Marco Vichi - Death in Sardinia

The four men in the Giulietta were all ex-convicts from Milan, three of whom had escaped just a month earlier from San Vittore prison. They were well armed and had planned to carry out robberies in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany before returning to their base in the Apennine mountains near Sasso Marconi.

The day of the shoot-out Bordelli phoned Piras’s girlfriend, Sonia Zarcone, a beautiful blonde from Palermo with whom the young Sardinian had fallen head over heels in love. The girl didn’t even cry upon hearing the news, but merely busied herself doing everything she could to make life easier for her boyfriend during those first difficult weeks in hospital.

Piras had undergone several operations at Santa Maria Nuova hospital, and each time it seemed it would be the last. In the end the surgeons decided that there was no more they could do, and they ‘set him free’, as Piras himself put it. The doctors forced him to take a long holiday to recover, and he’d decided to go to Sardinia to stay with his parents, who before his arrival hadn’t known a thing about what had happened to him. Sonia had stayed in Florence to sit two important exams. After a number of domestic battles, a phone was finally installed in the Piras home, and now the two lovers could stay in constant contact. Otherwise young Piras would have had no choice but to use one of the few telephone lines in town, the priest’s. And a sacristy really wasn’t the right sort of place to say certain things, Piras later related, chuckling. Apparently the beautiful Sonia liked to express herself rather explicitly, all the cliches about Sicilians be damned. Her free and easy manner came from her rather unusual family; her father was half Sicilian and half Spanish and a professor of economics at the University of Palermo, while her mother was from a very old Sicilian family.

But the installation of a telephone in the Piras home had another consequence as well. Bordelli had at last been able to talk directly with Gavino. They’d immediately started reminiscing about friends they’d lost during the war and remembering the most dangerous moments. Speaking with someone who’d lived through the same things made everything more vivid and painful. Gavino cursed the mine that had robbed him of one of his arms, and his rage against the Germans was still as keen as twenty years before. Then they cut short the war talk and started briefly recounting what they had done since the damned war. They promised to get together soon, but with the sea between them and all the work that neither could take a break from, it wasn’t going to be easy for either one to keep his promise.

From time to time Piras the younger would phone Bordelli to say hello and also to learn whether he was missing out on any interesting cases. Their last communication dated from a few weeks before.

‘I’m feeling better and better, Inspector. I still limp a little, but it’s not a problem. I’ll be back at work by January.’

‘No need to rush things. You’ll return when the doctors say.’

‘Any murders?’

‘Fortunately not … How’s Sonia?’

‘Fine … But I’m beginning to think Sicilians are even more stubborn than Sardinians.’

‘Don’t complain, Piras, you’re a lucky man.’

‘I know, Inspector, I know … How’s Baragli doing?’

‘Worse and worse.’

‘Damn …’

‘It’s a bloody mess.’

‘Poor bloke … Give him my best.’

‘How’s Gavino?’

‘The guy’s going to outlive us all! He’s made out of the same stones as the nuraghi. 3He’s always in his field, hoeing and sowing, and now he says he wants to buy himself a rototiller in the spring.’

‘Won’t that be a problem for someone with only one arm?’

‘He tried using a friend’s machine and says it’s fine.’

‘Give him a big hug for me.’

‘Thanks, Inspector …’

‘And give Sonia a kiss for me.’

‘Sonia only gets kisses from me.’

‘You’re starting to sound like a Sicilian.’

‘I’ll be on that ferry before the first of January, Inspector, you have my word.’

‘Ciao, Pietrino, let’s talk again soon.’

They found him on Wednesday with a pair of scissors stuck deep in his neck, at the base of the nape. Office scissors, the kind with pointed tips. When the stretcher-bearers of La Misericordia took away the body, all the building’s tenants stood in their respective doorways to watch. Seeing them pass, a woman on the second floor said:

‘That’ll teach him, the pig!’ Then she quickly crossed herself so that she might be forgiven for saying something so wicked.

The murder victim, Totuccio Badalamenti, was a loan shark. He lived only a few blocks away from Bordelli, in Piazza del Carmine, on the top floor of a fine old stone building. He was from southern Italy, like many outsiders in the city at the time. He’d been in town for a little over a year and worked as an estate agent as cover. In the neighbourhood they called him ‘the newcomer’ and probably would have kept on calling him that for ever had he not been killed. The whole San Frediano quarter knew exactly what he did, even though Badalamenti was careful not to ‘do business’ with anyone who lived near by. Every so often the inspector used to see him driving down those impoverished streets in his new red Porsche. He wore very fine gold-rimmed glasses and had a square-shaped head and frizzy hair you could scour a frying pan with.

Badalamenti lent out money, even very small sums, but always demanded outrageous rates of interest. Anyone who was late with payments faced the sort of penalties people commit suicide over. He was a violent man. Rumour had it that he beat the prostitutes he brought home with him, even though he usually made amends afterwards by paying them double. He was very rich and was always investing his money profitably in every imaginable sort of traffic. His wealth was legendary. One story had it that he’d bought a whole island down south just so he could swim undisturbed. He would buy houses and land at auction and then resell them, and often they’d belonged to the very people he had ruined. At other times he would rent squalid apartments cheaply, then fix them up at low cost and sublet them out for three times the amount to people in financial straits, petty criminals, prostitutes and the like. He kept copies of all the keys to his flats, and if a tenant went away for more than two weeks, he would manage to rent the place out to some other wretch, who would pay dearly for it. Some even said that he had a circuit of whores working for him in the south, and that he had dealings with the Cosa Nostra. There certainly was no lack of gossip about Badalamenti, some real, some invented, but nailing him wasn’t easy. He was very clever at using his work as an estate agent to camouflage his real occupation.

Bordelli dealt in murder, but having that loan shark so close to home really bothered him, like a pebble in his shoe. And so a few months earlier he had started concerning himself personally with the problem. As far back as the previous February he had spoken to Commissioner Inzipone about it, explaining who the man was and how difficult it was to find evidence to warrant arresting him.

‘We need someone who will press charges,’ Inzipone said, thoughtfully pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger. He didn’t seem terribly interested in the matter.

‘You know perfectly well that nobody will ever do anything of the sort, because they might well end up dead,’ Bordelli replied, annoyed.

‘Well then, stop wasting my time and tell me what you have in mind.’

‘I want a search warrant.’

‘Oh, do you? On what grounds?’

‘Whatever you can think up … By now even the cobblestones know who the man is and what he does.’