The address which Ciavarella had scribbled onto the hotline call report resulted as a four-storey apartment building along one of the inland sidestreets leading from the Pozetta stretch of the coast road. On the corner a hundred metres or so further down was the tobacconist's at which it was still believed Lee Bracewell had tried to procure a packet of Marlboro lights.
Such condominiums are the typical abode of the Italian elderly. Whilst the residence would perhaps have seemed the height of modern luxury back in the boom years of the fifties when it was built - back when its occupants were twenty-something newlyweds drunk on post-war optimism - it now seemed rather drab and featureless. Perhaps it was just the oncoming dark, but even the rose bushes in the communal front garden seemed somehow moribund.
It was the fifth of the intercom buttons lining the rusted left flank of the entrance gate which bore the name Quaranta. Quaranta - Cassano, to be precise; Italian wives do not traditionally take on their husbands' surnames. Updating the now singular nature of the name tag would be an unimaginably gutwrenching gesture, I could only suppose, and so the old man had preferred to leave it.
Ciavarella extended an index finger.
Twice.
Three times.
"Maybe the old man is not only blind but deaf also," Nuzzo muttered. Then, glaring: "Are we going to stand here all the night Ciavarella, or do you think maybe we can try a neighbour?"
The index finger moved obediantly upwards to the fourth button. This time, only one press sufficed.
"Pronto?", came a tinny, female voice. Although a little frail-sounding, it was clear from her tone that she was unimpressed at having been dragged away from whichever TV programme it was which was blaring away in the backgound.
His mouth as close as possible to the grill, his enunciation loud and laboured - almost to the point of patronising - Ciavarella explained who he was, who he was with and who we wished to speak to. The old woman's reply was both immediate and forthright, almost as if she wished it to be known that not only was she sound of mind and hearing but that she did not suffer fools easily.
"Then you have a problem, young man. Signor Quaranta, he passed over to our Lord not a month ago."
*
There still remained half an hour or so before dusk blackened to night and we would be able to conduct our little experiment. In the meantime Ciavarella was sent up to talk to the venerable old lady in person, see what he could find out. His glance back as he stepped through the buzzed-open gate was a portrait of apprehension.
Nuzzo meanwhile steered me towards the nearest bar - a noisy, brightly-lit den of masculinity. The sight of a carabinieri uniform provoked a moment of silence, playing cards to pause mid-slap, then things exploded back to their previous raucousness. Apart from a couple of twenty-somethings watching the World Cup on the tiny screen over in the corner, the comandante and I were the youngest of the assembled clientele by several decades.
My earlier wine haze had by this time worn off, a newfound sobriety further compounded by the double espresso Nuzzo forced down my neck. The late-night consumption of caffiene is a southern Italian tradition, in much the same way as lager and kebab is an English one.
After tipping back his own coffee Nuzzo shuffled off to chat to some of the assembled old timers, leaving me to only half-interestedly watch the game - a torbid, uneventful affair in the stifling Brazilian heat. In truth, it wasn't much better there in the bar; the ceiling fan was of the squeaky, slow-turning variety, the sort capable only of pushing the warm air back down at you. Hand flicking away the sweat from my brow, my thoughts drifted inexorably towards the realm of numbers, balances, bottom lines. Towards considerations of bottling costs, chemicals, the looming ever-present shadow of the tax man... No matter which way I twisted things, square pegs just don't fit into round holes.
"Ciavarella was right," Nuzzo reported, easing himself back onto the stool beside me. I was glad he was back; glad of the distraction. "Quaranta lied abouth'is age. He was ninety-one, not eighty-eight." There was an incredulous shake of the head. "Why would someone lie about that? What difference does it make?"
I was surprised to find myelf grinning. "Maybe he thought no-one would believe a man in his nineties. Better to pretend to still be a young stud of eighty-something."
The commander glanced out of the window, the night now fully descended. "Where the hell is Ciavarella?" Then, turning back to me: "Ninety-one!" Repeating it, as if I hadn't quite yet grasped the concept: "The man was ninety-one!" He shook his head once more. "Do you think you ever will be so old ispettore?"
"Hope not," I replied simply.
I was surprised by the sad nod of agreement. "No, neither I."
It was at that moment that Ciavarella finally reappeared. "I thought I would never would escape," he gasped, joining us at the bar. "First there was the tap in the kitchen that dripped. She showed me where her husband had kept his spanners. Then - oh santo Cristo - after that she took out the family photograph album..."
He'd managed to glean a little information on Rocco Quaranta however. There was a daughter up in Milan, a smattering of grandkids and great-grandkids, but they had only ever visited once a year during the summer. He'd died in his sleep; quite ironic really for an insomniac. The old lady had been aware of his sleeplessness for some time, more or less since his wife Carmela had passed away a couple of years earlier. She'd often heard the front door opening and closing across the landing at all hours of the night. He'd had a dog, a Jack Russell called Birillo. In dog years would have been as old as his owner. Quaranta took it for walks to try to clear his head. Then a few weeks ago she realised she hadn't seen or heard him for several days. It got to the point she thought it best to call the condiminium administrator... The poor sod had been lying there for five or six days, according to the coroner.
The best part of a week, yes...
Birillo had been a goner too, needless to say.
*
The commander's words were punctuated by the kind of sharp, wheezing pant which might be expected of someone who had just reached the summit of Everest rather than the short, gentle incline of the Pozzetta headland.
"All this... for a witness that... not only is old and blind... but dead also."
As the beach reeled into view beneath us, he paused to thrust palms into knees, exhale long and loud. Five, six times. Though no Olympian myself, and though my current lifestyle was hardly advisable, it was clear that the guy needed to do something. Start taking early morning constitutionals along the beach. Sign up for the caserma five-a-side league. Cut out all those plates of doughnuts he had sent up to his office. The shape he was in, his wish of not seeing ninety-one was almost certain. He would have to count his blessings if he even made it to seventy.
At doddering pace, I estimated the walk to be roughly fifteen minutes from the old man's home - the final five of these consisting of rocky ascent. It wasn't quite as treacherous as I had imagined at night however: the lights of the coast road were only fifty metres to our left - close enough to pick out sharp edges, pool minor drops in warning blackness. The moonlight played a contributary role too of course. That night it was a crescent but unfettered by cloud. The early morning of Monday August 27th, 2013, the sky had been similarly cloudless, the moon three-quarters full; Ciavarella had already checked on his smartphone.
A ninety-one year old would have to be sprightly, without question, of a certain level of courage, but it was by no means inconceivable that Quaranta had been able to labour his way up there that fine, late-summer night. The most recent photographs which in the following days would emerge showed a tall and surprisingly sturdy looking figure; though jowls hung and muscle tone had inevitably withered, I doubted there were many around of his age in better shape. In all likelihood, the headland had been a common nocturnal destination of his. Even in the darkness, the view was spectacular.
To our right, the breakers floated ghoul-like to the shore, their only earthly quality that of their eventual crash. To the left, the lights of the coast road curved off into the distance like a string of fairies slung around a Christmas tree. Beyond the stark, ragged silhouette of the opposite headland, meanwhile, the neon haze of Punto San Giacomo emmitted a heavens-bound violet haze.
"I can't see him," muttered Nuzzo, finally having caught his breath.
After dropping us off at the foot of the headland in the patrol car, Ciavarella had continued on to the holiday home. Better that way, we'd decided. Better that mine and Nuzzo's older, not-quite-so-sharp eyes did the viewing.
The beach lay stretched out beneath us, an ever tapering stripe blue-grey in the moonlight. Further illumination was added at various points by the overspilling back garden lights of the houses which lined the coast road; the thin column of smoke just visible from one of the nearest of these suggested someone was having a barbeque. Located as it was much further down, Signor Caputo's property was difficult to pinpoint however.
The truth was, I couldn't see Ciavarella either...
Beside me, the commander's mobile phone burst into life with some annoying, tinny ringtone. He extracted the small rectangle of light from his pocket, the uppermost part of his ear lent a blue-tinged translucency as he raised it upwards.
"Mamma.... Si, I'm coming home.... Soon, just some minutes, that's all... You have remembered to take your medicine?... Ok, Ok... I have to go now mamma. Ciao."
His mum? Was I to understand the man lived with his mother?
There was little time to reflect on this however. Phone still in hands, he pressed a finger awkwardly to keys, raised it to ear once more.
"Ciavarella where in the name of the Madonna are you?" The illuminated ear made a nodding motion, the whole face then turning in my direction. "'He says he is there, at the back garden gate." Despite the darkness, it wasn't difficult to read the commander's expression: Told you so.
"Tell him to shine his torch," I urged.
There was a sigh, that of one man humouring another despite being of the firm opinion that all further efforts were futile.
"The ispettore*, he says you must shine your torch."
A moment or two later there was a definite pinprick of light, its provenance in the section of beach caught in the half shadow of the opposite headland.
"The torch I see" Nuzzo observed. "But that good-for-nothing Ciavarella, no."
"Maybe if he took a couple of steps towards us," I suggested.
The instruction was dutifully if unenthusiastically relayed; a moment later, the light disappeared. I was surprised by the tension of those next few seconds: signor Quaranta's testimony represented the last hope of truly understanding the dynamics of that tragic night. If mine and Nuzzo's four combined eyes - eyes which were thirty years younger than Quaranta's - were unable to pick out a figure we knew for a fact was down there somewhere, then the commander's continued skepticism could be more than justified.
My brow was thrust all the way down, eyes squinting, never more concentrated... And yes - there in the distance, at point in which half shadow bordered full moonlight, emerged the antlike yet perfectly distinct form of appuntato Ciavarella.
*
Nuzzo was a silent figure as the three of us drove back towards town. I gazed at the low, wide shoulder diagonally across from me in the passenger seat, the passing lights rolling across it. Tried to guess his thoughts.
Certainly, it would now require an obstinacy bordering on the irresponsible to deny that the figures the old man had seen had been real. This accepted, the next logical question an investigator had to ask themselves was the following: what were the chances that two of three figures had been the Bracewell brothers? Given the vagueness of Quaranta's time estimate, given the proximity to the holiday home, wasn't it at least a possibility?
After dropping the comandante off home - a typical streetfront apartment block not far from the caserma - Ciavarella's final duty that night was to run me back to the vineyard. As we wound our way through the congested neon frenzy of the town centre, I recalled the scene a little earlier in Nuzzo's office.
"So, you're an Abruzzo boy then..." It was to prove the entrance to an interesting and informative conversation.
Carabinieri officers, I learnt, are obliged to serve their first eight years in a different region before they can apply for a transfer home. "I was lucky," Ciavarella told me. "For me it is only four hours. It's not so easy for a Sicilian that finds hmself in the Alps to visit his family and friends."
I remembered the photograph on Nuzzo's desk, my sensation that the cityscape in the background wasn't a local one.
"Mantova," I was soon informed; this somewhere up past Bologna, if my geography was right. "'He took his wife with him. She was a local girl they say. Francavilla Fontana I think."
"He's divorced then," I murmured, this seeming the only logical conclusion to Ciavarella's use of the past tense and the fact, as I now knew, that he lived with his mother.
Once through town, the coast road is windy and poorly lit. It was only upon rounding the next curve, easing his foot slightly on the accelerator, that the young officer felt confident enough to glance across at me.
"She died, ispettore. A car accident they say."
Even in the near-midnight darkness, the swallowed jerk of his Adam's apple was detectable.
"The baby also."
*
Sleep would once more prove elusive that night. The earlier coffee didn't help of course, but really, this was only a minor part of it. There were those damn numbers again, a pernicious swirl of them rotorblading through my mind. Big numbers, smaller numbers, never the quite the right way round.
At some point they dissolved away, were replaced by Diane's mysterious, half drunken smile. I allowed the image to remain a little while. Allowed myself to float. Drift out over gently rolling waves.
Then - suddenly, somehow - my mind's eye had brought Rocco Quaranta into sharp focus. He was standing on the headland, a barely distinguishable sillhouette dwarfed by the Mediterranean night. Far off in the distance, he catches sight of two tiny shadows... No, three. Si, right there - a third one, just a little behind...
How long had he watched them, I wondered? And had the figures been getting nearer or ever further away? It was a detail missing from Ciavarella's report; in his urgency to free the line, he hadn't thought to ask.
At some point the old man had turned around, probably thought little of it. Dragged himself off back home. Weary - so very, intolerably weary. Pulled along by Birillo's canine exuberance.
Birillo, yes... Those last few days, how much had he understood about what was happening? There must have come a time when he lost the energy to bark. A time when he didn't even have the breath to whimper. Was it starvation or else thirst which did for him first?
And still the questions came - sharp and rhythmic like darts flicking from a player's hand. Had Quaranta's daughter tried to call him? Assumed he'd just gone out somewhere - the supermarket, a walk with Birillo, the bar for a game of cards and a bit of company. Forgotten to call back, allowed the days to pass. How had she felt when the call had finally come? Christ, how the hell must she have felt?
But what about me? I doubted I'd have won any prizes as a son. Those last few years before mum died, had I been round to see them enough? Though only a couple of miles away, Sunday lunches all together had been a rare occurence - two or three times a year at most. I was at an important point in a big case, I'd tell them. The critical phase. And mum would purr over the phone that of course work came first. By that meaning my work; I doubt she'd have accepted my constant rejections with such eveness if my job had been to organise warehouse shelves or shuffle papers in some public office. My job, my rank... To so many people and in so many ways I'd hidden behind it. Used it to build a wall.
And dad? After mum had gone, I could count on the fingers on one hand the number of times I'd been round to see him. For all our generational differences - for all the scorn with which he'd seemed to hold my chosen profession and which I in turn had had for his views on immigrants, men helping out with the washing up and any form of music post Elvis Presley - he was, after all, my dad. The man was my father. And after mum went he'd been alone in the same way that Rocco Quaranta had been alone. But no, I realised, tossing and turning once more on the sweat-soaked pillow - that wasn't quite right. He'd been alone like Birillo the Jack Russell had been those final, unimaginable days...
Fathers. We were all fathers. My dad and I. Lee and Sean Bracewell. Quaranta, Duggan, Nuzzo...
Yes, the comandante too.
That young mother and baby forever frozen inside silver frame: this was the final image which slipped itself between my eyes and closed lids before sleep swept me off into its merciful embrace.