She went into the living room and looked out of the window at the street, through the blinds incrusted with year-old dust. There was nobody there and nobody was passing, even the Mercedes 230 had gone.
She wouldn’t give in, never. Livia was right, she didn’t want to descend into that cesspit, she would go to the police, hand over the film, and tell them everything, the middle-aged man in the Flaminia, he had even said he would get her a job as a shop assistant in Hamburg, but what kind of shop assistant? It was so easy to understand, but the nausea was too much: enough now.
She looked in the kitchen for something to eat, then stretched out on one of the two little beds with the bears and dogs and butterflies on the headboard, and even managed to fall asleep, then woke up, in the silence, in the stifling heat of mid-afternoon, and after she had been awake a few seconds, just like that, in the silence, the telephone rang.
Maybe it was Livia, she needed Livia, she had to tell her everything. She got up and went to the phone.
‘Alberta, Alberta.’
‘Yes, it’s me.’ It was Maurilia. The most scared voice she had ever heard, the voice of terror.
‘It’s Maurilia, Alberta, it’s Maurilia.’
‘I hear you, what is it? Where are you?’ She was not afraid yet, or rather, she didn’t want to be afraid.
‘It’s Maurilia, Alberta, it’s Maurilia.’
‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’
A man’s voice replied, and she recognised it even though she had heard it only once and it had only said a few words.
‘I think you recognised your friend Maurilia’s voice.’ His tone was even more threatening than before.
She didn’t reply, but he went on, knowing that she had heard him perfectly well. ‘You just have to take that roll of film back to the studio where you were this morning. Right now, because the photographer is waiting for it. You wouldn’t want anything unpleasant to happen to your friend Maurilia. Don’t pretend you don’t understand, that’ll only make it worse for you and your friend.’
She did not reply, she was about to shout out that she would go there, immediately, but with the police, only she couldn’t, because they had hung up at the other end. That was when she understood what was happening.
4
Everything was going wrong, the only thing that worked was the air conditioning in those two rooms in the Hotel Cavour, cool without being damp and without smelling odd; everything was going badly wrong in a way that the confident, efficient Milanese who passed, sweating, along the Via Fatebenefratelli or through the Piazza Cavour couldn’t begin to imagine, even though they read stories like this every day in the Corriere. For them, these stories belonged to a fourth dimension, devised by an Einstein of crime, who was even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics. What was real, for those people in the street, was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn’t feel so bad about smoking, and every now and again thinking about the next morning, the office, the work that had to be finished before the boss summoned them, or looking for a moment at those two girls standing alone waiting for the tram, with their low-cut tops. These were the natural dimensions of life, the rest they only read about and were as evanescent as things you only read about, he stabbed his wife 27 times, or else, housewife with five children involved in vast drug ring, or else gunfight between rival gangs in Viale Monza, all this was only reading, quite stimulating, but then they went back home and found the gas bill waiting to be paid. No, down there on the street, they couldn’t imagine how bad things were, even though up here they seemed like four carving forks with all those plates on the table filled with canapés, rolls, breadsticks with the tips covered in sweet ham from San Daniele, vases of butter in ice, rounds of pâté and bottles of beer in small silver buckets.
The only one wearing a jacket was Davide, and maybe he was the only other thing that was working apart from the air conditioning: suddenly in his life he had encountered beer, it had been an abrupt, passionate encounter, which greatly accelerated the detoxifying therapy, beer might be fattening, but someone like Davide would need a whole barrel of it before he got fat. As his alcohol intake decreased, Davide was slowly regaining the power of speech and a kind of masculine energy. Just then, he said, with a glass coaster in his hand, ‘Doesn’t anybody want the pâté?’ and offered it around.
Mascaranti shook his head, and so did Carrua, because he was there, too, also without a jacket, chewing rather than smoking his cigarette. And Duca also shook his head, and looked tenderly at Davide as he spread pâté on a small slice of bread. Ten more days, more or less, and his patient would be able to live happily on mineral water and milk.
‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Carrua said, putting the cigarette down in the saucer of his filter coffee. ‘With the photographer.’
Mascaranti still had his little notebook in his hand. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘There was nothing left at 78 Via Farini the day before Alberta Radelli’s death, it was all above board. The two rooms had been rented by a German more than a year earlier, but the landlord and caretaker of the building had seen this German only a couple of times, the only person working in the studio was a young man, a friend of the German, who told the caretaker his name was Caserli, or Caselli, but he’s not sure, because he didn’t see him often. Both the young man and the other man vanished into thin air a year ago.’
‘We should be able to track down the German,’ Carrua said, ‘you can’t rent premises without giving your particulars.’
‘Of course he gave them, here they are,’ and Mascaranti read, with a vague southern accent, a series of syllables coming from thousands of years back in the Black Forest, which his accent made a little genteel. ‘It’s an invented name and address, at least the police in Bonn, where this guy was supposed to be living, say there’s no name like it either in the official register of the city or in their own records.’
All that effort on the part of Mascaranti to find the studio, knowing nothing but the number, 78, and then when he had found it, there hadn’t been anybody or anything there for a year, nor had any trace been left behind.
‘One thing is clear,’ Duca said, mainly to Carrua, but also to Mascaranti, ‘to have rented those rooms using a false name, and then to have unfurnished it so quickly in the days after Alberta Radelli’s death, they must have considered the work they were doing there very important, and if the work consisted of taking photographs of naked women the caretaker must have seen girls going in and out.’
‘Yes, I questioned the caretaker’s wife, too,’ Mascaranti said. ‘Girls did pass through every now and again, but not very often, and she even told me what they were doing, she and her husband had gone a couple of times to see, the young man had invited them up. They were photographing little model cars, trucks, harvesters, she told me, and sometimes the girls were there as background, they use women to advertise all kinds of things these days.’