Poisonville (13 page)

Selvaggia had accepted out of vanity, but she soon regretted her decision, and now she was taking her revenge, with continual, intolerably late arrivals and other delays.

She had been missing their sessions for more than a week now. During the day she was far too busy with the Foundation, and at night she was involved with her latest lover.

And recently she had been showing up later and later. He didn’t care, he was happy to stay up late. His insomnia was his most powerful ally.

But the wait unnerved him. It was like the night Giovanna was killed, when his mother hadn’t come home. He had become so exasperated that he had been forced to go look for Francesco at the Club Diana.

And when he came home, she still wasn’t there. She finally arrived at dawn.

When he told her about his fight with Francesco she had flown into a rage, and had ordered him to forget about Giovanna. Then she had given him his usual cocktail of tranquilizers.

Neither of them could get to sleep, and so they wound up playing pinochle until lunchtime. They hadn’t spoken again, looking one another in the eye only when it was the other one’s turn to play. There was the usual silence full of tacit allusions that had built up over the years, and underscored by the snapping of the cards that his mother shuffled like a professional.

But not tonight. Tonight we have to talk. When will she be here? he wondered, overwhelmed with anxiety.

An hour later he heard the sound of tires on gravel.

He had built his studio on the ground floor so he could keep on eye on her comings and goings.

The sensation that his mother was trying to elude his surveillance drove him crazy.

“Who were you with?” he asked her as soon as she appeared at the door to his studio.

“The usual friends,” she answered laconically.

“Who?” he insisted.

Selvaggia puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. She tossed her bag on an armchair and took off her evening coat. She was as elegant as Nefertiti and her cleavage demanded the attention of any man older than twenty.

As she removed her Cartier earrings, she poured forth the list of friends like a schoolteacher with a migraine performing the enormously tiresome task of taking attendance.

“Tormene, Cesaretto, Ostan, Judge Morbelli . . .”

“That’s fine,” said Filippo with a note of hysteria in his voice. He stood up and grabbed the cordless phone.

“Let’s give them a call.”

“What are you doing, have you lost your mind? Put down that telephone. You can’t call people up at this time of night!”

They had battled for the phone. Filippo held it hidden behind his back, and in order to grab it out of his hands, Selvaggia was forced to wrap her arms around him in an embrace.

Filippo looked into her green cat’s eyes. No one could hope to resist that gaze. He let the cordless phone fall to the floor and held her arms firmly.

“Who are you seeing now?”

She boldly refused to answer.

He grabbed her by the wrists.

“I’m still young, I have every right to have fun . . .”

“With who?”

“Let me go,” she said as she broke free of his grasp. As she rubbed her wrists, she murmured:

“Davide Trevisan.”

“Davide Trevisan! I went to school with him. He’s my age, do you realize that?”

“I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, least of all yours.”

“Papa would turn over in his grave if he knew.”

“Oh spare me, your father! All he knew how to do was waste time with his wines, just like you. Don’t bring him into the argument, please. I gave your father everything I had.”

“You got quite a bit in return, it seems to me.”

The slap rang out unexpectedly.

Massaging his cheek, Filippo was flattered. It wasn’t a mother’s slap, it was the slap of a woman accustomed to keeping men at bay.

Selvaggia swept out of the room, throwing her earrings onto the floor as she went.

Filippo knelt to pick them up, yelling after her in a fairly steady voice:

“I’ll expect you tomorrow for the sitting.”

The sound of a slamming door was his mother’s eloquent response.

* * *

For the second time in two days, I was going back to Prunella’s house. I had something important I wanted to ask her. Alvise had left his country hovel, and had moved into Carla’s apartment. At first he resisted the idea, but Carla had insisted, after promising him that she would help him in his investigation. Even though it had been years since they had spoken, they had hugged warmly the first time. Carla, too, had always believed he was innocent.

“I knew him well,” she told me in the car. “He loved that furniture factory. He would never have set fire to it.”

“He was over his head in debt. Gambling debts,” I shot back.

Carla lit a cigarette. “He would have sold it. He wasn’t stupid enough to attempt such a clumsy piece of fraud.”

I apologized to Alvise. He had told the truth on least one point: Giovanna had pulled out the trial record and studied it carefully and thoroughly. She really was a fine lawyer. Carla told him the rest of the story. The news that the land where his furniture factory had once stood was now a secret toxic waste dump left him speechless. He picked up a two-liter bottle of red wine and took a long, gulping swig.

“Once there was a fine factory on that land, now it’s a fucking toxic waste dump,” he commented bitterly. “Before the trial, I had put all my property in Prunella’s name, to avoid losing everything in damages in case I was convicted. At least on that point your father was farsighted.”

And now I was on my way to see his ex-wife to ask for information about the land. She wasn’t actually his ex, to tell the truth. Alvise and Prunella had never divorced. For her, it was a sacrilege to break the sacred bond of matrimony.

When I parked outside the front gate, Prunella came to meet me with a rake in her hands.

“Gardeners cost a fortune nowadays,” she said, as if to justify herself. “I was just going in to have a cup of tea. Would you like to join me?”

“No, thanks,” I answered hastily. “I only have one question for you: what did you do with the land where the furniture factory stood?”

Prunella’s face darkened. “I sold it. About three years ago. I have nothing else, you know? Just this home. And I don’t know how I can ever keep it up in the years to come.”

“If you need money, just ask. Papa and I are at your disposal.”

“I’m not used to asking for charity. To think that we were once the wealthiest family in town. That damned Alvise managed to squander a fortune in just a few years.”

“There’s still Giovanna’s house and bank account,” I reminded her, annoyed by her squalid concerns.

“When the courts free up the estate. That’ll take a long time.”

“Papa could help you with that. I’ll mention it to him,” I said, to cut short the conversation. “Do you remember who bought the land?”

“A scoundrel,” she replied without hesitation. “Alvise had already had dealings with him. He bought it for pennies. ‘It’s just a heap of charred ruins,’ he told me. And I sold it to him without asking questions; back then nobody was offering to buy. In town, they said the place had a curse on it because of the people who had died in the fire.”

“What was his name?”

“Giacomo Zuglio.”

Alvise Barovier was seated in a chair in the middle of Carla’s living room. A towel was wrapped around his neck, reaching all the way to his knees. Carla stood behind him, cutting his hair with a certain self-assurance.

“That hair made him look older,” she explained.

“Well?” Alvise asked.

I said the name. Barovier leapt to his feet and snatched the towel away from his neck. “Zuglio, that bastard son of a bitch,” he snarled. “He was the bank officer who destroyed my business. I had a contract to manufacture furniture for a chain of hotels in Turkey. It was two solid years of production, but he cut off my line of credit, out of the blue, and demanded all the money back. It was a knockout blow. I couldn’t find any other banks willing to help. My friends wouldn’t help either, for that matter.”

“Do you think that Zuglio was involved in the plot to send you to prison?” Carla asked.

“I’m sure of it. He made the first move, to establish a motive.”

I said nothing. I could easily have refuted the statement, but why bother? Alvise, however, noticed my silence.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

I spread my arms helplessly. “I have a hard time believing there was a plot. Who would have a reason to ruin you?”

Alvise started walking back and forth in the room. “I don’t think you can imagine how often I’ve thought about it. It was a difficult time, lots of things were changing, but it was possible to glimpse the dawn of the golden age of the Northeast. Conte Giannino and I were planning to create an organized industrial sector.”

“Exactly what the Torrefranchi Foundation did later,” I broke in.

“Precisely. There weren’t many companies back then and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we did know that we could consolidate and coordinate our operations. And we knew that would make us stronger, both on the market and as an association. It was our dream. Instead, I wound up in prison, and he died of a heart attack a short while later.”

He sat back down, his gaze lost in an indeterminate moment in the past. Barovier was a beaten man dreaming pointlessly of redemption. I felt no pity for him. He had squandered his fortune on roulette; he had betrayed his wife—details that vanished from his version of what happened. Carla wrapped the towel around his neck again and went back to cutting his hair, with a cigarette clamped between her lips. Between the index and middle fingers of her left hand, she would seize a lock of hair, check the length, and then clip it. The smoke from her cigarette forced her to close one eye, but she didn’t seem to mind. Only when the cigarette had burned down to the filter did she finally decide to stub it out. She reached out for an ashtray emblazoned with the logo of a pharmaceutical company.

“Zuglio ruined the Barovier family’s life,” Carla said suddenly, staring at me.

I immediately saw what she was driving at. I had thought of it myself. “I became the slut of the man who ruined my life,” that damned sentence that I couldn’t get out of my mind was beginning to make sense. Moreover, Zuglio’s name appeared repeatedly in the trial record. And it was the most frequently underlined name. Sharp, almost angry strokes of the pencil.

It was my turn to stare at Carla. “I know what you’re thinking but I can’t believe it.”

“You don’t
want
to believe it,” she said emphatically.

She was right. What little we had discovered pointed to Zuglio—both past and present. Most important, he was the owner of a secret toxic waste dump, and Giovanna had known about it, since she had asked Carla to carry out tests on soil samples.

Okay, all the evidence pointed to Zuglio but I couldn’t accept the idea that Giovanna had been his lover.

I looked Carla in the eye. “Do you know him?”

“No.”

“I know him by sight,” I said. “I can assure you that he’s not Giovanna’s type.”

“What do you know?” Alvise cried. “Maybe Giovanna got caught up in something she couldn’t control.”

“Maybe she didn’t know how to manage things properly,” Carla added. “She got in over her head, and wound up in bed with that bastard.”

“You’re fantasizing now,” I replied, uncertainly. “Anyway, all we know about Zuglio is what they say about him in town.”

“We can always find out the rest,” Alvise suggested.

* * *

Giacomo Zuglio was a short man. Until third grade, he had been the tallest kid in his class. Then all the other kids that he had enjoyed tormenting began to grow, leaving him behind and, finally, looking down at him from above. From then on, the fun was over for him. His only purpose was to clamber over obstacles that cropped up in his path, each of them always too tall to get over easily. It was hard for him; by nature he was a fighter, a puncher, a combatant.

He’d had to settle for a bank job. When he was hired, he was convinced that he had what it takes for a spectacular career, but that’s not how it went. He remained on the ground floor, a humble director of a small-town branch. Any jerk could look down on him, just because he was so-and-so or such-and-such, from this important family, descended from this or that successful manufacturer. Lawyers, doctors, industrialists, craftsmen: they were all better than him. Soon, however, he noticed that there was a river of money flowing through his little branch of the bank, and not all of that money was earned through sheer hard work. And so he began to use the bank as if it were his personal property. He loaned money at cutthroat rates and deposited the profits in his personal coffers, which took the form of a fictitious holding company, a shell company that he had founded under his wife’s name. Once he had socked away enough money to equal a sizable win at the state lottery, he resigned from the bank and began his career as an “investor.”

His masterpiece had been a three-million euro swindle, the “Klondike gold rush.” He had got in touch with certain Italo-Canadians, well known to the FBI and Scotland Yard since the seventies, who turned out to be the owners of a few gold mines in Canada.

There actually was a little bit of gold still in them, but it would cost too much to bring it to the surface.

He had enrolled twenty or so fake promoters, genuine talents in the realm of cajoling and tricking the gullible and simple-minded. He had put together conventions in luxury hotels run by his usual group of friends and he had printed up tempting prospectuses. There was even a video depicting the bustling activity at the mine site.

The fraud had scooped up the savings of about a thousand small investors—a thousand fat chickens to be plucked. Clearly, none of them were readers of Mickey Mouse comics, because if they had been, they would have been well aware that even Scrooge McDuck had stopped prospecting for gold in that part of the world a hundred years ago. But such are the wonders of the free market. Small investors—the chickens—had just been skinned alive by the financial crisis of 2001, and for them actually to have to resort to hiding their money under their mattresses, the way their grandparents had done, only reminded them of their peasant origins. The initial investment was quite prudent, only 3,500 euros, but it was the investors themselves who insisted on putting in larger sums. There were some investors who put in their entire retirement nest egg. The salesmen were trained to dissuade those who were caught up in the fever, but most of the time even they couldn’t talk the investors out of it. People from the Northeast refuse to listen to reason if they think that by investing 3,500 euros they can earn 21,900 euros. The most mistrustful investors were invited to Canada. There they were welcomed by attractive hostesses, loaded into limousines, and then accompanied to the mines, where work was proceeding at a furious pace. When they returned home, they told their friends what they had seen, and they ultimately proved to be even more persuasive than the salesmen.