The Salati Case Read Online Free PDF Page A

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