At this point Maia plucked up the courage to mention a possible line of investigation. The story was this. In the Porta Ticinese district, in a part of the city that was becoming increasingly popular with tourists, there was a restaurant and pizzeria called Paglia e Fieno. Maia, who lives by the canals, has been walking past it for years. And for years this vast restaurant, through whose windows you could glimpse at least a hundred seats, was always depressingly empty, except for a few tourists drinking coffee at the tables outside. And it wasn’t as if the place was abandoned. Maia had once been inside, out of curiosity, and was alone, except for a small family group twenty tables farther down. She had ordered a dish of paglia e fieno, of course, with a quarter liter of white wine and some apple tart, all excellent fare and reasonably priced, with extremely polite waiters. Now, if someone runs premises as vast as that, with staff, kitchen, and so forth, and no one goes there for years, if they had any sense they would sell it off. And yet Paglia e Fieno has been open for maybe ten years, pretty well three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
“There’s something strange going on there,” observed Costanza.
“Not really,” replied Maia. “The explanation is obvious. It’s a place owned by the triads, or the Mafia, or the Camorra. It’s been bought with dirty money and it’s a good, upfront investment. But, you say, the investment is already there, it’s in the value of the building, and they could keep it shut down, without putting any more money into it. And yet no — it’s open and running. Why?”
“Yes, why?” asked Cambria again.
Her reply revealed that Maia had a smart little brain. “The premises are used, day in day out, for laundering dirty money that’s constantly flowing in. You serve the few customers who turn up each evening, but each evening you ring up a series of false till receipts as though you’d had a hundred customers. Once you’ve registered that amount, you take it to the bank — and perhaps, so as not to attract attention to all that cash, since no one’s paying by credit card, you open accounts in twenty different banks. On this sum, which is now legal, you pay all the necessary taxes, after generous deductions for operating expenses and supplies (it’s not hard to get false invoices). It’s well known that for money laundering you have to count on losing fifty percent. With this system, you lose much less.”
“But how do you prove all this?” asked Palatino.
“Simple,” replied Maia. “Two revenue officers go there for dinner, a man and woman, looking like newlyweds, and as they’re eating they look around and see there are, let’s say, just two other customers. Next day the police go and check, find that a hundred till receipts have been rung up, and I’d like to see what those people will have to say for themselves.”
“It’s not so simple,” I pointed out. “The two revenue officers go there, say, at eight o’clock, but however much they eat, they will have to leave by nine, otherwise they’ll look suspicious. Who can prove that the hundred customers weren’t there between nine and midnight? You then have to send at least three or four couples to cover the evening. Now, if they do a check the next morning, what’s going to happen? The police are thrilled to find someone’s been underdeclaring, but what can they do with someone who’s declaring too much? The restaurant can always say the machine got stuck, that it kept printing out the same thing. And what then? A second check? They’re not stupid, they’ve now figured out who the officers are, and when they come back they won’t ring up any false till receipts that evening. Or the police have to keep checking night after night, sending out half an army to eat pizzas, and perhaps after a year they’d manage to close them down, but it’s just as likely they’d get bored well before that, because they’ve got other things to do.”
“That’s for the police to decide,” Maia replied resentfully. “They’ll find some clever way — we just have to point out the problem.”
“My dear,” said Simei affably, “I’ll tell you what will happen if we cover this investigation. First, we’ll have the police on our backs, as you’ll be criticizing them for failing to detect the fraud — and they know how to get their revenge, if not against us then certainly against the Commendatore. And as you say yourself, we have the triads, the Camorra, the ’Ndrangheta, or whoever else, and you think they’re going to be pleased? And do we sit here as good as gold, waiting for them to bomb our offices? Finally, you know what I say? That our readers will be thrilled to eat a good cheap meal in a place that comes straight out of a detective story, so that Paglia e Fieno will be packed with morons and our only accomplishment will be that we’ve made them a fortune. So we can forget that one. Don’t you worry, just go back to your horoscopes.”
7
Wednesday, April 15, Evening
I could see how dispirited Maia was, and I caught up with her as she was leaving. Instinctively I took her by the arm.
“Don’t take it personally, Maia. Let’s go, I’ll walk you home. We could have a drink on the way.”
“I live by the canals, plenty of bars around there. There’s one I know that does an excellent Bellini, my great passion. Thanks.”
We reached Ripa Ticinese, and I saw the canals for the first time. I’d heard about them, of course, but was convinced they were all underground, and yet it felt as if we were in Amsterdam. Maia told me with a certain pride that Milan had once been very much like Amsterdam, crisscrossed by canals right to the center. It must have been beautiful, which was why Stendhal had so liked it. But later they had covered the canals for public health reasons, and only here were they still visible, with their putrid water, though at one time there were washerwomen along the banks. And in some of the side streets you could still see rows of old houses and many case di ringhiera.
Case di ringhiera, large old buildings with an inner courtyard and iron railings circling the upper floors. They were places I’d heard about, images of the 1950s that I’d come across when editing encyclopedias or when referring to the performance of Bertolazzi’s El Nost Milan at the Piccolo Teatro. But I didn’t imagine any still existed.
Maia laughed. “Milan is full of case di ringhiera, except that they’re no longer for poor people. Come, I’ll show you.” She took me into a double courtyard. “Here on the ground floor it’s been completely redeveloped. There are workshops for small antiques dealers — though really just glorified junk shops charging high prices — and the studios of painters in search of fame. Now it’s all stuff for tourists. But up there, those two floors are exactly as they used to be.”
I could see the iron railings around the upper floors, and doors that opened onto each balcony, and I asked whether anyone still hung their wash out to dry.
Maia smiled. “We’re not in Naples. Almost all of it has been renovated. At one time the steps went straight up to the balcony, which led to each front door, and at the far end was a single toilet for several families, with a hole in the floor, and you could forget any idea of a shower or a bath. Now it has all been done up for the rich. Some apartments even have a Jacuzzi and they cost an arm and a leg. Less where I live. I’ve got two rooms with water dripping down the walls, though fortunately they’ve put in a toilet and a shower, but I love the area. Soon, of course, they’ll be fixing that up as well. Then I’ll have to move out, I won’t be able to afford the rent, unless Domani gets going pretty soon and they take me on permanently. That’s why I put up with all this humiliation.”
“Don’t take it personally, Maia. It’s obvious that during a trial period we have to learn what we can write and what we can’t. In any event, Simei has responsibilities, to the paper and to the publisher. Perhaps you could do as you liked when you worked on celebrity romance, but here it’s different, we’re working on a newspaper.”