No answer.
‘Look, I know a lot, I know there are three of you, that man who’s the local boss, you and your friend here. You only know your boss, but he must know a lot of interesting people. Give me his name and address. You’re not a real Mafioso, the two of you are just pupils, you won’t be able to hold out.’ Delicately he placed his foot on the man’s stomach and started to press.
The man screamed that he’d had enough, he retched, then gave Duca the name and address, and some other things, too, some very interesting things.
‘Good, now if you want to keep your stomach, tell me, in detail, how you killed Alberta Radelli.’
With Duca’s foot on his stomach, the man told him immediately. He had understood. Duca listened to him, and as he listened he realised that his father had been right. ‘You have to speak their language. You can’t speak French to someone who only understands German.’ Of course it wasn’t right, of course a police force that acts correctly doesn’t use the language of violence, there are fingerprints, laboratory tests, well-conducted interrogations, psychological persuasion. But he wasn’t the police, he was a young loser who couldn’t hear the word Mafia without seeing his father with his arm stunted by a stab wound and reduced for ever, by that stab wound, to being a grey clerk in the Headquarters building, second floor, room 92, right at the back. Yes, he knew, it was just a common, ancestral thirst for revenge: he hadn’t been looking for justice, he hadn’t been trying to uphold the law, he had only wanted to see some of them face to face, and speak their language to them because that way you understood each other immediately.
‘And now tell me how you killed Maurilia. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the blonde girl you took to Rome.’
No, no, he remembered perfectly well, because the more he remembered the less Duca’s heel sank into his stomach, and he told the story with so many details it was almost like a novel. And then everything was clear, in every detail, and he was about to lift his foot from that stomach when the other man, the photographer, who had been so still on his bed of manure, had the bright idea of grabbing his leg. In his warped mind, it had occurred to him that Duca was there, his feet within reach of his hands, but he hadn’t thought it out. Duca, though, had already thought of it and was perfectly calm, he had one hand resting on the horse’s mane, and as soon as the photographer had grabbed his foot, he held on tight to the horse and with the same foot that the man was holding, kicked him in the face, twice, three times, until the man let go of his foot, moaning, and then he kicked him again, even harder, and the moaning immediately stopped.
The other man was sheltering his face with his hands. ‘No, no, no,’ he was saying.
But he had to be kept quiet, too, otherwise he might try to escape and that wasn’t good. ‘No, no, don’t worry.’ He didn’t even kick him so hard, just enough to knock him unconscious for a while. Then he left the stable and lit a cigarette.
They arrived two minutes later. Davide in front in the Giulietta, followed by Carrua in the police Alfa Romeo, then the van for transporting prisoners.
‘I told you not to get mixed up in this,’ Carrua screamed as he got out, very angry, as if it weren’t just a formality: he had known everything about the investigation from the start, through Mascaranti.
‘They’re in the stable,’ Duca said. ‘I can come over tonight and give you a report, they’ve already told me a lot of things. Be careful, there’s a horse in the stable, it’s very nervous, it keeps kicking, it must have kicked those fellows a few times.’
Carrua turned red. ‘If you laid one finger on them I’ll put you inside. Where are you going?’
He didn’t reply, he’d stopped listening to Carrua’s yelling. He took Davide by the arm and led him towards the Giulietta. ‘Take me straight to the centre of town.’ He didn’t ask him anything until they were near the Via Porpora, queuing like robot sheep in the traffic that had resumed in all its fury. Then all he said was: ‘Did you see her?’
He nodded, yes, he had seen her. That meant that he had gone to the Ulisse Apartments, rushed up to the second floor and seen Livia Ussaro.
‘Was she conscious?’
‘Yes.’
That meant that she hadn’t fainted, that she was sitting on a chair, naked, with all the chess pieces lying on the floor around her, and she was dabbing her face with a towel, there wasn’t much blood, no, there really wasn’t much blood, but she had been about to faint when he had seen her face, when she had lowered the towel for a moment to let herself be dressed, because he had had to dress her, but she didn’t faint, she hadn’t fainted once, not even when he had taken her down to the car, she had even tried to walk by herself, barely supported.
‘Where did you take her?’
‘To the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, Carrua told me to do that on the telephone.’
‘Let’s go there now.’
‘We can’t.’
Then Duca noticed that Davide’s body was moving convulsively, like children who have cried too much, at first it seemed like a kind of sobbing, but then he understood. And he also understood why they couldn’t see her: she was being put back together. The worst thing, apart from the scars, was the vertical cuts at the corners of her lips-his father had once described to him in detail a full facial scarring-that would make it difficult for her to speak or eat for several weeks. Until she had been mended a little, they wouldn’t be able to see her.
‘Then let’s go straight to the Piazza Castello.’ He told Davide where they were going, who they were going to see, and what they were going to do, and how he, Davide, could help him. ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t get out the back way,’ he said.
They left the car in the Piazza Castello and went the rest of the way on foot. After a while they reached the characteristically narrow old lane, where there was a shop for stamp collectors that seemed out of place here, with two pocket-sized windows on either side of the entrance displaying lots of beautiful stamps that probably nobody had ever looked at, not even the owner. They went in and walked down two steps into a little room, not much larger than a toilet, which functioned, with a certain claim to elegance, as the kingdom of philately.
There was nobody there, and it was very dark. Display cases hanging on the wall, stuffed full of stamps, gleamed dimly. Lying open on the counter was a very large album, then there was a small armchair, and a big red glass ashtray, which not only didn’t have any cigarette ends in it but was also veiled with dust: Signor A must have followed his doctor’s advice and stopped smoking some time ago. But above all there was silence, and when they had opened the door no bell had rung.
‘Is there anybody here?’ he asked politely, staring politely at the half-open door at the back, and then he understood the reason for the sense of unease he had been feeling: somebody he couldn’t see was looking at him from one of those display cases hanging on the wall, one of the stamps wasn’t a stamp, but a hole in the wall that you could look through from the other side. With really childish curiosity, he would have liked to know which stamp it was.
The little door at the back finally opened completely and an elegant gentleman appeared, smiling. He had a grey moustache, he was exactly as Livia had described him: Signor A.
‘I’m so sorry …’ Signor A’s intention was to apologise for keeping them waiting, but from across the counter the two of them grabbed him, dragged him over the counter and wedged him into the armchair, and Duca stunned him with a slap while Davide searched him.
‘Yes, here it is.’
It was a woman’s revolver: Signor A probably didn’t always carry it, he must have stuffed it in his pocket when he heard them come in.