Tobias Jones - The Salati Case

‘And you think he snapped?’

‘You talk to him. He says he was with his pregnant wife that night.’

‘He said the same to me this morning. Why did they split?’

‘I can’t remember. This was years ago.’

The barman brought over more drinks and Franchini threw his back. I looked out of the window.

‘And what did you make of the case?’

Franchini looked reluctant to reply. Didn’t like defeat, I assumed.

‘I didn’t get anywhere and I was too honest to pretend to the old Salati woman that I was on the brink of a breakthrough. I told her as much but she begged me to keep looking. I had the impression she knew more than she was letting on, or that she was holding back on me. It was like she wanted me to prove something she already feared. You get a sense for these things,’ he said condescendingly, looking at me through the white wire of his eyebrows, ‘after forty years’ detective work.’

‘Was it about money?’

‘Certainly looked that way. Riccardo was borrowing from one person and pretending to pay back another. It all went on gambling debts from what I could work out. He used to play the tables at the hotel out on the coast where he worked.’

‘What hotel?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Franchini said, shutting his eyes dismissively. ‘I remember the older brother, Umberto, getting quite hot under the collar on the topic. Said that his brother had cleaned him out.’

‘Did you check out his alibi?’

‘His wife painted the same picture of domestic bliss.’

‘What was she like?’

‘A real ice-queen. She looked like the kind of woman who could do anything she wanted to.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. You go see her. Very self-possessed and guarded.’

‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ I said, wanting my turn at being dismissive.

More men had come in by now and the windows were steamed up against the cold. I looked back at Franchini who was cracking walnuts in his fists and piling up the shells in an ashtray.

‘And there were never any sightings?’

‘Of the boy?’ He shook his head. ‘None. I convinced myself that he was done in that night or soon after.’

‘Why?’

‘You get a sense for these things. You know how it is. There were plenty of people who had a grudge against him.’

‘Sounds like a good time to go missing.’

‘He wouldn’t have been able to pull it off from what I remember. Sounded to me like he struggled to organise a tax return let alone an El Dorado one-way.’

‘He could have missed his train…’

‘I think that’s exactly what happened. The train he was expecting to get was over an hour late. That was the only lead we ever had. It meant he was hanging around the station for over an hour. I think he got bored, wandered off, and never got back to the platform. But you go to the station and ask if someone remembers his face from one Saturday night fourteen years ago. All that time, and with all the chaos that’s always going on there. People will laugh in your face.’ The drink was making him aggressive and as he spoke the hammocks under his eyes were rocking. ‘You might just as well ask a goldfish what they know about opera. Per carità!’ He laughed nastily, as if I were being a nuisance.

I got up. ‘OK. I’ll see you around.’

‘Stay for another.’

‘Next time,’ I said as I walked out.

Back in the car I opened the glove compartment and took out a map. It wouldn’t take me long to get to La Bassa, the lowlands. It was flat as a puddle of mud and smelt about the same.

Without this fertile land the city wouldn’t survive. This is where the pork and milk come from. It’s a tidy, moody place. In summer you can’t move for mosquitos, and in winter you can’t move for fog. The roads are thin ribbons raised up on earthy banks and flanked by irrigation ditches. If you meet a man or beast on one of these roads you need floats to let the other pass.

Everywhere there are willow and poplar plantations. They’re planted in perfectly parallel lines and create enough dry earth to sink the foundations for a new house. La Bassa, Mauro says, is like Louisiana, and he should know because he saw a photograph of Louisiana once.

I always get lost around here. I confuse the small farming communities with their little, proud squares and their lonely village grandeur. I usually come out this way for some food fair or a sagra , one of those summer events in a field where you dance to pop music and ballo liscio and drink fizzy red wine out of white plastic glasses.

As I approached Sissa the road became very narrow. There were abandoned houses dotted along the road. Many windows were empty of glass, or had only triangles of it left in their frames. There were barns whose beams were giving in to the weight of age and many of the long, half-cylindrical tiles lay broken on the ground.

But then the road veered right and brought me into the centre of a picturesque village. There was a church on one side of a small square with long steps leading down towards the fountain in the middle. There was a bar on the other side of the square, and a shop. A bit further away I could see a building with an Italian flag flying next to the European one.

There was no one around. The shop and the bar and what must have been the village hall were all closed. I got out of the car and looked down all the roads that led away from the square. They didn’t offer much. There was one old woman in black who was shouting for some animal or child to come indoors. In the other direction there was a man pushing a bicycle away.

I went down one of the side streets with a row of small cottages, ancient peasant houses that were shut up against the cold. The street was asphalted but there were cracks across it. I nodded a buongiorno at a man who was peeling potatoes over a hedge into a field of pigs.

‘Know where the Salati house is?’

‘Sure.’ He pointed at a house where there was a cluster of shiny cars. I could see someone carrying in a tray of food. ‘The end of this road,’ he barked, pointing, ‘the last house before the orchard. It’s the one on the right where all the mourners are.’

I walked down, trying to bounce my ankle into life.

On the left was a woman in gardening gear. ‘That the Salati house?’ I said to her.

The woman nodded.

‘You live here?’

She nodded again.

‘I’m a private detective, Signora.’ I let the news sink in. ‘I’ve been employed by the executors of Signora Salati’s will to verify the legal status of Riccardo Salati. Have you lived here long?’

‘This is where I’ve been since I was born,’ she said proudly. She pointed across the road to the house opposite. ‘That’s Silvia’s house, the red one. She moved in the day she got married.’

‘Could we take a look?’

‘Not much to see. And now’s not exactly a good time.’

I could see the orchard’s twisted branches to the side of the Salati house. Beyond the fruit trees were vines, their thin, bare arms wrapped around long lines of wire.

‘Are they going to sell it?’ I asked.

‘I expect so. Umberto has no interest in returning here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s part of the provincial jet-set. Sissa isn’t Portofino.’

‘I prefer Sissa,’ I said.

‘It’s a good village,’ the woman said, staring at me. ‘We’re close knit here, and some people think that’s bad. But we look after ourselves, we care for each other.’

‘Including Riccardo?’ I asked.

She looked at me and nodded slowly. She started talking about how her friend had continued her dignified battle for justice for her boy.

‘I’m trying to work out what might have happened to him,’ I said. ‘I get the impression that he was unreliable…’ I trailed off, hoping she would pick up the story, but she was pulling up a weed that had sprouted in the window frame of her house.