A cover: industrial photos meaning nude photos. It had stood up very well, for more than a year, under the eyes of the police, and it had stood up even after they disappeared, so that Mascaranti had spent all evening seething with anger.
‘Now let’s talk about the other girl,’ Carrua said.
The police often succeed through repetition, by repeating that two plus two equals four in the end you discover something more, but there wasn’t anything more to be discovered about Maurilia.
‘Maurilia Arbati,’ Mascaranti read in the notebook, ‘twenty-seven years old, worked at La Rinascente, in the department selling fabrics, towels, that kind of thing.’
Twenty-seven: in the Minox photos she didn’t look it, she had reached the age of twenty-seven as a nice, hard-working girl, the personnel department at the store had never had to reprimand her, and suddenly at that relatively advanced age, she enters the dark world of adventure.
So Mascaranti goes to La Rinascente and gets to talk to the right manager.
‘Impossible, do you know how many girls there are here?’ the manager says. ‘How are we going to find her knowing only that her first name is Maurilia?’
‘With that,’ Mascaranti says, pointing to the telephone that connects to the store’s loudspeakers. ‘You put out this message, for example: Signorina Maurilia is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately. Or even better: Signorina Maurilia, or any of her workmates who knows her, is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately.’
The manager calls a female clerk, she comes in, writes down the message and puts it out, once, twice, three times in succession, then waits three minutes and puts it out again, to all floors, to every corner of the store, through dozens of loudspeakers, so that it’s heard by all the people buying feeding bottles, Marie Therese chandeliers, flippers, ties for daddy, they hear the call, soft, not loud, but clear, the name Maurilia perfectly pronounced. As the clerk is just about to put the message out for the third time, the secretary admits a very short fair-haired girl, she doesn’t look much more than a child, although there are a number of things to indicate that she isn’t.
‘Maurilia?’ Mascaranti asks.
‘No, I’m a friend of hers.’
‘This gentleman is from the police,’ the manager says sternly. ‘Try to answer his questions as accurately as you can.’
‘What’s Maurilia’s surname?’ Mascaranti asks.
‘Arbati,’ the fair-haired girl says.
Triumphantly, Mascaranti writes the name in the little notebook, in three minutes he’s tracked down the blonde from the photograph, he’s home and dry. ‘Where does she live?’
The fair-haired girl hesitates, she’s about to say something, and he insists, he’s getting impatient: we’ll go to where this Maurilia Arbati lives, pick her up, and I’ll take her to Headquarters and there we’ll be able to sort this thing out, she posed for the photographs, she’ll know who, how, why. ‘Where does she live?’ he asks curtly.
The girl gets scared and says, ‘12 Via Nino Bixio,’ as accurately as the manager asked.
‘You’re good friends, right?’ Mascaranti asks: to know the address, like that, by heart, they must be good friends. The little fair-haired girl doesn’t reply, but it doesn’t matter, he has another question to ask: ‘Why didn’t Maurilia come up here herself? She’s the one we called for.’
‘Maybe she’s off sick,’ the manager says.
‘She’s dead,’ the little fair-haired girl says, turning pale, and they make her sit down.
‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’ Mascaranti wilts: if she’s dead he can’t question her, and if he can’t question her he won’t be able to sort anything out at all.
‘She died a year ago,’ the little fair-haired girl says, ‘poor thing, when I heard her name over the loudspeaker just now I felt really bad, after all this time, hearing that they wanted her in the manager’s office as if she was still alive.’
She had died very simply, she had left her work without saying anything, even to her, and had gone to Rome, probably with someone-a boyfriend, the little fair-haired girl said, modestly-she had wanted to take a swim, maybe she had been taken ill, and the next day they had found her by the Tiber, just outside Rome, washed up on the river bank like an abandoned boat, in her swimming costume, her clothes in the bushes almost a kilometre further down. The little fair-haired girl had found out from Maurilia’s parents when she had phoned them nearly a week later for news of her friend.
So that was the story and Mascaranti had immediately understood. ‘What’s your name?’ he had asked the little fair-haired girl, he had taken all her particulars, then had gone back to Headquarters and phoned Rome. Maurilia Arbati, death by drowning, found in the Tiber at such and such a spot, at such and such a time, by Signor such and such. From the archive he had even had somebody fetch him the Rome newspapers from that date, and read all the items about her he could find, most of which asked the question: Accident or crime? Did she drown or was she killed? You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant: in four days the two girls who had posed for the photographs on that Minox film had died, the blonde on the first day, the brunette on the fourth. One on the outskirts of Milan, in Metanopoli, the other near Rome, drowned in the Tiber. Both deaths were curiously ambiguous, one a not entirely convincing suicide, the other an accident that aroused everyone’s suspicions.
Now the ambiguity was over, they had died because they had been killed. With a bit of skill the perpetrators had staged Alberta’s suicide, she even had a letter in her handbag for her sister in which she asked forgiveness for killing herself-had they forced her to write it, or had she written it earlier, really intending to kill herself? And then a kind of accident for the other girl, Maurilia, an unlikely accident: a young Milanese woman who suddenly goes off to Rome to swim in the Tiber and drowns.
The silent Davide who was getting his voice back even asked a question: ‘But why did they kill one in Milan and one in Rome?’ He was a little naïve.
Duca, his doctor, explained it to him, patiently: he was the one person he was patient with. ‘Because if in the space of four days, a blonde girl was found drowned here in Milan, in the Lambro, let’s say, and then a brunette with her wrists slashed in Metanopoli, the police might link these two rather mysterious deaths and suspect from the start that there was a connection with something bigger. Whereas this way, the dead girl found drowned in Rome couldn’t possibly have anything to do, at least for the moment, with the dead girl in Metanopoli. The Rome police investigate their drowned girl and the Milan police their suicide, but they don’t find anything because they don’t know there’s any connection. You were the one who uncovered the connection by handing over that film, you were the one who was with Alberta the day before they killed her.’
‘So,’ said Davide-some people go from silence to being unable to stop talking-’if I’d handed over that film to the police immediately and told them everything that Alberta had told me, the culprits might have been found immediately.’
‘Maybe,’ Duca, his clandestine doctor, said. His patient had every possible guilt complex, not a single one escaped him. ‘Except that you’d have had to know that the thing Alberta left in your car along with her handkerchief was a cartridge and contained exposed film. But you didn’t know that. And your father would have broken your bones one by one as soon as he found out you’d got involved in something like this.’ A little laugh from Carrua who knew his powerful friend, Engineer Pietro Auseri, and a knowing smile from Mascaranti. ‘You’re not guilty of anything. So calm down and pour us some beer.’
‘I think we can draw a few conclusions,’ Carrua said. ‘First point: white slave trade. I don’t think there’s any doubt.’
No, there wasn’t any doubt. Even though he was a doctor and an apostle, he was hungry and finished the few remaining canapés.