The Salati Case Read Free Page B

shelf?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘You’re open all morning?’
    ‘Until five tonight.’
    I dropped the phone in the cradle, stood up and pulled on my jacket. I walked the back way, along Viale Mentana and Viale Piacenza, coming at the library through the Parco Ducale. It was a small building, but quick and efficient. A girl, the one I had spoken to by the sound of her Roman accent, fetched the two
Gazzettas
published over the weekend and passed them to me in a pile the size of a child’s mattress.
    I took them to a desk and laid them out in front of me. I took the Saturday edition and opened up the paper.
    It was winter and the sports section was full of
calciomercato
: the transfer gossip surrounding the big teams. All the important clubs and names were in bold so that you could read all the likely deals in a few seconds.
    I turned over another page and saw a wall of faces staring back at me. These were photographs of the people who had died in the last few days.
La Gazzetta
must have been making a mint out of mourners. I knew how much each inch cost from when I had lost a friend a while back. The
necrologi
were money for old rope.
    Most of the photographs looked as if they were taken when the deceased were in middle age and they made the paper like a throwback to the 1970s. There was something about the faces, the thickness of the glasses and the length of the hair, which looked out of date. Alongside each photograph or name were expressions of mourning from relatives and friends.
    There was no mention of Salati. She had probably died too late on the Friday for anyone to publish a mourning notice on the Saturday. I took the Sunday paper and flicked through it to the pages of the dead. Almost a third of a page was dedicated to her. There were thirty or forty rectangular inches of sympathy from relatives and friends, each announcing their deep regret. Everywhere the name Silvia was written in bold like one of those footballers about to be transferred.
    There was a photograph of her, a black and white shot. She looked purposeful: a thin necklace around a tight jumper. A good-looking woman with a determined mouth.
    I read through the names of those who had publicised their sense of loss. They were just meaningless names to me but I would get copies. My work was all about methodology. I would cut out every mourning notice and arrange them in some kind of alphabetical order. Many of the mourners wrote only first names, so it wouldn’t be an authoritative index of her kith and kin, but it was the closest I could come up with for now.
    I walked to a side room where they kept the day’s papers and found the
Gazzetta
. I went to the
necrologi
again. There were more mourning notices expressing regret at Silvia’s death, fewer this time, but there were still a dozen or so.
    I scanned through them and immediately saw the name Riccardo. I read the sentence above it. ‘I am devastated by our loss. I will always carry you in my heart. Your son, Riccardo.’
    I looked at the words again. ‘Your son, Riccardo’, it said.
    My immediate reaction was the same as Umberto’s. Nobody comes back from the dead, I thought. That was make-believe. This read more like someone who wanted to cloud an inheritance.
    But it clouded my case as well. And if this was a phantom Riccardo, I would then be chasing two ghosts instead of one.
    I asked the girl to photocopy the Sunday and Monday necrologi. She looked at me and sighed quietly. ‘One euro and twenty please.’
    I passed her some coins that she dropped in a wooden drawer. She put the papers under the machine and a lime-green light moved across the paper.
    ‘The papers from the 1990s, are they back there as well?’
    ‘
La Gazzetta
?’ she said over her shoulder.
    ‘
La Gazzetta
, summer of 1995.’
    ‘It’s on film. Which months do you want?’
    ‘June, July, August.’
    She gave me the photocopies and then opened the front desk and went back into the stacks. She came back with three large