Death in August

‘Find everything I asked for, Piras?’

‘Got it all.’

Bordelli downshifted, and the Beetle backfired.

‘It’s the carburation,’ said Piras.

‘I’ll take her to the doctor’s as soon as I can. Now listen closely, Piras. In a few minutes you’re going to see the room where a woman of about sixty died. I’ll try to sum up for you what we know so far.’

He told him about the allergy, mate pollen, Maria’s suspicions, the brother Dante, and the will.

They entered the villa. The smell of old furniture and dust gently invaded their noses. In the bedroom Bordelli took the objects Piras had gathered out of the paper bag and arranged them one by one, reconstructing the original situation. He showed Piras how the woman was when he found her, miming the corpse’s position, hands on his throat. Then he sat down and lit a cigarette.

‘Let’s play a game, Piras. You pretend to know for certain that it was a murder, in spite of the fact that the post-mortem shows that the woman died of a violent asthma attack. The question is this: how did the murderer kill the lady?’

Piras grinned.

‘There’s one thing I can tell you straight away, Inspector.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Are you sure you’ve put everything back the way it was?’

‘Absolutely.’

Piras picked up the little bottle that was supposed to be the Asthmaben.

‘The cap was screwed on?’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes no sense to me. All the other elements point to great agitation, whereas the cap …’

‘Right.’

Piras put the bottle back in place and kept looking around. He went to the window and opened it, perhaps because the room was full of smoke. He paced about the room a little more. His dark eyes jumped quickly from one object to another. At last he stopped in front of Bordelli.

‘Does the killer have an alibi in this game?’ he asked.

‘Let’s pretend he does, since he did organise everything so he could kill without getting caught.’

Piras nodded, pensive.

‘This is a tough one,’ he said.

‘That’s why I called you. Do you feel like handling the case? Together with me, I mean.’

‘That’s fine with me. Could I ask you a question, Inspector?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Is this an official assignment or your own idea?’

‘It’s all mine, Piras. But if we discover anything, you’ll get the credit, too, and I’m sure you’ll be promoted.’

‘Another thing, Inspector. Do you already have a hypothesis, or are you sailing in the dark?’

‘I have no idea of anything. I’m completely in the dark. I haven’t even got the results of the post-mortem. It may actually come out that the lady died without anyone’s help. But I don’t like the look of this. There’s a great big fly buzzing in my skull.’

Piras saw the weariness in Bordelli’s face move up a notch.

‘You need to sleep,’ he said.

‘You’re probably right. You think about the riddle, in the meantime. We’ll meet up again in my office tomorrow, let’s say half past nine. I’ll have the pathologist’s results by then. I’d like to take stock of the situation before interrogating the Morozzis.’

‘All right.’

They went out, leaving the window open. Piras didn’t say a word the whole way back to the station. Deep inside, Bordelli was smiling. He felt as if he was back in the platoon with Piras’s father. Same Sardinian silence, full of thoughts.

At nine o’clock that evening, Bordelli stripped down naked and got into bed. He had hardly eaten a thing. The heat gave no quarter. He tried to sleep, but in the absence of DDT the mosquitoes had an easy time of things. They were biting him mostly on the veins of his hands. He absolutely must remember to buy some zampironi. He put his raw hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling. He thought about Dante, Maria and the intelligence of mice. He had read somewhere that for every man in the world, there were seven women and a million mice, and that, ‘with such superior numbers, they could take over the world’, but he couldn’t remember whether that meant mice or women.

The following morning he awoke around midday, sweaty and aching, church bells clanging in his head. Even in August there was a priest to pull the clapper. He threw his legs out of bed and, once on his feet, felt a stabbing pain slice through his head like a knife through butter. His dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He felt old, but he wasn’t, he told himself, he wasn’t old at all. It was all the fault of those bad memories and the line of work he was in.

He dragged himself into the bathroom, pressing his temples hard with his forefingers. He wet his hands and face with cold water, and when he looked up, he saw a fifty-three-year-old man in the mirror with deep circles under his eyes and sagging cheeks. He leaned over the sink, supporting himself with his hands, and took a long look at himself. For consolation he thought of Diotivede at seventy, as lucid and light of step as a child. Seventy minus fifty-three made seventeen, not a bad number.

He shaved, hoping the weariness that had accumulated in his wrinkles like invisible dirt would be carried away with his beard. After a cold shower, he reheated the coffee of the previous morning and drank it in a hurry. Stepping out on to the pavement, he had to close his eyes halfway, so brilliant with sunlight were the streets. The soft, burning asphalt cast Saharan reflections.

It was one o’clock when Bordelli parked his Volkswagen in front of the Trattoria da Cesare, which had remained open for the dog days. It was rather eerie to see Viale Lavagnini completely deserted. Leaving the car windows slightly open, he headed into the restaurant. It was the only place he ever went to eat, and by now it was a bit like going to the home of friends. As soon as he entered, a number of hands rose in greeting. The tables were full of solitary husbands whose wives were at the beach, but Bordelli by now had his own reserved table in Toto’s blazing kitchen, next to the ovens of the shortest cook in Europe. He sat down on his customary backless stool and leaned his shoulders against the wall.

‘Ciao, Toto, I hope you’re not going to give me wild boar again,’ he said.

‘Hello, Inspector! What have you got against wild boar?’

‘Nothing, in winter …’

‘All right, no boar. Today, for delicate souls, there’s also panzanella.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

Normally Toto’s dishes were swimming in fat. Even his fruit salads had something greasy about them. Panzanella. This was the first time he’d ever made panzanella. But Bordelli quickly discovered that Toto’s version included an unheard-of amount of onions. He nevertheless served himself a heaped plateful, deciding not to eat anything else. Watching Toto juggle the skillets, he thought that spending the summer in the kitchen in front of eternal flames must be a kind of mission, which would make Toto a missisonary. The heat there felt rather like a truncheon to the head. Mere breathing was an effort, though that didn’t stop Toto from talking. The formidable cook was also a born talker, and he often told stories of his home town in the south.

‘… Like that relative of mine, Inspector, who went to America in ’32 to work as a labourer and now he’s got more money than a lawyer.’ This was followed by a thousand anecdotes that had a touch of myth about them. Sometimes he talked about thirty-year feuds that were still going strong. He would name all the dead, down to the last. People from his town would keep him up to date through letters and by telephone, giving descriptions of faces reduced to pulp by sawn-off shotguns and of goat-tied bodies. Bordelli gladly listened to him. He liked the musical intonations of his speech and his use of the plural voi, which in Toto had nothing to do with the Mussolini era.

‘What was that wine you gave me, Toto!’

The cook opened his eyes wide.