The Voltone

Saturday, 12:30 PM. Piazza Maggiore.

For the first time that day, Maresciallo Moretti had a hot espresso in his hand and nobody talking to him.

He had left Vanni at the hotel, taking statements from thirty-three relatives, which would take the rest of Vanni’s life. He had left Officer Zucchi at the station, filing a complaint about the Carabinieri car, which would take the rest of his. And he had walked, slowly, the long way round under the arches, to the one place in Bologna where he had always been able to think.

The Voltone del Podestà was not a room and not a street. It was a great stone crossing under the old palace at the corner of Piazza Maggiore, where two passages met under a high vaulted ceiling. It was always cool there, even in June. At each of its four corners, where the arches came down to the ground, there was a thick stone pillar, and every guidebook in the world told you the same thing about those pillars.

If you stood facing one corner and whispered into it, a person facing the opposite corner, fifteen metres away, across all the noise of the passage, would hear every word as if you were standing at their ear.

Moretti had known this his whole life. He had tested it with his wife on their second date, in 1990. He had whispered I think I’m going to marry you, and she had whispered back You haven’t paid for the pizza yet, and he had known, right then, that he would.

He stood facing the north-east corner, because it was in the shade, and drank his espresso.

It was a good espresso. It was a promise kept.

Behind him, across the passage, tourists came and went. A child ran from corner to corner, shouting into the stone and then running to hear it. Somewhere a guitar was playing. Moretti closed his eyes.

“Leo,” said a voice in the stone, right in front of his face. “You’re dripping.”

Moretti opened his eyes.

“I’ve been in a canal,” said a second voice, close and tired and wet. “You’d be dripping.”

The voices came out of the corner of the wall as clear as a radio. They were both whispering. Moretti did not turn around. He had learned over thirty-four years that when the world decided to tell you something, you stood very still and let it.

“Did you lose him?”

“He didn’t follow. He looked at the water and then he looked at his sandals.”

“His sandals?”

“He didn’t want to get them wet.”

“Thank God for vanity. Is it all right? Is it in there?”

“It’s in the bag. It’s fine. It’s warm. It hummed the whole way. When I climbed out by the old mill, a dog followed me for two streets.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I am keeping it down. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re whispering in a wall, like idiots.”

Moretti finished his espresso without tasting it. Canal. Bag. Warm. Hummed. He thought of a chandelier going slowly up, and a mustard-yellow suit going out the door, and a voice saying the situation has evolved.

“All right,” said the first voice, the one he now knew belonged to the suit. “Listen. The situation has—”

“Don’t.”

“—changed. Here is what we do. We forget the university until Monday. We forget the envelopes. We forget everything. We keep the object somewhere safe. On Monday we sell it to the physicists for a fortune. And tonight, Leo, we don’t go to Massimo at all.”

“We don’t pay him?”

“We don’t pay him. We don’t see him. We get on the last train to Rimini. We stay with your aunt. By the time Massimo notices we’re gone, we are rich men lying on the beach.”

“Marco.” A long, wet pause. “Massimo is Giulia Rossi’s godfather.”

“I know.”

“The object came from the Rossi wedding. We stole his goddaughter’s wedding present. And now you want to sell it and not pay him.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”

“How should I say it?”

“Semiotically.”

Moretti put his empty cup down, very gently, on the stone ledge at the foot of the pillar.

He knew who they were now. Marco Bellandi. The Norway mortadella business, three years ago. The report had crossed his desk. Fake artisan sausages, a Norwegian importer, a very angry letter from Oslo, and a butcher in the Quadrilatero who had politely refused to press charges because, he said, he preferred to settle things personally.

Massimo Grandi. Midnight. The Rossi gift. Rimini.

Moretti looked at the stone in front of him and saw, for a moment, the thing he had wanted for thirty-four years. Not the arrest. The story. A dinner table, and his wife across it asking, as she had asked every night since 1991, What happened at work today? and, for once, an answer that was not paperwork.

He leaned forward, until his mouth was almost touching the cold stone of the corner, and whispered.

“Don’t move. Carabinieri.”

There was total silence in the wall.

Then, from fifteen metres behind him, someone screamed.

Moretti turned round in time to see them go. The mustard suit went first, out of the Voltone and into the brightness of Piazza Maggiore. The tall one followed, soaked from the chest down, with a green cycling backpack held in both arms in front of him, like a man carrying a cake out of a fire.

And behind them, as they ran, things began to rise.

A pigeon rose off the stones, upside down, flapping in confusion. Three café chairs outside a bar lifted gently into the air and turned over, one after another, as the backpack passed them. A tourist’s hat went up. A child’s balloon, which had been going up already, went up faster. It was like watching the wake of a boat.

“Stop!” shouted Moretti, and he began to run, for the first time since about 2011.

He was not a fast runner. He had never been a fast runner. But the square was wide and full of people and the two men were zigzagging between them, and for a moment, halfway across the piazza, near the steps of the great unfinished church, he thought he might actually catch them.

Then a Vespa came out of Via Clavature at the speed of a thrown knife.

It was pale blue and very old and driven by a boy of about seventeen, with a helmet on the back of his head and a large insulated delivery box strapped behind him. He was not looking where he was going. He was looking at his phone, which was clipped to the handlebars, showing a map.

Moretti saw the boy. The boy saw Moretti. The Vespa did not see anybody.

The next thing Moretti knew, he was lying on his back on the warm stones of Piazza Maggiore, looking at the sky.

The sky was very blue. A pigeon crossed it upside down. Somewhere far away, a man in a yellow suit was still screaming.

“Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry!” The boy’s face appeared above him. “Are you all right? Sir? Are you alive?”

“Yes,” said Moretti.

“Oh thank God. I’m late. I’m so late. Sorry!” And the face was gone, and the engine whined away across the square.

Something was sitting on Moretti’s chest. It was warm, and it was wrapped in white paper, and it smelled wonderful.

He picked it up. It was a sandwich. A soft white roll, still hot from the oven, split open and stuffed with mortadella, sliced thin and folded over and over on itself, pink and shining, with the little white squares of fat in it like stars.

Moretti lay on the stones of Piazza Maggiore and ate it.

It was the best thing he had eaten in a year. Perhaps in five years. He ate the whole thing, slowly, looking at the sky, while tourists walked around him and a woman asked if she should call someone and he waved her away.

When he had finished, he wiped his fingers carefully on the paper, folded the paper into a square, put it in his pocket, and took out his radio.

“Vanni.”

“Maresciallo!” The boy’s voice crackled with excitement. “I’ve been investigating. I’ve made a breakthrough. It’s anarchists. But not ordinary anarchists. Maresciallo, I think we are dealing with gourmet anarchists.”

Moretti looked at the sky.

“Vanni,” he said, “listen to me carefully. This case is mine.”