“I’ve spoken to well-informed people and I’ve sought the advice of our colleague Lucidi. Perhaps you don’t know he has links with the secret services.”
“I know, I know. But do you trust him?”
“They’re people used to keeping their silence, don’t worry. I need a few more days to gather other cast-iron evidence—cast-iron, I say—then I’ll go to Simei and present him with the results of my investigation. Twelve installments for twelve zero issues.”
That evening, to forget about the bones at San Bernardino, I took Maia out for a candlelight dinner. I didn’t of course mention Gladio, I avoided dishes that involved taking anything off the bone, and was slowly emerging from my afternoon ordeal.
XVI, Saturday, June 6
BRAGGADOCIO SPENT SEVERAL days that week putting together his scoop and the whole of Thursday morning hunkered down with Simei in his office. They reemerged around eleven o’clock, with Simei commending him, “Check the information once again, thoroughly. I don’t want any risks.”
“Don’t worry,” replied Braggadocio, radiating high spirits and optimism. “This evening I’m meeting someone I can trust. I’ll do one last check.”
Meanwhile the news team were all busily arranging the regular pages for the first zero issue: sports, Palatino’s games, letters of denial, horoscopes, and death notices.
“No matter how much we invent,” said Costanza at one point, “I’ll bet you we won’t manage to fill even those twenty-four pages. We need more news.”
“All right,” said Simei. “Perhaps you can lend a hand, Colonna.”
“News doesn’t need to be invented,” I said. “All you have to do is recycle it.”
“How?”
“People have short memories. Taking an absurd example, everyone should know that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March, but memories get muddled. Take a biography recently published in Britain that reexamines the whole story, and all you have to do is come up with a sensational headline, such as ‘Spectacular Discovery by Cambridge Historians: Julius Caesar really assassinated on Ides of March,’ you retell the whole story, and turn it into a thoroughly enjoyable article.
Now, the Caesar story is something of an exaggeration, I grant you, but if you talk about the Pio Albergo Trivulzio affair, here you can produce an article along the lines of the Banca Romana collapse. That happened at the end of the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with the present scandals, but one scandal leads to another, all you have to do is refer to rumors, and you’ve got the story of the Banca Romana business as if it happened yesterday. I bet Lucidi would know how to pull a good article out of it.”
“Excellent,” said Simei. “What is it, Cambria?”
“I see an agency report here, another statue of the Madonna crying in a village down south.”
“Terrific, you can turn that into a sensational story!”
“Superstitions all over again—”
“No! We’re not a newsletter for the atheistic and rationalist crowd. People want miracles, not trendy skepticism. Writing about a miracle doesn’t mean compromising ourselves by saying the newspaper believes it. We recount what’s happened, or say that someone has witnessed it. Whether these Virgins actually cry is none of our business. Readers must draw their own conclusions, and if they’re believers, they’ll believe it. With a headline over several columns.”
Everyone worked away in great excitement. I passed Maia’s desk, where she was concentrating on the death notices, and said, “And don’t forget, ‘Family bereft—’”
“‘—and good friend Filiberto shares the grief of beloved Matilde and dearest children Mario and Serena,’” she replied.
“You have to keep up with the times—the new Italian names are Jessyka with a y or Samanta without the h, and even Sue Ellen, written ‘Sciuellen.’” I gave her a smile of encouragement and moved on.
I spent the evening at Maia’s place, succeeding, as happened now and then, in making a cozy love nest out of that bleak den piled with precarious towers of books.
Among the piles were many classical records, vinyl inherited from her grandparents. Sometimes we lay there for hours listening. That evening Maia put on Beethoven’s Seventh, and she told me, her eyes brimming with tears, how ever since her adolescence, the second movement would make her cry. “It started when I was sixteen.
I had no money, and thanks to someone I knew, I managed to slip into a concert without paying, except that I had no seat, so I squatted down on the steps in the upper balcony, and little by little I found myself almost lying down. The wood was hard, but I didn’t feel a thing. And during the second movement I thought that’s how I’d like to die, and burst into tears. I was crazy then, but I went on crying even after I’d grown up.”
I had never cried listening to music, but was moved by the fact that she did. After several minutes’ silence, Maia said, “He was a fruitcake.” He who? But Schumann, of course, said Maia, as if I had become distracted. Her autism, as usual.
“Schumann a fruitcake?”
“Yes, loads of romantic outpouring, what you’d expect for that period, but all too cerebral. And by straining his brain he went mad. I can see why his wife fell in love with Brahms. Another temperament, other music, and a bon vivant. Mind you, I’m not saying Robert was bad, I’m sure he had talent, he wasn’t one of those blusterers.”
“Which?”
“Like that bumptious Liszt, or the rambunctious Rachmaninoff. They wrote some terrible music, all stuff for effect, for making money, Concerto for Goons in C Major, things like that. If you look, you’ll find none of their records in that pile. I dumped them. They’d have been better off as farm hands.”
“But who do you think is better than Liszt?”
“Satie, no?”
“But you don’t cry over Satie, do you?”
“Of course not, he wouldn’t have wanted it, I only cry over the second movement of the Seventh.” Then, after a moment’s pause, “I also cry over some Chopin, since my adolescence. Not his concertos, of course.”
“Why not his concertos?”
“Because if you took him away from the piano and put him in front of an orchestra, he would have no idea where he was. He wrote piano parts for strings, brass, even drums. And then, have you seen that film with Cornel Wilde playing Chopin and splashing a drop of blood on the keyboard? What would have happened if he’d conducted an orchestra? He’d have splashed blood on the first violin.”
Maia never ceased to amaze me, even when I thought I knew her well. With her, I would have learned to appreciate music. Her way, in any case.
It was our last evening of happiness. Yesterday I woke late and didn’t get to the office until late morning. As I entered, I could see men in uniform searching through Braggadocio’s drawers and a plainclothesman questioning those present. Simei stood sallow-faced at the door of his office.
Cambria approached, speaking softly, as if he had some secret to tell: “They’ve killed Braggadocio.”
“What? Braggadocio? How?”
“A night watchman was returning home on his bike this morning at six and saw a body lying face-down, wounded in the back. At that hour it took him some time to find a bar that was open so he could telephone for an ambulance and the police. One stab wound, that’s what the police doctor found right away, just one, but inflicted with force. No sign of the knife.”
“Where?”
“In an alleyway around Via Torino, what’s it called . . . Via Bagnara, or Bagnera.”
The plainclothesman introduced himself. He was a police inspector and asked when I had last seen Braggadocio. “Here in the office, yesterday,” I replied, “like all my colleagues, I suspect. Then I think he went off alone, just before the others.”
He asked how I had spent my evening, as I imagine he’d done with the rest. I said I’d had supper with a friend and then gone straight to bed. Clearly I didn’t have an alibi, but it seems none of those present had one either, and the inspector didn’t seem overly concerned. It was just a routine question, as they say on TV cop shows.
He was more interested in whether Braggadocio had any enemies, whether he was pursuing dangerous inquiries. I was hardly about to tell him everything, not because there was anyone I was anxious to protect, but I was beginning to realize that if someone had bumped off Braggadocio, it had to do with his investigations. And I had the sudden feeling that if I’d shown even the smallest sign of knowing anything, I too might be worth getting rid of.
I mustn’t tell the police, I thought. Hadn’t Braggadocio told me that everyone was implicated in his stories, including the Forestry Rangers? And though I’d regarded him as a crank until yesterday, his death now assured him a certain credibility.
I was sweating. The inspector didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps he put it down to momentary distress.
“I’m not sure what Braggadocio was up to these past few days,” I said. “Maybe Dottor Simei can tell you, he assigns the articles. I think he was working on something to do with prostitution. I don’t know if that’s of any help.”
“We shall see,” said the inspector, and he moved on to question Maia, who was crying. She had no love for Braggadocio, I thought, but murder is murder. Poor dear. I felt sorry not for Braggadocio but for Maia—she’d probably be feeling guilty for speaking ill of him.
At that moment Simei motioned me to his office. “Colonna,” he said, sitting down at his desk, his hands trembling, “you know what Braggadocio was working on.”
“I do and I
