The Past is a Foreign Country Read online

  ‘Colonel Roberti wants to speak to you, lieutenant. He said he’d like to see you at once.’

  Chiti put out his cigarette and closed the file. He was sure the colonel wanted to know if they had anything new on the assaults. The case was starting to get out of control and everyone was on edge. But there wasn’t anything new, and the colonel wasn’t going to like that at all.

  The lieutenant walked along the corridors of the Fascist-era building that housed the barracks. He had no great desire to see the colonel, and wished his immediate superior, Captain Malaparte, hadn’t been promoted to major and gone to take up a post at military school, leaving him alone, at twenty-six, to take charge of the team of detectives.

  He knocked at the door, heard the colonel’s thin voice telling him to come in, and walked into the room. He stood to attention, three metres from the desk, until Roberti, having assured himself that military protocol had been respected, signalled to him to approach and sit down.

  ‘Well, Chiti, anything new on these assaults?’ He’d been right.

  ‘To tell the truth, colonel, we’re trying to put together all the data we have in our possession. But of course we also need to look at what the Flying Squad have. Of the five assaults, three were reported to us and two to them. As you know, it’s not easy to work with the police…’

  ‘In other words we don’t have anything new.’

  Chiti rubbed his chin and cheek the wrong way, making his stubble rustle. He nodded, as if capitulating. ‘No, colonel. We don’t have anything new.’

  ‘The fucking prosecutor is on my back, the fucking prefect is on my back. The fucking newspapers are on my back about this case. What should I tell the whole bunch of fuckers? What have we done up until now?’

  Roberti liked to swear. He probably thought it made him sound virile. As he had a high-pitched voice, the effect was quite the opposite, but he would never know.

  ‘The usual things, colonel. The first assault was reported at least three hours after it happened. The girl went home, told her parents everything and they came with her to the barracks. We sent a patrol over there, but obviously the place was deserted by then. The police are dealing with the second and third assaults, because in both cases the girls went straight to casualty, where the police have an officer on duty. We have managed to get hold of the police reports, though, and it seems like those assaults were pretty much the same as ours. They all took place in the entrance halls of municipal housing blocks, where the door is always open, even at night. We’re dealing with the last two. In one case, the victim came straight to our barracks, on her own. In the other, the latest to date, two passers-by called 112 when they saw the girl on the ground, crying, close to the entrance where the assault took place…’

  ‘All right, all right. But what actual steps are we taking? Are we tapping anyone’s phone? Are we tailing anyone? Do we have any names? What do our informers say?’

  Whose phone are we supposed to be tapping if we don’t have any suspects? And what use are our informers? This guy is a sex maniac, not a pusher or a fence.

  He didn’t say that.

  ‘To tell the truth, colonel, we don’t have enough to go on to be able to ask the Prosecutor’s Department for a phone tap. And obviously we’ve put pressure on all our informers, but no one knows anything. Which isn’t surprising, as we’re dealing with a maniac, not a common criminal.’

  ‘Chiti, I don’t think you understood what I said. We have to come up with answers on this case, we have to arrest someone. One way or another. I’m leaving Bari next year and I don’t intend to do that with an unsolved case on my hands.’

  He seemed to have finished. But then he went on after a brief pause, as if he’d just remembered something important.

  ‘And this wouldn’t exactly be the best start for your career here either, my dear Chiti. Remember that.’

  My dear Chiti.

  He tried to ignore the last remark. ‘I’ve been thinking, colonel, perhaps we ought to consult an expert in criminal psychology. He could draw up a profile of the attacker. That’s what they do in the FBI, I’ve been reading about it and…’

  The colonel raised his voice, so that it was even more high-pitched – and distinctly unpleasant. ‘What are you on about? Psychological profiles? The FBI? All that American crap, Chiti – that’s not the way to catch criminals. To catch criminals, you need informers. Informers, phone taps, men on the ground. I want all the men on your team out on the streets, talking to their informers, putting pressure on them. I want plain-clothes patrols out all night. We have to get this maniac before the police do. Put together a few men with balls and get them working exclusively on this case, immediately. The FBI, the CIA, all that’s for the movies. Is that clear?’

  Perfectly clear. The colonel had never conducted a single investigation worthy of the name. Thanks to his connections, he’d spent his whole career in cushy office jobs, commanding battalions or teaching cadets.

  The lesson in crime detection methods was over, and the colonel made a gesture with his hand to tell him that he could go. The kind of gesture you make to a troublesome servant.

  The kind of gesture Chiti had seen his father make many times to subordinates, with the same stolid expression of arrogance and contempt on his face.

  Chiti got to his feet, took three steps back, and clicked his heels.

  Then he turned and left the room.

  3

  ANOTHER OF THOSE nights.

  It always happened the same way. Chiti would fall asleep almost immediately, have a couple of hours of deep, leaden sleep, then be woken by a headache. A dull stab of pain between the temple and the eye, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left. He would lie in bed for a few minutes as the pain increased, until he was completely awake. Every time, for those few minutes, he would hope against hope that the headache would pass as suddenly as it had come, and he could get back to sleep. But it never passed.

  Tonight was no different. After five minutes he got up with his temple and eye throbbing. He went to prepare his forty drops of Novalgin, praying it would have an effect. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the headache lasted a devastating three, four, even five hours. There would be tears in his eyes and a kind of muffled but implacable beating, nagging and rhythmical, inside his head, like the dull drumbeat of madness.

  He swallowed the bitter drink with a shudder. Then he switched on the stereo, put on the first CD of the Nocturnes, made sure that the volume was turned down low, and went and sat down in the armchair, wrapped in his dressing gown. In the dark, because with a headache like that light was even more unbearable than noise.

  He curled up in the old position as the music began. The same music his mother used to play, all those years ago. In other lodgings as cold and empty as these, while he listened, curled up just as he was now, and for those few minutes felt safe.

  Rubinstein’s piano had the texture of crystal. It evoked images of moonlit glades, familiar mysteries, dark, quiet places full of perfumes and promises and nostalgia.

  Tonight the medicine worked.

  He fell gently asleep, just when he needed it, surrounded by those limpid notes.

  Morning again. Time to go down to the office. The same building, the same claustrophobic journey through the service quarters, the canteen, the offices of the operations unit, the officers’ mess. And vice versa.

  Most of the furniture in his quarters had been supplied by the administration. There wasn’t much that was his: the stereo, the discs, the books, and that was about it.

  There was a full-length mirror on the wall near the door. A typically ugly barracks accessory.

  It was hard to avoid looking at himself in the mirror every time he went out. Since he’d arrived in Bari, something had been happening to him more and more frequently, something that used to happen to him when he was about fifteen or sixteen, and which he had thought was buried in the remotest nooks and crannies of his teenage years at military school.
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  He would see himself in the mirror, examine his face, his clothes – trousers, jacket, shirt, tie – and he would have the impulse to break everything. Both the reflecting surface and the reflected image. There was a kind of cold rage in that impulse. A rage at that prosaic surface, that image of himself in the mirror, which didn’t in any way reflect what he had inside him. Splinters, fragments, fumes, burning lava, shadows, fiery flashes. Sudden screams. Abysses he couldn’t even look into.

  That morning, he felt the same violent impulse.

  He wanted to break the mirror.

  To see his own image reflected in a thousand scattered fragments.

  That morning a so-called operations meeting was scheduled with the marshal and the two sergeants: the members of the team of detectives the colonel had ordered him to put together.

  ‘Let’s try and go over what we have, and see if we can come up with anything. We’ve all read through the files, so I’d like each man in turn to tell us what he thinks the five assaults have in common. You first, Martinelli.’

  Martinelli was the marshal. He was a tough old character, who’d spent thirty years dealing with Sardinian brigands, Sicilian and Calabrian Mafiosi, Red Brigades members. Now he was in Bari, not far from his home village, for the last few years before his retirement. He was tall and bulky, with a shaved head, hands as big – and as hard – as ping pong rackets, a thin mouth, and eyes like slits.

  No criminal had ever relished the idea of coming up against Martinelli.

  He seemed uncomfortable, and shifted on his chair, making it squeak. He didn’t like taking orders from an Academy graduate, Chiti thought.

  ‘I don’t know, lieutenant. All five assaults took place around San Girolamo, the Libertà area…no, wait, there’s one – one of those the police are dealing with – which happened in Carrassi. I don’t know if that’s significant.’

  Chiti had a sheet of paper in front of him. He noted down what Martinelli had said, and as he wrote, it seemed to him that this was all an attempt to make himself look good. He had an idea about how the investigation ought to be carried out, but it was all abstract. It was based on what he had read in books and, above all, seen in films. Maybe that bastard of a colonel was right. And these men, all of whom were more experienced than he was, probably knew it, too. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, and he made an effort to dismiss it.

  ‘What about you, Pellegrini?’

  Sergeant Pellegrini was plump and short-sighted. He was a certified accountant: not exactly a man of action, but one of the few who could use a computer, and find his way through bureaucratic and financial documents. That was why they had taken him on to the team of detectives and kept him.

  ‘I think we have to look through the records. We have to look for people with previous convictions for filth like this in the last few years and check them one by one, to see if they have alibis for the nights of the assaults. We need to find out if any of them came out of prison recently, maybe just before this whole thing started. At least, that way we’d have something to work on. I mean, these creeps never get out of the habit, prison doesn’t take away the craving. If we find a lot of names that fit, I could start a database. As we go on we can add data and then cross check it… Well, anyway, you can find out a lot if you look in the records…’

  At least this was a suggestion that might lead somewhere. Chiti felt a little better.

  ‘What about you, Cardinale? Any ideas?’

  Cardinale had become a sergeant early. One of the very few cases in the carabinieri where someone had been promoted as a recognition of unusual merit. He was short and thin, with a boyish face. Two years earlier, while off duty, he had been in a bank when a gang of robbers had come in. There were three of them, one with a pump action rifle, the other two with pistols. Cardinale had killed one and arrested the two others. It was like something out of a film, except that it really happened, and one man did die. A nineteen-year-old doing his first robbery. Cardinale was not much older at the time, and they had promoted him to sergeant immediately, and given him a gold medal they usually only gave to dead carabinieri.

  He was an unusual character. He was studying science at university, which was why his colleagues regarded him with a mixture of diffidence and respect. He didn’t say much, and could appear quite brusque sometimes. He had lively but inscrutable dark eyes.

  ‘I don’t know, lieutenant.’ He paused, as if about to add something. As if that I don’t know were only the introduction to some clear idea he had in his mind. But then he didn’t add anything.

  The meeting lasted another few minutes. They decided to do what Pellegrini had suggested and check men with records for sexual violence. To pull out their files, check when they’d been in prison, look at the MOs, take their mug shots – if there were recent ones, or make new ones if there weren’t – and start to show them around in the vicinity of the places where the assaults had occurred.

  Hoping to get somewhere.

  Before the attacker did.

  4

  GIULIA AND I broke up at the beginning of April. A couple of weeks earlier I’d slept with another girl.

  Francesco had introduced us one Saturday morning. Francesco and I were seeing each other almost every day now, even when we weren’t playing poker. We were friends. It was the word he himself used, putting a strange emphasis on it. Friends. He said he’d had very few friends before me, maybe only two. Whenever I asked him about them, though, he became evasive. In fact he would become evasive every time the conversation touched on his private life.

  Francesco, as I’d realised from the start, not only knew a lot of people, he knew many different kinds of people, and I really couldn’t figure out how he’d come to meet some of them.

  The so-called decent Bari of professional people, well-to-do families, beautiful girls. The world of shopkeepers and people with social pretensions, where he went hunting for prospective victims. The kind of characters who hung around underground venues. And the criminal element that haunted the gaming clubs and were involved in all sorts of shady dealings.

  He had an extraordinary capacity for blending in. His behaviour, the way he talked, even the way he moved, changed according to the company he was in. And whatever the company he was in, he was always at his ease, or so it seemed.

  That Saturday morning, we’d arranged to meet for an aperitif. By the time I arrived he was already in the bar, sitting at a small table with two girls I’d never seen before. They were both over the top: too carefully made up, too perfumed, too fashionably dressed. Too much of everything.

  ‘Mara and Antonella, meet my friend Giorgio,’ Francesco said, and smiled – a smile I knew well by now. The kind of smile he had when he was enjoying himself at other people’s expense.

  I shook hands with Mara and Antonella and sat down, and we ordered our aperitifs.

  Mara worked in the offices of an insurance company. Antonella was studying to be a dental technician. They were both just over twenty, had horrendous local accents, smoked Kim cigarettes and chewed chlorophyll gum.

  We talked about all kinds of interesting things. Like horoscopes. Or whether it was better to go to the disco on Friday or Saturday. Or the fact that they had recently left their respective boyfriends – both bores – and now they wanted to enjoy themselves. Mara was particularly insistent on this last point, but both of them looked us right in the eyes, to see if they’d made themselves sufficiently clear.

  It was a beautiful day, and after a while Francesco suggested we all go and have lunch in a restaurant by the sea. The two girls raised no objection and we left the bar.

  As we walked to the car, Francesco and I a few metres ahead of the girls, Francesco said in a low voice, ‘We’re going to fuck these two this afternoon.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, keeping my voice down too.

  ‘We’ll get them a little drunk and then we’ll fuck them,’ he continued as if I hadn’t opened my mouth. ‘Not that we really need to get th
em drunk. They’re already gasping for it.’

  He was right, and I felt like laughing. Not that there was anything funny about the situation, I was just nervous. I made an effort to hold back the laughter, but it came out as a stupid smile, almost a grimace. I could feel it on my lips. So I said the first thing that came into my head, to wipe away that grimace. ‘Where are we going anyway?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I have a place. Let’s take your car, it’ll impress these two.’

  So we took my black BMW, which did indeed impress the two girls. We went to a restaurant by the sea, outside the city, and had a great meal of raw seafood and grilled lobster. We drank chilled white wine and as the bottles and glasses emptied, the conversation grew thick with increasingly explicit – and increasingly crude – sexual allusions.

  That was the day I discovered Francesco had a kind of pied-à-terre. It was a small apartment, two rooms plus kitchen. The furniture was new, and the place looked as anonymous as a hotel room.

  It was four o’clock by the time we got there. Mara and Antonella were both pretty drunk. There were no formalities, no preliminaries, no discussion about how to pair up. Antonella and I ended up in the bedroom, while Francesco and Mara stayed in the living room, where there was a big black sofa.

  My eyes and Francesco’s met as I went into the bedroom. He winked at me.

  It was like an obscene gesture, that wink, but I didn’t realise it at the time. Or didn’t want to realise it. So, once again, I responded with a smile.

  A few moments later Antonella and I were throwing ourselves onto the bed, clinging together. What I remember most is her breath, which smelled of wine and cold cigarette smoke. While we were having sex – we did it several times, and at length – she called me darling, and I said to myself, Darling? Do I know you? Who are you? And again I felt like laughing like an idiot. Here I was, I thought, fucking this girl – a beautiful girl – and I didn’t even know her. At times, I almost had to stop and make an effort to remember her name.