Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

‘I agree that Enrico is hardly a worthy successor, but he’s young yet.’

‘Not so young he can’t start acting like a man. Perhaps it is time to give him some lessons in courage.’

‘As I say, Zia Rosa will certainly panic when Enrico vanishes for a few hours. That could be misconstrued.’

‘I told you, I know. We shall consider how the families react and draw conclusions later,’ said Basile. ‘If Maria Itria, who keeps her neighbours at a distance, were to start phoning and visiting them inquiring in worried tones about Ruggiero, that, too, might signal a bad conscience. Do not forewarn the Megales or any other family, Salvatore. Make sure the sons of several families are here tomorrow. We must be seen to be just.’

Milan

‘I’ll have the sea bass,’ said Magistrate Bazza. ‘And you?’

Magistrate Fossati shook his head. ‘I can never get used to the idea of fish in Milan…’ He looked at the menu without enthusiasm. ‘I’ll have the mix of cold cuts,’ he told the waiter. ‘Just water to drink.’

The waiter collected the menus and left.

‘You should try the fish.’

‘You know I’m from Livorno, Ezio. When I visit my parents’ graves, I eat fresh local fish. My mother used to make a fantastic cacciucco. Actually, I don’t usually eat at lunchtime. I’d have preferred to meet for dinner in the usual place.’

‘I wanted to meet as soon as possible,’ said Magistrate Bazza. ‘Have you got the file on the missing girl?’

‘Teresa Resca. Yes.’ Fossati glanced around the room, then handed the file to his friend.

Bazza ate breadsticks as he glanced through the pages, then handed them back.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t help.’

‘No?’

‘Definitely not organized crime. But that I can’t help is in itself an important pointer. For one, the modus operandi is needlessly complicated. From what I can see here there was a long stakeout in broad daylight, they depended on public transport and relied on a certain amount of luck. But I had my mind made up before I even looked at your file. This is not a Mafia abduction.’

‘Are you supposed to make up your mind like that before you even see the file?’ said Fossati.

‘There’s not much in that file that isn’t already in the public domain. Nothing to make me change my mind. This has nothing to do with the Ndrangheta or any other Mafia.’

‘Don’t the bastards you deal with ever reserve unpleasant surprises for you? Don’t they ever act out of character? I mean if you really knew everything about how they operate…’

‘You know how it works, Francesco. Intelligence gets you only so far. We know a hell of a lot but can’t act upon it. The Northern League and Berlusconi have cut our funding. Did you know that my colleagues in Calabria have to wash their own cars? And they can get fined for insubordination if they don’t. Then that creep Maroni with his pervert’s moustache and red glasses comes on TV and says his Ministry has done more to combat…’

‘Aw, don’t start that conversation again, Ezio,’ said Fossati. ‘I’m here about the girl.’

‘It’s not organized crime. That’s not where you should be looking. I would have heard a whisper. I spent the morning with a team of excellent Carabinieri analysing intercepted communications over the past six months, focusing on any reference to the girl and her father. The father got mentioned twice. It’s not enough. He hasn’t written any exposes in months anyhow. It makes no sense for them to decide to silence him when he is already silent.’

The waiter arrived with Fossati’s platter of cold salamis and hams. Fossati lifted a length of speck. ‘Help yourself,’ he told Bazza.

‘No. I’ll wait for my fish. So tell me about the rumour mill on your side of the building.’

‘Everyone’s interested in the murder of that insurance broker. The poor bastard with the same name as Magistrate Arconti.’

‘Interested, as in displeased the case went down to Rome and got bounced up to us in the anti-Mafia wing without anyone else getting a look-in?’

‘No. Just interested. Or not interested, as the case may be. There isn’t even enough belief or passion for magistrates to feel strongly about jurisdiction rights nowadays.’

‘They’re right to feel disheartened,’ said Bazza. ‘Almost everyone you and I investigated in the ’90s is in political office now. All we did was raise the cost of bribes. I don’t understand how you managed to stay on there.’

‘An ordinary magistrate manages to solve a lot of cases, put away people who have done real harm. I don’t know how you bear it in the anti-Mafia. Huge rolling investigations that never come to an end, the constant reminders of the extent of the infiltration of organized crime, the cowardice of politicians.’

‘When we manage to break a case, we order arrests in the hundreds. That’s always gratifying. We shut down entire systems, even if only temporarily. Ah, here’s my sea bass.’

Bazza smiled happily as he slipped off the shining skin, peeled away a layer of brown flesh and unpacked the fluffy white meat beneath, sucking his fingers as he did so. He fell silent until he was halfway through it, then said, ‘You had a strange run-in with that magistrate in Rome once, didn’t you?’

‘Arconti? Yes,’ said Fossati. ‘It was some time ago. I think it’s safe to say he won the bout.’

‘But you became friends afterwards?’

‘Friends… no. We wear different political colours. Magistratura Democratica versus Magistratura Indipendente and all that, though of course those allegiances were more important then than now. Arconti’s a Catholic conservative, but one of the better ones. At the time, I thought he was a pawn of the Christian Democrats, but I was wrong there. He’s not beholden to anyone, though I resented the way he assumed I was acting out of left-wing prejudice.’

‘He was right about you. At the time, you were highly politicized.’

‘And so were you.’

‘Those were the days,’ said Bazza. ‘Remind me how Arconti outsmarted you.’

‘I was investigating illegal party political funding, and Arconti’s name came up,’ said Fossati. ‘It looked to me like he had deliberately mishandled an inquiry into donations, and then intervened to persuade the preliminary judge to throw out the case for lack of evidence. Everything magistrates in Rome did back then was suspect.’

‘Such was the mood of the day. Turns out, we were no better here in Milan.’

‘I would contest that. But I was wrong about Arconti. I assumed he was obeying a political master, and I ordered a wiretap on him. It was easy to do that in the ’90s, remember? I had a go-to guy in the Finance Police, and he set it up, then reported back to me. By then, I was already beginning to guess that Arconti was clean. Remarkably clean, as a matter of fact. But being clean didn’t stop him from being a sly southerner. Somehow, he found out what I was doing. He took elements from several investigations and combined them in a way that dumped a lot of suspicion on the guy from the Finance Police I was using. He then applied for a wiretap on the policeman. So every time my man reported back to me on what he had heard Arconti say, Arconti was sitting there in Rome listening in. And the clever thing was, if he had tried to wiretap me directly, I would have probably found out. We were listening into one another for four months, and then one day he called me up himself, invited me down to Rome, and we spoke. He said he could see I was doing my best in difficult circumstances, and hoped I could see the same was true for him. The Finance policeman, by the way, got caught accepting bribes two years later.’