‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Carrua said. ‘I remember somebody doing that in 1959. A man whose wife always took sleeping pills at night. One night he gave her one more than usual, then slit her wrists and came to us in the morning to say he’d found her dead.’
‘And how did you find him out?’
‘We beat it out of him. It was Mascaranti who questioned him. When you think up a trick like that, you never think you might be beaten. There’s no need of any Chinese torture, after the fifth or sixth slap from Mascaranti, a person has to decide before his brain explodes.’
‘I didn’t say she was murdered,’ Duca said, standing up. He hoped, with all his heart, with all the last spark of trust in his fellow men, with all his anger, that it wasn’t anything as nasty as that. He went to Davide. ‘Come on, let’s pitch our tents at the Cavour.’ He put his hand on his shoulder and gave it a little fraternal squeeze.
PART TWO
Every time we find a pimp we have to crush him … But what exactly do you want to crush, my darling? The more of them you crush, the more there are. And that’s all right, but maybe you have to crush them all the same.
1
No, not everything was so nasty.
Davide had stayed in the car, behind the wheel. Mascaranti and Duca climbed to the third floor; as usual in this kind of building the lift was out of order, and on every landing you could hear at least one TV set with Milva singing on the Milva Club, and often even two. Milva was singing on the third floor, too, but the volume faded almost to nothing after they had rung the bell, then the door opened and the sister of the suicide or murder victim or whatever she was, the sister of Alberta Radelli, smiled shyly at Mascaranti.
‘Police. We need to talk to you.’
She made the usual face that honest Italians make when they see a policeman, a pensive face that gradually turns increasingly anxious. She must have done something wrong, she couldn’t remember what, but they had already found her out. The police had already been there, the year before, about poor Alberta, so what could have happened now? If she had been an American she would have replied, ‘How can I help you?’ in a polite, concerned tone, but she was an Italian from the South who the year before had been on the verge of losing her job with the phone company because her sister had killed herself and had been in the newspapers, so she didn’t say anything, not even ‘Yes,’ just let them in, ran awkwardly across the little room to switch off the television set, blotting out Milva completely, and turned to look at them: one rather tall, rather thin, rather unpleasant-looking-that was him, Duca-the other short and stocky, and even more unpleasant-looking, and she didn’t even ask them to sit down, just as she didn’t tell them that it was illegal for the police to enter a citizen’s home after sunset, because she didn’t know the law, not that anyone did know it, and even if she had known it she still wouldn’t have said anything.
‘Is this your sister?’ From a small leather briefcase Duca had taken out an 18×24 photograph and held it up to her, in the little room illuminated now only by a lamp with a plastic shade, bought at Upim or La Standa, and placed next to the TV set.
Every now and again his father had talked to him about his work and each time he did he told him, talking about his days in Sicily with the Mafia, that the only method which had proved effective over the years, with both criminals and honest people, with good and bad people, was a fist in the face. These people are crafty, don’t waste your time on them. Forensics is one thing and that’s fine, but a police force using nice words, persuasion, psychological games, only makes new criminals. First give them a punch in the face, and then ask the question, you’ll see, a person who’s taken a punch responds better because he’s realised that when the need arises you can talk his language. And if the person who’s taken the punch is an honest man, don’t worry, even honest men can have accidents.
He had never liked the theory, and was even convinced that it was wrong, but now he had applied it. The photograph he had chosen to show the woman was one of the most indecent shots of her dead sister. It was just like a punch in the face.
Apart from looking at the photo, Alessandra Radelli did nothing, she didn’t turn red, didn’t turn white, didn’t start to cry, didn’t even say ‘oh.’ Nothing. But her face seemed to become smaller.
‘Is this your sister?’ he asked again, more loudly.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Sit down, signorina.’ He already knew everything about her, from the phone company where she worked, from the landlord-she paid her rent regularly-and from the caretaker-she never received men, nor had she received them when her sister was still there.
‘Do you know anything about these photographs?’
She shook her head, she was starting to breathe heavily, it was probably the heat, the room was small, even more hot air came in from the window that looked out on the courtyard. Mascaranti had found the light switch and lit the thing which hung from the ceiling of the room and which revealed itself to be an attempt at a chandelier.
‘What did your sister live on? Did she have a job?’
She knew perfectly well what they meant, and she started speaking. She seemed almost calm, but her face remained, inexplicably, smaller than when they had arrived. Of course, of course, Alberta had found work immediately, as soon as she had arrived from Naples: she had become a shop assistant.
‘Where?’
She told them where, a shop, although the term was a little vulgar: better to say a ‘men’s boutique’ in the Via Croce Rossa, where a young man enters, climbs a small carpeted staircase, and in a softly furnished little room his measurements are taken for a shirt by two young female shop assistants, or if he needs gloves for the car, French ties from Carven, original American pants, or anything else, the two shop assistants, guided by another lady, are always there, and one of the two assistants had been Alberta Radelli.
‘How long did she work there?’
‘Two or three months,’ she wasn’t sure.
Mascaranti was writing everything down.
‘And then?’
‘She left.’
‘Why?’
She couldn’t remember, maybe Alberta had quarrelled with the manageress.
‘And after that?’
One by one, she told them all the places where her sister had worked, those that she knew, including the phone company. Mascaranti wrote them all down and then counted them up: in the year and a half she had been in Milan, Alberta Radelli had worked a total of almost eleven months, most of the time as a shop assistant. More than they had expected. The remaining seven months were taken up with intervals of unemployment.
‘But she also gave lessons, I got a lot of lessons for her.’ The famous arithmetic, history, and geography lessons to schoolboys.
‘How much did she charge per lesson?’
‘Six hundred lire.’
As much as an hourly cleaner but, apart from the social injustice and the debasement of cultural values, Alberta Radelli didn’t have much to play with from these lessons. Cruelly, he turned over the photograph, which for a while he had kept face down, and showed it to her again. ‘You realise your sister was doing something that wasn’t very nice’-look at the photo, he seemed to be saying-‘and I can’t believe you didn’t know anything about it, given that you lived together.’
She nodded, as if to say, yes, she knew something, and Mascaranti was getting ready to write it down, but all she said was that she had occasionally had her suspicions, because sometimes, even when she wasn’t working, her sister gave her twenty or thirty thousand lire to help her with her monthly bills.