Poisonville (5 page)

When I finally made it back home, I poured myself a large cognac and threw it back, without even taking off my overcoat. Then I walked from room to room, gathering up all the pictures of Giovanna, and I threw them into the trash.

“That’s where you belong, you slut.”

I had to wait for a sullen, unprecedented fury to wash out of my mind and body. Then I broke into sobs, pulled the photographs out of the trash can, and hugged them to my chest.

“How could you do this to me, Giovanna? What happened to you, my love?”

* * *

He boarded the first morning train. He had hidden his duffel bag in a nearby field. It would only be a burden, a hindrance to him in what he had to do next. The train cars were full of dozing commuters; no one paid him the slightest attention. He stepped off the train at the first stop, a few miles away but already in a different province. He ate breakfast at the train station coffee bar. Two officers of the Polfer, or railroad police, came in and ordered yet another of the succession of espressos they’d drink that day; one of the two officers gazed at the man thoughtfully, observing him as if the face reminded him of someone. It gave the man a sharp stab of pain in his belly. It was a stab of fear. If they had asked him for ID, that would have spelled the end of his plan. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He kept a sidelong eye on the policeman in the big plate-glass mirror behind the bar. The police officer, a stout fifty-year-old with white hair tufting out from beneath his hat, had been momentarily distracted by the female barista. She wanted to know about a gang of Gypsies that had been sighted in the area over the past few days. The man heaved a sigh of relief. He turned his gaze to his own reflection in the mirror. His hair was too long, too tangled. In fact, in those parts men his age, men with jobs and families, went to the barbershop more frequently than he did. He left a couple of ten-cent coins on the counter for a tip, and left the coffee bar. He went to the public bathrooms at the far end of the train station, and used a rubber band to tie his hair back in a ponytail. Then he headed into town. He stepped into a phone booth and dialed the number again. Again, he heard the anonymous and impersonal voice of the answering machine. The man didn’t know what to make of it. Angry and disappointed, he positioned himself on a bench near the town church. He didn’t have long to wait. An old man pedaled up on a bicycle, leaned it against the wall by the church’s main portal, and went in, without locking the bike. He wouldn’t be inside for very long, just time enough for a prayer and a genuflection. But the man would already be long gone. He swung onto the bicycle seat and pedaled away quickly, thinking to himself as he rode that, around there, certain customs would never vanish. As for himself, he’d never been a regular church-goer, and lately he’d stopped going entirely. In his own life, he’d always found more spiritual comfort and understanding in the arms of a skilled whore than kneeling at a confessional.

The dense fog was thinning, as punctual as death that time of the year. He would need to find a place to hide, and there was no time to waste. Last night he had slept in a shed on a construction site; he had almost frozen to death.

He pedaled for ten or fifteen miles. He still remembered how to use the gears properly and, despite his age, his muscles still had their spring.

He felt like clipping a playing card to the front fork, so that he could listen to the tack-a-tack-a-tack in the spinning spokes, a sound that seemed to belong to a lost, archaic world, confusingly enveloped in another kind of fog, the fog of memory. When he reached the outskirts of town, he stopped outside a grocery store. He peered in through the plate glass window and saw that both the owner and the few customers were third-world immigrants. Reassured, he walked into the store with a confident step, smiled genially, and began to pull canned goods and other items from the shelves. When his shopping basket was full, he walked over to the cash register.

“Two bottles of red wine,” he asked.

“No wine. No alcohol,” the proprietor replied in foreign-accented Italian.

He slid the two plastic bags filled with groceries onto the handlebars, and pedaled back out into the countryside. The fog almost made him miss the dirt road he was looking for. He was obliged to make a wide circle back before he could turn into the lane. As he rode along between skeletal grape vines, the fog grew even denser. The rough surface of the road made the bicycle rattle and jolt; it wasn’t easy to keep his balance. He was beginning to feel tired; he needed to rest and think about everything that had happened since his arrival the day before.

He rode practically blind for a couple of miles, until he could finally make out the silhouette of a house through the fog. He dismounted and wheeled the bicycle, careful to make no noise over the last fifty yards.

The house was shrouded in silence. He circled cautiously around it until he realized that the building was completely abandoned. Reassured, he peered in through one of the windows, whose shutters dangled slightly askew, each from a single surviving hinge. He shattered the window glass with an elbow to get inside. When he set foot on the floor, he felt fragments of glass crunch and snap beneath the soles of his hiking boots. He ran his fingers along the wall until he felt a light switch. He flipped it on: there was no power. Making his way by the flame of a lighter, he managed to find the kitchen. It was empty, except for a table with a broken marble top. He rummaged through the drawers and, amidst the clutter of mismatched cutlery, wine corks, multicolored rubber bands, and rusted corkscrews, he found several candle ends.

By the light of the candle flames, he saw that he had stumbled into an eighteenth-century mansion, abandoned for years, probably because of some never-resolved dispute over an estate. Aside from a few skittering mice and a dropped ceiling of spiderwebs, there were no signs of life. The furniture had all been taken away, except for a pile of chairs in the dining room and a swaybacked sofa. The chairs were decorated with finely crafted intarsia work, but they were badly worm-eaten. In the middle of the back wall stood an enormous and empty fireplace. It was brutally cold. He managed to kick a couple of chairs to pieces, and he piled up the shattered wood in the fireplace. It was almost dark by now; no one would notice the smoke. He had a nice fire going before long. Later, he would retrieve the duffel bag containing his possessions. The man pulled the sofa closer to the flames and sat huddled, still wrapped in his heavy jacket. He made himself a sandwich with a can of tunafish, and opened a can of Mecca Cola. He pulled a transistor radio out of his jacket pocket and switched it on. He tuned the radio to a local station that broadcast only Italian music requested by listeners; the callers all spoke dialect, as did the announcer. After an old hit by the pop singer Drupi dedicated to a certain Rosi, the DJ, Franchino, took a call from an elderly female caller.

“Ciao, Franchino, it’s me, Maria,” she introduced herself.

“
Carissima
, it’s been a while since we’ve heard your voice.”

“Eh, I’m so busy with my grandchildren. There’s four of them now, and you know, at my age . . .”

“Oh, come on, you’re practically a teenager. So, Maria, what song would you like to request?”

“‘Tears in the Wind’
by Adamo. And I want to dedicate it to that girl that died the other night, Giovanna Barovier. Poor girl, to think that she was getting married next week. It makes me think about my poor sister . . .”

“Yes, we mentioned it during the news report at the top of the hour,” Franchino interrupted her. “A sad story.”

The man switched off the radio. He’d heard enough.

* * *

“Answer the test questions by selecting the number of minutes of foreplay that women say they like, depending on the setting: ‘Sex in the bathroom during a party?’” Rocco read out loud from the latest issue of the Italian edition of
Men’s Health,
holding it up to the dome light in the Jeep Cherokee.

“Three minutes,” answered Denis.

“Sex on a first date?”

“Half an hour.”

“Yeah, okay . . . Sex in her parents’ house?”

“Ten minutes, better not to waste time, or else . . .”

Rocco marked each of Denis’s answers with a check mark on the test. They were both sitting in the back seat while Lucio, in the driver’s seat, prepared three abundant lines of cocaine, using a circular hand mirror as a surface.

They had been parked for two hours now, waiting for the bluish light from the television set in the little villa finally turned off.

“Christ, this is a drag,” said Denis, “if you ask me, the old lady’s fallen asleep watching ‘The Costanzo Show.’”

“‘The Costanzo Show’ isn’t on the air anymore,” Rocco replied, as he added up his friend’s test score.

“Well, okay, then she tossed back a couple of shots of Vov liqueur and nodded off on the sofa, and now she’s overdosed.”

“Here, take this and shut up,” Lucio ordered, handing over the hand mirror with the lines of coke.

Denis snorted the line with a straw from his Coke.

“Nice fucking technique, way to snort,” Rocco commented, with the air of an offended purist.

“TV’s off,” Lucio reported, while Rocco clamped his left nostril shut.

“Let’s get moving,” Denis suggested impatiently.

“No. Give her the time to have a piss, and then we’ll catch her in bed.”

“Fuck that, let’s catch her on the toilet,” Rocco snickered.

“That’s disgusting,” commented Denis. “By the way, why do we always have to hit on stinking old women, never a nice piece of young pussy?”

“Lucio keeps those for himself . . .” Rocco said, with a mischievous smile.

Lucio turned sharply, staring menacingly back over his shoulder at Rocco: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know fuck.”

“Oh yeah? Then why wouldn’t you let us inflict a little punishment on that sweet piece of pussy, the Barovier? A girl like that driving around alone at night is just looking for hard cock. And she got what she was looking for. And that’s not all she got. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, by any chance, would you?”

Lucio turned to stare at the dark windows of the little villa. Then his arm shot back, a sharp blow of the elbow to Rocco’s nose, followed by a spurt of blood. He sat tensely, his elbow poised to strike again. But Rocco was too busy moaning, covering his nose with both hands, like a Hindu rapt in prayer.

“Shit, you knocked over the mirror,” was all Denis had to say, bent over in a frantic attempt to sniff up whatever cocaine he could glean from the carpet.

Lucio opened the car door and got out, circling around the Jeep and opening the rear compartment. He reached in and pulled out a baseball bat, then pulled Rocco’s door open. He jerked Rocco out of the car and kicked him in the balls, forcing him into a kneeling position on the ground before him. He raised the baseball hat high into the air over Rocco’s head. Rocco continued to snivel over his poor bleeding nose.

“Lucio, what the fuck do you think you’re doing!” Denis had finally decided to get out of the Cherokee and say something, though he remained at a respectful distance from the baseball bat. “Don’t do it; what did he do to you?”

Lucio stared down at Rocco, unsure what to do next:

“Don’t you ever dare. Never again. Ever.”

Rocco managed to nod with a whimper.

Lucio lowered the bat; he clearly considered the matter settled.

He turned to Denis: “Let’s go, the old lady must be asleep by now.” He pulled his ski mask over his head.

As she lay stretched out on the floor, gagged and bound, her eyes burning from the fluoroacetophenone spray, her heart racing crazily, the old woman would remember a cascade of objects, dresser drawers, clothing, and the athletic shoes of her attackers as they stepped over her, on her, and every so often, kicked her in what was clearly an intentional infliction of pain.

For the Cherokee Gang, as they had all too predictably decided to call themselves, this was their sixth home invasion and robbery. They all employed the same technique: take the victim by surprise, in her sleep, usually an old woman living alone, then tie her up and gag her. And then turn the house inside out, destroying anything they couldn’t take with them. It was Denis’s job to blind the victim momentarily with an anti-mugger spray. That had been Lucio’s idea. He had a twisted sense of humor about these things. Rocco was assigned to finding objects of value and Lucio went to work with his baseball bat.

On the desk of Inspector Mele, the file on the gang got thicker with each home invasion, but there were no clues at all. He figured they were a group of drug addicts from out of town.

* * *

My father arrived at my house at seven in the morning, and the phone began ringing at eight o’clock sharp. Reporters. They had caught the scent of the scoop of the year and they were churning the water, in a feeding frenzy, in search of a statement. Papa had shown me the front page of the two local papers. They reported the news of my fiancée’s death, with the old version, from accidental causes. Then they had seized on the troubled past of Alvise Barovier, Giovanna’s father. I wasted no time reading any of the articles. Each time the phone rang, my father picked up the receiver and identified himself, and each time the reporters became a little less frenzied and aggressive at the mention of his name. The word “murder” was in the air, and became gradually more frequent.

“How did Prunella take it?” I asked him.

“Poor woman. She’s a wreck. After the end of her marriage, Giovanna was everything to her.”

“She was everything to me, too,” I remarked, bitterly. “I wonder if she ‘was everything’ to her lover.”

Papa shook his head. “I still can’t believe it. But didn’t you notice anything was wrong?”

“I’m afraid not. Otherwise she’d still be alive.”

Shortly after eleven, Mele showed up. “There’s a problem,” he announced. “I need you to come to the barracks.” He turned and addressed my father as well. “The prosecutor would appreciate it if you would come, too.”