Valerio Varesi - Gold, Frankincense and Dust

“Commissario, you should be pleased,” the magistrate said. “You’ve learned one important thing. It seems the car was not stolen as Soncini claimed.”

“Do you think they’re telling the truth?”

“Do you think someone who does my job could risk putting her hand in the fire? But if you really want my opinion, I do believe it,” she said, winking at Soneri. “Why should they make up a story? People only do that when they have some reason for it, but in this case they’ve nothing to fear, don’t you agree?”

The commissario nodded. “That means the Romas and Soncini were in business together.”

“Cocaine?”

“I thought of that,” the commissario said. “But in that case, what are we to make of the bomb at Golden?”

“Maybe it was directed at Soncini.”

“If you’re in business with somebody, you know nearly all about them. Anybody doing business with Soncini must have known that he and his wife wielded quite different levels of economic power,” Soneri said.

“And who’s to say, in spite of that, that they were not united when it came to business?”

He was about to reply, but he stopped himself. Marcotti’s hypothesis suddenly shed a new light on the case.

“Who knows? You might be right.”

When he emerged from the magistrate’s office, night was falling and he had still not seen Medioli. He was grateful for the fact that this man who had lived in exile from the world had been caught up in the whirlwind of events. “Our infiltrator”, Soneri had called him as he took his leave from Marcotti.

“I’d put my money on him,” she had replied, winking at him once more.

As he drove along Via Mantova in the direction of the prison, he felt like Fabrizio del Dongo fleeing towards the Po, on the same road and perhaps in the same state of mind. His instinct was that this was the final round and there would be no second chance, whatever Sbarazza might think. Capuozzo had made him a lengthy speech, in his customary woolly style, strewn with vague suggestions. The murderer was behind bars, the motive was clear enough, Nina’s relatives would soon forget and public opinion was pacified. Why waste more time? There was no shortage of work in the questura, and anyway digging too deep often resulted in bringing to the surface questions no-one really wanted spend even more time confronting.

Nonetheless, Soneri pressed on. He was aghast at the prospect of dealing with bureaucratic matters, signing papers or pursuing half-witted drug addicts who had held up tobacconists with a dirty syringe. And of contemplating life without Angela. The reasons for deciding to persevere with Medioli were professional pride and curiosity, but also vanity with regard to Angela. For some days, his name had been on the front pages of the papers she read. It was his way of keeping his profile up, even if there was only one reader who interested him.

*

He was escorted through a dozen doors and gates before he got to the interview room. Nothing had changed — same rattling locks, same low ceiling, same stifling atmosphere, same off-white paint. However, Medioli appeared in better shape, more healthy and more at peace with himself than when they had last met.

“I’ve been expecting you,” was his promising opening. “But I was beginning to think that you didn’t care anymore to hear what I had to say. As the days went by, I was more and more convinced that the law wasn’t interested in probing too far beneath the surface. I presumed that extended to me. I thought of sending a message to the magistrate saying that I was ready to cooperate, but I never got round to it. I’m fine here. I’ve a good relationship with everybody and I’ve been teaching these unfortunate lads in here how to fix engines. I gave them hope and I’ve found a purpose in life. That helps, doesn’t it?”

Soneri nodded gravely, but he preferred to get away from this subject. “I should have come sooner. I had the explanation to so many things within reach.”

“I don’t know about ‘so many’, but some, yes. From what I read in the papers, you’re already very well informed.”

“No, not ‘very’. For instance, I don’t know what kind of deal the Romas and Soncini had with each other.”

“Soncini?” Medioli started to snigger, but immediately pulled himself together. “You know that in a camp there are all kinds, honest and dishonest, the same as anywhere else. But you must also know that the Romas have a weakness for gold.”

Several different thoughts coalesced in Soneri’s mind to form one unbroken thread — Golden, Soncini’s deals, the Romas’ gold and Marcotti’s idea that Nina’s murderer and Soncini’s wife were partners in business and not only to keep up appearances.

“Are you saying that Golden used gold stolen by the Romas and that Soncini was the go-between?”

“You’re missing one item: Nina Iliescu.”

“She was an intermediary?”

“What I reckon is that at the beginning she was put under pressure by her fellow countrymen, used as a means of recycling all that gold. With the Romas as with everybody else, nothing is like it used to be. They’re as greedy for money as the next man. There was a gang in the camp who could never get enough to keep them satisfied. They even started robbing churches, and that’s when the friction broke out. There are some things you just don’t touch, and in their world tradition still counts. That’s why the Romanians moved out, because the feuding was turning into an ethnic war.”

“So Iliescu was caught in a web?” Soneri said. He still clung to the belief that Nina was a victim of the clan.

“In my opinion, yes. Don’t forget that her family was related to the Romas.”

“In the end they hated her. Maybe she had managed to crawl out of the dunghill?”

“Maybe that’s what happened, maybe she was already condemned, but from the night of the accident, when you arrested me, I don’t know anything more.”

“What about Mariotto? Why did they beat him up?”

“Because in spite of the alcohol, he’d seen what really happened. The B.M.W., I mean. Without that information, you’d have had a hard job of it, wouldn’t you?”

“Razzini’s B.M.W., the same model as Soncini’s,” the commissario said, as though talking to himself.

“I don’t know who this Razzini is,” Medioli said. “What I do know is that Soncini dumped the body there that night because it was the safest place. Nobody ever climbs down the slope beside an autostrada, and the Romas were there to guard it. But with all he’d been up to beforehand, it all back-fired on him.”

“But Nina really was one of them …?”

“You said it yourself. In the final stages they hated her. There were nasty rumours circulating about her.”

“Why?”

“I think she’d breached some code. Or as you were implying, probably she wanted to get out, which in the eyes of the community came to the same thing. I believe the Romas had agreed to eliminate her, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of them was there on the night of the murder. Business was going well with Soncini, if you see what I mean. Nina was a loose cannon and knew too much.”

“So it wasn’t just about the baby?”

“That was a matter for her lover’s wife, but Signora Martini herself didn’t do too badly out of the arrangement: access to cheap gold, you understand? And if Soncini hadn’t been such a brainless cocaine addict, it’d all have gone smoothly. Mariotto was beaten up because he blurted everything out and that was no good to anybody, but it was really meant as a warning to Manservisi. He hates the Romanians like poison and told you what Mariotto had seen. He wanted to give you a tip-off, but he couldn’t say too much because he was afraid.”