‘And where did she say the money came from?’
‘Once she told me she was translating a book from French and that she had been given an advance.’
‘And did you believe her?’
Pitifully, she shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Did you tell her you didn’t believe her?’
She hadn’t really told her she didn’t believe her: she had tried to find out if she had someone, she thought in fact that she did have someone, a man who might not have been very young, quite a generous man, but she hadn’t tried to find out more, otherwise she wouldn’t have accepted the money. In her clumsy way, she was sincere.
‘So you didn’t know,’ he had to be even more brutal, ‘that she earned that money by picking up men, or being picked up by them, different ones each time.’
No, she didn’t know, and finally she began to tremble a little, but without crying, her whole face was visibly trembling, and yet she wasn’t crying. ‘What’s happened? She’s been dead for a year, we’ve already suffered so much, my father and I, what are you looking for now?’
It wasn’t easy to explain what they were looking for and he didn’t even try, because he himself wasn’t sure exactly what they were looking for, maybe the truth, if he didn’t find the very idea of the truth laughable. What is the truth? Does it even exist?
‘All right, you don’t know anything about this,’ he said, putting the photo back in the leather briefcase, ‘but maybe you can tell us something else that could help us. Your sister must have had friends, acquaintances. Did you ever see any friend of your sister’s? Did your sister ever talk to you about anyone?’
The trembling ceased gradually, resignedly, because it’s useless to tremble or cry, what’s the point of it? ‘She always said she was going to see some friend or other, but I can’t remember all of them and anyway she only ever mentioned first names.’
He made her tell him what she remembered, and Mascaranti wrote everything down. The friend she remembered most was the schoolteacher. ‘She hadn’t graduated yet, but Alberta called her the schoolteacher. She came here to the house, once, to pick her up.’
He was interrogating: having been interrogated so many times by the prosecuting attorney at the trial, and also in prison, he was now the one asking the questions, and it was an interesting experience. ‘So you don’t remember the name, is that right, you only knew her as the schoolteacher?’
No, she said, she remembered the name, Livia Ussaro: she must have written it down in the little address book.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘could I see this address book?’
She went into the hall, took it from the hook from which it was hanging next to the telephone and brought it in to him. Without looking at it, he put it in the briefcase together with the photograph. ‘I’ll bring it back in a few days.’ Livia Ussaro didn’t sound a very likely name, it might be a pseudonym: start looking for a woman called Livia Ussaro and you probably wouldn’t find anything. And he was getting tired of Mascaranti holding that little notebook that vanished inside his big hands, that little Biro, and the fact that he was writing everything down.
‘Do you remember any other friends?’
‘She mentioned so many. She’d say, I’m going to see Maurilia, or else somebody would phone and say, this is Luisa, is Alberta there?’
Was she winding him round her little finger, or was it innocence in a pure state, a precipitate of innocence, obtainable only in a laboratory?
‘I was also thinking of men friends,’ he said, patient but already irritable.
‘No, never men.’
Mascaranti ran his Biro through his hair: he wasn’t trying to write on his head, but the woman had said ‘never men’ quite seriously, straight out, it had come from her heart, she wasn’t trying to deceive anyone.
‘The photograph I showed you suggests your sister may have had a number of male acquaintances. Whatever it was she did, she’s dead now, and there’s no point in your trying to cover it up, we’ll find out in the end anyway. Men must have phoned your sister, maybe lots of them, and some may have given their names. Please tell me the truth.’
‘No man ever phoned her,’ she said immediately, and she seemed genuinely sorry that she couldn’t help him.
She wasn’t lying. ‘It’s possible,’ Mascaranti said. ‘Maybe she didn’t let them phone here because she didn’t want to make her sister suspicious.’
While they were about it, they committed another violation of her rights as a citizen and did a quick search of the apartment.
‘Your sister must have left some personal objects here. We’d like to see them.’
Unaware that the constitution gave her the right to refuse, she took them to the one bedroom in the apartment. There were two small beds like the cots of four-year-old children who sleep with teddy bears clutched to their chests, and indeed, on the light wooden headboards, bears, dogs, butterflies, and snails with long horns had been painted. ‘She slept here with me, I left her clothes in the wardrobe, and everything else she had is in that suitcase on top of the wardrobe.’
Mascaranti pulled down the suitcase, opened it, and was about to start writing down everything it contained, but Duca stopped him. ‘Leave it, there’s nothing here.’ There were a large number of bras, knickers and suspenders, some hair clips, a hairdryer, a novel by Moravia, a fountain pen, and an opened packet of cigarettes: Alpha, rather a strong brand for a young woman.
‘We’ve finished.’ No, not everything was nasty. Alberta’s unfortunate sister may have been weak and foolish, but she didn’t know anything, she hadn’t been part of anything that wasn’t above board. But in the hall, before they left, he still asked, ‘Did you ever figure out why your sister killed herself?’
She said no with the same expression on her face, and finally her eyes grew moist. ‘I don’t know, it was terrible when they called me to the morgue, I hoped it wasn’t her. The evening before she’d talked about the two of us going on holiday together, she said she wanted to go a long way away, somewhere abroad. She was cheerful, and I told her off, I said we didn’t have enough money to go abroad, the landlord had asked for the latest instalment, it was fifty thousand lire, but she wanted to go on holiday, as far away as possible, she said.’
So that was why, that day, she had told Davide, alongside the gentle river, that she needed fifty thousand lire, and he had given it to her: it was for the expenses, the caretaker, the lift that didn’t work, the heating, which her sister had to pay. But why she had killed herself, if she had killed herself; nobody knew, the sister even less than anyone else. He was pleased, at least there was something here that wasn’t nasty. He tried as best he could to apologise for his cruelty. ‘I’m sorry, signorina, if we disturbed you at night, but you work all day and we couldn’t come at any other time,’ but his attempt at kindness had a disastrous effect: Alessandra Radelli started sobbing and as they began descending the staircase they heard her sobs until the door closed.
Downstairs, they got in the Giulietta, and Davide was still at the wheel, the unofficial driver of an unofficial police commando, and having crossed the city they got out at the Hotel Cavour, their headquarters, as they did every evening.
‘A bottle of dry Frascati, not chilled,’ he ordered as soon as they were in the two connecting rooms. They took off their jackets, apart from Davide, and loosened their ties, even Davide. They were in the second phase of the treatment: change of poison. Davide could drink all the wine he wanted, even a wine that had an imaginary similarity in taste to whisky, but never again a single drop of whisky, or any other strong liquor. For two days, Davide had been holding out quite well, only his silence was tending to get worse.
Mascaranti was a bureaucrat, he needed to write a report of the work they had done during the day, and a plan of what they would do the following day.