I’m no good at this, he thought. Never had been, never would be. He’d tried hard, he really had, but do what he might he’d never been a natural like Alberto, Nestore and poor Leonardo. ‘Not really officer material.’ He’d never forgotten that comment. It had stung, even though an officer was the last thing he’d wanted to be, if he’d been honest with himself. And it had made no difference. Strings were pulled and buttons pushed, and he got his commission just the same, thanks to the influence of his father, who of course had never let him forget the fact.
But that martinet at the military academy had been right. He wasn’t officer material. He could follow orders as faithfully as a dog, but he couldn’t give them in such a way as to inspire the same unthinking obedience in others. Or even in himself. Above all, he lacked the initiative to improvise successfully when things got tough and there was no superior around to tell him what to do. Such as now.
What was he to do? Where was he to go? He hadn’t spoken to his sister for months, and anyway they’d find him there easily enough. The same went for his few close friends, even supposing he could impose on them without explanation. A trip abroad was tempting, but that meant credit cards and identification and all the rest of it, a paper trail that could be traced. What he really needed to do was just disappear until the situation resolved itself.
He strode on with fake purposefulness through the eddying currents. When another cafe loomed up, he turned into it blindly and ordered a whisky. Gabriele rarely drank, and never before lunch. He knocked the foul-tasting spirit back like medicine, staring at his image in the mirror behind the bar, surprised as always by his sturdy, wiry body and determined gaze. He always thought of himself as tiny, weedy, frail and terminally inadequate. The joke that life had played on him was putting such a personality inside the body of a professional welter-weight boxer. It had saved him from getting beaten up at school, and later at the academy, but even those victories felt hollow, won by deceit. And the women in his life, unlike the men, had never been fooled. On the contrary, they had loved him, those few who had lasted longer than a week or two, precisely for the weakness they had so perceptively diagnosed. For a while it had seemed sweet to be mothered again, but in the end it felt like another defeat.
Besides, they had all wanted to be real mothers, and he had no intention of collaborating in a re-run of that sad sorry farce. Hippolyte Taine, whose collected works Gabriele was currently reading, had as usual got it ruthlessly right: ‘Three weeks flirting, three months loving, three years squabbling, thirty years making do, and then the kids start again.’ He wasn’t going to let that happen to him. Besides, it might turn out to be a boy. He’d had enough of father-and-son routines to last him several lifetimes. The women had sensed this and moved on, and by now Gabriele had lost all interest in the whole business. If you didn’t want children, what was the point? At his age, sex seemed a bit disgusting and stupid, and the present cultural obsession with it depressing and sick. According to various comments that his mother had let slip from time to time, this was at least one thing that he had in common with his father.
The cafe was starting to fill up now. It was small and rather seedy for this area, and the clientele was very different from that at the previous establishment: tradesmen, street sweepers, delivery drivers, city cops, pensioners, janitors…
It took another moment before the penny dropped, and when it did Gabriele had enough sense not to use his mobile. The cafe‘s pay phone was at the rear of the establishment, in an overflow zone where the tables and chairs began to peter out and be replaced by stacks of mineral water cases, cardboard boxes of crisps, unused advertising materials and a broken ice-cream freezer with its lid up. On the wall nearby hung a framed black-and-white aerial photograph of a small town somewhere in the alluvial flatlands to the south, Crema or Lodi perhaps. It must have been taken shortly after the war, for there was still little extensive development outside the walls, just a few suburban villas and the railway station. After that the vast plains spread away, faintly lined with dirt roads and dotted at intervals with isolated cascine, the rectangular complexes of clustered farm buildings characteristic of the Po valley.
He stood there, phone in hand, staring up at the photograph. Eventually the dialling tone changed to an angry whine. Gabriele hung up, fed in a coin and redialled. He knew what to do now, and it could be done.
‘ Pronto.’
‘Fulvio, it’s Gabriele Passarini.’
‘ Salve, dottore.’
‘Listen, you remember that time, years ago, when I locked myself out of the shop?’
A brief laugh.
‘It’s happened again?’
‘It’s happened again. And I want you to do the same thing you did last time. Do you understand?’
‘You mean go down to…’
‘Yes, yes! Exactly what you did last time. I’ll be waiting.’
There was a pause. When Fulvio finally spoke, he sounded flustered, perhaps by the intensity in Gabriele’s voice.
‘Very well, dottore. I’m up to my ears with work this morning, but…’
‘I’ll make it worth your while.’
He hung up, wiped his palms on his coat and returned to the bar, where he ordered and downed a coffee and then paid his bill before leaving the cafe.
Fulvio was waiting for him just inside the doorway. The janitor was a lean, stooping man whose perpetual expression of amazement, due to the loss of his eyebrows in an industrial accident, gave him a slightly gormless air. In fact, Fulvio was the intermediary, when not the instigator, behind everything that happened in the building. Gabriele had recognized this early on, and had always taken good care to ensure that Fulvio was aware that he both understood and appreciated the situation: a panettone from one of the city’s best pastry shops every Christmas, some chocolates for his wife on her birthday, the occasional but satisfyingly large tip now and again.
The janitor beckoned Gabriele in, then pulled the rusty iron door to and locked it again. A dim bulb showed the steep stairway down into the cellarage.
‘Any new developments?’ Gabriele asked casually, using the stock phrase they had evolved for this conversation.
Fulvio sighed profoundly. After the evident and excessive emotion in Gabriele’s voice on the phone, he sounded relieved to return to this well-worn topic.
‘Eh, what can I tell you? Signora Nicolai had another mild heart attack last week, but she’s recovered now and will probably see us all out. Pasquino and Indovina are much the same as ever, and the Gambetta family are still arguing over who gets what from their uncle’s will. But I promise you, dottore, an apartment here will become vacant sooner or later.’
‘But probably not during my lifetime.’
‘Eh, eh, eh!’
They walked down the steps and along a narrow passageway that led into a cavernous space filled with dim hulks kept vague by the thin whey of light from open barred windows at pavement level above. Selecting another key from the bunch he carried, Fulvio unlocked a door in the end wall. He switched on a feeble light and they passed through into another subterranean vault, similar in shape and size to the previous one but this time smelling strongly of coal. The floor crunched beneath them as they crossed towards a set of steps in the corner leading back up into the building above.