Poisonville (20 page)

“Three trucks have pulled up; they’re loading the drums,” she alerted me.

“So they’ve decided to clean house,” I commented in a low voice.

“I think you need to come see this. The view is quite interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

“Come here, and on the double,” she said, then hung up.

Carla was right. By the light of the powerful spotlights illuminating the ground, it was possible to see quite clearly, through the binoculars, the faces of a number of people.

“Which one is Zuglio?” Carla asked.

“He’s the short guy in the beige overcoat; the one who’s talking with Trevisan and Constantin.”

“Do you know the other ones?”

“I’ve seen two of them before, here at the dump,” I answered. “But I’ve never seen the other three.”

The five thugs worked busily and with precision. Drums and jerry cans were unearthed and loaded onto the trucks. The dogs, excited at the activity, barked continuously. Carla mounted a powerful telephoto lens on her camera body and began shooting.

“I’ve spent all my savings,” she explained, as she adjusted the focus. “I need to ask you a favor,” she added, after a short pause. “I need to borrow your car. I would have some problems trying to follow the trucks on my bicycle.”

I looked down at Constantin, who had lit yet another cigarette. As he talked, he continually looked around. “I won’t let you go on your own.”

She lowered the camera and stared at me. “Are you sure? You might get in over your head . . .”

“Stop treating me like a child,” I hissed at her.

She gave me a crafty smile.

The trucks lined up, ready to pull out. Constantin, Trevisan, and Zuglio climbed into their repective automobiles and drove off toward town.

“Now it’s our turn,” I muttered, hoping that I wasn’t about to get myself into a world of trouble.

On the Mestre viaduct, the trucks blended in with the other heavy vehicles moving past slowly, under the alert gaze of the highway police. Then they merged onto the highway. Around Bologna we were already certain that they were heading south. They stopped for fuel, and the drivers took advantage of the opportunity to grab a sandwich. And Carla took advantage of the opportunity to take some nice photographs of them and of the license plates of their trucks.

The drivers never went faster than fifty miles per hour. They didn’t want to run the risk of being pulled over. Something as simple as a speeding ticket could arouse the curiosity of the police. We followed them, hanging back at least two hundred yards.

“Giovanna wasn’t honest with the two of us,” Carla said, breaking a silence that had gone on for a good long while.

“I’d have to agree that she wasn’t.”

“She used me. I was just a pawn in her plan,” she added, with resentment in her voice.

“She used everyone. Even herself. And in the end she paid, with her life.”

“But we loved her. I was her best friend, you were her fiancé. She shouldn’t have treated us this way.”

“I try not to judge her. She meant to tell me everything, and that’s enough for me.”

“Even after seeing that video?”

“Yes. It’s just that now I feel a little more detached,” I replied, hestitating as I hunted for the right words. “It’s hard to explain. Giovanna seems more and more like a ghost imprisoned by a spell, who needs for her murderer to be punished before it can find peace.”

“And before it can finally free you to live your own life,” she added, sympathetically.

Silence returned. Carla fell asleep. Every so often I turned to look at her, thinking how different from Giovanna she was. I woke her when, shortly after dawn, the trucks left the provincial highway and drove deep into the countryside around Nola. Across the fields, plumes of smoke arose from numerous bonfires.

“The land of fires. The color of the smoke indicates the nature of the filth they are burning,” Carla began explaining, as she pointed in various directions. “Black: plastic wastes. Red: phosphorous substances. And the smoke down there is light blue because of the concentration of chromium.”

“How is this possible, in broad daylight?” I asked indignantly.

Carla snickered. “Here the Camorra’s in charge. Now you know what sort of people Trevisan and Zuglio do business with.”

We drove along an irrigation canal; beyond it rose billows of dense, acrid smoke.

“You see, they use bales of rags soaked in solvents or halogen compounds as a base for the fires,” she went on explaining. “They pretend they’re getting rid of rags, and instead they’re getting rid of toxic waste at a cut rate.”

We drove off and in the distance we glimpsed a farm, with water buffaloes grazing lazily. “Mozzarella with dioxin,” she said with bitter irony. “Here the people get sick and die. Liver cancer, leukemia.”

As we were talking, the trucks came to a halt and, after a while, a couple of cars joined them. Through the binoculars I saw a handshake between the drivers and the new arrivals. Carla took a series of photographs, and then she squeezed my arm, hard.

“Let’s go, Francesco. I’m afraid.”

At last, I could take full advantage of the Lancia’s powerful engine. The trip home was much quicker. Before we pulled into town, Carla asked me what I intended to do.

I felt nauseated, bitter, and indignant. My father couldn’t possibly have imagined that the Eco T.D.W. was dealing in toxic waste with the Camorra. This was no longer a simple case of small-town fraud. This was “ecomafia.” And it was no longer possible to negotiate with those people, it wasn’t possible to try to broker a solution to the matter; we had to involve the law.

“We’ll go see Mele, and we’ll give him the film.”

“What about your father?”

I shrugged resignedly. “I’ll tell him afterwards.”

Mele slammed his hand down hard on the desk. “So you decided to become junior detectives.”

“We just wanted to be sure, before we—” I took a stab at self-justification.

“Not a word from you—you’re a lawyer, and there are certain things you ought to know already,” he scolded. “You’ve undermined the investigation. They’ve already cleaned house at the local health board and on Zuglio’s land. We won’t find any usable evidence to take them to court.”

“There are the photographs; there’s our own eyewitness testimony,” Carla broke in.

“It’s not much, barely enough to justify starting an investigation. If the two of you had only been a little smarter, we could have caught them all with their hands in the cookie jar.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll make a report to Zan with your statements and the photographs of these gentlemen,” he replied. “The first thing we need to figure out is whether this toxic waste operation has anything to do with Giovanna’s murder.”

“Do you really have to hand over the evidence to Zan?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

He spread his arms in resignation. “It’s his investigation.”

Carla and I signed our statement and got up to go.

“Have you told me the whole truth, or should I expect some other surprise later on?” the inspector asked.

Neither of us answered. With a gesture of one hand, the inspector ushered us out of his office.

The secretary informed me that Papa was at the Foundation for a meeting. The Torrefranchi Group was headquartered in a large villa by the river. In the old days, the notables who traveled from the city preferred a boat to the jarring discomfort of a horse-drawn coach. The villa had been built at the orders of a descendant of a Venetian doge at the end of the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, the property had fallen into the hands of a wealthy Jewish family from Trieste. During the Second World War, the villa had been requisitioned by the local German headquarters, and the legitimate owners never returned from Dachau. I had been there on only two occasions with Papa, once for a literary awards ceremony, and once for a charity banquet to raise money to finance the pediatric ward of the new hospital.

At the front gate, I was ordered to halt by two security guards. Muscular physiques wrapped in charcoal-grey tailored suits, with crew cuts and sunglasses. My surname wasn’t enough to get me inside. They told me to wait while they requested authorization. After a couple of minutes, they waved me in. At the door, I was welcomed by a courteous secretary in a navy blue suit with a gold-plated name tag on her lapel that identified her as Mariangela. She accompanied me into a comfortable little lounge where she pointed me to a table covered with carafes, coffee pots, and trays of finger pastries. “The meeting is almost over,” she told me. “I’ve already told your father you’re here.”

About ten minutes passed and a small crowd poured into the lounge. They were too busy talking animatedly and pouring cups of coffee and serving themselves pastries to notice me. Then the Contessa swept in with Davide Trevisan at her heels. Selvaggia kissed me absent-mindedly first on one cheek, then the other. “Your father is still tied up,” she warned me in a low voice. Then he headed over to a group of men smoking in a corner.

Trevisan poured himself a glass of fruit juice. “The Contessa has forbidden alcohol,” he confided in a whisper.

I was astonished to see him at the Foundation, treated like any of the numerous partners. After his meeting with Papa, I expected to see him kicked out on his ass. But here he sat, safe and happy. He came to sit down in the office chair beside me.

“I have to thank you for your discretion in this matter of the toxic waste,” he said in a low voice. “As I explained to your father, I was deceived by several employees who kept the truth from me.”

I nodded, doing my best to stay calm. I wanted to tell him that I had photographs of him standing on Zuglio’s land as the excavator unearthed the drums, but the Carabinieri would be talking to him about it later.

“We’re packing our bags,” he added, after biting into a pastry. “We’re all heading for Romania. Fuck the Chinese, and fuck the tax collectors.”

“Will you still be dealing in waste?”

He smiled with satisfaction. “No. I bought machinery from a bankrupt shoe factory for a song, and I shipped it to Timisoara. Next week, I’m going down to hire the workers.” He laid one hand on my arm in a conspiratorial manner. “Twenty female factory workers, all attractive and all available, obviously. In Romania, the real problem is keeping your dick in your pants.”

I wondered to myself how I’d ever managed to hang out with such a squalid creature and consider him a friend. I had even thought of asking him to be my best man. Giovanna wouldn’t let me. She had always dismissed Davide as a false and conceited fool. So I asked my father to be my best man.

I realized that Trevisan had launched into a description of the joys of Romanian sex, and I decided to put a stop to it by changing the subject. “Of course, there’ll be a lot of layoffs here after you leave.”

“We’ll take the best ones with us,” he explained. “We need specialized workers who can teach the others how to do their job. The Romanians don’t know how to do a thing.”

“What about the others?”

He shrugged. “A lot of them are third-world immigrants, and they can just go back home, because we’re sick and tired of blacks and Moroccans.” Then he lowered his voice. “And the locals will have to take care of themselves. They’ll think of something. Our people have always rolled up their sleeves when times are tough.”

Just then, I saw my father walk into the lounge. He came toward me with a smile on his face. “You forgot to shave this morning,” he scolded me good-naturedly. “What are you doing here? Did you have something urgent to tell me?”

I smiled in a reassuring manner. “No, Papa. I just wanted to say hello and ask if you’d like to have lunch with me.”

“I’m sorry, I already have plans.”

“No problem. We’ll do it another time.”

I drove aimlessly around the countryside for a couple of hours. I couldn’t seem to make sense of what had happened. Papa must have had good reasons for what he had done, but I couldn’t manage to make sense of his behavior. I couldn’t imagine that he had fallen for Trevisan’s pathetic lie about being deceived by his employees. Perhaps he had chosen to pretend to believe him, figuring that, in any case, once the Torrefranchi Group had moved to Romania, the problem of the Eco T.D.W. would be unimportant. The real reason I hadn’t spoken to him before going to Mele was that, in the end, I knew he’d dissuade me from telling the police anything. But Papa certainly couldn’t understand how serious that traffic in toxic waste really was. He hadn’t seen the Land of Fires, the plumes of colored smoke befouling the air. People were getting sick and dying because some northeastern manufacturer wanted to save a little money on waste management. My father was probably willing to ignore all that in order to achieve his dream of the Foundation. But I wasn’t. Considering the way matters stood, I could be certain of only one thing. I would never work for the Foundation nor would I ever set foot in my father’s law offices. Once the Carabinieri’s investigation became public, everyone associated with the Torrefranchi Foundation would treat me like a leper. And my father would never forgive me for betraying him. My short professional life in town would be over. After my visit to the Foundation, though, I wasn’t so sure that I minded.

Nothing happened for a couple of days. Then one morning Carla came to see me and thrust a sheet of paper into my face. “Read that,” she snarled furiously.

I glanced quickly at the first few lines. “You’ve been fired,” I stammered in surprise.

“For entering the laboratory after working hours and for using the equipment for my own personal ends,” she recited from memory. “And how do you think they knew about that?”

“From my father,” I answered promptly. I looked at her unhappily. “I told him because I wanted to convince him that the pollution caused by the secret waste dump was really serious. Forgive me.”

Carla heaved a sigh as she flopped down into a chair. “Oh, they would have gotten rid of me anyway. Ferrari is a powerful man in the world of public health, and if I had reported him he had plenty of strings he could pull.”