The Second Life of Inspector Canessa Read online

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  In association with

  WALTER PRESENTS

  THE SECOND LIFE

  OF INSPECTOR

  CANESSA

  In a world where we have so much choice, curation is becoming increasingly key. Walter Presents was first set up to champion brilliant drama from around the world and bring it to a wider audience.

  Now, in collaboration with Pushkin Press, we’re hoping to do the same thing for foreign literature: translating brilliant books into English, introducing them to readers who are hungry for quality fiction.

  This book was recommended to me by an Italian friend with impeccable taste. Set in the 1970s, it follows the story of legendary former cop, Annibale Canessa, forced out of his Italian Riviera retirement to investigate the brutal killing of his estranged brother in Milan. The action flicks between Canessa’s past and present, weaving a page-turning web of corruption and deception. A quintessential Italian hero is born in this thrilling crime story.

  THE

  SECOND LIFE

  OF INSPECTOR

  CANESSA

  ROBERTO

  PERRONE

  TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN

  BY HAMISH GOSLOW

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  In association with

  WALTER PRESENTS

  THE

  SECOND LIFE

  OF INSPECTOR

  CANESSA

  To Gérard de Villiers

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note On Carabinieri

  Prologue: Many years earlier, many years later

  1: The Third Millennium

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  1984

  2: The Third Millennium

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  1980

  3: The Third Millennium

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  DECEMBER 1979

  3: The Third Millennium

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  1979

  5: The Third Millennium

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON CARABINIERI

  Annibale Canessa and Ivan Repetto, the main characters in the novel, belong to the Carabinieri, Italy’s national gendarmerie. Carabinieri are one of the four major branches of Italian law enforcement, alongside the Polizia (Police), the Guardia di Finanza (Finance Police), and the Army proper, from which they split in 2001. Their duties overlap with the Polizia, though they are also employed to police the military, and are regularly deployed alongside the latter in missions abroad.

  Their ranking system follows its own rules, though names may be similar to other forces, and are divided into four major careers: Officer, Inspector, Superintendent, and Carabiniere. Throughout the text, Canessa follows the Officer path, eventually leaving the force as a Colonel, while Repetto remains in the Inspector bracket, leaving with the role of First Marshal.

  Their official motto is Nei Secoli Fedele – ‘Loyal through the centuries’ – which is not dissimilar to the US Marine Corps’ Semper Fidelis. One of their unofficial sayings, however, can also be found in the text: Usi Obbedir Tacendo [e Tacendo Morir] (lit. ‘used to obey in silence, and in silence die’); this is a quotation from the poem ‘La Rassegna di Novara’ by Costantino Nigra, in which the poet uses the line to describe the Carabinieri as King of Sardinia Charles Albert looks over the various parts of what will eventually become the Royal Italian Army.

  PROLOGUE

  Many years earlier, many years later

  He felt, rather than saw, the gun in his hands. This was no dream, but a vivid memory, with the power to tear apart whatever he was doing at that moment. Once it came over him, it was all there was. And here it was again.

  How could an actual memory break into a dream? He was sure this only happened to him. And when it did, he had to sit down or lean against something. Calm down, let the images run their course, wait for them to stop. That’s what he did this time too, perching on the edge of the mattress. He could hear soft snoring from the bed above him. He’d given his place to the latest arrival – almost begged him to take it.

  He breathed and waited in the darkness.

  It started with touch, then moved to sight. Everything was clear in his memory, even though the day was dark and the main colour, grey. He felt the rough stock of the Tokarev TT-33, a Yugoslavian pistol with nine rounds.

  Gazing down the barrel of the gun, he saw a man holding two children by the hand, a boy and a girl. He stared at them, knowing full well what was about to happen. He wasn’t afraid – not for himself anyway. Looking around, he saw trees, flowerbeds, a crowded street, the road ahead and cars stuck in traffic on this winter’s morning. The chaos, crowds, and people – none of this had ever stopped them. But the children were new. They’d chosen to strike before the man dropped them off at school. Why? Wouldn’t it have been better after? That was the one detail he couldn’t see clearly. Maybe because it belonged to the previous days.

  He looked at the gun again. Nothing was happening. Everything was on hold. It was all down to him. He was supposed to open fire. He was the leader. In the meantime, the man pushed the girl a few metres away and she looked shocked, almost hurt by his sudden behaviour. He couldn’t move the boy, who held on to his hand with improbable strength, sticking stubbornly at his side. That’s why he hesitated. He gripped the Tokarev, which was just waiting for h
is orders: loyal, reliable, a weapon that had never let him down.

  The gun sat still in his hand while he watched the boy, who wouldn’t let go of his father’s. He felt something sharp – a knife in his guts – at the scene. It wasn’t just fear in the boy’s eyes: there was something deeper, something that went beyond familial affection. This was more than a lifeline chucked to a dinghy from a rescue boat during a storm. But even if it hadn’t been, he asked himself: is there anyone I could throw a rope to? He didn’t care about the man or the boy. It wasn’t pity or emotion he was feeling. He only cared about that question, so violent it stopped him in his tracks.

  His thoughts were drowned out by a gunshot. He turned to his accomplice, who had just opened fire and he grimaced as if to say: what are we doing here with our guns in the middle of the road, while people are screaming and fleeing, and somebody’s called the police? So he started shooting too, on auto-pilot: one, two, three times. The man, at first hit only in the arm, now collapsed to the ground, dragging the boy with him. The boy started sobbing, but he was unharmed, considering that he was still clinging to his bullet-riddled dad and covered in his blood. The accomplice was moving in to finish the man off, when sirens started blaring close by. He turned back with a nasty grin. ‘He’s croaked.’

  He looked at the boy once more, before someone pulled him away.

  A few minutes later, when they’d driven some way from the shooting, the other man growled: ‘The fuck were you thinkin’, eh, Pino?’ That Neapolitan accent grated on him like nothing else in the world.

  He didn’t reply. He was thinking, like he would nearly every day for the next thirty years, of the small hand gripping the larger one, of the tie that bound them together. Something powerful, something absolute. Something he would start feeling himself only many years later, during his life’s second act, on the final downhill slope.

  Dedication. Loyalty.

  There: that’s what it was. Having someone you’d never let go of, someone you’d hold on to tightly. Someone who was special.

  Dedication. Loyalty.

  For thirty years, that memory had knocked him sideways each time he mentally reran the details. (He added nothing, omitted nothing: if he wanted, he’d have been the perfect witness.)

  Yet even though it kept coming back, the memory no longer troubled him.

  He’d found the answers he’d been looking for. He could finally make that phone call.

  1

  The Third Millennium

  1

  Cursing her age, Maggese’s widow struggled out of bed. Climbing out of that sarcophagus was even worse than getting into it. ‘I’ll get a new one tomorrow,’ she kept saying, ‘this is the last time I’m sleeping in that.’ The following night, of course, she’d be back, and every time she felt like she was jumping from an even greater height. Naturally, it was just an impression: the bed had been the same for the past thirty years. It was an old bed, dating back to the end of the 1900s, already too high to begin with. And then her poor late husband Aristide had put a mattress on it that was so tall it looked like a six-storey building. She’d tried to tell him that it was too high, and he, never domineering, had kindly replied that it was good for their health, and they’d come to love it over time. ‘Because it’s so far from the city smog?’

  Aristide was a big man, and he never had to jump to get off. He just let his feet touch the floor. But she was so small that when they got together, their families said they’d have to use a ladder in order to kiss. In any case, she’d never complained and she never changed the bed out of respect and nostalgia, not even after his passing.

  Some of her students said cruelly, ‘Yeah, he died because she tested him on the Pythagoras theorem, too.’ Maggese’s widow had taught maths all her life. She only retired when they wouldn’t let her stay any longer. Had it been up to her, she’d still be teaching equations and geometry – pointlessly, for the most part. She was a widow and a grandma four times over, thanks to her sons, who lived in Bologna.

  They didn’t live too far from her neighbourhood in Reggio Emilia, but she barely even saw them at Easter or Christmas. ‘Ah, young people these days,’ she thought, ‘they don’t observe the church festivals, they don’t even eat’ – and admittedly only her late husband had done justice to her impressive Christmas menu. Her sons, their wives, and her grandchildren just picked at the dishes – ‘They don’t respect their mothers and fathers.’ As a young teacher on the Po delta, she’d endured a hellish bus journey, crossing the whole of Emilia to get to her parents’ farm as soon as she could. A woman who often made the same journey once told her, ‘It’d be easier to reach America by steamer.’

  ‘Oh well,’ she cut herself off. ‘I should let it go, these are an old woman’s thoughts.’ She jumped off the bed, her landing as shaky as ever, and headed to the bathroom. On her way back, passing through what she liked to call the dinette, she shifted the curtain aside to look out, drawn by the light of a full moon. She nearly let out a surprised ‘Oh!’

  Under the large orange tree that dominated the garden of a semi identical to hers, on a swing he’d built for his daughter, was her neighbour from across the road. Maggese’s widow looked at the bright kitchen wall clock. It was almost too bright – she hadn’t worked out how to change the settings. Four-thirty a.m. What was he doing there at that hour, pushing himself gently on the swing? Had he and his wife had a domestic? Strange, they were such a kind and loving couple. All three of them very well mannered, the girl too: ‘Good morning Mrs Maggese,’ she learned to say, right after her first steps.

  She stared at him a little longer, trying to make out his expression, but the moonlight made his features hard to read. He didn’t look like an adulterer.

  ‘I hope it’s nothing too serious,’ the widow concluded. She headed back towards her bed and prepared herself yet again for the ascent.

  ‘I was baptised and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith.’

  Whenever he read the opening line of Tolstoy’s A Confession, he’d see himself a child again in a big church, holding on to a small ivory book. In shorts and long white socks, he frantically directed his thoughts towards the heavens, trying to be pure and close to God, as he’d been taught in Sunday School. Who knows why the only church he really remembered from his childhood was the baroque one in the centre of Genoa. He’d stand under the vault in a grey suit, his shorts barely grazing his knee, hands joined together, the bored uncle behind him playing godfather, and the small prayer book he kept happily turning in his hands because it was shiny and new. He’d always liked books, especially new ones.

  Like Tolstoy, he’d also been raised within a faith. It had all ended quickly, not long after his confirmation.

  He’d picked up that library book, compelled by an unsettling feeling he’d had ever since he’d grabbed the phone some time before, answering on the third ring. And so, for the four hours’ train journey ahead, two there, two back, he’d chosen the reading that had always been, for him, a precursor to change.

  It was a small edition, a youthful theft (back then they were called ‘proletarian expropriations’) from some occupied library: first edition, December 1979. The unsettling feeling got stronger when he read the date and linked it to the phone conversation and the period of his life it had unearthed. But he hadn’t been able to say no. He might have been good at omitting facts, but he couldn’t tell an out-and-out lie. If it had happened a day earlier, on Thursday, he could’ve used work as an excuse, blaming the impossibility of asking for leave at such short notice from the public library where he worked as a supervisor. A weird irony, really: he’d spent so many years removing books (illegally, he knew now, but not back then), that now in the second half of his life he looked after and defended them. But not today, not on a Saturday.

  Sara would be taking their daughter to Scouts and he’d planned a long lazy day of readi
ng. Then, at dinner, the phone call came and he found himself here, at four-thirty in the morning, swaying gently on the swing he’d built for his daughter under their wild orange tree.

  On the other side of the street, a light came on. Maggese’s widow pulled her curtain aside.

  Napoleone Canessa smiled and lit himself a cigarette. The light from the match flickered for a second in the darkness. He thought about the meeting, the reason the man wanted to see him in Milan just before eight. Why such a rush? as if time were slipping through his fingers. He sat there, thinking, uncertain, asking himself the same question that had been weighing on him for hours, and had kept him from enjoying a nice evening with his wife and daughter. Why me? Then he realised. Maybe I’m just a middleman, a means to get to someone else.

  The potential role of mediator worried him even more than the phone call, the journey ahead, the uncertainties raised by the voice from his past. If his suspicions turned out to be true, he would end up confronting the one person in the world he hoped never to see again, and hadn’t seen in thirty years: his brother.

  2

  Judge Federico Astroni became aware of the woman only when she was directly behind him. If she’d wanted to take him out – as he often imagined it going down: killed by a woman, a pasionaria, like Marat with Charlotte Conday in the consul’s bathroom – she could’ve done so at any moment. She was incredibly quiet and, of course, incredibly thorough. Though her world was so different to his she was always ahead of the game, a quality he shared and was glad to have found in her – and in his collaborators more generally – after searching long and hard.

  The Filipina help placed the small tray on the desk and said, ‘Signor, your coffee.’

  The magistrate smiled at that word. She never said signore, only signor. He’d once tried to convince her to finish the word, but no joy. Whenever she spoke to a guest, that signor would linger and the guests waited in vain for the addition of their name or surname: Signor… Rossi, Signor… Carlo. But no. Her signor would float in mid-air, and disappear along with her.