Valerio Varesi - Gold, Frankincense and Dust

“Commissario, I was tired of that life,” Medioli said, pushing back the white hair which was hanging over his forehead.

“A life on the run?”

“With those people. In the caravans, always on the move, hiding away. What kind of life is that? If I think about it, I believe I have already served my sentence. Any way you look at it, I’d have been better off in jail.”

Medioli abandoned himself to self-pity, while the commissario made an effort to imagine the man as he must have been twenty years before, still strong, sure of himself, perhaps even arrogant. When he compared him to what he was today, Soneri almost spluttered with laughter, but this, he then reflected, was the destiny of all humankind.

“You could have left sooner, couldn’t you? As you did this evening. You’d have got away with it if it hadn’t been for the mist, and the fact that you were drunk. After all this time …”

“I didn’t know where to go. In the outside world, I don’t have anyone left, and in the world of the Roma travellers, I’ve always been a guest.”

“You’ve no children?”

“Yes, two grown-up daughters, but they didn’t want any more to do with me. I read that in the papers. I’ve never seen my grandchildren.”

Soneri weighed him up, looking at him distrustfully. There was something about the man and his story which did not square up, and while he was trying to work him out, the officer who had taken the fingerprints brought in an old folder from the archives with the dossier on Medioli. He started flicking through it. It had been done with a typewriter and the pages were turning yellow. “Probable motive, jealousy,” he read in the report.

“You stabbed her because you thought she was seeing another man, is that right?” Soneri asked abruptly, continuing to read. The man had several previous convictions for causing an affray, malicious damage to public property and resisting arrest.

Medioli nodded like an altar boy.

“But was it true?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to think back after all this time. It’s as though it belongs to another life.”

“Yes, I can understand,” murmured Soneri, thinking of his own and of other people’s lives. “Unfortunately it’s the same one.”

The old man replied with a despairing, unresisting look. “I’m old and infirm. I’ve nothing to lose. All I ask is a place where I can die with dignity. Something other than a caravan, something that doesn’t follow laws that are not mine. I would like a normal end — I just want to be like other people, even if that means being in jail.”

“And you’re telling me that’s why you put on this crazy act, this absurd flight? You must have known it was going to make us suspicious.”

“A last clutch at life. If it had gone well, I’d have had a couple of hours of excitement, but it would’ve been even better if I’d crashed the car like the people on the autostrada. That too would have been a normal end. I heard the collisions in the dark. One after the other, a barrage, and I thought: if only that had been me …”

“I would hardly call that a normal end. There’s a burned body on the side of the motorway in front of the camp … Maybe that’s somebody’s wife who met her end because of a husband like you.”

Medioli seemed to stiffen. “What have I got to do with that business?”

“I’ve no idea. But I did see you make off as soon as we arrived. What do you expect me to think?”

“Commissario, I swear …” The man did not manage to complete the sentence. He held his head in his hands and sat hunched up as though he wanted to disappear.

“If you hadn’t been as naïve as you have been …” Soneri said, attempting to console him. “Listen, let’s do a deal: you give me another lead. You tell me all you know or have heard around the camp. Maybe, over there, someone noticed some movement, saw a car pull up …”

“If there was anything, the one to ask would be Omar. He checks everything and knows everything that’s going on.”

“You weren’t on the best of terms with him?”

Medioli shrugged again. “You’re O.K. over there only as long as you’re useful.”

“Same as everywhere else.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, I was tolerated there, and if you’re not one of their kind …”

“So how exactly were you useful?”

“I’m a mechanic. I can fix cars and engines.”

“Is that all?”

“I was the odd job man. There are not many men who really work. The women and children earn their keep by begging. You understand?”

The commissario nodded.

“I was fed up doing their bidding,” Medioli said bitterly. “And when I began to feel my age and get aches and pains, they started complaining that I was not pulling my weight. Some of their cars would never move even if you shoved them. I sometimes did some work for the people in the fairgrounds, and that is one hellish life.”

“Are you telling me you’ve spent the last twenty years with the travelling people?”

“Why not? What choice did I have?” Medioli said, raising his voice slightly, seemingly on the verge of tears. “I threw it away, remember?”

“You threw it away the day you decided to murder your wife.”

Medioli sighed and seemed to be once again peering into the emptiness.

“Was it really out of jealousy?” Soneri asked again.

“What does it matter?” the man whispered. “I was another person. When you grow old, you might be more forgiving and understand criminals better. You can never tell. I have been a criminal, but now I could be a policeman.”

“I understand them today, don’t doubt it. At least, I understand why they behave in a certain way. Then there’s the law, but that’s another matter.”

“Perhaps my wife was not unfaithful to me,” the old man murmured, sounding like a sleepwalker. “The problem is that she was vague, ambiguous. She gave me the impression that she was not thinking only of me. She kept me on tenterhooks. That was what I really couldn’t stand.”

“It’s the best way to make people love you,” Soneri said, “but I understand it might not be easy to put up with somebody who wants to be in charge.”

“That’s the way it was then …” Medioli said, letting his hands fall on his lap in a sign of surrender, while the commissario kept his eyes on him, thinking how grotesque, inconsistent and senseless life was.

“I still don’t understand why you stayed with these people for twenty years,” Soneri said, getting back into the policeman role. “Twenty years roaming about in muddy camps with people who never accepted you.”

“I had no idea where to go and I hardly ever had any money. I had a half friend who worked in a fairground and I asked him to hide me until everything blew over, but the way things went, until yesterday I ended up moving from one tribe to another, running here and there, wherever there was a call for my services. I was pushed from pillar to post. It was the only way to avoid arrest. You know that a camp with travelling people is the best place to hide.”

The commissario thought that observation over and it seemed to him the most logical thing that had been said in the course of that bizarre evening. Medioli’s story was just one surreal piece of it. Juvara called him back to the present by going over to him discreetly. “Commissario, do you want us to make a start on checking the register of missing persons? I was wondering if …” he said, alluding to the body.

Soneri nodded, but was still deep in thought.

“Will we include foreigners?”

“Definitely,” he replied, and as though on automatic pilot, turned back to the old man. “Were there many foreigners in the camp?”

“Not too many, but I knew a lot who tended to hang about. Up till yesterday, there was a group of Romanians at the dump. We let them be because they had been chased away from somewhere else. The spaces around the dumps are the only places where you don’t get evicted.”