The Lizard Strategy

by Valerio Varesi, Joseph Farrell

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Italy's Maigret returns in another smouldering noir from a master of the police procedural

"A master storyteller" Barry Forshaw, Independent

Parma is blanketed in snow, but this pristine, white veneer cannot mask the stench of corruption. Its officials are no longer working for its people - only for themselves - crime is out of control and resentment festers in every district.

Commissario Soneri remains at heart an idealist, so the state of Parma wounds him more than most. And now he is presented with three mysteries at once, each more impenetrable than the last.

In a river creek on the outskirts of the city, tipped off by a local, he finds a mobile phone that rings through the night but holds no data; an elderly patient with senile dementia is reported missing from a hospice; and the mayor of Parma, who was reported as taking a holiday on the ski slopes, has disappeared off the face of the earth - just when he seemed certain to be implicated in a seismic corruption scandal at city hall.

Release date: June 28, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

“JUVARA, WHAT WOULD you say if you read that some unfortunate individual had been injured when a roll of cotton wool was tossed from the fourth floor of a building, that someone was at death’s door after being struck by a feather, or that someone else had been knocked to the ground by a pigeon shitting on his head?”

“Sorry, what are you on about now?” the inspector asked.

“Nowadays you get the most incredible rubbish in the papers.”

Juvara gave Soneri a puzzled look. The commissario walked over to his desk and laid out that morning’s paper, bringing his fist down on a headline splashed over five columns: WEEK OFF FOR MAYOR CORBELLINI, and lower down: ON THE PAGANELLA WITH BOYS FROM NAVETTA.

The inspector continued staring at him with the same bewildered expression.

“You see? You don’t look aghast. You’ve been anaesthetised.”

“But commissario . . .” Juvara was reduced to stuttering.

“Don’t you see the state this city’s in? Do you care if the mayor has pushed off to a ski slope? And do we have to be told all about it? However, if everybody reacted the way you do . . . I hope that at least a few folk would get seriously angry.”

The inspector shrugged. “It’s just another piece of news.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Let’s forget it.”

“Forgive me if I say so, sir. At times, you seem unduly moralistic,” Juvara said with a grin. He had long since grown accustomed to the commissario’s outbursts, which arrived without any warning.

“If only there were a bit more morality around in this city! There’s a putrid, stagnant stench in the air, but anyone who so much as holds his nose is attacked as a hypocritical bigot,” Soneri said. “Take all those poor souls who end up here. Sometimes I wonder what right we have to slam them in jail. What are we supposed to blame them for? Yes, alright, every so often they rob a bank and run off with a couple of thousand euros, but don’t bankers get away with thieving day after day? How come one lot ends up in jail and the other doesn’t?”

“Commissario, we shouldn’t be saying things like that. And anyway, that’s a right can of worms.”

“That’s the sort of thing people say when they want to change the subject,” Soneri said, somewhat piqued. He got to his feet and marched out of the office.

*

He strode furiously along Via Repubblica among the rush-hour crowds. It seemed as though the city was being evacuated and a defeated army was careering heedlessly through it. A few centimetres of snow were more than enough to cause an outbreak of madness among Parma’s mothers, done up like mountain rescue teams as they went to the aid of their offspring, but also among the fathers, muffled up inside their two-ton four-wheel drives which mounted pavements and flowerbeds to get right up to the school steps. The television channels and the newspapers had gone into overdrive about the dreadful weather and had generated waves of hysteria, contributing to a commotion that irritated Soneri more and more. He remembered his own childhood in the Montanara district: the heavy snowfalls, the sledges on the few slopes, the walk to school, the snowball fights, the search along the way for stretches of virgin snow, the crunching sound underfoot, and his wonder at finding his own footprints still there as he made his way back home. What has it come to when one of the most natural occurrences of winter is seen as an insurmountable obstacle?

Angela had long reproached him about his disquiet, and said he had lost all sense of time. He replied that he did not think of himself as being out of touch, but the whole world had gone to rack and ruin, had become grimy, worn out and unbearably slothful. He found some peace of mind in the silence of Piazzale dei Servi, where he stopped to look at a fir tree whose branches were weighed down with snow. Staring at the tree, he blotted the houses, the people and Parma itself from his view as though he too were on the Paganella. This perspective somehow brought the mayor back to mind.

He had never thought of Corbellini as a skier. Always so elegantly turned out, hair so carefully parted, suits in sober English hues, he seemed to walk on tiptoe as though crossing an ice field. He did not seem in any way the sporty type, and the idea of him with the boys from Navetta, a district on the outskirts of the city once inhabited by poor people crammed into huts but now an estate of social housing colonised by immigrants, its balconies festooned with coloured clothes hung out to dry, was too much. This was a day of strange events: snow, general chaos, phoney excitement, and now Corbellini on a ski-lift.

As he stood contemplating the fir tree, his thoughts jumping about in festive delight on the first real day of winter weather, Angela called him.

“Commissario, be careful you don’t go skidding about. The city has turned treacherous.”

“Why, did you end up on your arse?”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? When I was a girl, I used to go ice-skating.”

“When you were a girl!”

“What are you getting at? Are you implying I’m past it?”

“No, it’s just that memory plays tricks. Like with this city, which seems never to have seen a snowflake before. Want to know something? I’d like to see a metre of snow falling just to annoy all these idiots here.”

“Well, I haven’t lost my memory. I like the snow, even if it’s just for its colour. This world is so grey nowadays!”

“If we ever fall out, signora avvocato, at least we’ll have one thing in common to hold on to.”

“You mean something to slide on.”

“It’s our mayor who’s sliding.”

“On a grand scale! They’ve just arrested a pack of Council officials, the ones closest to him.”

“No, he really is sliding about. He’s away on a skiing trip to the Paganella.”

“The world’s going mad. I never expected to see him anywhere except in a theatre foyer or on a sunbed.”

Soneri made no reply. Angela’s irony was the best solvent for his bad mood.

“Today isn’t the first time odd things have happened,” she went on.

“I was just thinking the same thing not so long ago. I’m now convinced that normality doesn’t exist, that everything seems strange to me because I no longer understand where the world’s headed.”

“Come on! You’re having one of your crises of total rejection, but just hang in there and it’ll pass. Listen to this. You remember that elderly colleague of mine, the woman who became one of the first female lawyers in Parma?”

The commissario grunted in agreement.

“Well, she called me this morning to tell me that during the night she keeps hearing ringtones and snatches of tunes.”

“So what? That’s nothing new. With all the devices people cart about with them, their pockets are like bandstands these days.”

“It’s not that. She lives in the Montebello district and her house is near the dyke along the Parma river. The ringtones come from there.”

“There are piles of toxic waste along the river bed.”

“Adelaide is not going off her head,” Angela said, raising her voice a little. “She told me because she thinks there’s something fishy going on.”

“Has she heard anything else? Did she go down to have a look?”

“Don’t be silly! She’s afraid. She lives alone in that house, and there’s open ground down to the embankment.”

“A lot of people are afraid nowadays. What does she want me to do?” Soneri asked.

“To drop in for a few minutes. She’s a good woman and deserves a bit of attention. She’s one of the old school, a bit like you,” Angela said, with a touch of mockery in her voice.

“You don’t have any younger colleagues who need a bit of cheering up?”

“Plenty, but I doubt they’d be glad to have you hanging around. Do as you please. If need be, I’ll go myself.”

*

The traffic was quieter at lunchtime and rays of sunlight brightened the city. Soneri walked down to the Lungoparma, the road along the river where the view opened out onto the sprawling, irregular skyline on the far side. The houses there were huddled together in groups in what had once been the city’s working-class district. Snow fell on the river, and the still water resembled a sheet of cast iron. On the other side of the parapet from the road, there was a small urban jungle of poplars and willows which followed the river into the heart of the city and offered cover for the urban wildlife seeking shelter in the comfortable heat bubble of the houses. At the Dattaro bridge, he found himself opposite the Montebello district, dominated now by the appalling Mirror Cube that housed the Post Office. Following the river in the direction of the distant hunchbacks of the Apennines, he ended up at Adelaide’s doorway, which he remembered from having been there with Angela. The district, on the other hand, brought to mind a construction scandal in the ’70s which had involved a group of Council officials of every political stripe. At that point Parma lost her innocence, and the shamelessness of that episode provided her with an excuse for giving herself to anyone who asked.

“How are you, Adelaide?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Like a ham hung up to be seasoned.”

“You’ll become even more desirable,” Soneri said.

She threw him a warning glance. “Don’t mock me. I really miss my work. Retirement produces more victims than an epidemic, and the worst thing is you were looking forward to it.”

“Tell me more about these ringtones.”

“I know you’ll think I’m off my head or on the bottle. I didn’t even want to tell Angela, but then I decided it was better to risk setting off a false alarm and being taken for an old drunkard than just ignoring it. And anyway, I don’t care what they think of me anymore.”

“Does it only happen at night?”

“Yes, I think they come up along the embankment. Sometimes the sound is like a pop song, but at others it’s like classical music. Other times it’s just an ordinary ringtone or an electronic buzz.”

“When did you first hear it?”

“Three days ago. At first, I paid no heed, but the second time it was obvious it couldn’t be someone hiding out down there. No-one could stay on the embankment for long in this cold.”

“Did you hear the sound today as well?”

“It’s very punctual, at regular intervals, hour after hour.”

They looked at each other in silence, engrossed in their little mystery. Meantime, the first traces of darkness seemed to be moving across the slopes down to the river, beyond the embankment. Soneri leaned out and it was then that he noticed the first wisps of mist floating along the river Parma in the direction of the hills. The moisture suspended above the water seemed to be going in the opposite direction to the mist on the riverbanks, the one seeking out the mountains and the other the sea. It was this rebellion against normality which he found delightful in mists. Quite suddenly, the horizon seemed to vanish, and in the grey gloom the croaking of crows fleeing for refuge among the houses rang out.

“This seems to be the boundary between the city and the countryside. You’re vaguely aware of an invisible border which separates the one from the other. I love the ambiguity,” Soneri said.

“You’re near the city centre even if you seem to be far away. Piazza Garibaldi and the Duomo are little more than a kilometre from here,” Adelaide said.

“In your opinion, what is it that’s ringing over there?”

“If you ask me, it’s a mobile. The new models give out different sounds depending on who’s calling.”

“And how many different tones have you heard?”

“At least four, maybe more. I was wondering, if there’s a mobile among the trees, does that mean there’s an owner who can’t reply?”

“By this time, the stench would’ve given him away. Anyway, we’ll have to wait till morning. The mist has brought down the curtain,” he said, watching the mist flowing towards the mountains as though rolling on the wind.

It took only a few minutes for him to walk from the silence of the house by the river to the residences of the wealthy in Viale Solferino, and to proceed from there through the Barriera Farini into the city. Adelaide was quite right: the distances were not great. But the change of scenery seemed like a leap in time. He turned into the botanic gardens and felt the same sensation he had experienced shortly before, but the roar of the traffic and the shouts of the children returning home from school broke the enchantment of that little jungle. To complete the change in atmosphere, his mobile rang.

“Am I disturbing you, sir?” Juvara asked.

Soneri detested that kind of hypocritical premise, and cut him short. “What is it?”

“They’ve managed to lose a patient at the Villa Clelia care home, and they’ve been onto us to ask for help.”

“What do you mean, lose a patient? It’s not like losing a button!”

“The fact is they can’t find him.”

“What did I say earlier? There’s so much rubbish doing the rounds nowadays.”

“It’s an elderly man with dementia. He seems to have got out of bed and disappeared.”

“Are the patrolmen on the job?”

“Yes. They looked in the courtyard, in the garden and in the neighbouring streets. The hospital’s security staff are searching too, but they’ve come up with nothing.”

“Has he any family? How old is this man?”

“Do you want me to read out the report?”

“Do what the hell you like,” Soneri snapped. “Do you have to read out a schedule to tell me if he’s fat or thin, tall or short?”

“Alfio Romagnoli, eighty-three years old, medium height, slim build, taken into hospital with gastroenteritis, suffering from senile dementia. No known relatives,” Juvara said, without missing a beat.

“Does he have problems walking? Is he lame? Arthritic? Does he have a limp?”

“None of the above.”

Soneri ended the call and set off for Villa Clelia, passing the Arco del Petitot and the Tardini stadium on his way. The entrance was on Viale Partigiani d’Italia, near San Lazzaro, and he thought to himself how appropriate it was that a care home now filled with old folk dismissed from the public hospitals and sent there to die should be situated in the district which had once been a refuge for people suffering from the plague.

On reaching the hospital, he walked up the stairs and past wards where in the darkness an unconscious, resigned humanity lived in a silence interrupted by isolated howls emitted from the depths of night terrors.

The director, a corpulent individual who was extremely sure of himself, gave his name as Malusardi. In his office, Soneri found two other doctors, one male and one female, waiting for him. The male doctor introduced himself as being in charge of the geriatric ward.

“We cannot understand how it could have happened or where he might have ended up,” the director said.

“When did you notice he was missing?” the commissario asked.

“At six o’clock, when the nurses made the rounds with the morning medicines.”

“How many people are on night-shift?”

“One or two, in addition to an on-duty doctor, who has to take care of the medical ward as well. It’s on the other side of the staircase.”

“The patients in the same room as Romagnoli, did they see anything?”

Malusardi shrugged his shoulders. “They were asleep, but even if they’d been awake . . .”

“Can you show me to the ward?”

The male doctors got to their feet, and the woman, who had not yet opened her mouth, led the way along a corridor where the heat and the smell of medicines caught Soneri by the throat. From the darkness of the various rooms, a litany of the moans, curses, laboured breathing and occasional snores of people intermittently asleep made up a chorus that resembled the death rattle of some large, wounded animal. There were ten rooms on either side of the hallway, with two doors at the far end, one opening onto the staircase and the other onto the emergency exit.

“Is there an alarm on that door?” the commissario asked, pointing to the exit.

“If anyone opens it, a buzzer goes off and flashing lights come on all over the ward.”

“So, he must have made his way out among the visitors,” Soneri said.

The three doctors remained silent, foreseeing trouble ahead.

“Perhaps someone took him out, pretending he was somebody else. Anyway, the important thing now is to find the old man,” the commissario said. This suggestion seemed to cheer Malusardi up. Some half-asleep carers and a couple of elderly ladies who were assisting relatives peeped out from behind doors.

“Are they here overnight as well?” the commissario asked.

“Some of them are,” the director replied. “But they often doze off.”

Soneri had the impression he was holding something back. “Were you around when Romagnoli disappeared?” he asked the doctor in charge of the ward.

The doctor was about to answer but Malusardi got in first. “No, it was Dr Camelotta’s day off. Dr Magni was on duty.”

“What did you do when you noticed he was missing?”

The director came in quickly with his reply. “Dr Magni was finishing his shift, but he stayed on to oversee all the procedures – in other words, to inform the ward sister, the medical office, the police, the hospital’s security staff and the paramedics.”

The commissario gave a grunt. He found it strange that an elderly patient suffering from dementia had managed to outwit all those white coats and the ostentatious efficiency of a private healthcare establishment.

“If he’s not under the bed, there’s no point in searching in here,” Soneri said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance. He got up and left the hospital, but stopped near the stadium to pull out his mobile. He called Pasquariello, the head of the flying squad.

“What can you tell me about the disappearance of this old fellow?”

“We’ve searched the neighbourhood and spoken to the shopkeepers in the district, but nobody’s seen him. A very curious business.”

“Did you search the hospital itself?”

“Only the garden, together with their own security men. The directors kept us out. They’re convinced he’s left the premises.”

“It does seem the most obvious conclusion.”

“And yet I can’t help thinking that if he did get out, we’d have found him by now,” Pasquariello said. “Where’s an old guy in his pyjamas with no memory going to go?”

“In his pyjamas?”

“The nurses told us that all the clothes he was wearing when he arrived, including his shoes, were still in his cupboard.”

The commissario struggled to contain his rage. The case seemed at the same time both extremely simple and desperately complicated. He felt inadequate.

The head of the flying squad advanced a comforting hypothesis. “If he can’t be found, there’s only one possible explanation. Maybe there was some reason to make him disappear.”

“You mean he might have been kidnapped?”

“It doesn’t take much to convince someone suffering from dementia. All you have to do is tell him you’re taking him home, throw a raincoat over him and pass him off as a relative. From what my men picked up, the security amounts to nothing more than a doorkeeper. But even this idea is hard to credit. The old guy had no relatives and no property. Not a bean. Or else . . .” Pasquariello added, leaving the phrase hanging in the air.

“Or else?”

“Maybe the solution is so obvious that none of us has thought of it. We’ve got our heads so filled with complexities that we often neglect the most obvious leads.”

Soneri muttered, “You’re right,” in the tones of a sleepwalker, and hung up. A similar thought had shortly before struck him with the strength of an urgent physical need. He turned back towards the hospital as the city was settling down for dinner and the snow was hardening on the roads and pavements. The courtyard of Villa Clelia, covered with a film of ice, shone under the lamplight. Everything appeared as bright and inviting as the entrance to a mountain hut. He rushed up the stairs and burst into the geriatric ward. A couple of nurses pushing the medicine trolley stared at him and tried to stop him. “Excuse me. It’s not visiting time.”

The commissario paid no heed but marched straight on, hearing at his back the hurried steps of one of the nurses, her shrill voice shouting out, “Where do you think you’re going?” He reached the emergency exit with the woman still remonstrating behind him, grabbed hold of the handle and pushed. He stood for a few seconds with the door half open onto the freezing walkway, observing the nurse with a triumphant and accusing look. The woman stopped in turn, silent and bemused. The freezing air on his face was an invitation to go forward onto the darkness of the staircase where the service lights seemed to be out of order. He felt like a bloodhound following the scent of a pheasant. He stood on the walkway waiting for his eyes to adapt to the gloom and then it struck him that he had at last found a use for the torch on his mobile. He went down one floor, became aware of the brightness coming from the door of the lower ward, and continued on down. The torchlight went out and he almost tripped. When he switched it back on, he saw him. He seemed so composed as to suggest that he had consigned himself willingly to a gentle death from the cold. He was seated on the third step from the ground floor, his feet on the ground, his body lying back on the stairs and his head reclining serenely on a step as though it was a pillow. He was wearing nothing but his pyjamas, standard issue, rather like overalls, tightened at the wrists and ankles. Soneri stretched out a hand to touch him, but then pulled back as though afraid of waking him. This time his mobile was genuinely useful, allowing him to make a call that would help old Romagnoli escape from his involuntary concealment.

“There’s a job for you here at Villa Clelia,” the commissario told Nanetti, head of the forensics squad.

Nanetti replied with his mouth full. “You think I’m a nurse?”

“Unfortunately for you, you chose a profession where it’s permissible to give you a kick up the arse at any time of the day or night.”

“What do you mean, ‘chose’?”

“Come on, you love your job really! Your face is always on T.V., and that white coat gives you a certain je ne sais quoi.”

“Piss off, commissario! If it was left to me, I’d only put on the white coat to look like a doctor and get to visit the young female patients.”

“Tough luck! We’re in the geriatric ward.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a body on the staircase of the emergency exit. They left it in the fridge.”

“You’ve been imbibing too much Gutturnio, eh?”

“If only! No, he was on the stairs all night and the freezing cold has left him stiff as a board.”

“You do pick your time! I was halfway through a dish of pasta e fagioli.”

“Please accept my apologies for having interrupted this delightful relationship.”

When he had hung up, Soneri sat down on the steps beside the old man and kept watch as he slept.

NANETTI ARRIVED WITH two members of his staff and all the necessary paraphernalia. The hospital had been roused from its torpor, and Malusardi, the doctors on the executive and Camelotta, head of the geriatric ward, rushed to the scene. Together they made a lot of useless fuss as they milled about with worried expressions.

“What do you think?” Soneri asked, when his colleague came in from the cold.

“At first sight it seems he froze to death, perhaps after a stroke,” Nanetti said, blowing his nose. “There’s no trace of blood, the body appears intact with no sign of violence. Then again, maybe they poisoned him.”

“That was my verdict too, but this story has taught me not to ignore the most obvious lines of inquiry, which are very often the right ones.”

“In the forensics squad, we never ignore them, but for us it is much simpler because physics and chemistry force us to follow the one path. That way we avoid behaving like mental tossers, which is not the case with you intellectuals.”

“Sometimes you just have to toss ideas about,” the commissario replied, without rising to the bait. “In fact, it occurred to me to look on the staircase precisely because I was thinking of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. People go searching everywhere except in the most obvious places.”

“Oh, I do beg your pardon. There are two exits here, the principal one and the emergency exit. Where could he have escaped from?”

“Yes, but they believed he’d got clean away, whereas he’d only taken a couple of steps.”

Malusardi came over to them. “If you’d like a bite to eat, I’ll ask the kitchen to prepare you something.”

Soneri and Nanetti exchanged glances and declined the offer. It was better to go hungry than face a hospital meal. In the meantime, the magistrates had turned up and tension was rising once again.

The director did not insist. “If there’s anything we can do, just ask.”

“If it’s the way I think it is, I’ll be off quite soon. You’ll have to deal with the prosecution office,” Soneri said.

The director’s expression turned more serious. “I was the first to be misled and let down,” he stammered.

“I’m getting the impression that things were not quite as they should have been. The door was not alarmed, there were no lights on the stairs. It’s just as well I inspected only the emergency staircase.”

Malusardi gave a rancorous smirk. He might not have been accustomed to inspections, or perhaps he was skilled at lessening their scope. “If you are insinuating that we’re not properly equipped, let me tell you that we have the most modern security system of any public hospital.”

“Exactly,” Soneri said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that nowadays we entrust security to technology as a way of shirking responsibility. We care less and less about how we ourselves behave.”

Malusardi made a gesture signifying indifference. “If the alarm on the door had sounded, the nurses would have seen the old man going out and would have been able to stop him. The responsibility lies with the person who unplugged the system. There was no fault on the hospital’s part.”

“At the end of the day, it’s always a question of individual error, but it’s too easy to dismiss everything in that manner.”

The director gave the impression of not following this line of reasoning, and the commissario became aware that the discussion had carried him beyond his own remit. He said no more and turned away. Later, as they were leaving the hospital and heading out into the mist which by that time in the evening had settled in, Nanetti returned to the subject.

“That guy’s in the shit,” he said, referring to Malusardi.

“He’ll get away with it. He’s been pulling in enough money to be able to retain the best lawyers.”

“It’s a nasty business. An old man suffering from dementia walks out of the hospital and no-one even notices – or thinks of going to look for him on the stairs.”

“It’s always somebody else’s fault. He’ll duck out of it and the weakest party will end up carrying the can. The usual false justice. It’s a disaster when you stop saying ‘us’ and say only ‘me, me, me’.”

“Don’t make it too complicated, eh? I told you I’m not an intellectual.”

“Do you want me to tell you how I see it at this point?”

“Before you get started, let’s go to Alceste’s and have something to eat. I’ve left a tab open.”

The commissario nodded and went on speaking. “On the walkway, I saw some cigarette butts. Somebody was going out there for a smoke, and to make it easier for himself he switched the. . .