Poisonville (15 page)

“A pimp,” Barovier commented. “What is the link between him and those drums filled with toxic waste?”

I didn’t have the slightest idea. I was baffled. I had expected a simpler story. I kept watching the Romanian while he talked to the two truck drivers. He was dressed expensively but without taste or discernment. He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to the others. He was calm, relaxed. He certainly had no idea he was being spied on.

I passed the binoculars to Alvise. “I may not know that man,” he said a few minutes later. “But I can say one thing for certain: he’s a dangerous criminal.”

“Pearls of wisdom, available at bargain rates?” I joked mockingly.

He sighed in annoyance. “Try spending a few years in prison, you’ll learn to recognize gangsters,” he explained. “And I can assure you that the Romanian is one of the really bad guys.”

I turned the key in the ignition and started the car. I didn’t have much experience with criminals. I was a corporate lawyer. I had been involved in only a few criminal cases, and they’d always been purse-snatchers or drug addicts who’d been caught stealing car radios.

“Maybe we should go have a chat with Inspector Mele.”

“Not so fast, boy,” he said in an insolent tone of voice. “We just need to be more careful. Now take me to Carla’s house. I’m hungry.”

Before getting out, he clapped a hat on his head and pulled up the collar of his jacket. I assume he meant it as a way to keep the neighbors from recognizing him. I doubted that anyone would remember his face after such a long time. If anything, he had rendered himself so shady and suspicious-looking that anyone would have noticed him and wondered what he was up to. He didn’t bother to say goodbye. Which was just as well. I didn’t feel like talking to him either.

* * *

“What shall we talk about today?” asked Eriberto Moroncini.

“Your ficus benjamin plant,” Filippo answered. “You’re taking bad care of it; it’s not getting enough light.”

Filippo was stretched out on a leather couch that was straight out of a movie. Everything was filmic in Moroncini’s office. Especially the wainscoting. The use of a well-established stereotype, the renowned psychiatrist had explained in an interview in
Vogue
, helped to reassure patients about the reliability of the therapy. “Do you like plants?”

“I wish I had been born a plant. I could live on just light and water.”

Moroncini scribbled with his black-and-green Parker pen a personal ideogram in his Moleskine notebook.

Filippo turned to look at him. “So you liked that one, eh?”

Moroncini remained expressionless. “Why plants?”

“They seem immobile, but they’re growing upward, reaching for the sky.”

“Do you like to reach for the sky?”

“Not in the way that you mean. Or that my mother means.”

“Your mother?”

“Sure, I’m here because she wants me to be here, right?”

“I wouldn’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

“You are a famous psychiatrist. There are people who have to make appointments six months ahead to begin a course of therapy with you. So why did you fit me right into your busy schedule?”

“I added an hour to my normal consulting day.”

“Sure, but why?”

Moroncini didn’t answer.

“Because my mother asked you to, that’s why.”

Moroncini closed his notebook.

“No one can say no to her, so you can imagine how hard it is for me,” Filippo continued.

“Why, in your opinion?” This time, it wasn’t a routine question.

Filippo stroked the leaves of the ficus benjamin with one finger.

“My mother is a power artist. Dominating other people is what excites her.”

“And you? What excites you?”

“I’m impotent, didn’t my mother tell you that?”

“She told me that you have a strong tendency toward self-pity.”

Filippo started clapping in an ostentatious burst of applause.

“Fine. At last, a little stern orthodoxy.”

“Are you sure that you’re impotent? It seems to me that you’ve had a lot of girlfriends.”

“Before I decided to give up sex, I was dating Giovanna Barovier. In the summer, we used to go to Forte dei Marmi. We have a turn-of-the-century villa there. Fifteen bedrooms. And you want to know something? I made sure we stayed in a hotel. Never at my house. My mother didn’t like Giovanna, and she didn’t give a damn whether I liked her.”

“You could have gone somewhere else, you could taken a trip somewhere . . .”

“When you’re born in a town like this, there’s no way out, you can’t even run away from someone you don’t like. In a big city, if you don’t like someone, you don’t even have to tell them. Just don’t take their phone calls.”

“Who’s keeping you from moving away? You’re an adult, you’re wealthy, you can do what you want.”

“All I can do is what my mother wants.”

“That depends entirely on you.”

“Right. Which takes us back to square one.”

* * *

A couple of days later, Carla phoned to invite me to dinner. From her tone, I understood that she had something important to tell me.

“Why don’t you come over to my place?” I suggested. “I really don’t want to see your house guest.”

I had to insist, but Carla finally accepted, and now I was waiting for her, while keeping an eye on the simmering chopped onions and vegetables for the risotto. Carla arrived with a bottle of wine, a South African Cabernet Sauvignon.

“For once, no Calchi Renier wines,” she joked.

She took off her ankle-length down overcoat. Underneath, she was wearing a dress with a simple cut. Her face was only slightly made up, and she was much cuter than usual. I felt guilty for thinking it.

The risotto wasn’t bad. It was the first time I’d put any effort into cooking something since Giovanna’s death.

“Is that all?” Carla asked as I took the dirty plates into the kitchen.

“Are you still hungry?”

“Actually, I am. All I had for lunch was a sandwich.”

In the pantry, I found a can of foie gras. “I don’t have the right kind of bread or wine for this,” I warned her.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, as she started spreading butter on a slice of whole wheat bread.

I watched her eat for a while, while Carla told me how much she missed southern Italian cooking.

“What have you found out?” I interrupted.

She poured herself some wine. “I checked out a number of documents and I asked around discreetly. The waste from the Santi & Giustinian printing plant is supposed to be treated by a local company, the Eco T.D.W.—the T.D.W. stands for ecological treatment and disposal of waste.”

“Instead they wound up in the secret dump.”

“Right. The Eco T.D.W. is supposed to transform the waste into harmless, inert material, for use in building or agriculture, depending on which chemical substances are being treated.”

“Do you know who owns it?”

Carla shook her head.

“Tomorrow I’ll go to the Chamber of Commerce,” I said. “It shouldn’t be hard to find out.”

“The checks are carried out by local health board staff,” she explained as she rummaged through her purse for a pack of cigarettes. “I managed to get a look at the file for the printing plant. Everything seems to be in order. The signature belongs to a certain Arturo Ferrari, the director of the laboratory.”

“I know him. The court has him do expert investigations from time to time.”

“But he can’t be the only corrupt official,” Carla pointed out. “He must have accomplices in the regional government too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. The fraud must be profitable enough to grease all the wheels that need oiling.”

Carla stood up and went over to pour herself a small shot of grappa. I couldn’t help but remember that Giovanna couldn’t stand grappa. She liked whiskey. A bottle of her favorite brand still stood on the tray.

Carla sniffed her liquor. “I’ve thought at length about this thing, and there’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “The dump can’t be the final destination for the toxic waste.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s too close to town, don’t you see? It doesn’t make sense to bury it in your own backyard. They used to do it, but after a series of scandals and trials, they wised up.”

“That quarry,” I remembered. “Some of the kids who went to play in it developed tumors.”

“And they all died,” she pointed out. “I’m certain that they take the waste somewhere else.”

“Maybe out of the country,” I suggested, thinking of Constantin.

“Or to southern Italy,” Carla suggested. “It’s a gold mine for the Camorra. I learned about it when I worked in Caserta.”

It was my turn to pour myself a shot of liquor. I chose a cognac.

“What did you find out about Zuglio?” my dinner guest asked.

“I’ve made some discreet inquiries myself. Zuglio lends money; according to rumors he’s a loan shark, operating outside the law. Anyway, I found out the most important thing. He still owns that land. He never sold it or rented it.”

“Then he’s definitely involved in the fraud,” Carla commented as she slipped into her down overcoat. She pulled a hat and woolen gloves out of the pocket.

At the door, she apologized for her suspicions. “I was upset,” she explained.

I said nothing, and I gave her a farewell kiss on the cheek.

At the business registry of the Chamber of Commerce it took me less than ten minutes to discover the names of the owners of the Eco T.D.W. There were three partners, and the only familiar name was that of Davide Trevisan. I never knew he was in the waste management business. I assumed that he had followed in his father’s footsteps, selling American farm machinery. But the surprises didn’t end there. According to the information I found in the certificate, my friend’s two partners were both well over sixty. It had all the earmarks of a front operation.

It was cocktail hour when I walked into the Bar Centrale. Davide, as always, was leaning on the counter with a wine spritzer in his hand. With his usual casual tone, he was recounting a piece of defamatory gossip about a woman who owned a local pet shop, and who was commonly nicknamed the “dick-breaker” because, for the second time now, one of her lovers had wound up at the emergency room with a “fractured” penis as a result of the unusual sexual practices that the woman demanded. Moreover, the guy in question was a well-known rugby player. Before going over to say hello, I waited for the laughter triggered by Davide’s story to die down.

“I wanted to apologize,” I told him right away. “I was upset after my fight with Filippo.”

He extended his hand. “You’re a good guy,” he said with a smile. “What’ll you drink?”

We chatted about this and that, then I managed to shift the conversation to the subject of work.

“How’s it going with the threshing machines?” I asked.

He waved one hand in the air. “Oh, I got out of that business a while ago,” he answered. “I wasn’t making any money. Nowadays, aside from the vineyards, there’s no agriculture around here. Just industrial sheds. Now I’m a
scoassaro
, a garbage collector.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have an industrial waste company,” he explained. “The regional government was offering funding, and I took advantage of the situation . . .”

I ordered another round of aperitifs. “And how’s business?”

“It’s going great,” he said, making a rather vulgar gesture to ward off misfortune. Then he lowered his voice. “The great thing is that running this company got me into the Foundation as a member; I take care of waste disposal for every company in the group. So now I’m finally a member of the country club, and it’s a paradise—all the hottest babes in the district.”

“You’re a member of the Foundation?” I repeated in disbelief.

“You didn’t know? Your father was a big help. Though I have to say, Jesus God, his fees are something to behold . . . in my next life, I swear, I’m going to be a lawyer.”

Trevisan continued to spout nonsense, but I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I thought about my father. That miserable scoundrel Davide could ruin him if the fraud was uncovered.

And to think that we’d been friends since we were boys. I felt as if I’d been betrayed. Again.

That evening Carla called me. “So, any news?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I lied. “It’s going to take a few days. I’ll call you as soon as I learn something.”

I had no other options. I had to wait for Papa to come home and take care of the situation before it became public. Otherwise, the scandal would ruin him.

* * *

The old industrial shed was lit up like a spaceship, and a horde of young people were walking, entranced, toward this close encounter of the third kind, as if they were a vast herd of wobbly-gaited E.T.s. For more than a month now, rumors had been circulating about this event in all the schools. The word was out that at least five thousand young people from all over the Northeast would attend. The location had been chosen because it could be reached from all directions via four routes, arrayed geometrically along the main compass points, to prevent traffic jams. In the schools of Treviso, Castelfranco, Padua, and Mestre a map had been circulating. A copy had fallen into Lucio’s hands. That Saturday, he had decided that the Cherokee Gang would celebrate big time. They would blow the take from the last few robberies all at one time.

They parked the off-road vehicle in a strategic location, and then elbowed and pawed their way onto the improvised dance floor, in the midst of a human wave that surged and subsided like so many flocks of panicky birds. They had gulped down every imaginable form of chemical additive, and vigorous squirming in the middle of an overheated mob produced a sort of benumbed excitement in them, made up of physical contacts that could lead as easily to sex as to violence. Love in the time of sardines. Lucio, Rocco, and Denis were in their natural habitat, determined to become part of that bubbling magma whose ultimate purpose was to achieve a manifold coupling with the first available sardinette they managed to catch.

It was Denis who spied the sardinette. She was fifteen, at the oldest sixteen. She wore a pair of jeans so low and snug on her hips that they were a clear invitation to slip your hand inside. She had a lunar complexion, sky-blue eyes, and a fleshy strawberry for a mouth. Her scent was natural. Incredibly, even her sweat smelled good. And she had a child’s voice that drove him wild when she shouted, “My name’s Martina,” over the booming speakers that throbbed like the veins of Kurt Angle, the professional wrestler.