He looked them in the eyes, insistently, as priests will sometimes. “Why do you want to know about him?” he asked.
“Because he is dead and I’m alive,” Spino said.
He wasn’t sure why he’d answered like that. He felt it was the only plausible answer, since, truth to tell, there was no other reason. So then the priest clasped his hands together on the table, and, stretching out his arms, his white cassock slipped back to show his wrists, which were also white, and his fingers fidgeted a little with each other.
“He wrote to me,” said the priest. “I’ll show you the letter.” He opened a drawer and took out a blue envelope with a postcard inside showing a view of the city that Spino sees every day. The priest handed it to him and he read the few lines written there in a large, rather childish hand. Then Spino asked if anyone else had seen it, and the priest shook his head smiling, as if to say that no one had bothered to come and talk to him. “I couldn’t be of much use to the police,” he said, “and then it’s too much of an effort to climb up here.”
They exchanged a few casual remarks about the beauty of the place and the history of the church. Sara embarked on a pleasant conversation with the priest about the frescoes, Spino restricting himself to listening to their authoritative remarks as they spoke easily about the Knight, the Angel, Death, and the Hanged Man, until he remarked that it was odd but they sounded like tarot figures, and he pointed to the book on the table. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like it, Father,” he added, “it being about life’s strange coincidences.”
The priest smiled and looked at him indulgently. “God alone knows all the coincidences of this existence, but we alone must choose our own set of coincidences from all those possible,” he said, “we alone.” And so saying he pushed the book towards Spino.
So then, for fun, Spino took the book and opened it at random without looking. He said: “Page forty-six,” and with a solemn voice, as if pretending to be a fortune teller, read aloud the first paragraph. They laughed out of politeness, as one does after an amusing remark, and it was clear that this laughter also marked the end of their conversation. So they said goodbye and the priest showed them out. The sky was growing dark and they hurried down the path, having heard the horn of the bus in the village square announcing its imminent departure.
Sara flopped on her seat with a sigh of satisfaction and tidied her hair slyly. “We should go on vacation,” she said. “We need a vacation.” He nodded without saying anything and leaned his head back on the headrest. The driver turned off the interior lights and the bus sped out of the village and along the hillside. Spino closed his eyes and thought of destiny, of the sentence he had read from that book, of life’s infinite coincidences. And when he opened them again the bus was already driving through the pitch dark and Sara had gone to sleep with her head on his shoulder.
9
Seeing him holed away behind his desk with that childish frown he sometimes wore when he had too much to do, Spino thought how Corrado always loved to play the part of the cynical newspaper editor, a type they’d seen together in the movies so many times. Spino had arrived ready to tell his friend about his Sunday outing. The morning’s newspaper, as always on Mondays, was almost exclusively given over to soccer and contained no news of any importance. He would have liked to have told Corrado that Sara was perhaps about to set off for a short vacation, and if he wanted to take him on free of charge as a private investigator, here was an occasion not to be missed.
But when Corrado said: “Another,” holding up two fingers, Spino’s good humor suddenly evaporated and he sat down without the courage to speak, waiting.
“The policeman died last night,” Corrado said, and he made a gesture with his hand, a cutting gesture, as if to say “that’s it” or “end of story.” There was a long silence and Corrado began to leaf through the pages of a file as if there was nothing more to say about the matter. Then he took off his glasses and said calmly: “The funeral will be held tomorrow; the corpse is laid out in a mortuary room at the police barracks; the wire services have already released the text of the official telegrams of condolence.” He put the file back on a shelf and fed a piece of paper into his typewriter. “I’ve got to write it up,” he said. “I’m doing it myself because I don’t want any trouble, just straightforward news, no speculation, no fancy stuff.”
He made as if to start writing, but Spino put a hand on the machine. “Listen, Corrado,” he said, “yesterday I spoke to a priest who knew him, I saw a letter. He was a sensitive person, maybe this business isn’t as simple as it seems.”
Corrado jumped to his feet, went to the door of his little glass office and closed it. “Oh, he was sensitive, was he?” he exclaimed, turning red. Spino didn’t answer. He shook his head in a sign of denial, as if not understanding. So then Corrado said to listen very carefully, because there were only two possible explanations. First: that when the police arrived the dead man was already dead. In fact The Kid died by the door to the apartment. Now, the gun that killed both him and the policeman, from which six shots were fired, was found on the kitchen balcony at the end of a short passage. So obviously it wasn’t suicide since a dead man couldn’t possibly run back the whole length of the passage and go out on the balcony to leave the gun there. Second explanation: the gun, with somebody holding it, was on the balcony, waiting. The Kid knew this, or didn’t know, impossible to be sure. At a certain point the police knock on the door and The Kid calmly goes to open it. And at that moment the gun pokes in from the night and fires repeatedly both on The Kid and on the police. So then, who was the dead man? Unknowing bait? Or aware that he was bait? A poor fool? Someone who wasn’t involved at all? An inconvenient witness? Or something else again? All hypotheses were possible. Was it terrorism? Perhaps. But it could equally well have been something else: vendettas, fraud, something secret, blackmail, who knows. Perhaps The Kid was the key to everything, but he might also have been just a sacrificial victim, or someone who stumbled into an encounter with destiny. Only one thing Corrado was sure of: that it was best to forget the whole business.
“But you can’t let people die in a vacuum,” Spino said. “It’s as if they’d died twice over.”
Corrado got up and took his friend by the arm, pulling him gently to the door. He made an impatient gesture, pointing to the clock on the wall. “What do you think you’re going to find out?” he said, pushing him outside.
10
“Indian summer, St. Martin’s Day, winter can’t be far away.” Somebody used to say that to him when he was a boy, and in vain Spino struggled to remember who it was. He thought about it on a station platform swept by cold gusts of wind, waving as the train bellied out into the curve. He also thought that a lot could happen in three days. And in his mind a childish voice was laughing, saying: “Three little orphans! Three little orphans!” It was a piercing, malignant voice, but one he couldn’t recognize, recovered from some distant past when memory had stored away the emotion but not the event that produced it. Leaving the station he turned to look at the lighted clockface on the façade and said to himself: Tomorrow is another day.