them for years.’ She took the camera in both hands and looked at the boys’ faces.
‘You didn’t want to go to the funeral?’
‘Whatever else I am, I’m not a hypocrite,’ she said.
‘And what about Elisabetta? Doesn’t she have a right to go to her own grandmother’s funeral?’
The woman looked at me and, for the first time, looked guilty. It was clear she hadn’t even told her daughter yet.
I took the camera back and sped through the photographs. ‘Tell me if you see Tonin.’
‘Go slower.’
My thumb kept clicking the shift. People got larger on the screen as they got closer.
‘That’s him.’
It wasn’t what I had expected. He was a tall, thin man with white hair. He had an overcoat with large shoulders, which only made his legs look thinner. The photograph showed him walking on his own. His face was a long way off, but it looked set against the world. A hard, marble face with a long, thin nose.
‘You sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Family?’
‘Don’t know.’
I nodded. I had to talk to Tonin. I could make an educated guess about what had been going on, but it was no more than a guess. Silvia Salati’s husband had died in 1995 and suddenly another man was getting close to young Riccardo. Someone was setting him straight financially.
‘How old is Elisabetta now?’
She shot a defensive stare at me, as if she wanted her daughter kept out of it. ‘Fifteen.’
‘And you’ve got other children?’
‘A boy. I married a few years ago.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said, sounding insincere. ‘When exactly?’
‘A year or two after all that.’ She shrugged.
‘I heard it was just a year.’ It might have come out more mean than I intended, because she pointed a finger at me and sneered.
‘There was no overlap.’
I leaned across her to open the door. ‘I’ll be in touch. If you think of anything, call me.’ I held out one of my cards. She took the card but didn’t move. She sat there for a few seconds, thinking. She looked at me as if sizing me up. ‘If you’re going to drag us through all this again I implore you, for the sake of my family, do it quickly.’
I nodded and started up the engine.
The Hotel Palace was dead in winter. In the foyer two boys were playing football with a screwed-up piece of paper. Their uniforms were unbuttoned and they looked like schoolchildren in a playground. They stopped when they saw me and one of them went behind the front desk.
‘Any grown-ups around?’ I asked.
The boy pointed through a doorway. It led through to a windowless box of a room. A man was pulling glasses out of a cardboard box and lining them up behind the bar.
‘Can I get a drink?’
The man grunted. ‘What do you want?’ The accent was Calabrese.
‘Give me a malvasia.’
The barman grunted again as he bent down to the fridge and pulled out a bottle. As he uncorked it, he spilt some on to his knuckles. He wiped his fingers on his oily apron, then picked up the bottle again and poured the yellow fizz into a flute.
‘Three euros.’
I passed him a twenty. ‘Keep the change.’
The man looked at me with tired eyes. ‘What are you after, Mister?’
‘Call it research. I’m trying to track down a character who used to live in Rimini in the early 1990s.’ I pulled out the photo. ‘He used to work here. Name’s Riccardo Salati. Had a woman from around here called Anna. Anna di Pietro.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Castagnetti. I’m an investigator.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to talk to the manager. Or preferably someone who worked here in the early 1990s.’
‘The manager’s not around.’
‘What’s his name?’
The barman made a tutting sound with his tongue as if even this much was confidential. I looked over his shoulder and read the licence granting the bar permission to sell alcohol. The name said Lo Bue.
‘Is the manager Lo Bue by any chance?’
‘Rings a bell.’
‘How long has he been here?’
‘Longer than me.’
‘Far back as ’95?’
‘How would I know?’
‘And where is he?’
‘He’s not around. He doesn’t show much during winter.’
‘And if you’ve got to phone him, where do you call?’
‘He doesn’t like to be disturbed.’
‘Say someone tells you to call him,’ I pulled out my pistol and placed it gently on the bar. ‘What number do you dial?’
The man opened his palms and put his hands upwards. He was staring at me with scorn. I kept one hand on the gun and pulled out my phone with the other. As the man said the numbers, I punched them in. I listened to the silence of connecting satellites.
‘Sì.’ A voice came on.
‘Lo Bue?’
‘Who is this?’ He was even thicker Calabrese than his heavy.
‘Castagnetti. I’m a private investigator.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to talk to you about Riccardo Salati.’
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds and then: ‘Who gave you my number?’
‘Father Christmas. So how about it? I hear he used to work for you back in the early 90s? Him and his woman, Anna di Pietro.’
‘I remember him. He was the lad that went missing.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Come to the hotel tomorrow. Come for lunch.’
‘Sure.’ I snapped the phone shut and looked at the barman.
‘What time’s lunch in your part of the world?’
‘Eh?’
‘Never mind.’ I put the ironmongery back in its holster. ‘Sorry about that. I get impatient sometimes.’
The drive back was dull and I started thinking about my bees. A few months ago I had had to burn three of my hives. They were all infested with varroa. Dirty little parasitic mites. It took a couple of minutes to burn years of hard work. Theirs, not mine.
I like them because there’s never any risk of me getting attached to one in particular. There are no names and no emotions. I said as much to Mauro a while back, and he laughed, and said that was why I had problems with women. But I like the bees because they are so different to humans. They believe in hard work and hierarchy, for one.
I had got into bees way back. When I was a boy and my parents had died, I went to live for a while with my uncle somewhere in the mountains outside Turin. He had a farm. One summer there was a swarm, a nasty blob of noisy bees like a furry tear-drop just able to cling to the branch. It was throbbing like a hairy heart.
A few hours later an old man arrived and dropped the swarm into a basket. There was something about the way he did it that impressed me. Maybe it was because he was French and the exoticism of the foreigner excited me. But I wanted to have that skill, to show a child that something terrifying could actually be beautiful and productive.
I forgot all about it until I found another swarm a few years back in a hollow tree up near Fornovo. I built a hive out of some old planks Mauro had and mail-ordered the rest. I had beginner’s luck for a while. The first year I got twenty-eight kilos of wonderful honey. I almost doubled it the next. I was hooked. I didn’t mind getting stung. No worse than a few nettles on a country walk. It cost next to nothing. You didn’t need more than half a dozen tools and a box of matches.
There was something peaceful to it. Maybe because they could so punitively defend themselves, there was a pact of gentility. If they had to sting, they died. If they stung, you were sore. So you were careful and respectful. You took their honey, but you fed them in winter, you kept them free of diseases. Or I did, until last summer.
The mites were everywhere. I tried being soft and hard. I used sucrocide and then chemicals, but nothing worked. In the end, I dug a hole in the ground, chucked the lot in there, and threw a match on top.
My phone started dancing on the dashboard. I put it to my ear and heard a young girl’s voice. ‘This the detective?’ The voice sounded soft and uncertain.
‘Sure, who’s this?’
‘My name’s Elisabetta di Pietro. You were with my mother this afternoon.’
I couldn’t work out how she had my number and then remembered. ‘And you found my card in her handbag?’
‘Her coat pocket actually.’ She laughed nervously. ‘Why is my mother hiring a private detective?’
‘She’s not.’
‘So who are you?’
‘I’m looking into your,’ I wasn’t sure how to say it tactfully, ‘into your father’s disappearance.’
‘You going to find my father?’
I made a non-committal noise.
‘I almost hope you don’t find him alive.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because the thought that he’s still out there and, I don’t know, never wanted to see me …’
It made sense. If Riccardo was alive, he clearly didn’t care about her. When children are treated that way, they learn to reciprocate.
‘There’s no evidence that he’s dead,’ I said.
‘You mean you think he’s still alive?’
‘I doubt that very much. I think it’s very unlikely your father is still alive. But it is possible.’
‘And is my mother a suspect?’
‘Everyone’s a suspect.’
‘Except me.’ It sounded like she was smiling and I tried to imagine what she looked like.
‘You were two, right?’
‘Two and a bit.’ She laughed at herself. ‘I still say it like I’m proud of that extra bit.’
‘And when did your mother meet Giovanni?’