Poisonville (8 page)

“What do you have in mind?”

Selvaggia saw a gleam in the eyes of her personal lawyer. She smiled at that virtually imperceptible manifestation of vitality. “We need a public acknowledgment.”

She intentionally used those precise words, even if Antonio at that juncture would be unable to grasp their more profound meaning. “We own a broadcasting company. Let’s use it.” And in order to leave Visentin the time necessary to appreciate her strategy, she plucked the cigar from his fingers and indulged in a deep and voluptuous drag.

“Well, maybe that reporter at Antenna N/E, Beggiolin. He has a big following in town.”

“That’s exactly who I was thinking of,” smiled Selvaggia, returning his cigar to him.

* * *

My father lived in an Art Nouveau villa that had belonged to one of the earliest major industrialists in the area—a pioneer in the field of farm machinery. His factory was demolished decades ago, and his heirs had chosen to change their line of work and place of residence. My father bought the villa immediately after my mother’s death and I had never lived in it, what with boarding school and the university. Papa decided not to remarry, and his only companions were his domestic servants and the family of the concierge who had lived with him for many years now.

Severina, the concierge’s wife, opened the gate for me and gave me a melancholy smile. Sergio, the butler, opened the door just as my finger was about to touch the buzzer. He greeted me with a deferential hauteur, like a movie butler, and showed me into the living room. A comforting fire was crackling in the little fireplace. Papa sat watching television. He gestured for me to sit down beside him.

On the screen I saw the images of the piazza and the café. Beggiolin appeared on screen, pointing to the interior of the café.

“Here, in the Bar Centrale, a few minutes ago, according to reports from numerous eyewitnesses, Filippo Calchi Renier and Francesco Visentin engaged in a fistfight. That alone would be a minor piece of news—though we must say that when two scions of two such important and respected families brawl in public, the town’s image is badly tarnished as a result—were it not for one significant detail. Filippo Calchi Renier has publicly accused Francesco Visentin of murdering his own fiancée, the unfortunate Giovanna Barovier . . .”

My father picked up the remote control and turned the television off.

“Nice work,” he said with a cutting tone. “They’ve been running and rerunning this piece for more than an hour. They stop for a commercial break, and then they run it again.”

“I know, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“You have no excuses, Francesco. And don’t try to feed me nonsense about being upset and losing control. There are things you just don’t do. It could result in my being hauled before the board of the order, and as you know, I’m the chairman. I would have no choice but to resign.”

He stood up and went to pour himself a glass of prosecco from a bottle chilling in an elegant silver ice bucket. “In any case, that’s not the main problem. You displayed yourself to the world as a violent individual incapable of self-control,” he went on. “And everyone will feel justified in assuming that you killed Giovanna.”

“To tell the truth, that’s what they already think.”

He ignored my comment. “From this moment on, you will do nothing on your own initiative. You will do only what I tell you to do. I will take care of everything. I’ve already arranged to take care of the evidence, and tomorrow evening we will go and have a talk with Filippo.”

“What evidence are you talking about?”

“The sperm. I talked to Marizza, we won’t have any surprises.”

I stood up and grabbed the wineglass out of his hand. “Why did you do that? Do you think I’m guilty?”

“No. But you can never be too sure in cases like this one. I’ve been a lawyer for too many years to leave things to chance. One mistake and you’re screwed. It would be just one more piece of evidence against you because, in case you haven’t grasped the point, you have no alibi after two in the morning, and Giovanna was killed between one and three.”

“The DNA test of the sperm doesn’t prove anything. I could easily have killed her after her lover left the house.”

“Precisely. Which is why it is advisable to get rid of any elements that could make your position any worse.”

I smashed the glass on the floor. “Instead of worrying about me, an innocent man, you should pressure Zan to find the man who killed her. All you need to do is pick up the telephone, and that incompetent fool would actually be forced to do some genuine investigating.”

My father pointed to the shattered glass on the wet floor. “You see?” he said, in an exaggeratedly calm tone of voice. “You are incapable of dealing with the situation.”

“I want to know why you don’t pick up that fucking phone.”

“Moderate your language,” he warned me. “There’s a time for everything. First and foremost, I want to be absolutely sure that you aren’t implicated. Then we’ll think about the investigation. Giovanna was like a daughter to me. You know how much I loved her.”

“This is only helping the murderer to get away with it.”

He shrugged. “I can’t help it if Zan is incompetent,” he said in an irritated tone of voice. “And he can’t pursue multiple lines of investigation at the same time. Breathing down his neck would do no good at all. We must make the right moves at the right time.”

“Then why not have him replaced?”

He shook his head in disappointment at my naïveté. “That would be the worst possible move. Everyone would think that I had taken him off the case because he had you dead to rights.”

* * *

Adalberto Beggiolin was known in the circles he frequented by the nickname of “puddle shark,” a cold-blooded predator that foraged in shallow, filthy waters.

He was hardly a sniper with a high-precision rifle. He was more comfortable working with a sawed-off shotgun. If you shoot into the crowd, you’re sure to hit something. He looked on newsgathering as an activity akin to carpet bombing. In his view, good reporting resulted in bleeding, screaming victims.

He was therefore somewhat disconcerted when, following Giovanna Barovier’s death, he received no specific instructions on who to target, either from the station owner or his own producer. Left to his own devices, a predator of his caliber turned blind and stupid. His instinct had led him to savage the first red meat that bumped up against his snout, but this time he’d mistaken his prey.

His reports on Francesco Visentin and Filippo Calchi Renier had increased the station’s ratings, but something told him that this time he’d fired into the wrong knot of bystanders.

What Beggiolin lacked was prudence, discernment, and the gift of self-censorship. That was why he failed to make it up to the level of the national broadcast news; that was why he was still swimming in circles in the puddle of local society news; he had become a big fish in a small pond.

When he was summoned for a meeting with the Contessa, he prepared himself for the worst; he knew that this time he had pissed on the Persian carpet.

He gulped down the last bit of meatball sandwich that he’d packed for lunch that morning, and left the newsroom without a word to anyone.

On his way over to the Villa Selvaggia, he tried to remember everything he knew about the Contessa.

He remembered the things that everyone knew, including the fact that through the Foundation she controlled 70 percent of Antenna N/E.

In particular, though, he recalled her exaggeratedly protective instinct toward her slightly deranged son.

He had seen them together, about a year earlier, in the local prison.

The Torrefranchi Foundation had announced a program for the reintegration into society and rehabilitation of convicts released from prison. The slogan was: “Let’s give them another chance.” The Contessa had been impeccable in her introductory speech. She had dominated that audience of criminals and convicts with a style worthy of a sadomaso dominatrix. Then she had given the floor to her son, who had spent fifteen embarrassing minutes struggling to deliver a short speech that he had committed to memory along with a fistful of sedatives. It was like watching a pathetic Christmas ritual, with Filippo playing the part of the timid and intimidated child reciting a saccharine little poem, continuously seeking his mother’s approval, as she fed him word after word, her lips moving in silent unison.

That woman was a remarkable piece of work: one minute she was Margaret Thatcher addressing the House of Lords, a minute later she was a worried mother, looking down at her badly brought-up son with a look of beautiful concern.

As Beggiolin made his way through the spacious drawing rooms of the Villa Selvaggia, he had no illusions. He was expecting the tigress to greet him by clamping her fangs down hard, not certainly by licking the back of his hand.

He obediently trailed along behind the butler, doing his best not to let the bloody scenes of hunting depicted on the villa’s walls unnerve him excessively. His legs were beginning to shake. He hoped he wouldn’t have to remain standing during the interview.

Luckily, it only lasted five minutes. And it turned out fine. Firing a shotgun blast into the crowd; that was his specialty. That was basically what the Contessa had said to him. Of course, she hadn’t used those exact words. What she had really said was: “The important thing is to take a clear stand. Unsettling things are happening in town. Elderly women have been attacked in their homes over the past few months, and the police are no closer to catching the culprit than they were before. Why don’t you talk about that? Perhaps poor Giovanna ran afoul of these same cowards. It’s only a hypothesis, of course. Other ideas can be developed. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job. I leave the details to you. One last thing: the young Francesco Visentin will soon be cleared of suspicion, and it strikes me that, when the time is right, he deserves to have his reputation fully and amply rehabilitated, don’t you agree?”

He sure did think so. The Contessa had given him the scent, and he had charged off like a pack of bloodhounds in full bay. The following morning he was in the office early, and he worked until the middle of the afternoon to put together a blue-ribbon report announced by teasers throughout the broadcast day.

It was 8
P.M.
, and the prime-time television news was coming on. His piece was the opening report, and in the town tavern, the Osteria Dalla Mora, the fans were cheering as if at a championship soccer game.

For Beggiolin, it was like attending the premiere of a film he had directed.

As the special report on the home invasion gang was being broadcast, he watched the audience react in unison just as originally intended. Their anger was being goaded to a fury, channeled in precisely the direction desired by the Contessa. “Outsiders,” “people that aren’t from around here,” blacks, Albanians, and Moroccans. They were obviously the guilty parties, they were the ones that the police and the Carabinieri simply refused to go after.

Beggiolin knew his audience, and he knew it well. Small businessmen who had become arrogant with the rivers of cash they had made in the eighties and nineties, and who were now wetting their pants at the prospect of being swept away by their hungry and ambitious Chinese rivals. It’s always these fucking Chinese. First they were Communists, now they’re capitalists, and all the while the factories are laying off workers, closing down, moving out of the region or out of the country. Craftsmen, businessmen, restaurateurs with increasingly empty wallets. A vast populace that hadn’t appreciated their good luck while they had it, who had felt invincible before—but who now felt only fear. Fear and anger. And the anger was growing rapidly because they couldn’t blame the usual crowd of thieves running the government, now that the government was being run by people just like them—irate businessmen and media tycoons. And so they turned to the television, hoping to hear something other than the usual reports from the front.

But that evening, the television, in the person of Adalberto Beggiolin, had suggested to them a very simple little idea, not at all complicated, easy to grasp. It was all the fault of the barbarian invasions. Negroes who had come to town to steal our jobs, Moroccans who were selling drugs to school kids, black women selling sex for a few dollars on every street corner, diabolical temptresses who were stealing good husbands from the family hearth. Young Serbian and Hungarian women who didn’t know how to clean house or cook meals, but who were eminently capable of taking local boys to bed and conniving them into proposing marriage.

In the news report, the women were angriest. There was no upside to prostitution for them, while their husbands on the other hand had a certain vested interest to protect.

As he leaned against the counter in the tavern, Beggiolin caressed his audience with his gaze. Some of them he knew personally. Aldo Trolese, a former employee of the electric company ENEL, now retired and working as a cabinet maker, a good old boy unless he got started on his third bottle of red. Tommaso Nadal, a human refrigerator and the owner of a moving company. Tommaso always wore two leather wristbands, even when he went to sleep at night. They made him look like one of those bewhiskered warriors who fought against or alongside Conan the Barbarian.

Then there was Elide Squizzato. Actually, she was present in two forms, physically in the tavern but also in the video. Beggiolin had chosen to interview her because of her incredible facility for weeping on cue. All you had to do was get her to say the word “negro” and she turned red as a beet and teared up as if someone had let off a tear-gas grenade under her nose. During the course of the man-in-the-street interview with her that Beggiolin had done “by chance,” he had cajoled her into pronouncing the magic word on three separate occasions, and poor Elide had failed to complete her thought after the third, her shoulders shuddering in sobs. All the same, the idea came across quite clearly: whatever it was the blacks had done to her, it certainly must have been something horrible.