‘Have fun.’
‘No need to tell us that, darling!’ she said, sending a barrage of kisses through the receiver.
Bordelli sighed in the dark and turned on to his side. He closed his eyes, hoping to go back to sleep. All of a sudden he saw in his mind’s eye the tattered bodies of Caimano and Scardigli, after they had stepped on an anti- tank mine a hundred yards away from him. They hadn’t even shouted. One of their arms had to be taken down from a tree. Fucking war. In the morning you were sharing dishwater coffee with a friend, and that evening you were putting his body parts into a coffin.
Bordelli often thought about the war; he still felt it very close by. Sometimes it seemed as if he had stopped shooting at Nazis just yesterday. He could still hear the voices of his dead comrades, their laughter, each as distinct as a signature. He could still hear each one’s personal verbal quirks and curses. If he had to name one good thing about the war, it was the way it had forcibly mixed people of every region together. One learned to recognise the different dialects and mentalities, the myths and hopes of every part of Italy.
Bordelli turned on to his other side and thought about the fact that he had nearly stopped smoking. This was a great triumph for him. During the war he had got up to a hundred cigarettes a day, the famously terrible MILIT cigarettes issued by the government. Once the Americans arrived, smoking no longer felt like torture. But Bordelli had kept smoking a hundred a day. Thinking about it now made him feel nauseated. Without turning on the light, he reached out and picked up a cigarette, his fourth. He propped himself up on one elbow and lit it. The ashtray was in the same place it had been for years; it was hard to miss. He smoked, still jumping from one memory to another, following no order whatsoever. Sometimes his head filled with many memories at once and they began to overlap, so that it became impossible to make any sense at all of the jumble.…
The telephone on the nightstand rang, and he groped in the dark for the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘Is that you, Inspector?’
‘I think so. What time is it?’
‘Two.’
‘Has something happened?’
Mugnai faltered.
‘I don’t know yet … I mean … well, a short while ago a woman phoned, saying she was worried … says some lady’s not answering her phone, and she says that’s unusual … Inspector, do you by any chance know what a “lady companion” is?’
‘I’m sorry, Mugnai, you’ll have to start over again, from the beginning.’
‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Inspector. I probably shouldn’t even have bothered you, but I’m here by myself, and you’ve always said that if I had any doubts about anything …’
‘There’s no problem, Mugnai, I’m listening, but try to make things simpler.’
‘I’ll try, Inspector, but nothing is clear, not even to me; I wrote everything down, otherwise I’d forget it … A little while ago a woman, called Maria, phoned saying she was the lady companion of a certain lady with two surnames … What’s a lady companion?’
‘I’ll explain another time.’
‘Does it have anything to do with whores?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Go on.’
‘Sorry, Inspector. Anyway, this woman, Maria, I mean, says she spends the whole day with the lady, but then at eight o’clock she leaves because the lady wants to be alone at night. Every night, however, round midnight, she phones the lady to see how she’s doing, because the lady is old and sort of sick.’
‘You should say “elderly”, Mugnai; “old” isn’t very nice.’
‘Whatever you say, Inspector … Anyway, so tonight Maria called at round about midnight, but there was no answer. She tried again a little later, but still no answer. She kept calling every fifteen minutes till one o’clock, and then she took a cab to go and check on the lady in person. She says she can see the light on inside, but the lady won’t come to the door. So she called us.’
Bordelli had already started getting dressed.
‘So why didn’t she go inside?’
Mugnai slammed his hand down on the table.
‘That’s what I said, too, Inspector! Why didn’t she go inside? And you know what she said?’
‘What?’
‘She said nobody else has got the keys to the villa, because the lady doesn’t want to give them out.’
The inspector sighed.
‘If she was so worried, she should have gone there with the woman’s doctor and broken down the door,’ he said. Mugnai practically ate the receiver.
‘That’s what I said, too, Inspector! And you know what she replied?’
‘What?’
‘She said the lady’s doctor is so small that if he tried to break open the door he would break his shoulder.’
‘Well, then the fire department.’
‘I swear I said that, too. And so she says: “Well, at this point, there’s nothing more to be done. The lady’s dead.”’
‘Fine, I think I get the picture.’
‘And you know what she said next, Inspector?’
Bordelli buckled his belt, holding the receiver between chin and shoulder.
‘Go on, Mugnai, stop playing guessing games.’
‘Sorry, Inspector.’
‘Well, what did she say next?’
‘She said the lady was murdered.’
‘And how does she know that?’
‘She doesn’t know it. She only said she could sense it. Then she started crying.’
‘Maybe she reads too many mysteries.’
Mugnai slammed his hand down somewhere else.
‘That’s what I thought, too, Inspector! So what are we gonna do?’
‘Let me put on my shoes, and I’ll be on my way.’
‘Sorry about this, Inspector, but you always told me that-’
‘Forget about it. I couldn’t sleep, anyway. Give me the address.’
By half past two Bordelli was driving his VW Beetle up Via della Piazzola, a narrow little street in the hilly, posh end of town. The headlamps lit up the grey asphalt, which was full of potholes and patches. On either side of the street loomed the great facades of aristocratic villas and the monumental gates of villas hidden farther within. Against the black sky, the great, motionless manes of the trees stood blacker still. Bordelli felt an acidic bubble expand in his stomach and rise up into his mouth, prompting him to suppress, with some effort, the desire to light a fifth cigarette. He pulled up at number 110. The gate of Villa Pedretti-Strassen was closed. As the street was too narrow for him to park, he was forced to leave the car a hundred yards ahead, where the road widened. There wasn’t a breath of wind. It was still hot outside, even at that hour.
He walked back down to the villa. Beyond the colossal cast-iron gate, at the back of a dark garden full of trees, he could make out the villa’s dark silhouette. And, behind a towering hedgerow of laurel parallel to the house, the lighted rectangle of a window. Bordelli put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and suddenly felt all his accumulated fatigue. He wished he could lie down on the ground and savour the peace enveloping the villa, immobile, watching the sky and thinking of the past.
He tried to push the great gate open, but it was locked. It was also very tall, with pointed spikes on top. He had better find another solution. Walking along the enclosure wall, he found a small side gate. He pushed it open, forcing the accumulated rust in the hinges. The garden was in a state of abandon, but not completely, as if a gardener tended it perhaps three or four times a year. The villa, with its crumbling facade, must have been from the seventeenth century. Three storeys, five windows per storey, all closed except for the one with the light in it, on the first floor. Through the uneven panes he could see a frescoed ceiling.
Hugging the walls of the villa, he arrived at the rear. There was a large park with very tall trees and a small
