Poisonville (16 page)

After giving her a dose of ecstasy that would knock a horse on its ass, Denis pretended to read her palm, pronouncing, seriously: “It seems to me that you have problems with your parents.” It was the most obvious thing to say—all kids have problems with their parents. But Martina’s eyes had lit up with admiration and, in confirmation of his skills as a seer, she had confided that she had been able to blackmail her father into letting her come to the rave because she had caught him eating Nutella in the garage.

Denis had nodded, in perfect empathy, and after scowling menacingly at some guy who had stepped on his Reeboks, he proffered a pearl of profound wisdom: “The bad thing about parents isn’t so much that they’re your Mom and Dad, the problem is more that you’re their daughter.” After that, she let him take her by hand, and she looked up at him with an adoring gaze as they made their way upstream, against the current, finally attaining the exit sign that pointed the way to paradise: the reclinable seats of the Cherokee. To the highly toxic blend of amphetamines he had ingested, he had added one of his father’s Viagras, as a little extra insurance. The sardinette was pleased with the results; or, at least, she was until the doors of the Jeep Cherokee swung open and Lucio and Rocco climbed in to join the party. Then the little idiot started yelling that she wanted to go back to join her girlfriends. The she started screaming for her mother. “Make up your mind, little girl—do you want your girlfriends or your mother?” That was Rocco’s contribution, in an attempt to downplay the drama. She kept screaming, so Rocco put the Jeep in gear and peeled out. The last thing they wanted was for all that yelling to spoil the big Event. Lucio decided to forget about their little party; he ordered Rocco to pull over and let the girl go. This time, Rocco told him to fuck himself. He pushed harder on the gas, and the Jeep Cherokee went swerving and jolting down that damned dirt road. Everyone in the Jeep was bouncing in the air like those watermelons you see in the back of the Mexican flatbed truck they show on television commercials, even though the Cherokee had some badass shock absorbers and springs. There was one thing about Rocco: he was nearsighted as a mole, but he refused to wear glasses, because he didn’t want people to make fun of him. It doesn’t take a genius to guess what happened next. The dirt road suddenly ended. In seconds, the Jeep lurched into the middle of the state highway, and with perfect timing, a cement truck slammed into the side of the vehicle, as if it had just been waiting for them. BAM! The truck shoved the Cherokee more than a hundred yards down the road, and as it was shouldering it along the asphalt, it tumbled the car and crumpled it like an aluminum beer can. And to think that this was the night they had decided to be on their best behavior.

When the pair of vehicles finally came to a halt, there were two survivors: the guy driving the cement truck and Lucio, who was still breathing, though it was impossible to tell his arms from his legs. That was how the Carabinieri found him. They hurriedly loaded him onto an ambulance, which had sounded its siren out of a sense of duty more than anything else. They were certain that he’d be dead long before they reached the hospital.

Their pity for the victim didn’t last long, though. As they were extracting the corpses of Martina, Rocco, and Denis from the wreckage, the Carabinieri found thirty-five thousand euros in cash, a set of emerald jewelry, a string of pearls, and about thirty rings, including two wedding bands. The dashboard had exploded on impact, spraying projectiles of loot everywhere in the car. The Carabinieri had no need to leap to conclusions; it was more a matter of acknowledging a proven fact.

* * *

The bottle of Sambuca was almost empty. Astrid, the television fortuneteller, looked to her like a Madonna, with the scarf wrapped around her head and the jewelry dangling from her neck and ears. The telephone receiver pressed against her ear was slick with warm sweat. Paola Cavasin had been on hold for forty-five minutes, waiting her turn to talk. But now that she was finally connected to the fortuneteller herself, she couldn’t manage to find the words to express the weight pressing down on her heart, the sensation of anguish that even the Sambuca failed to assuage. Also, she was bewildered by the horrible fishtank effect produced by the silent television. They had told her to turn down the sound entirely—to “prevent an annoying feedback effect,” is what she thought they’d said. So she would speak into the phone, and then Astrid would answer her over the phone, moving her lips soundlessly, like a giant fish. How could they have a conversation like this? And yet Astrid seemed to have an answer for everything. It was as if she could see the bottle of liqueur hidden under the coffee table through the television screen.

“I know he’s cheating on me with those awful women, he doesn’t even try to hide it from me anymore. Lucio has figured it out by now.”

“Who is Lucio?” asked Astrid, moving her lips to ask the question a full second or two after Paola heard it come through the phone.

“My son,” she answered. And she felt like crying when she said it.

“How old is he?” asked the fortuneteller.

Paola couldn’t seem to focus. Before she could answer, she always had to wait for Astrid’s lips to stop moving.

“Eighteen. I can’t take this anymore. What should I do?”

“Paola, now calm down and listen to me carefully. I have something important to tell you.”

Paola leaned forward, closer to the television screen.

In the video picture, the fortuneteller selected a card from a tarot deck. The card seemed to worry her quite a bit. She turned it over once, and then turned it over again, the way you do with an expired certified check, as you wonder how to cash it.

With the usual delay, her lips moved on the screen, and so Paola, who had moved the receiver away from her ear, missed the first couple of words.

“ . . . Period of trouble. He could wind up falling in with bad company.”

Paola whined softly, biting the heel of her hand to keep from broadcasting her whimpering to the viewing audience.

Astrid picked something up from her desk, it looked like one of the charms that she wore around her neck, but Paola couldn’t be certain. Her eyes were blurry with tears.

“I am going to give you this amulet, and I want you to wear it everywhere you go. It is a very powerful amulet, and I am giving it to you because an amulet can only be bestowed as a gift. This amulet is a catalyzer of benign forces. You must keep it on your person at all times, when you hug your son. You must keep it for a week, then I want you to come see me. But take my advice and never let it out of your sight, off of your person . . .”

Clinging desperately to the television, the telephone, and the slender thread of hope, Paola hadn’t noticed that her doorbell had been ringing imperiously for several seconds.

Astrid called her name: “Paola?”

The fortuneteller looked out at something or someone on the other side of the video screen. Paola thought that she might be trying to glimpse her front door, but perhaps there was just a director standing next to the television camera. Her next-door neighbor, Elda, had been in the studio audience for “Passaparola” once, and she had explained to Paola that there are lots of people signaling to one another, inside the television.

“Paola, are you still there? Maybe you have to go and answer the door . . .”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well then, for now I’ll bid you farewell. Make sure to leave your address with the phone attendant for the amulet, and call me back. Ciao, darling.”

Astrid’s lips kept on moving, but in the telephone what she heard now was a pre-recorded voice asking her for her name and address, so that they could send her the precious amulet.

“Open up, it’s the Carabinieri.”

That wasn’t the voice from the telephone. Paola put down the receiver, forgetting to provide her address, and tried to get to her feet.

After she finally managed to unhook the security chain, slide back the bolt, and turn first the top key, then the bottom one, the door seemed to swing open on its own. Even a few hours later, she couldn’t seem to remember whether or not she had turned the handle, just as she wasn’t sure if she’d asked who was at the door. Sure, they had said they were Carabinieri, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can say “Carabinieri” and still be an armed criminal. As she was opening the door, she hadn’t even thought to look through the peephole. The voice had sounded honest, so she just opened the door. It was a good thing, too, because they really were the Carabinieri. They had all looked at her with a strange expression, then the oldest Carabiniere, a handsome man with salt-and-pepper curly grey hair and a southern accent, had told her something about Lucio. That he’d been in a car crash, but that he wasn’t dead, thank God, but then they asked her if they could take a look at his bedroom, in fact, before she knew it, they were searching the whole house, and she could just imagine what her animal of a husband would have to say about that. But if Lucio was hurt and in the hospital, what were they looking for? Giacomo was certain to lose his temper: he’d take it out on her first, because she’d let them in, and after that on Lucio. Lucio—just as the fortuneteller had predicted, had fallen in with bad company.

* * *

“She seems like a housecleaner, more than the lady of the house,” Inspector Mele thought to himself once the clatter of keys and sliding bolts had come to a halt and the door had swung open. As soon as the one surviving occupant of the Cherokee had been identified, he had alerted Giacomo Zuglio, the father, who had rushed to the hospital. His son, Lucio, was still in emergency surgery.

He knew this guy, Zuglio; he’d run into him before. He was an operator who had good connections, and he hadn’t managed to nail him yet. That was why he was so amazed at the situation. Giacomo Zuglio, suspected of money laundering and loan sharking, was only a worried father, while the real criminal was his son, an eighteen-year-old boy who was scheduled to take his high school final exams this year.

The house was expensive, but even he, who was nothing more than an underpaid inspector, understood at a glance that there was money and nothing more. There was none of that history, elegance, taste that you can’t even define clearly, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when it’s not there. It’s not so much the furniture itself, it’s how the furniture is arranged, or else it’s the feeling that certain houses seem to have been there for centuries, and the passage of time has made them elegant and attractive, or, as people say, understated. Zuglio’s little villa, which must have been 2,700 square feet with a nice location, had something about it that corresponded more to the people who lived in it than to the house itself. There was too much furniture, when a single nice painting would have been sufficient, sofas upholstered with different types of fabric—solid pink here, a floral pattern there. It was an unholy mess to look at, in other words, as if the architect who had designed the house had one thing in mind, and then the minute he left, the Zuglio family had set about betraying that vision without even realizing it.

This sequence of musings had lasted no more than a handful of seconds, of course. The inspector was certainly not the kind of person to spend a lot of time thinking about interior decoration. While he unleashed his men to search the various rooms in the house, he asked where the son’s room was— Lucio’s room. It was no simple matter to get that information, because the poor woman was buzzing from one room to another, like a crazed housefly. She seemed to be somewhat deranged, too. That bottle of Sambuca under the coffee table in the living room probably had something to do with that. It was always useful in his line of work to guess certain things on the spur of the moment, though he wasn’t there to investigate the woman. He was there to see if he could recover the bulk of the swag, because if they’d found all that loot in the Cherokee, there would probably be more, much more, in the house, unless the son of the loan shark and the deranged housefly had been crafty enough to hide the plunder somewhere else. He doubted it, though. Young men, at least that kind of young man, assume that they’re immune to the rules of the game. And since the young man in question still lived at home, he ignored dresser drawers, armoire, and mattress—the obvious targets of paternal searches—and focused on the wooden baseboard. The main difficulty involved was kneeling down to pry it away from the wall, because he had the back of a fifty-five-year-old policeman who had spent the last thirty years manning roadblocks and checkpoints in the foggy winter weather of the north, or in the driver’s seat of an Alfa Romeo squad car. It took him a little longer than ten minutes to find the stash—a hole carved out behind the baseboard in a corner, hidden behind a linen chest. In the cavity, he found jewelry, bundles of cash, and even a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle. But what made him lean his aching back against the wall was a photograph, a snapshot showing the boy, Lucio Zuglio, in the company of Giovanna Barovier.

* * *

Inspector Mele slid a photograph onto the desk. “Do you know him?” he asked.

I didn’t answer right away. It was a young man. Young, handsome, with a sullen expression. The photograph had been taken in a restaurant. Sitting across the table from him was Giovanna; she, unlike him, was smiling into the lens. Her right hand was wrapped affectionately around the young man’s arm.

“I’ve never seen him before. Who is he?”

“Lucio Zuglio.”

“Zuglio?” I exclaimed in surprise. “Is he related to Giacomo Zuglio by any chance?”

“He’s his son. Do you know Giacomo?”

“No.”

Mele gave me a funny look. “Then why did you ask about him?”

“Just curious. I’ve heard his name before.”

Mele sighed dubiously and then told me about the chain of events that had led to the discovery of the Polaroid in the young man’s bedroom. “It was carefully concealed,” he explained. “He definitely didn’t want it to be found.”

“Is he the one?”

Mele took back the photograph and slid it into a folder marked with the coat of arms of the Carabinieri. He was ill at ease. “I can’t say. I’m waiting for him to recover a little before questioning him, but he seems too young to fit in with the phrase reported by the witness, Carla Pisani . . .”