“What kind of hours do you think a slaughterhouse works?” Teresa asked. “I mean… I’ve no idea. I never met anyone who worked in one. I never thought about it….”
She fell silent. A short, elderly man with a pained gait, the kind that spoke of hip trouble, had left by a side door and was now hobbling towards them.
When he arrived and stared suspiciously through the iron bars of the gate, Costa flashed his ID card and asked, “Calvi?”
He had a thick walrus moustache and was wearing a heavy lumberjack shirt. Stained.
“The only one. This is about Giorgio, I guess.”
“What makes you say that?”
He sighed and unlocked the gate. It was a heavy mechanism. It wouldn’t be easy to get inside without a key. Certainly not if you had a reluctant companion with you.
“The probation people phoned this morning. Said he hadn’t called in or something. I don’t get it. Either he’s free or he’s not. You tell me. Which is it?”
“You haven’t been listening to the news?” Costa asked.
The lurid circumstances surrounding Toni LaMarca’s murder had already made it onto the hourly broadcasts. Costa didn’t want to think what overimaginative junk would fill the papers tomorrow. Somehow Giorgio Bramante’s name had been mentioned as prime suspect. Given the number of memories that were still fresh about the original case, this had the makings of a story the media would love. He couldn’t help but wonder whether Bruno Messina had realised that and called a few TV and newspaper friends himself, just to stir things a little. Fourteen years before, all the sympathy had run one way. For Bramante and, by implication, Messina’s fired father. If the story was to get big — and that seemed inevitable — well, Messina was a political animal. He’d make sure it came complete with the spin he wanted.
“Something’s happened to Giorgio?” Calvi asked, with a sudden concern. “Don’t tell me that. The poor guy’s been through enough as it is. Going to jail for what he did. Unbelievable.”
“We need to know where he is,” Costa replied carefully. “Do you have any idea? When did you last see him?”
“He was on the morning shift here yesterday. Till three in the afternoon. Then he went home. Never came back. I don’t know where else he spends his time. Ask Enzo Uccello. They were in jail together. Got released around the same time. No — Enzo was a couple of months before Giorgio. Good men. Good workers. I don’t mind giving them a break.”
Teresa caught Costa’s eye. Here was the opening they sought.
“Where do we find Enzo?” Costa asked nonchalantly.
Calvi nodded at the building. “Working.”
“Do you mind if we come in?”
“It’s a slaughterhouse,” Calvi reminded them. “Just so you know. It’s clean, as hygienic as the city people say it should be. We don’t break the law. We do a good job, as kindly as we can. But I’m warning you…”
“Thanks,” Teresa said, smiling. “After you.”
Calvi led the way.
Teresa had told them the problem in the car. At first examination — and Teresa’s preliminary opinions were rarely wrong — Toni LaMarca had suffered two significant injuries. The spike through the back, beneath the shoulder blade, which would have been extraordinarily painful, but not fatal. She had an idea about that already. Then — and this must have occurred afterwards — some massive, so far unexplained, trauma to his chest, directly over his heart. A trauma that had removed a substantial amount of tissue, in a circular pattern some forty centimetres wide, clean down to the ribs, then continued on to penetrate to the heart beneath. Rosa Prabakaran could have been forgiven for thinking some close-up shotgun was to blame. But for the absence of powder and shot — and those bright, clean, unmarked ribs staring at her in the crypt — Teresa said she’d have thought the same thing. But what killed LaMarca was no ordinary weapon. Somehow, she said, her instinct told her it had to do with the work Bramante had done in the slaughterhouse. A knife. An implement. Something that lived in the bloody arena behind these closed doors, and didn’t get mentioned much in the outside world.
The slaughterhouse owner opened the door and instantly the smell and the light hit them. The place reeked of meat and blood and the overwhelming stench of urine. Rows and rows of bright spotlights, like batteries of miniature suns, ran across the ceiling. Once his eyes had adjusted, Costa found the hall was empty, save for one lone individual at the far end, sweeping what looked like a grubby tide of brown water into a central lowered drainage channel.
“You’re lucky,” Calvi told them. “We’re between consignments. But…” — he made a deliberate show of staring at his watch — “there’s a truckload outside that has to come through in thirty minutes. I’m warning you. Now I have to do paperwork. You talk to Enzo on his own. These cons don’t like it if the rest of us are around when they get reminded of things.”
Somewhere outside, there was the sound of a horse, whinnying. It was a scared sound, high and loud, the cry of a creature pleading for comfort. Then a rattle of angry hooves on wood.
They all went quiet.
“You get used to it after a while,” Calvi added, then limped away, leaving them on their own.
The four of them watched as Calvi went into a small office next to the entrance. It had one window looking out directly onto what Costa took to be the production line of the slaughtering floor: live animals came in at the far end, were stunned, killed, then hung on a moving chain and progressively butchered as the corpses travelled down the hall.
Teresa shaded her eyes against the burning lamps in the ceiling, looked up at the mechanism that moved the carcasses along, took hold of one of the big hooks and said, “Exhibit number one, gentlemen. It was one of these that put that hole in Toni LaMarca’s back.”
Peroni blinked at the long hallway. “There’s got to be a hundred of them at least. And…”
A series of smaller adjoining rooms, with the same white clinical look and blazing lighting, ran off from the opposite wall. Sides of red and fatty marbled meat hung on them.
“…the rest. It’s so bright in here.”
“When you’re dealing with dead things, you need to see what you’re doing,” Di Capua muttered. “I’m looking,” Teresa’s assistant added, then walked across the hall, surreptitiously pulling on a pair of white plastic gloves as he did so.
The figure under the last set of lights stopped pushing the huge broom and glanced back at them, uncertain at their approach. The tide of grubby water at his feet swelled slowly round his boots then continued down to the channel at the centre of the hall.
“Enzo!” Peroni shouted. The other man nodded. They walked over. Costa showed his badge.
“First-name terms,” the man muttered. “This must be bad.”
Enzo Uccello was a short, skinny man with a gaunt face, prominent teeth, and thoughtful eyes. He looked in his mid-thirties, and a little worn down by life.
“We need help,” Costa told him. “When did you last see Giorgio Bramante? And where were you last night?”
Uccello muttered something under his breath. Then…
“Giorgio went off shift here yesterday at three. I haven’t seen him since. Last night I stayed in, drank my one regulation beer — which is as much as I can afford — and watched TV. On my own, before you ask.”
He had that easy, glib way of answering questions any cop recognised. He’d been through this before.
Costa was getting interested. “Where do you live, Enzo?”