Marco Vichi - Death in Sardinia

Reaching the bottom of the staircase he told himself that the war had ended over twenty years ago, and he had to stop looking at the world through its prism. He turned to the left after Porta San Miniato. Via San Nicolo was dark as usual. When he reached the end and turned down Via de’ Bardi, a freezing drizzle started to fall. A bit farther on, he spotted Guido’s BSA and Raffaele’s Solex in the distance, parked along the pavement.

He walked past number 30 and, a few paces on, found himself in front of number 34. There was no number 32. Maybe Guido had taken the piss out of him. He turned round to have a better look, and between two majestic front doors he noticed a camouflaged door in the facade. There was only one buzzer, as Guido had said, enclosed in a carved marble setting. The doorbell was more precious than the door.

He listened hard but couldn’t hear any music. He tried pushing the buzzer, but heard no ringing within. He pressed again. It was quite cold outside. He stuck a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it. He had a ticklish feeling in his stomach, like a child afraid to be caught doing something forbidden. Who knew whether those two had even heard the doorbell. He was about to ring again when the door opened. Guido invited him inside. The dark entranceway smelled of damp plaster and septic fumes. Behind the door were two staircases, one ascending, the other descending. Guido took the down staircase, with Bordelli following behind. It was a rather long, stone stairway. Some soft recorded music came from below, a sad sort of lament accompanied by a guitar. The inspector would have liked to ask who the singer was, but he refrained. He didn’t feel like being treated like an old fogey again.

They entered a large basement room with brick vaults, illuminated by a pair of light bulbs with red plastic shades. Raffaele was sitting on a mattress, changing the strings on a black electric guitar. Seeing the inspector come in, he put the guitar down and got up to greet him. The air smelled of stale smoke and you could practically sink your teeth into the humidity.

‘I hope you’ll leave us a little time to play,’ Raffaele said, shaking his hand. Bordelli smiled and looked around.

‘So this is your lair,’ he said, glancing at the record player on the floor and two amplifiers as big as refrigerators.

‘Call it whatever you like,’ said Raffaele. Guido sat down on the mattress and resumed the operation of changing the guitar strings.

‘Are there only two of you?’ Bordelli asked.

‘We’re looking for others.’

‘Do you play stuff you can twist to?’ the inspector asked, choosing at random a modern term that seemed appropriate. Raffaele and Guido exchanged an amused glance.

‘The twist is for snot-nosed mummy’s boys,’ said Raffaele.

‘What kind of music do you play?’

‘Satanic stuff … we climb walls and drink the blood of virgins,’ said Raffaele.

‘I guess you don’t like giving straight answers either,’ said Bordelli. It felt like an encounter between two tribes that had never met before. The sad music kept playing on the gramophone, and it wasn’t at all bad. It entered one’s ears and stayed there.

‘I only try to avoid saying things you wouldn’t understand,’ said Raffaele, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. Guido watched the scene in silence, all the while fiddling with the guitar.

‘It used to be old people who said that sort of thing to children,’ said Bordelli.

‘They still do, I assure you … but our ears have changed.’

‘Grown longer and hairy?’

‘We don’t need your rules any more,’ Raffaele said with a serious face.

‘You always speak in the plural,’ Bordelli observed, pulling out a cigarette.

‘Perhaps it’s because all dinosaurs look alike to me,’ Raffaele said, shrugging his shoulders.

Hearing this, Bordelli began to understand a little better what it was he felt when dealing with these youths, Odoardo included. He didn’t feel attacked so much as ignored. In their eyes he wasn’t a man, but a category. And yet just a few days before with Rosa, he’d smoked some of the same stuff they smoked …

The disc ended and Guido reached out to put another on. Bordelli lit his cigarette. A song began playing, but again it was completely unfamiliar to him.

‘I wonder where it is you’re all running to,’ he said, addressing them in the plural.

‘As far as we can get from Methuselahs like you — from your suits and ties and straight and narrow paths we’re supposed to follow without any questions … We’ve had it with all that crap,’ said Raffaele, pleased with his speech. Guido in his corner approved with a grunt.

‘What’s a Methuselah? You called me that another time, too,’ said Bordelli.

‘He’s an old man in the Bible.’

‘Ah, thank you,’ said the inspector.

‘It’s not your fault. You just happen to be an endangered species,’ Raffaele said quietly.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Raffaele shook his head.

‘Why did you come here, Inspector?’

‘I wanted to ask you a question.’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘I want you to tell me … how many times, and from what telephone or telephones, you called Badalamenti,’ Bordelli improvised.

‘What do you need to know that for?’

‘Never mind about that.’

‘I rang him only once, together with my sister, from a bar in Piazza della Liberta,’ said Raffaele. Bordelli still called the square Piazza Cavour, but he was careful not to reveal this, lest he appear even older.

‘All right, then, there’s nothing else,’ he said. Guido had finished stringing the guitar and looked at him as if expecting to be asked a question.

‘We want to play,’ said Raffaele, but the tone meant more or less Get the hell out of here .

‘Where can I put this out?’ asked Bordelli, holding his cigarette butt in the air.

‘Just throw it on the floor,’ said Raffaele. The inspector dropped the butt on to the flagstones and crushed it with the tip of his shoe. Then he gestured goodbye and went out, happy to leave that catacomb.

A fine freezing rain was falling, and the cold penetrated the skin. Bordelli walked quickly to the car, staying close to the buildings. When he finally got into the Beetle, his hair was dripping wet, and he tried to dry it as best he could with his handkerchief. His headache was making itself felt again, and at moments it was as though he had a nail stuck in each temple. Perhaps it meant that the weather was about to get even worse. He looked up at the sky. It was a uniform grey. If the temperature dropped another couple of degrees, it might snow in earnest this time. He started up the car and drove off. He felt a little muddled, maybe even sad. An old melancholic, wandering through the night alone. He crossed the Arno and instinctively turned right. He took Via Lungo l’Affrico and continued straight all the way to Salviatino. Then he turned down Viale Righi, drove past Piazza Edison and continued down Viale Volta. That was where he wanted to go. He wanted to see the house he was born in, the mysterious garden where, as a child, he had waged battle against the fiercest monsters …

While driving past he slowed down as usual and looked at the ground-floor windows. They were all dark. He would have liked to see at least one of them lit up, just so he could imagine that his mother was still waiting for him behind the curtains, praying before her makeshift altar of holy images and candles. As he drove away he felt like an old fool again, and as he entered Piazza delle Cure he saw his father again, with that old sea-dog’s face of his … Whenever the old man got angry, his mother used to tell him to calm down, because mature men were not supposed to carry on that way. And Dad would always reply with the same thing: ‘What are you saying? Even your precious Jesus got pissed off once!’ And Mamma would start screaming that Florentines remembered the Gospel only when it was convenient for them, and they would start bickering about the Church and related matters …