If the entrance gate is closed, I’ll be waiting for you outside, but get there on time, I don’t want to hang around in the street. Please, don’t ask any questions. Take your bag, get in the car, make sure you have the timing right, and come. Then I’ll tell you everything. Check the rearview mirror every now and then, and if you think someone’s tailing you, use your imagination, do some crazy turns to throw them off. It’s not so easy along the canals, but after that, lots of ways to give them the slip, jump the lights on red. I trust you, my love.”
Maia could have had a promising career in armed robbery. She did things to perfection, and within the agreed hour, there she was in the entranceway, tense but happy.
I jumped into the car, told her where to turn to reach Viale Certosa as quickly as possible, and from there she knew her way to the highway for Novara, and then the turnoff for Orta, better than I did.
We hardly spoke during the entire trip. Once we’d reached the house, I told her it might be risky for her to know all that I knew. Would she prefer to rely on me and remain in the dark? But I should have guessed, there was no question. “Excuse me,” she said, “I still don’t know who or what you’re frightened of, but either no one knows we’re together, in which case I’m in no danger, or they’ll find out and be convinced I know. So spit it out, otherwise how will I ever think what you think?”
Undaunted. I had to tell her everything—after all, she was now flesh of my flesh, as the Good Book says.
XVIII, Thursday, June 11
For several days I barricaded myself in the house, afraid to go out. “Come on,” said Maia, “no one in this place knows you, and those you’re scared of, whoever they are, have no idea you’re here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied, “you can never be too sure.”
Maia began treating me like an invalid. She gave me tranquilizers, stroked the back of my neck as I sat at the window gazing out at the lake.
On Sunday morning she went off early to buy the papers. The killing of Braggadocio was reported on an inside page, without much prominence: journalist murdered, may have been investigating a prostitution ring, attacked by pimp.
It seemed the police had accepted the idea, following what I had said, and perhaps after hints from Simei. They were clearly not thinking about us journalists, nor did they appear to have noticed that Simei and I had gone missing. If they’d returned to the office, they would have found it empty, and besides, the inspector hadn’t bothered to take down our addresses. A fine Maigret he’d have been. But I don’t imagine he’s worrying about us.
Prostitution was the more convenient lead, routine stuff. Costanza could have told him, of course, that it was he who was investigating those women, but he may also have thought Braggadocio’s death had something to do with that story, and he might have begun to fear for his life and kept quiet as a mouse.
Next day Braggadocio had even vanished from the inside pages. The police must have had plenty of cases like his and, after all, the dead man was no more than a fourth-rate hack. Round up the usual suspects, and be done with it.
At dusk I watched as the lake darkened. The island of San Giulio, so radiant under the sun, rose from the water like Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.
Maia decided to try to put me back on my feet, so she took me for a walk on the Sacro Monte. I’d never been there before. It’s a series of chapels on the top of a hill with mystical dioramas of polychrome statues in natural settings, smiling angels but above all scenes from the life of Saint Francis. In the scene of a mother hugging a suffering child, I saw, alas, the victims of some remote terrorist attack.
In a solemn meeting with a pope, various cardinals, and somber Capuchin friars, I saw a council meeting at the Vatican Bank planning my capture. Nor were all those colors and other pious terracottas enough to make me think of the Kingdom of Heaven: everything seemed a perfidiously disguised allegory of infernal forces plotting in the shadows. I went as far as imagining that those figures at night would become skeletons (what, after all, is the pink body of an angel if not a deceptive integument that cloaks a skeleton, even if it’s a celestial one?) and join in the danse macabre in the Church of San Bernardino alle Ossa.
Indeed, I never believed I could have been quite so faint-hearted, and felt ashamed to let Maia see me in such a state (there, I thought, she too is going to ditch me), but the image of Braggadocio lying face-down in Via Bagnera remained before my eyes.
From time to time I hoped it might have been Boggia, the killer from a hundred years ago, who had materialized at night in Via Bagnera, through a sudden rent in time and space (what did Vonnegut call it? a chrono-synclastic infundibulum), and disposed of the intruder. But this didn’t explain the telephone call to Vimercate, the point I used with Maia when she suggested that perhaps it was a two-bit crime, that you could see right away that Braggadocio was a dirty old man, God rest his soul, that perhaps he’d been trying to take advantage of one of those women, hence the vendetta by the pimp looking after her, a simple matter, where de minimis non curat praetor—the law doesn’t concern itself with trifles. “Yes,” I repeated, “but a pimp doesn’t telephone a publisher to get him to close down a newspaper!”
“But who says Vimercate actually received the call? Maybe he’d changed his mind about the whole enterprise, it was costing him too much. And as soon as he found out about the death of one of his reporters, he used it as a pretext to close down Domani, paying two months’ instead of a year’s salary. Or maybe . . . you told me he wanted Domani so that someone would say, Put an end to it and I’ll let you into the inner sanctum.
Well then, suppose that someone like Lucidi passed on news to the inner sanctum that Domani was about to publish an embarrassing series of articles. They telephone Vimercate and say, All right, give up this gutter rag and we’ll let you into the club. Then, quite independently, Braggadocio gets killed, perhaps by the usual nutcase, and you’ve eliminated the problem of the telephone call to Vimercate.”
“But I haven’t eliminated the nutcase. Who crept into my house at night?”
“You’ve told me that story. How can you be sure someone came in?”
“So who turned off the water?”
“But listen to me. You have a woman who comes in to clean?”
“Only once a week.”
“When was she last there?”
“She always comes Friday afternoons. And, as it happens, that was the day we found out about Braggadocio.”
“So? Couldn’t she have turned off the water because of the drip from the shower?”
“But on that Friday evening I had a glass of water to swallow down a sleeping pill . . .”
“You’d have had half a glass, that was all you needed. Even with the water turned off there’s always some in the pipe, and you simply hadn’t noticed. Did you drink any more water that evening?”
“No, I didn’t even have supper, I just finished off half a bottle of whiskey.”
“You see? I’m not saying you’re paranoid, but with Braggadocio killed and what Simei had told you, you jumped to the conclusion that someone had broken into your house that night. In fact, no, it was the cleaning lady, that afternoon.”
“They made short work of killing Braggadocio!”
“That’s another matter. So it’s quite possible no one’s interested in you.”
We have spent the past four days pondering, constructing, and ruling out possibilities, I getting gloomier, Maia ever more obliging, moving untiringly back and forth between house and town to buy fresh food and bottles of malt whiskey, of which I have drained three. We made love twice, though I did it with anger, as if to get something out of my system, with no feeling of pleasure. Even so, I felt more in love with that creature who, from a sheltered sparrow, had transformed into a faithful she-wolf, ready to bite whoever might want to harm me.
That was until this evening, when we switched on the TV and found ourselves, almost by chance, watching a program about a British documentary called Operation Gladio, just broadcast by the BBC.
We watched in amazement, speechless.
It seemed like a film by Braggadocio. It included everything that Braggadocio had imagined and then some, but the words were backed up by photographs and other documentation, and were those of well-known personalities. It began with the activities of the Belgian stay-behind and confirmed, yes, that the existence of Gladio had been revealed to heads of government, but only to those the CIA trusted, so Moro and Fanfani were kept in the dark.
Appearing over the screen were declarations by leading spies, such as, “Deception is a state of mind, and the mind of the
