The Salati Case

Monday

I was looking for Via Repubblica 43, but the fog was thick. I could barely see the doors, let alone the numbers. I had got a call out of the blue an hour ago, asking me to go and see some notary called Crespi.

Eventually I found 43 chiselled into the stone at head height. Below was a brass rectangle with black letters: ARMANDO CRESPI, NOTARY.

I rang the buzzer and a female voice gave me directions over the intercom, ‘left-hand staircase, fourth floor’.

The wooden door into the palazzo was so large that there was another smaller one inside which now clicked open.

I walked up the stone staircase slowly, not knowing who Crespi was or what he wanted.

‘Permesso,’ I said as I walked into an opulent front office of walnut wood and burgundy leather.

The receptionist looked at me. ‘Castagnetti?’

I nodded. People only give me my full surname when things are formal. Everyone else calls me Casta.

‘Please have a seat,’ she said. ‘I’ll let Dottor Crespi know you’re here.’

I sat down and looked around. There was a business newspaper placed at the centre of a round table. On the walls were dark oil-paintings. The whole office felt formal and old fashioned.

The quick click of the woman’s heels on the marble floor announced her return. ‘He’ll be with you shortly.’

A few minutes later a short, white-haired man came into the reception area. ‘Castagnetti? My name’s Crespi. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. Please come this way.’

The notary led me down a wide corridor and held a door open for me. He motioned for me to sit down. He went behind his desk and leaned to his right to open a drawer and pull out a folder. Every movement seemed slow and precise. He put the folder on the desk between us and laid his thin fingers on top of it.

‘You’re a private investigator, am I right?’

I shrugged. ‘I offer my clients clarification.’ That was what I always said. ‘Offro chiarimenti.’ I clear things up.

He looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You look younger than I expected,’ he said.

I shrugged again. ‘How can I help?’

He smiled briefly. It looked like a muscle spasm. ‘A client of mine passed away on Friday. She has left a testament which is-’

‘Name?’

The notary paused to acknowledge the interruption. ‘Salati, Silvia.’ The inversion of the first and second names was deliberately formal. ‘For reasons of the correct disposal of her estate’, he went on, ‘it is necessary to certify as to the legal status of her younger son, a certain Salati, Riccardo. He was reported missing in the summer 1995 and is almost certainly deceased. But his legal status is currently “missing”. My late client’s estate can only be distributed if that assignation can be changed to “presumed dead”. ’

‘You want me to prove he’s dead?’

‘The will requires that,’ he held up a letter and pulled on his glasses. His voice went up a semitone to indicate that he was quoting from the old lady. ‘… due investigation should take place to reconstruct exactly what happened to my younger son Riccardo.’

‘Younger son? How many children are there?’

‘Two. The older brother being Salati, Umberto.’ Crespi raised his eyebrows at me like I should recognise the name. The legalistic inversion of surname and Christian name was beginning to irritate me. ‘He owns Salati Fashions on Via Cavour,’ Crespi explained.

Another clothing boutique. By now, almost the only shops left in the centre of town are those selling speed-stitched cloth from the Far East.

‘This isn’t a murder case, Castagnetti. All my client would be commissioning you to do is to verify the legal status of the subject.’

‘You need a “missing” turned into “dead”?’ My tone was at odds with the mellifluous phrases of the notary, who paused again, as if to acknowledge my vulgarity.

‘All you would be required to do’, he stared at me, ‘is to form an opinion upon whether the man in question is dead or alive.’ He threw his palms upwards, as if to say that it was the simplest task in the world. ‘If I may say, Signora Salati was a client of mine all her adult life. I personally saw the devastation her son’s disappearance had upon her. This isn’t merely a request to help with archiving a case; this is a chance to allow a kind, honest woman to rest in peace.’

It was quite a speech. The notary looked pleased with it. He was nodding his head slowly with his eyes reverently shut.

I thought it over quickly. It sounded like an unpromising proposition. I preferred the fresh cases, where there was hope.

The old ones meant faltering memories and no happy ending, if there was an ending at all.

‘Big estate?’

‘That is confidential and, if I may say, irrelevant. Suffice to say that it’s the standard estate of a woman who had been economically comfortable for thirty years. Allora?’

‘And the terms of the will?’

‘The terms of the will have no relevance to your investigation. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite.’

‘Meaning?’

‘She left an open will. Which means that her executors were given the facility to rewrite it according to the results of your investigation. Her will requires independent proof of her second son’s status before her estate is disposed of. That disposition is determined by whether or not the boy is “missing” or “presumed dead”.’

I hate notaries. Each one creates their own refinement of arrogance. Not even Crespi, I thought, would be without an interest.

‘Tell me more about the case,’ I said.

The notary drew breath. ‘I know very little about it. The subject in question disappeared from the train station on the night of San Giovanni 1995.’

‘When’s San Giovanni? August sometime?’

The notary looked at me, surprised I didn’t know. ‘24 June.’

‘No police investigation?’

‘His common-law wife in Rimini reported him missing three days later. The carabinieri filed the report and that was that.’ ‘They didn’t investigate?’ ‘There was no evidence of a crime having been committed.

And Riccardo had a bit of a history of disappearing. They were reluctant to waste public money looking for a man who had a habit of being, shall we say, on the road.’

‘No sightings since?’

‘Nothing.’

I looked at the meticulous little notary who was uncapping a fat fountain pen as if to draw up the contract.

‘My standard fee’, I said, ‘is two thousand euros per week. I take five thousand up front to cover expenses. I report and invoice on a weekly basis.’

The notary jotted the figures down hastily and stood up to shake hands. ‘My secretary will issue you a cheque for your expenses.’ He passed me a card so I passed him one back. ‘Come and see me in a week’s time. Chiaro?’

‘Chiarissimo.’

Back on the street I tried to think in straight lines. Silvia Salati had died only a few days ago. They had to find Riccardo not because there had been some sighting or contact, but simply for routine. Riccardo’s mother had died and there was an estate to be distributed, nothing more. The case was as cold as the Salati woman. It seemed actuarial, not human: it was about the direction of money, not about the whereabouts of a man who had probably been dead a good decade.

The more I thought about the case, the less I liked it. I knew that my report was expected to be just a rubber stamp, something that was needed in order to release funds. I wasn’t expected to solve something, just to tick a few boxes. There were bound to be ‘interests’ in the case. There were always ‘interests’ that slanted things, external pressures which tried to push it in one way or another.

The old woman had presumably left something: a house, maybe a few savings. Her heirs would be more interested in finding Riccardo dead than alive. Someone, and it was probably Umberto Salati, would be hoping I could prove as much. That way there was one less person with whom to share the estate. Not that that made much sense if the widow died poor.

I headed towards the centre of town. The damp claustrophobia of Padanian fog sucked the colours off the city. It felt isolating because you couldn’t see more than a few metres ahead. The place felt so humid that even the cobbles seemed to sweat.

I tried to walk on tiptoe to move my stubborn, busted ankle. It always got worse in winter. The weather seemed to stiffen it up and I spent my time drawing circles with the toes of my foot, trying to loosen up the rigid scar tissue. It had happened a long time ago. Someone had tried to give me a foot massage with a security door. I didn’t walk for a while.

I looked at the blurred people coming towards me through the fog. Women in egg-shaped fur coats. Men with pencil goatees. Orange buses and elderly cyclists.

It was a strange city. It had been transformed since I was a boy. There used to be old eccentrics living in town, the descendants of families who had lived in a particular borgo since Maria Luigia was Duchess. Children played football in the cobbled backstreets. There had been artisans: the carpenters and cobblers and tailors. Now, though, everyone had moved to the suburbs. In the centre there were only clothing boutiques and phone-dealerships selling glinting handsets made you- know-where. The rest were banks and legal offices and various ‘authorities’.

But somehow the city had retained its charm. It was cut in half by a river and that meant you could only reach the other side by using one of half a dozen narrow bridges. They became arteries where you saw friends and friends of friends. It was a city small enough for coincidences to happen and where everyone had some sort of connection to everyone else.

That was why I liked this time of year. It was the only season when the place offered anonymity. Visibility was reduced to twenty or thirty metres, and for once you could limp around without fear of being recognised. This was the only time you could really go about your business unseen.

Not that I really understand what my business is. I have no company, no headed notepaper, no staff. I don’t advertise. Now I think about it, I don’t even know how Crespi got hold of me.

But I’m always busy. There’s always employment for someone who lives off the dirt. And I do the dirtiest: fraud, missing persons, anti-mafia, omicidio. The only thing I don’t do is infidelity. I don’t mean in my private life, because there’s no one there to be unfaithful to. I mean I don’t snoop with a telephoto, trying to prove that people are putting it about. I don’t do it because it’s sordid and sad and – like the fog – it’s all the same.

But that’s how I got started in this line. That’s how everyone starts off. Marina, an old friend of mine from way back, thought her husband was cheating on her. She said she was certain of it, said she wouldn’t even trust him to put out the rubbish any more. He denied it until he was red in the face, swore on his blessed mother’s life that he would never betray her. He used to get furious with her, said she was demented.

She was telling me about it one day and I just offered to find out. As soon as I said it she was gripping my hand, pleading with me to give her back a bit of certainty in her life. She said she would arrange to go away one weekend and we would see what happened. Half an hour after her man had dropped her at the station he was unbuckling another woman’s bra.

Before I knew what was happening, every cuckold in Emilia-Romagna wanted my help. That’s how I discovered I had a talent for something useful. I could give people the truth. I found I had a talent for getting to the heart of things, for finding out about what had been hidden or covered up. I had a half-decent radar for deceit. People began to bring their injustices to me, perhaps because they sensed it was a subject I understood. They brought me their terrors and their tragedies. ‘Where is my wife?’ they would plead, or ‘Who killed my daughter?’ I never understood why they asked me. Maybe they asked everyone and I was the only one who offered to help.

And I don’t know why I did. At the beginning it might have been kindness, looking into troubles because some people seemed to have an unfair amount of them. I listened to their stories and asked questions in return. Question after question until someone didn’t want to reply.

But it’s not kindness any more. I’ve seen what polite people can do and I don’t trust politeness or kindness any more. It’s just a job and I do it for the money. And I take the money because the costs are so high: after a few months in this line you lose trust in everything. When you’ve seen that much betrayal and deception, you can’t trust what you see, let alone what you don’t. Everyone becomes a suspect. Mauro says that’s why I’m no good with women. I always look for a motive, and when someone says they’re in love, that they’re living without an ulterior motive, I worry about what they’re really up to.

I waited for a pause in the traffic to cross the road. Cars loomed out of the damp cottonwool air and sped past. I felt my ankle throbbing and leaned on my right instead.

I decided to go and look at Salati Fashions and turned into Via Cavour. It was there on the right on the way to the Battistero.

Through the shop window I could see a man who looked like the proprietor. Salati must have been mid-fifties. He had a thick grey moustache which covered the top of his mouth. It was yellowing on the right-hand side so I assumed he was a smoker. He looked thick set, like he had rounded out in recent years.

I watched a couple walk into the shop and Salati was on them, offering help, pulling hangers off the rails. I watched the way the man smiled at the young couple. He put his head on one side, a move that made him look as manipulative as a six-year-old in plaits.

The couple left the shop and I heard Salati offer them a curt buongiorno as if he were saying get lost. I walked through the door before it had sprung shut.

‘Umberto Salati?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Castagnetti. I’m a private investigator.’

Salati hesistated and tried to get his eyebrows to touch. ‘You’re the person who’s going to verify,’ he paused out of delicacy, ‘as to the status of my brother, is that right?’

‘It is.’

‘He’s already hired you?’

‘Crespi? This morning.’

‘Tell me your name again.’

‘Castagnetti.’

He looked aggrieved.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘How did he find you?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

He clicked his tongue and walked around the shop shuffling hangers. He looked nervous. ‘You know someone is trying to pretend Riccardo is alive?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The mourning notices in the paper today… there was one from Riccardo.’ He must have seen me perk up, because he quickly tried to damp down any excitement. ‘Riccardo’s not alive,’ he said, holding my stare. ‘Someone wants us to think he is, but he’s long gone, I’m afraid.’

‘So why would someone pay to publish a mourning notice in the newspaper?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘That’s your job.’

‘When did she die?’ I asked quietly.

‘Friday.’ He looked up at me as if trying to work out why I had asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly.

Salati sighed. ‘At least we saw it coming.’

In my line, I thought, it’s always coming. Only difference is, I’m supposed to do something about it. I looked up at Salati and he looked tired. I knew what it was like to lose a parent because I lost both a long time ago. Salati was in a bleak place.

I looked around the shop. There were light pink jumpers and shirts with extraordinarily large collars.

‘Coffee?’ he asked.

‘Thanks.’

‘Laura,’ he cooed to his young assistant, a girl whose body was perfect but for her cantilevered nose, ‘could you make us a coffee?’

There was something gentle in the way he spoke to her and I wondered if they were lovers. Most of the shopkeepers ended up taking their pretty assistants out for dinner as a prelude to showing them the finest hotel rooms in Romagna.

‘You’re not closing for lutto?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘It actually helps having something to do. We’re closing up later.’

Laura was out back now and I decided to iron out what I knew. ‘The night your brother disappeared, he was waiting for a train back to Rimini, right?’

‘He had bought a ticket. Some people came forward to say they had seen him buying a ticket.’

‘And then?’

‘Nothing. He was supposed to be going back to Anna in-’

‘Who’s Anna?’

‘His woman. They had a daughter, my niece.’

‘Called?’

‘Elisabetta.’

I was writing down the names. ‘Anna what? Salati?’

‘No, di Pietro.’

I wrote it down. ‘Do they still live in Rimini?’

‘Last I heard.’

‘You’re not in touch?’

‘On and off. Not as much as back then, but sure, we talk occasionally. Anna and my mother weren’t close.’

‘Why?’

‘You would have to ask Anna. But they didn’t get any closer once Ricky went missing. The opposite. Once it was clear

Ricky wasn’t coming back, we saw a lot less of her and of little Elisabetta. She was two I think when it happened.’

‘And what brought Ricky back this way that weekend?’

‘He had just come to see my mother in Sissa for the day.’

‘Sissa? That where you’re from?’

‘Right. She had driven him back to the station, dropped him there. I think that was another reason it hurt her so much. She blamed herself for not staying with him on the platform until the train came. As if you had to wait with a twenty-year-old. He would have thought it ridiculous, and so, in other circumstances, would she. But because she never saw him again, she felt it was her fault that she had just dropped him there.’

‘What time, do you remember?’

‘She said it was twenty minutes before the ten thirty train.’

‘And she drove off as he went to buy a ticket?’

‘Sure.’ He said it like he was still defending her.

‘Where will I find Anna?’ I changed tack.

‘I told you, Rimini.’ Salati’s tone had altered now. He clearly felt he alone was left to defend his family’s honour.

‘Any address?’

‘I’ll go find it.’ Salati stomped out to a back room and I looked at Laura, the young assistant. She had come back with two plastic thimbles of coffee. She looked at me and held the tray out.

‘Thanks.’

Salati returned with a piece of paper: ‘Via dei Caduti, 34. Rimini.’ He took the other coffee and smiled at the girl.

‘What were you doing’, I caught Salati’s eye, ‘the night Ricky disappeared? 24 June, wasn’t it?’

Umberto looked at me and laughed nervously. He was

about to say something, but then wiped down his moustache with his thumb and his forefinger and looked at me again. ‘You don’t waste time do you?’

‘Who were you with?’

‘Roberta.’

‘Your wife?’

He nodded. ‘My ex.’

‘Anyone else with you two that Saturday night?’

‘Just the two of us. I think she was due that weekend, or the one after. I can’t remember. We were just sitting there at home waiting.’

‘Your first?’

‘Yeah. Daniele.’

‘How many you got?’

‘Two boys.’

‘They still in the city?’

‘No. She took them back to Traversetolo when we split.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Why did she go to Traversetolo? That’s where her parents were from.’

‘No, why did you split?’

‘Roberta and I?’

I threw my chin into an upward nod.

‘She didn’t give a reason. Just said our marriage was over.’

He didn’t look particularly wistful about the separation. If there was any pain there, I guessed Laura eased it nicely. He seemed like so many of the middle-aged men I met in this city: a financial success and a family failure. One out of two wasn’t bad, I always thought. I would settle for one out of two.

I looked around the shop one last time. I turned over one or two labels. The prices were written by hand with an ink pen.

Salati saw me and took a shirt out of my hands and rubbed the cloth between his thumb and forefinger and started explaining the quality of his stock. His fingers looked, like him, slightly chubby. He obviously liked the finer things in life. He was a bon viveur, but then everyone was around here.

‘I’m going to make some enquiries’, I said, ‘and come back to you. Buongiorno.’

I walked out quickly. I didn’t like getting sucked into idle conversation with suspects. As soon as they offered you something, they would be asking for something in return. I heard Salati shouting goodbye to my back as if I were one of his customers, but by then I was back in the fog, enveloped in its icy white cold.

I crossed the road and walked towards Borgo delle Colonne. It was one of the few colonnaded streets in the old city. Protected from the rain, and close to the inner ring road, this was where the city’s prostitutes used to wait for their clients at night. It had been a bohemian haven when I had moved in here ten years ago, but the whole area was now being made ‘signorile’ and the prostitutes had been moved on to the motorway slip-roads. I missed their ugly honesty.

I walked up to my flat and sat at my desk. I rested the phone between my jaw and ear as I dialled the familiar number of the carabinieri.

‘Dall’Aglio? It’s Castagnetti.’

‘Good morning.’ He paused. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m reopening a case. The disappearance in 1995 of a young man called Riccardo Salati.’

‘Silvia’s son?’

‘Exactly. You knew her?’

‘Vaguely. I heard she died last week, is that right?’

‘Yeah. It’s about the will. This boy disappeared in 1995. It would have been the Questura that dealt with it.

‘I remember. And what do you want?’

‘The name of the officer who took the report, his present posting, and any documentation which you might have in the records regarding the case.’

‘That all?’ He laughed. ‘It’s very busy here, I doubt anyone will have time to look into it until this evening. I’ll get someone on it when I can, and I’ll call you back by the end of the day.’

It went on like that for an hour. I phoned everyone I thought necessary. I phoned the town hall to ask if I could distribute the photocopies of the missing boy. I had to fax my request, so I typed up a letter. I made a note to ask Umberto Salati or Crespi for a photograph. I phoned every school in the city until I found out which ones Riccardo had attended. I phoned the secretaries to arrange visits.

On a whim I decided to phone the only doctor listed for Sissa. A secretary answered the phone and eventually put me through to the doctor. I introduced myself and the man started buttoning up.

‘An investigator you say?’

‘Sure. I’m after just a couple of-’

‘I can’t tell you any details of any of my patients. You understand, confidentiality…’

‘Even the ones who are dead?’

The man didn’t say anything and I pushed it.

‘Silvia Salati.’

‘Silvia? What do you want to know about her? She only died last week.’

‘How?’

‘How did she die?’ The man breathed out loudly. ‘Nothing confidential about that. It was her lungs. She had been a smoker all her life.’

‘Nothing unexpected?’

‘I told her thirty years ago it was going to happen.’

I thanked him and put my finger on the phone cradle and lifted it again. I listened to the dialling tone, thinking about what to do next. I opened my diary and found the number for the library.

Long beeps followed long silences.

‘Emeroteca,’ said a young woman’s voice.

‘Have you got La Gazzetta from the last few days?’

‘Sure.’

‘Open shelf?’

‘Sure.’

‘You’re open all morning?’

‘Until five tonight.’

I dropped the phone in the cradle, stood up and pulled on my jacket. I walked the back way, along Viale Mentana and Viale Piacenza, coming at the library through the Parco Ducale. It was a small building, but quick and efficient. A girl, the one I had spoken to by the sound of her Roman accent, fetched the two Gazzettas published over the weekend and passed them to me in a pile the size of a child’s mattress.

I took them to a desk and laid them out in front of me. I took the Saturday edition and opened up the paper.

It was winter and the sports section was full of calciomercato: the transfer gossip surrounding the big teams. All the important clubs and names were in bold so that you could read all the likely deals in a few seconds.

I turned over another page and saw a wall of faces staring back at me. These were photographs of the people who had died in the last few days. La Gazzetta must have been making a mint out of mourners. I knew how much each inch cost from when I had lost a friend a while back. The necrologi were money for old rope.

Most of the photographs looked as if they were taken when the deceased were in middle age and they made the paper like a throwback to the 1970s. There was something about the faces, the thickness of the glasses and the length of the hair, which looked out of date. Alongside each photograph or name were expressions of mourning from relatives and friends.

There was no mention of Salati. She had probably died too late on the Friday for anyone to publish a mourning notice on the Saturday. I took the Sunday paper and flicked through it to the pages of the dead. Almost a third of a page was dedicated to her. There were thirty or forty rectangular inches of sympathy from relatives and friends, each announcing their deep regret. Everywhere the name Silvia was written in bold like one of those footballers about to be transferred.

There was a photograph of her, a black and white shot. She looked purposeful: a thin necklace around a tight jumper. A good-looking woman with a determined mouth.

I read through the names of those who had publicised their sense of loss. They were just meaningless names to me but I would get copies. My work was all about methodology. I would cut out every mourning notice and arrange them in some kind of alphabetical order. Many of the mourners wrote only first names, so it wouldn’t be an authoritative index of her kith and kin, but it was the closest I could come up with for now.

I walked to a side room where they kept the day’s papers and found the Gazzetta. I went to the necrologi again. There were more mourning notices expressing regret at Silvia’s death, fewer this time, but there were still a dozen or so.

I scanned through them and immediately saw the name Riccardo. I read the sentence above it. ‘I am devastated by our loss. I will always carry you in my heart. Your son, Riccardo.’

I looked at the words again. ‘Your son, Riccardo’, it said.

My immediate reaction was the same as Umberto’s. Nobody comes back from the dead, I thought. That was make-believe. This read more like someone who wanted to cloud an inheritance.

But it clouded my case as well. And if this was a phantom Riccardo, I would then be chasing two ghosts instead of one.

I asked the girl to photocopy the Sunday and Monday necrologi. She looked at me and sighed quietly. ‘One euro and twenty please.’

I passed her some coins that she dropped in a wooden drawer. She put the papers under the machine and a lime-green light moved across the paper.

‘The papers from the 1990s, are they back there as well?’

‘ La Gazzetta?’ she said over her shoulder.

‘ La Gazzetta, summer of 1995.’

‘It’s on film. Which months do you want?’

‘June, July, August.’

She gave me the photocopies and then opened the front desk and went back into the stacks. She came back with three large rolls of film and walked me over to the old-fashioned machines for viewing. She put one roll into position and fixed the other end into a slot and ran it forwards. She flicked a switch and the film was projected on to a large screen.

‘Backwards, forwards,’ she said, showing me the buttons for scanning through the month’s editions.

I thanked her and she walked back to her desk. I was both expectant and subdued. There might be something here that could give me some background, but it would probably just be a waste of time. Most of my work involved wasting time.

I started on 24 June. I went through the paper scanning the headlines. The first few pages were normally national and international news. I turned to the inside pages that ran small stories about what was going on in the city.

On 29 June I saw a small paragraph in a side-bar of information about shop opening hours and parking discounts. There was no photo and no byline. It was an appeal for information: SISSA MAN MISSING, ran the headline:

Riccardo Salati went missing on Saturday 24 June. He was last seen waiting for the Rimini train on platform two of the railway station. Anyone with information is asked to contact Colonello Franchini at the Questura.

I wrote down the name Franchini and quickly moved to the subsequent papers.

I went through the next two months but there was nothing. I would have to talk to someone on the paper, one of the reporters, see if they remembered anything.

I gave the rolls of film back to the girl and walked out. Just as I was reaching the road my phone started tickling my leg.

‘Castagnetti, it’s Dall’Aglio.’

‘That was quick. Any news?’

‘Not really. There wasn’t an investigation as such, because there was never a crime, not that we knew of.’

‘So who was Franchini?’

‘How did you get his name?’

‘Saw one of his adverts in La Gazzetta.’

‘Right. He registered the boy’s disappearance. It was more a bureaucratic mechanism than the beginning of an investigation. That’s the only thing I found, the report. Once he was reported missing some photographs will have been distributed and advertisements will have been placed in the local press. But there’s nothing here in our records.’

‘Who was Franchini?’

‘He was one of the commanders when I arrived. Retired now.’

‘No relative of Piero Franchini?’ It was always worth trying to make connections. Piero Franchini was a town councillor. Had been for as long as I could remember.

‘Not that I know of.’

‘And what was the word on him?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know, what did they say about Franchini?’

‘Franchini? A bit of a drinker.’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘He was straight if that’s what you mean. Straight as a Roman road. Never a hint of association with anything other than the force and his family.’ Dall’Aglio was always quick to defend his uniform.

‘Where can I get hold of him?’

‘He moved out to the hills.’

‘Anything a bit more precise…?’

‘Listen, Castagnetti, I shouldn’t even have given you this much. You can find him easily enough. I’m not giving out addresses.’

‘The village at least.’

‘Medesano.’

‘OK. Thanks. I owe you one.’

‘You don’t owe me anything. I don’t trade favours because they become like money. People want more and more of them. I just render public what I decide is in the public interest.’

‘You’re a good man,’ I buttered.

‘I only ask that you keep me informed of your investigation.’

‘Of course.’

I drove over to Medesano. It was a town I knew a bit. A girl I used to know had friends out there.

It was a small place. There weren’t many bars and only one or two were open. The first one I went into was full of early afternoon boozers. There were a few men playing cards on large, circular tables. Others were reading newspapers. The low ceiling was made up of foam squares resting on aluminium runners. A fruit machine chimed from a far corner where a wheezer was dropping his coins. The room smelt of men: aftershave and grappa, coffee and sweat.

‘You know a man called Franchini?’ I asked the barman.

‘Sat over there.’ The man pointed at a large newspaper. All I could see were fingers holding the edge of the pages.

‘Small world,’ I said.

‘Small village,’ he corrected.

I went round the side of the paper and looked at the man. He looked jowly and tired. He was one of those men who are so big they snore even when they’re awake. There’s something about retired cops I find melancholic. It’s as if once they leave the service their whole life is meaningless. Franchini was wearing a suit as if he couldn’t face wearing anything else, but it was all creased like it was the only one he had left.

I took my coffee over. ‘Colonello Franchini?’

He looked up, startled by being given his rank.

‘My name’s Castagnetti. I’m working on a case you left open way back.’ I looked at the man’s face that had dropped into a serious, defensive scowl. ‘You remember Riccardo Salati?’

He almost closed his eyes and stared at me as if he resented the disturbance. ‘Rings a bell.’ The words came out as a single sound.

‘Went missing in 1995.’

‘Right,’ he said unconvincingly.

‘The boy was catching a train back to Rimini, you remember?’

The man was nodding slowly now. ‘And he never arrived. I remember. I only remember because that woman kept hassling me for years afterwards to investigate this or that.’

‘Which woman?’

‘It was his mother, lived out in Sissa.’

‘She won’t be hassling you any more,’ I said, looking at him.

‘She copped it?’

‘Died last week.’

‘That why it’s being reopened?’

‘Distribution of the estate,’ I said, nodding.

Franchini glazed over like he was missing his old job. ‘And you’ve been hired to find the corpse?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Buy me a drink,’ he growled, ‘and we can talk about it.’

I lifted my chin at the barman and shouted for two grappas. The man popped the cork off a half-empty bottle and poured the water-like liquid into two shot glasses. He brought them over.

Franchini slugged it as soon as it was in front of him. I looked at him as his head went backwards. The underneath of his chin was stubbly, like he couldn’t be bothered to shave properly. There were grey clumps of wiry beard poking out between the blood vessels.

He put down his glass and stared at it. ‘She was obsessed by it poor woman. Anyone would be, but there was nothing I could do. He was a young lad. Early twenties. Had a woman and a kid in Romagna somewhere.’

‘All news to me. I haven’t seen the file.’

Franchini fixed me with a stare. ‘There isn’t one. He was reported missing, and that was that in those days. Nowadays they would spend all day printing off letters to relatives to keep them informed of the lack of progress. We let it drop. The way that woman went on at me, you would have thought I didn’t care. I cared too much, that was what my wife always used to say.’

I nodded and let the grappa touch my upper lip. It was a powerful poison.

‘I didn’t ignore any leads,’ Franchini looked at my glass, ‘it’s just that there weren’t any. There was no evidence that anything untoward had happened to him. Truth told, it wasn’t the first time in his life he had gone absent without leave.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I can’t remember all the details, but that boy had a wanderer’s sort of lifestyle. He played cards, lost money, borrowed money. His woman, I can’t remember her name, she said something like that herself. I don’t remember much more about it than that. This insistent mother and her unreliable son.’

I listened to the man slurring. He was the classic drunk, veering between the aggressive and defensive.

‘So there’s no file on the case?’

‘All you’ll find is the report listing him as missing.’

There was something about the way he said it that made me distrust him, think there was more to it than that. He had said it too nicely, and nice didn’t come natural to the Colonello.

‘And?’ I said, making it sound like I knew there was more.

Franchini caught me looking at him with suspicion. His face was blank, but he was blinking and he gave up the pretence.

‘When I retired,’ he said slowly, ‘I was looking forward to spending time travelling with my wife.’ He paused and stared at me defiantly. ‘When she died I didn’t have a lot to do and I went into the same line as you for a year or two. Did a little private work to help pay the bills.’

‘And you worked for Silvia Salati?’

‘It was five or six years ago. Nothing came of it. There were as many blanks then as there were before. You won’t find anything.’ He looked at me with a drunkard’s disdain, as if he were deliberately trying to give offence.

I lifted my drink again and stared at Franchini through the bottom of the shot glass. I placed the glass back on the table and signalled to the barman for another round. ‘Tell me about when he went missing. Why was he catching a train?’

‘To go home. Had a woman in… Ravenna or Rimini.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Emma. Or Anna. Something like that.’

‘And?’

‘What?’

‘What was the story on her?’

‘She was one of those alternative types. Living out of a caravan by the beach. That boy Riccardo had cleaned her out of money, so she had a motive. They had a pretty tempestuous relationship. Ricky put it about a bit, and she didn’t hang around either. Less than a year after Ricky went missing, she had married someone else.’

‘Does she still live out there?’

‘Sure, last I heard. Rimini it was.’

‘And their girl, what was her name?’

‘I don’t remember. Cute little kid. There was a stand-off as I remember between the Salati woman and Anna or Emma or whatever she was called. When I came back from Rimini that poor old Salati woman was more interested in how her granddaughter was than in the progress of the case. She hadn’t been allowed near her since her son died.’

He had said ‘died’, and saw me notice it.

‘You think he’s dead?’

He nodded quickly, like it was a certainty.

‘And what was the progress?’ I asked, wanting to keep the drunkard on track.

‘Nothing that I recall. His woman seemed like one of life’s gamblers who had already written off Riccardo as a bad debt. She was moving on, that’s what she said.’

I was trying to build up a picture of Riccardo’s family, but it was always hard when it was through someone else’s eyes, especially eyes pickled in grappa.

‘And the brother? Umberto?’

Franchini squinted, trying to remember.

‘He had lent the lad money too. From what people told me, Riccardo only had to open his mouth and people seemed to part with their money. He begged and borrowed to avoid calling it theft. That Umberto was pretty furious about the whole thing. He was tight as a clothes line.’

‘And you think he snapped?’

‘You talk to him. He says he was with his pregnant wife that night.’

‘He said the same to me this morning. Why did they split?’

‘I can’t remember. This was years ago.’

The barman brought over more drinks and Franchini threw his back. I looked out of the window.

‘And what did you make of the case?’

Franchini looked reluctant to reply. Didn’t like defeat, I assumed.

‘I didn’t get anywhere and I was too honest to pretend to the old Salati woman that I was on the brink of a breakthrough. I told her as much but she begged me to keep looking. I had the impression she knew more than she was letting on, or that she was holding back on me. It was like she wanted me to prove something she already feared. You get a sense for these things,’ he said condescendingly, looking at me through the white wire of his eyebrows, ‘after forty years’ detective work.’

‘Was it about money?’

‘Certainly looked that way. Riccardo was borrowing from one person and pretending to pay back another. It all went on gambling debts from what I could work out. He used to play the tables at the hotel out on the coast where he worked.’

‘What hotel?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Franchini said, shutting his eyes dismissively. ‘I remember the older brother, Umberto, getting quite hot under the collar on the topic. Said that his brother had cleaned him out.’

‘Did you check out his alibi?’

‘His wife painted the same picture of domestic bliss.’

‘What was she like?’

‘A real ice-queen. She looked like the kind of woman who could do anything she wanted to.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. You go see her. Very self-possessed and guarded.’

‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ I said, wanting my turn at being dismissive.

More men had come in by now and the windows were steamed up against the cold. I looked back at Franchini who was cracking walnuts in his fists and piling up the shells in an ashtray.

‘And there were never any sightings?’

‘Of the boy?’ He shook his head. ‘None. I convinced myself that he was done in that night or soon after.’

‘Why?’

‘You get a sense for these things. You know how it is. There were plenty of people who had a grudge against him.’

‘Sounds like a good time to go missing.’

‘He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off from what I remember. Sounded to me like he struggled to organise a tax return let alone an El Dorado one-way.’

‘He could have missed his train…’

‘I think that’s exactly what happened. The train he was expecting to get was over an hour late. That was the only lead we ever had. It meant he was hanging around the station for over an hour. I think he got bored, wandered off, and never got back to the platform. But you go to the station and ask if someone remembers his face from one Saturday night fourteen years ago. All that time, and with all the chaos that’s always going on there. People will laugh in your face.’ The drink was making him aggressive and as he spoke the hammocks under his eyes were rocking. ‘You might just as well ask a goldfish what they know about opera. Per carità!’ He laughed nastily, as if I were being a nuisance.

I got up. ‘OK. I’ll see you around.’

‘Stay for another.’

‘Next time,’ I said as I walked out.

Back in the car I opened the glove compartment and took out a map. It wouldn’t take me long to get to La Bassa, the lowlands. It was flat as a puddle of mud and smelt about the same.

Without this fertile land the city wouldn’t survive. This is where the pork and milk come from. It’s a tidy, moody place. In summer you can’t move for mosquitos, and in winter you can’t move for fog. The roads are thin ribbons raised up on earthy banks and flanked by irrigation ditches. If you meet a man or beast on one of these roads you need floats to let the other pass.

Everywhere there are willow and poplar plantations. They’re planted in perfectly parallel lines and create enough dry earth to sink the foundations for a new house. La Bassa, Mauro says, is like Louisiana, and he should know because he saw a photograph of Louisiana once.

I always get lost around here. I confuse the small farming communities with their little, proud squares and their lonely village grandeur. I usually come out this way for some food fair or a sagra, one of those summer events in a field where you dance to pop music and ballo liscio and drink fizzy red wine out of white plastic glasses.

As I approached Sissa the road became very narrow. There were abandoned houses dotted along the road. Many windows were empty of glass, or had only triangles of it left in their frames. There were barns whose beams were giving in to the weight of age and many of the long, half-cylindrical tiles lay broken on the ground.

But then the road veered right and brought me into the centre of a picturesque village. There was a church on one side of a small square with long steps leading down towards the fountain in the middle. There was a bar on the other side of the square, and a shop. A bit further away I could see a building with an Italian flag flying next to the European one.

There was no one around. The shop and the bar and what must have been the village hall were all closed. I got out of the car and looked down all the roads that led away from the square. They didn’t offer much. There was one old woman in black who was shouting for some animal or child to come indoors. In the other direction there was a man pushing a bicycle away.

I went down one of the side streets with a row of small cottages, ancient peasant houses that were shut up against the cold. The street was asphalted but there were cracks across it. I nodded a buongiorno at a man who was peeling potatoes over a hedge into a field of pigs.

‘Know where the Salati house is?’

‘Sure.’ He pointed at a house where there was a cluster of shiny cars. I could see someone carrying in a tray of food. ‘The end of this road,’ he barked, pointing, ‘the last house before the orchard. It’s the one on the right where all the mourners are.’

I walked down, trying to bounce my ankle into life.

On the left was a woman in gardening gear. ‘That the Salati house?’ I said to her.

The woman nodded.

‘You live here?’

She nodded again.

‘I’m a private detective, Signora.’ I let the news sink in. ‘I’ve been employed by the executors of Signora Salati’s will to verify the legal status of Riccardo Salati. Have you lived here long?’

‘This is where I’ve been since I was born,’ she said proudly. She pointed across the road to the house opposite. ‘That’s Silvia’s house, the red one. She moved in the day she got married.’

‘Could we take a look?’

‘Not much to see. And now’s not exactly a good time.’

I could see the orchard’s twisted branches to the side of the Salati house. Beyond the fruit trees were vines, their thin, bare arms wrapped around long lines of wire.

‘Are they going to sell it?’ I asked.

‘I expect so. Umberto has no interest in returning here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s part of the provincial jet-set. Sissa isn’t Portofino.’

‘I prefer Sissa,’ I said.

‘It’s a good village,’ the woman said, staring at me. ‘We’re close knit here, and some people think that’s bad. But we look after ourselves, we care for each other.’

‘Including Riccardo?’ I asked.

She looked at me and nodded slowly. She started talking about how her friend had continued her dignified battle for justice for her boy.

‘I’m trying to work out what might have happened to him,’ I said. ‘I get the impression that he was unreliable…’ I trailed off, hoping she would pick up the story, but she was pulling up a weed that had sprouted in the window frame of her house.

‘He would leave on a whim,’ she said eventually, ‘or show up on another. You never knew where he was going to be from one minute to the next. He was often away all summer working in the hotels in Rimini. Then, out of the blue, I would be woken up by him shouting to his mother in the middle of the night, asking her to open up. No warning. There was no warning to anything he did, except when he went missing. That was the one thing which, looking back, might have been expected.’

‘How come?’

‘Just the way he lived. Like I say, he would be here one minute, gone the next. He was a wanderer without roots, and sometimes those kind of people just’, she had the weed in her hands and was looking at it, ‘don’t come home.’

‘Did he have many friends here?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. But he wasn’t disliked. And he certainly didn’t have any enemies.’ She looked over to the house opposite. ‘But ever since he moved out east we all lost touch with him.’

‘And who was Riccardo’s woman?’

She paused. ‘A girl called Anna. She came up here once or twice, but she and Silvia fell out. They were both strong women and both had their opinions.’

‘What did they fall out over?’

‘I don’t know and I didn’t ask. But I expect Silvia thought she wasn’t good enough for her son and probably said as much.’

‘Riccardo and Anna had a child, right?’

‘They had a little girl. She was the other reason that Ricky’s disappearance hit Silvia so hard. It meant she lost her little granddaughter as well.’ She inhaled deeply and seemed to shudder with the effort. ‘Silvia mentioned them more and more towards the end. I got the impression she had an idea of what had happened. She felt guilty in some way for letting it happen.’

‘Letting what happen?’

‘Letting Riccardo disappear. Allowing him to walk out on his life and his family. Maybe it was just she felt guilty for giving up on him. She always said she just wanted to know. She said that until she knew she couldn’t get on with her life, and she said that even as she was dying – as if she had any life left to her. I can’t get on with my life until I know, she used to say.’

I frowned. I was used to these pat phrases by now. People always said the same sentences over and over, and always with such solemnity.

‘She knew she was about to die’, the woman was carrying on, ‘and she wanted to straighten everything out.’

‘How did she intend to do that?’

‘Hire you, I assume.’

I nodded. ‘Her other son, Umberto,’ I said. ‘He and his wife separated, right?’

‘Yes, they’re separated, but she was up here too when Silvia was dying. Roberta she’s called. A nice lady.’

I tried to remember all the names I was accumulating. I didn’t want to write it all down for fear of freezing the old woman. I looked at her again. She was petite. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun so that you could see her wrinkled, elegant face.

‘Did they have a happy marriage?’

‘Umberto and Roberta?’

‘No, Silvia and…’

‘Paolo?’ She looked at me with stern, blue eyes. She looked over my shoulder as if the distance might be able to provide her an answer. Eventually she looked back at me.

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘But you have an idea?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m uncomfortable speculating on anyone’s marriage, let alone that of a friend who isn’t yet buried.’

I nodded slowly, as if in recognition of her tact. Tact, for once, was enough. It was as good as an admission that the marriage wasn’t a bed of roses. Marriage never is from what I’ve heard.

‘Were there other people?’

She shrugged and said nothing. We stood there side by side in silence for a few minutes. I’ve never come across the family that doesn’t have secrets, and the Salati family sounded like it might have a few of its own.

‘I’ll go and pay my respects,’ I said, bowing slightly to the woman. ‘I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Lucentini. Maria Lucentini.’

I nodded and walked towards the Salati house. As I was going through the door, I saw Umberto.

‘I thought I would come and pay my respects,’ I said.

Umberto nodded and pointed me to the end of a corridor and towards the stairs. He looked different. He must have shut up the shop for lutto and it looked as if he had been crying. There were other women going in and out of the rooms, carrying drinks on trays. The whole house smelt of incense and spices, of cinnamon or cloves and candles.

I walked up the stairs and found the coffin in a room beyond the other bedrooms. It was on varnished trestles and the lid was held open at an artistic angle. I looked at her marble face. I’m so used to seeing violent deaths that it surprised me how serene she looked. No blood and no bruises. I stared at her for a minute, half expecting her to twitch back to life.

There was no one else in the room. I pushed the door slightly shut and looked around. There was a chest of drawers covered with photographs.

I looked at them all quickly and saw one of Umberto and another man from what I hoped was fifteen years ago. It must have been the two brothers, they looked so similar. Umberto already looked like he was widening out. He was simply staring at the camera. But Riccardo, if it was him, was smiling, showing a wide gap between his teeth. It was a roguish kind of face. He looked like a man who could switch on the charm like a tap.

I slipped the photograph out of its frame and into my pocket. I shook Umberto’s hand on the way out, but didn’t say anything. There’s not much you can say when someone’s dead and ‘sorry’ is pointless the first time, let alone the second.

I drove back to the office slowly. It was getting dark and I got lost as usual. I had turned left too soon and ended up driving through hamlets I had never heard of.

By the time I got back it was gone six. I took the photograph and ran off 200 copies on my cheap paper that warped with the warm ink. I looked at the photograph again: Riccardo’s face was thinner and more melancholy in black and white. The lack of colour made him look like something from long ago, a relic from another age.

I put all my equipment in the safe: the notebook, the gun, the camera. I was about to go to bed when the phone went.

It was Mauro. He wanted to tell me a woodpecker had had a go at one of the hives and had almost made a hole. ‘It looks like the thing’s made of balsa once the pecker’s been at it two minutes.’

Mauro was my only schoolfriend who had had less luck than me. He had gone into the army, got shot up in countries he had never heard of. Had a marriage as messy as a nightclub at dawn, only now it was a divorce, so he didn’t even have that.

I kept my hives in his back garden for all sorts of reasons. Mauro didn’t have neighbours, for one. And because having my stuff out there gave me an excuse to go and see him often.

‘It was making an almighty noise,’ Mauro said, ‘almost knocking the thing over. I’ve shooed him away twice.’

I said I would come round. If I knew Mauro, the real reason he wanted company was to get his elbow to work.

It was only a ten-minute drive to the north of the city, and Mauro was there in his garage when I pulled in. We took a torch and went to look at the hives. He showed me the damage: a long, vertical scar. The bird hadn’t quite made a hole, but he had been halfway there.

We looked at the other hives. I’ve only got eleven, so it didn’t take long. They seemed all right. I said I would come back later in the week and fix up the cracked one.

‘Drink?’ Mauro said.

Mauro was like a lot of drinkers. His struggle against the poison made him into a pessimist and he ridiculed anyone who made a show of being rigorous or upright. And yet at the same time he was more idealistic than any of us, and could be brutal when he saw hypocrisy or deceit. With a glass inside him he started talking about a recent case of a well-known mafioso from down south who had been let out of prison because he had hiccups. That wasn’t quite the story, but that’s how Mauro told it. And from there he was quickly on to the subject of our wonderful, sad country.

‘It’s all screwed up, Casta,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, why don’t people do something about organised crime? Everyone complains about the system here, but the majority has never stood up to it. A few thousand go to the piazza, but millions don’t bother.’

‘Mauro,’ I said, ‘crime is like religion: it’s no good unless it’s organised.’

He laughed at that, and refilled our glasses. I told him I was on a new case, and he started ridiculing me as if I had said I was taking holy orders.

‘What have you got that needs redeeming?’ he said, swigging his second.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, what is it you’re feeling so guilty about?’

‘Maybe not doing the washing-up.’ I tried to laugh. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, why do you have to save everyone?’

‘I don’t.’

‘It’s like you’re always trying to prove yourself.’

‘I’m always trying to prove something. That’s my job.’

‘But all you’re really doing is trying to prove yourself.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I did.’

‘You’re talking in riddles, Mauro. I go after real people and real crimes. Things happen, I try to uncover clues, events,

motives.’ I pushed away my empty glass. ‘I’d better head off, I’m going to a funeral tomorrow,’ I said.

Mauro slipped in his watery way from spiteful to solicitous. That’s why I still liked him. He would challenge you constantly, but in the end he always cared, though he hated to show it. ‘Anyone I know?’

‘No. It’s work.’

‘Let’s raise a drink to him.’

‘Her. I’ve raised enough for today. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I glanced at old Mauro. His face looked desperate, like he couldn’t stop what he was doing, which was filling up our glasses. If I didn’t keep him company he would sink both, so I picked up mine and threw it back.