The Cold Summer Page 20

  The case of the builder, on the other hand, seemed less easily related to something territorial. The perpetrators had been harder, less scatterbrained; they didn’t speak in dialect; they were violent, even more so than was necessary; they had taken care to keep the kidnap victim under control with ropes or plastic handcuffs and blindfolds, whereas they hadn’t taken too many precautions in grabbing the ransom money. These two things were contradictory in a way: greater caution in controlling the victim, less caution during an extremely delicate phase like the retrieval of the money. The opposite modus operandi from the Japigia kidnappers, who had been less concerned with controlling the victim but had paid more attention to the retrieval.

  What did this difference mean? Assuming it meant anything at all. As Lopez had told them, lightning kidnappings had become a widespread activity, convenient and of little risk. So thinking about what these differences meant might turn out to be a pointless exercise.

  He remembered the story of the drunk who has lost his house keys and looks for them in the street, under a lamp post. He looks for them but doesn’t find them. After a while, a passerby asks him what he’s doing, and he replies that he’s lost his keys and is looking for them. Did you lose them under this lamp post? the passerby asks. No, I lost them in that alleyway, the drunk replies. So why are you looking for them here? Because it’s light here, whereas in there it’s dark and you can’t see anything. A clever little joke that explains what we often do, without realizing it, when we try to solve a problem without the right coordinates. We look where it’s light, even though that’s exactly how not to solve the problem.

  Fenoglio had reached Corso Cavour. The sky was overcast now and the wind had turned colder. The maestrale’s coming, he told himself, putting on the jacket he’d been carrying over his shoulder.

  He heard someone calling him.

  “Marshal!” The voice was so heavily accented as to seem a caricature. He turned and recognized Francesco Albanese, the clumsy robber.

  “Good afternoon, marshal.”

  Fenoglio smiled. “You still haven’t got rid of that Bolzano accent.”

  The young man looked at him for a few moments, puzzled. Then he got the joke and returned the smile.

  “So you’re out, I see?”

  “Yes, Marshal, I plea-bargained, like you told me. They gave me a year, but as I didn’t have a record they released me straight away.”

  Fenoglio looked at him for a few moments. “And what are you doing now?”

  “No more robberies, I swear. I do cigarettes, sometimes a little pot.”

  “What about a normal job?”

  “A normal job? Would you hire me? I’m also a car park attendant.”

  “Unlicensed.”

  “All right, unlicensed, yes. But I behave myself. First of all, I don’t ask for any money. If they want to give me something, fine. If not, I don’t say anything, I don’t threaten them. Nothing. If they leave me the keys, I just use them to park the car when it’s double-parked, so that they don’t have to pay a fine. I’m honest.”

  “Would you like a coffee, Albanese?” That at least was a quality that Fenoglio possessed: he never forgot a face or a name, or a face coupled with a name. It was a spontaneous thing with him, a thing that helps in many jobs – particularly in that of a law enforcement officer, for a variety of reasons. Some obvious, some much less obvious.

  Albanese smiled, surprised. “Thanks, marshal. I never refuse a coffee.”

  They went into the Saicaf coffee bar. The young man greeted everyone like a regular customer and they all greeted him warmly.

  “I guess they know you here,” Fenoglio said.

  “They know me, and they know they can trust me. If for example someone has their engine stolen, they ask me, and sometimes I can help them find it.”

  “Just like that, out of friendship, right?”

  “Well, maybe they give me a little something.”

  “Yes, and sooner or later you get arrested as an accessory to extortion.”

  “What’s extortion got to do with it? I’m just doing a few favours.”

  Fenoglio decided to drop it. Now was not the time to get involved in legal niceties on the concept of accessory to extortion on the part of a go-between. When they left the coffee bar, Albanese resumed speaking.

  “You say I’m unlicensed. All right, I’m unlicensed. But you know what the guys in the proper car parks do, all above board, with the permission of the municipal council? The ones at the railway station or down by the harbour?”

  “What do they do?”

  “They get people to leave them their keys if the car park is full. It seems like they’re doing them a favour, because they’re licensed by the council, they even have uniforms, right?” He paused, as if expecting a confirmation from Fenoglio that they were indeed licensed by the council, or perhaps something else.

  “And then?”

  “And then they let their criminal friends take the cars when they have something to do. A delivery, a robbery, whatever. That way they have a clean car, and if anyone gets the licence number it’s down to you, I mean, to the owner. Maybe you’ve gone away somewhere, you’re on a train or a ship, you think your car’s in a safe place, instead of which it’s become an underworld taxi.”

  Fenoglio was interested now. “And they do this at the station and the harbour?”

  “Yes, they always do it. The licensed car park attendants with the council uniforms, you know what I mean. Because people think that if you have a uniform you’re an honest person and they can trust you, and if you don’t have one – like me – you’re a criminal. You have no idea of the dirty tricks those guys in uniforms get up to. When I was in the army, those lousy officers – no offence to you, obviously – stole petrol, stole food, even stole blankets …”

  The young man continued his speech, but Fenoglio had stopped listening.

  Soon afterwards, they parted. Fenoglio could have repeated word for word what the young man had said up to a certain point, but nothing of the last part of the conversation.

  Because hearing about criminals in uniform had given him an idea. One of those ideas where it’s pointless thinking it’s Sunday and you can go home and watch TV or continue with your stroll, maybe go to the cinema again, whatever.

  Thinking these things, he had already turned into Via Imbriani, heading in the direction of the station. He had a few things to check. And he had to do it this afternoon. No question of putting it off till tomorrow.

  7

  The next morning he went looking for Pellecchia and found him in the courtyard, chatting in a friendly manner with a handcuffed young man. The scene had its own grotesque normality.

  “Let’s go upstairs, we need to talk.”

  “What’s up?”

  “An idea. So absurd that right now I don’t feel like talking about it with our superiors or the prosecutor. As we’ve been doing this little investigation together, I can only talk about it with you.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but all right.”

  They got to Fenoglio’s office. He closed the door and sat down on the desk.

  “Well?”

  “What if the kidnapping of the Grimaldi boy was carried out by police officers or carabinieri?”

  Pellecchia didn’t reply immediately, and didn’t display any surprise. He went and sat down, as if he needed to, and lit a cigar without asking for permission. “What made you think of that?”

  Fenoglio didn’t reply immediately either. Pellecchia’s reaction had been strange. It had a strange slowness about it. He tried to figure it out and couldn’t.

  “It first crossed my mind when Angiuli mentioned handcuffs, I mean, when he said that his father had been handcuffed. An obvious association: you hear handcuffs and you think police or Carabinieri. What’s more, those people had said they were from the police. When it was clear they were plastic handcuffs, I dropped the idea. Anyone can buy plastic straps from a hardware stor
e.”

  Pellecchia sniffed, then passed his hand over his chin. He nodded, pursing his lips. It was almost as if he already knew what Fenoglio was about to say.

  “Yesterday, I ran into a guy I arrested for attempted robbery a couple of months ago, the same day we found out about the kidnapping of the Grimaldi boy and there was that shootout in Enziteto. We stopped and had a chat, and after a while he said something that brought the idea back in my head. So I decided to do a check.”

  “What kind of check?”

  “I checked the records of the kidnap victims and their families.”

  “Damn right,” Pellecchia said after thinking for a moment. “Did anything come out?”

  “The jeweller has never even been stopped for driving without a licence.”

  “And the other guy?”

  “Officially, Angiuli doesn’t have a record either. But by consulting the databank and making a few phone calls, I discovered that the Prosecutor’s Department in Naples and the Finance Police here have both looked into him; I’ve just got back from talking to a friend of mine, an anti-drug marshal in the Finance Police. They’re convinced he’s involved in shifting large quantities of cocaine from Venezuela to Italy by way of Spain. At least that’s their hypothesis. His wife’s Venezuelan, and according to the Finance Police her family are involved in trafficking over there. They investigated him for months.”

  “What did they come up with?”

  “Nothing. They’re pretty sure he and his wife are the driving force behind the traffic and that the building company is just a money-laundering operation. But they haven’t been able to pin anything on him.”

  Pellecchia’s face, which up until then had been devoid of expression, seemed to come back to life. “A trafficker. I knew there was something not quite right about him.”

  “Okay. So let’s assume for a moment that my hypothesis is correct. Let’s assume that among the people responsible for the kidnapping of Angiuli’s father and the kidnapping of the boy there was a carabiniere or a police officer. Someone who has access to confidential information, or at least someone who knows who the criminals are, who knows which people have money but would be highly unlikely to report a kidnapping to the authorities.”

  “Actually, none of the victims of these lightning kidnappings ever reported it.”

  “Correct. So let’s suppose you and I decide to go into the kidnapping business. We want to maximize our earnings and reduce our risks to the absolute minimum. If we’re really determined, intelligent, unscrupulous sons of bitches, who do we choose as victims? People who have instant access to large amounts of cash and absolutely no desire for the authorities to know about it. Since we’re detectives, we have access to confidential information, and since we’re crooked detectives we have the balls – maybe it turns us on – to grab the son of a boss like Grimaldi in the middle of a Mafia war and make everyone think his rivals are responsible for the kidnapping.”

  Pellecchia didn’t reply. He went over to the window that overlooked the courtyard and looked out, half closing his eyes. As if he didn’t recognize what he was seeing, or as if all at once, at that exact moment, he had noticed something he had never seen before.

  “Are you all right?” Fenoglio asked.

  Pellecchia turned, as if only now realizing he wasn’t alone in the room. “Do you mind if we take a walk?”

  Fenoglio stared at him for a long time. “All right,” he said at last.

  No sooner were they outside than a huge cloud covered the sky. Pellecchia put his hands in his pockets. As he walked, he looked around as if lost. It occurred to Fenoglio that he had never seen him with his hands in his pockets. Distortions. Shifting sands. Regularities that suddenly lose their rhythm and form a different alignment.

  “Let’s go over to the seafront.” He crossed the road without waiting for Fenoglio’s reply. “I like the water. I like the sea. I like going in it, swimming, sailing. I like looking at it. It makes me feel clean. It’s a nice feeling.”

  “Feeling clean?”

  “Yes, a nice feeling. When it happens.” He stopped by a castiron lamp post and looked out at the horizon. Finally, he shook his head. “I once heard you say that you became a carabiniere by chance.”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “I don’t understand how you can become a carabiniere by chance.”

  Fenoglio shrugged. The clouds were moving rapidly because of the wind. The air had a salty tang. There was something dramatic and yet sweet in that backdrop.

  “We do almost everything by chance,” Fenoglio said, “even if we’re not conscious of it most of the time.” He immediately regretted his words, thinking them banal.

  “Sometimes I don’t understand the things you say,” Pellecchia replied. “Anyway, I wanted to be a carabiniere.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t good enough to play football.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I used to play. I even tried out for first-division teams, but it was immediately obvious that I’d never get beyond the inter-regional championships and would never earn a living from it. As a boy, whenever they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d say: a football player or a carabiniere. Having ruled out football player, which was dream number one, I chose carabiniere, which was number two. But apart from my boyhood ambitions, you know why I became a carabiniere?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t like criminals. Because they scared me, although I would never have admitted it. I wanted to be on one side, I wanted things to be clear. The good guys and the bad guys. The bastards and the others, us. The rules. Those who obey them and those who don’t. I joined when I was eighteen, and soon enough I realized things weren’t clear at all.”

  “It isn’t easy to establish who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”

  “Precisely.”

  Precisely, Fenoglio thought. And the question of the rules is even more complicated. It’s wrong to break them systematically, but it’s also impossible to always respect them. Sometimes you let someone go who you should arrest. Sometimes you put the screws on someone and lock him up even though you don’t have anything to go on. There’s no way of living in this world if you don’t handle the rules in a flexible manner. Rules exist, and they should usually be respected, but you have to be ready to set them aside, at least every now and again, otherwise it’s better not to do certain jobs. Black and white are abstract concepts. There is a broad grey area in which you have to move with caution, because the maps are inaccurate.

  “Let’s suppose I’ve done things that were … wrong,” Pellecchia said. “And let’s suppose I tell you about them. What would you do with that information?”

  Fenoglio caught himself sniffing, just as Pellecchia did. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you tell me. And on the reasons why you’re telling me.”

  “Crimes. Committed by me.”

  The clouds were still moving rapidly, making the sun appear and disappear. “If there are no good reasons, maybe it’s best you don’t tell me anything else.”

  Pellecchia took a puff at his cigar and blew out the smoke. “And what if it’s useful to the investigation?”

  “Which one?”

  “The Grimaldi kidnapping.”

  Fenoglio looked at him. He looked at him as he had probably never done before. He made what amounted to an inventory of his features, one that was even more thorough than if he’d had to register them and then describe them as accurately as possible. The slightly crooked nose; the skin made leathery by unprotected exposure to the sun; the long lashes; the grey eyes that were green in the sunlight; the short, thick, greying hair. It was true, he did look like Robert De Niro. Strange, Fenoglio thought, he’d never noticed it before.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Or maybe it’s important. I don’t know.”

  “Let me see if I’m following you. Are you saying the
re are things you’ve done, or things you’ve been involved in, that might help us with our investigation into the Grimaldi kidnapping?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things that happened recently?”

  “No, in the past …” He made an exasperated gesture with his hands. Exasperated and angry. “Fuck it, enough of this shilly-shallying. I’ll tell you everything, then you do what you want to. You decide, but right now I can’t keep this stuff to myself.”

  Fenoglio was about to repeat that he couldn’t guarantee anything. But he didn’t say it: there was no point. They were in the middle of the grey area. Black and white are abstract concepts.

  “Do you mind if we stay here by the sea and talk? I don’t feel like going inside.”

  “Of course, let’s stay here.”

  “Do you remember when we went to the medium?”

  “Yes?”

  “I told you I was ashamed. You thought I was ashamed of myself in general. Partly, I am, but at that moment I was thinking of a specific thing, something I’ve never been able to forgive myself for.” There was an awareness in Pellecchia’s expression that was rare for him. “Do you know Guglielmo Savicchio?”

  “The fellow at the command unit, who works with the colonel?”

  “That’s the one. Do you know anything about him?”

  “I barely know him, I’ve never worked there.”

  “Some years ago, before you came to Bari, we worked together in the criminal investigation unit.”

  “Wait, wait. Was he the one who killed a young guy in a shootout?”

  “Yes.” Then, after a long pause: “We were together that time. I’d had a reliable report about a guy who was supposed to be transporting half a kilo of cocaine on behalf of certain people in the Libertà area. We waited for him near the garage where he was meant to be depositing the stuff. He noticed us as he drove up on his motorbike; we tried to stop him and he swerved in this crazy way and managed to get away from us. Savicchio already had his gun in his hand. He took aim and fired. Five shots. The bike skidded and the guy fell off. We went to him and he was dying. Savicchio took another gun from his pouch, a small one, and fired two shots in the direction of where we’d been standing. Both of them hit the side of our car. I can still remember the noise. The noise is the thing I remember best about that evening. The five shots from his service pistol, the two shots from the 6.35, like branches snapping. He cleaned that fucking dummy pistol with his shirt, to remove his prints, and put it in the guy’s hand.”