It was one o'clock. He collected statements and reports, stacked the dossiers. In despair, he got up and went out.
"And yet," he was thinking, "Valdarena, the cousin. . he was the one who gave the alarm. Is this a sign… an unmistakable sign… of innocence? Or at least, of an easy conscience. Conscience! But what about the cuff of his shirt? No, the whole thing wouldn't come clear. The story of that caress sounded made-up to him. Caress a dead woman! Or else. . There are murky moments in the slow drip-drip of the hours: the hours of puberty. Evil crops up unexpectedly in sudden, horrible shards from beneath the tegument, from beneath the skin of gossip: a fine accountant's diploma, then a university degree. From beneath the covering of decent appearances, like a stone, it breaks the ground, and you can't even see it: like the dark hardness of the mountain, in a green field.
The handsome Giuliano! Too upset, he had seemed, too nervous, and too depressed, at the same time. He was on the verge of breaking down. He couldn't manage to maintain the proper composure. "How can you be so calm?" Don Ciccio had asked him: it was a trap. Anything but calm. "They're open-handed; they don't count the change. Ah!"
Liliana Balducci was very rich, Liliana Balducci nee Valdarena. She had money of her own and, to some extent, she was mistress of it. An only child. And her father had had a gift for coining money. Even Doctor Fumi, in the vast din of this whole symphony, had picked out the theme, "the motive," the Leitmotif.
"Her old man knew his onions, all right. During the war, and during the post-war, too. He was a real, a no-bones-about-it shark. He had died, too, a couple of years ago, some time after the daughter got married. The apartment in Via Merulana was his property. Business deals, partnerships, investments here, there and everywhere. Owner of this, part-owner of that. Lending money on mortgages, mortgaging to buy up. He must have been a real son of a bitch." He accompanied this sermon with some twirls of his right hand. Liliana had referred vaguely to her father's fortune, on San Francesco's day, during that happy meal.
As for the Valdarena relatives, Doctor Fumi had taken care of them. First Pompeo went to calclass="underline" a long tramp it was, and no results. Then the sergeant: nothing. Finally the relatives themselves came to see Fumi. So he had given them the full treatment; he had handled them, in his way, touching them first here, then there, with great gentleness, swaying his head as if he were reciting a poem: with those eyes, with that voice of his, Fumi, if he had wanted, could have been a five-star criminal lawyer! A real tear-jerker!
Giuliano's mother no longer lived in Rome: a handsome woman, they said. Pompeo had codified the registerial information that had emerged relative to the relatives. A native talent, refined by excellent practice in the art and by the necessity for saving time, for abbreviating the long chains of procedural syllogisms, eye, ear and nose, at the service of the old gray matter, assisted by an occasional roast-beef sandwich, had made him a master of delineating with a few strokes, a couple of hard and fruitful knocks, the most entangled family trees of the whole repertory. And with the most edifying details.
When it came to women, especially, and exploiters of women, love, lovers, true marriages and false ones, cuckoldom and counter-cuckoldom, Pompeo was supreme, you might say. Certain smart-ass bigamists or polygamists, with all their troubles and poly-troubles, and with all the mess of the respective kids whom they sort of wanted sometimes and then maybe didn't want — well, in all that muck, he slipped in and out with the ease of a taxi driver. His necessary association with the underworld, his abbreviated investigation, obtained by his intuition of those "family status" questions, had brought him to such a pass that, on a moment's notice, he could give you all the "cohabitations," let's say, from Via Capo d'Africa to Via Frangipani, and as far as Piazza degli Zingari, at Via dei Capocci and Vicolo Ciancaleoni; and then down, past Piazza Montanara — not even worth mentioning — to Via di Monte Caprino, and Via Bucimazza and Via dei Fienili: the things that man knew! Or the neighborhood of Palazzo Pio, that other pesthole, and in all those alleyways behind Sant'Andrea della Valle, Piazza Grottapinta, Via di Ferro, and the Vicolo delle Grotte del Teatro: and maybe even Piazza Pollarola, even though the people there are classy, they still have some funny additions to the household, or a character or two around who isn't in the police's good graces. In those areas, in fact, he kept his trumps. There, he knew by heart all the couples, all their kith and kin, and all the ramifications that they sprung in the spring, whether the ramifications came in the shape of horns, or whether they appeared farther down on the body: the double couples, and the triple, the royal flushes, in all the possible combinations: birth, life, death, and distinguishing marks. He knew the dumps they rented, and when they moved out of one to go into another, the double rooms with kitchen privileges, the closets, the rooms let by the hour, the sofas and even the couches, with every flea that lives in them, individually.
So for Pompeo the Valdarena tribe was child's play. Giuliano's mother had left Rome to live elsewhere. Having married a second time, a certain accountant named Carlo Ricco of the Moda Italiana, she lived with the latter in Turin. The information on the children was good: they went to school and studied. Her classy relatives — well, it seemed she had "been somewhat cast off by them"; and they had made no effort, from Turin: but on the other hand "she had become estranged from her mother-in-law," or rather her "in-laws," as they were called, en masse: leaving her son to his grandmother. When you came right down to it, everybody was really satisfied, after all the rows and tears: because when she doesn't have cash, the best job a widow can find is to dig herself up another man who'll marry her. Giuliano had maybe been a little depressed and jealous of his mother, for a while he seemed kind of grumpy with everybody: then, as he grew up and developed, little by little, he had come around and seen reason: his mother was young and beautiful. And the depression of a kid like him… He had soon found people who pulled him out of it.
His grandmother spoiled him rotten: this grandmother who was Liliana's Aunt Marietta.
Well, and then what? Things all started going wrong at once. Giuliano's mother, seven or eight months ago, was hospitalized in Bologna, stuck in a bed at San Michele in Bosco: an automobile accident, while she was on her way to Rome to visit the relatives — that's how much she disliked them, poor woman! They'd come by way of Milan. Both legs smashed: it was a miracle that she had saved her skin at all. There, traction and counter-traction, weights attached to one foot and to the other. And machinery of every shape and kind. For this reason, too, the signorino was a little dazed, and had been for some while: he was worried about his mother. And the womenfolk, all over him, sympathizing, poor boy! Going out of their way to see if they couldn't console him.
Liliana Balducci, then, was very rich. Daughter of a profiteer. So then what?
He, the young gentleman her cousin, his technique was that of the idler, the good-looker. Who has or can have his fill of women till they run out of his ears. But surely, too, inside, he must have had some fixed idea. A goaclass="underline" surely he had one in his heart of hearts. Aha: he wanted her to be the one to want him. Now Ingravallo could see it clearly. Giuliano wanted to be desired. To give himself: but to condescend, to sell himself dearly. At the highest possible price. He tried to play it cool and handsome, like that, to act fancy-free. With all women. And even with her. Sure. He wanted to be fair to them all, her included.
And then when she had gone crazy, too, the way certain poor creatures do lose their minds over certain animals in the right season (Ingravallo clenched his teeth), certain characters ripe for jail — then, the bastard! then, plonk, plonk, plonk, the rain of bank notes. Great big drops, too!