Game for Five Page 2

  “The problem is,” he said as he tried to get the lighter out without his overcoat falling off the rack, “so many kids these days only enjoy themselves if what they do costs a lot. Not that there’s anything new about that, let’s be clear. It’s just another way to look cool, to show that you have money. Except that fashions change. Right now, luckily for me, it’s fashionable to pretend to know about wine. If only you saw how many kids come in after dinner, take the wine list and then call you over. ‘What I’d like is a . . . ’ and maybe they confuse the name of the producer with the name of the wine, or else they want an ’87 Chianti, which if they knew the least thing about it they’d know that an ’87 Chianti is no good for anything but lighter fuel, and then as if that wasn’t enough they eat cheese with honey. The hardest part is to agree with them without laughing.”

  “You should just tell them they don’t understand a damned thing,” Pilade cut in with his usual politeness, “and then set them straight on a few matters. That way they’ll learn little by little.”

  “Oh, yes, they’ll learn little by little, and then they’ll go somewhere else,” Aldo replied. “They don’t want to drink well and eat well, they just want to show off how cool they are for knowing about wine. Let them do what they like. I sell food and wine, I don’t give lectures.”

  One thing has to be recognized: whenever Aldo asserted that he sold food and wine without frills he was absolutely right. The Boccaccio offered an extensive cellar, with a particular leaning toward Piedmont, and exceptional cooking. Period. The service was good, if informal, and the décor was not especially elegant. Moreover, if anybody ever happened to express any disappointment with the food, this would somehow always reach the ears of the chef, Otello Brondi, known as Tavolone, who, although endowed with incomparable talent in the ancient culinary arts, had not been greatly blessed by the Muses in any other respect, and so the critic would often find him looming over the table, with his thirty-five cubic feet of belly and two thick forearms as hairy as a bear’s, asking, “What do you mean, you don’t like it?” in a not exactly accommodating tone.

  Aldo lit his cigarette. “Personally,” he went on, “I hate places where if you order a wine not perfectly suited to what you’ve chosen to eat, or if you try to bend the rules of Gastronomy with a capital g, they treat you as if you’re some kind of hick and say, ‘No, no, no, why do you want to spoil that saddle of rabbit off the bone with a green bean and cashew nut flan? If only you’d listen to me . . . ’ or even worse. I know places where there’s no middle way, either you’re a connoisseur and then the owner loves you and always gives you a star entrance, or you’re a piece of shit who doesn’t know a damned thing about wines and then they make it pretty clear to you that someone like you should stay at home and not come around there breaking balls, because there are people waiting. They don’t mind your money, they just can’t stand you.”

  This speech was greeted with complete silence.

  Wednesday was never a very busy day, plus there was a biting wind outside, which every now and again blew the lids off the trash cans and rubbed the branches together and howled under the double-glazed door. Only the noise gave any idea of how cold it must be out there.

  Massimo had had enough of standing behind the counter pretending to be a barman, so he came out through the flap and made a timid attempt to get rid of the old-timers—they were nice guys, but they did get on your nerves after a while—so that he could close up and go home.

  “It must be more fun anyway, going to the disco than playing cards. Didn’t you have a game tonight?” he said, craftily putting the night in the past tense, hoping in this way to make it clear that he was about to close.

  “Hey, you’re right, we still have time,” Ampelio said.

  “But there are five of us,” Massimo said, cursing himself inwardly. “You’re always forgetting I stay open after midnight so you can play cards, but I don’t think games for five people have been invented yet.”

  “You may have a degree, Massimo, but you really are ignorant. Haven’t you ever played a game of briscola for five?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve never played a game of briscola for five? Ampelio, what did you teach your grandson when he was little?”

  “To ask his grandmother three times for chocolate and give half of it to him when they had him on rations because of his diabetes.”

  “What an idiot, your grandpa. Listen, how about giving it a go? I’m sure you’ll like it. I’ve never known anyone who doesn’t enjoy briscola for five.”

  Massimo thought it over. It was bitterly cold outside and the idea of going out there wasn’t especially inviting.

  That’ll teach me to be clever, he thought. But the idea of avoiding the cold for a while longer wasn’t a bad one.

  He went to get his cigarettes. Outside, the wind was making the shutters whistle, and the street lamps were swaying, lighting the street only in flashes that made it look truly ghostly. He made himself a coffee without asking the others if they wanted any, went to the table, sat down, and stretched his legs. Then he put his elbows on the arms of the chair, lit a cigarette, and said, “Go ahead.”

  The four old-timers took their chairs and made themselves comfortable at the table without the usual round of cursing. In fact, their whole attitude had changed to a mixture of satisfaction and concentration, as if they were the repositories of a great secret and were pleased to have found someone who could appreciate it.

  Pants were straightened, sleeves rolled up, and cigarettes placed religiously on the table, as if to underline to themselves that they were really going to need them. The typical behavior of those savoring something in advance.

  Even Massimo’s mood had changed. As he watched the old-timers getting ready he had started to feel something. It was like when you’re a little kid and the older children ask you to play with them, of their own accord, without their mothers forcing them to do so. You’re being allowed to take part in a ritual, whatever dumb thing you get up to you have a lot of fun, and you end up with a day to remember. For a fraction of a second, he wondered if thinking that playing cards with four old geezers was a lot of fun mightn’t be a symptom of something strange about him, but he immediately dismissed the thought.

  Can I at least decide what I like? he thought, and focused his attention on the High Priest who was about to open the gates of the Temple to him.

  “So,” said Pilade, who was acting as master of ceremonies, “this is how it works: the cards are dealt, all at the same time, eight cards per player. Then you do the auction. Each person in turn declares how many points he thinks he can win on the basis of the cards he’s holding. For example, the auction starts at sixty, the first person says ‘I win with sixty-one,’ the second says, ‘I win with sixty-three,’ and so on, until one player fixes a value so high that the others give up. Whoever wins has the right to choose the briscola, like this: let’s say you have an ace and a three of a particular suit, do you follow me?”

  “Yes, yes, I follow you.”

  “Then you should call the king of that suit. You say ‘king of whatever’ and that way you establish two things. One, that the briscola is that suit. Two, that your partner for that hand is whoever has the king of that suit. The other three are against. To win you both have to score the points you declared at the beginning. It’s good to win the auction because that way you get to choose the briscola, but you have to play to win while the others play to make you lose. Plus, you’re two against three.”

  “But once the teams have been formed, how do you know when it’s your turn?”

  “You just go around the table. The nice thing about the game is that you don’t know who’s playing with you. As soon as you’ve said the card, all four of you start giving each other dirty looks, and accusing each other of being the intruder, and saying they don’t have any cards of that particular suit. One of them is lying. But until that card turns up you have no idea how the game is going, neither you nor your opponents. Only the player who has the king knows the whole situation, and obviously he’ll do everything he can not to be found out, he may even lose lots of points to hold off being discovered as long as possible. Did you get all that?”

  “Deal the cards, and let’s give it a go.”

  He had gotten home at four in the morning, after dumping Grandpa Ampelio on the couch, because Grandma Tilde went to bed at eleven and bolted the door of the bedroom and whoever was out stayed out.

  He had really enjoyed himself. And ever since that night, whenever the customers allowed it, he’d played briscola for five and had a whole lot of fun.

  TWO

  About an hour and a half had passed and the game was over. Pilade had won, Massimo and Aldo had put up a good fight, and Ampelio and Rimediotti had been a disaster. As Massimo, once again forced to be a barman, gathered the glasses, the four old youngsters laboriously shifted their chairs in the direction of the sidewalk. Having transformed the vicious circle into a parliamentary amphitheater, they were now ready for what, in Pineta, was the national sport.

  Sticking your nose in other people’s business.

  “So, did you see? There’s even been a murder now.”

  “I know. Just imagine! A poor girl murdered in her own home! It’s already dangerous enough on the streets with all these Albanians around, now they kill you in your own home.”

  “Gino, I’m sorry but, firstly, can you tell me what the Albanians have to do with it, and secondly, how do you know she was killed in her own home?”

  “She was wearing slippers, fur slippers. Nobody walks about outside in fur slippers apart from crazy old Siria. That means she was killed in her own home.”

  “Poor thing . . . ”

  Massimo, who was emptying the overflowing ashtray in the bucket, couldn’t stop himself from asking, “But where do the Albanians fit in?”

  Gino looked up at him, gave an upward jerk of his chin (an age-old gesture, intended to reinforce one’s own opinions almost as if invoking divine knowledge for oneself: it is indispensable in barroom arguments, especially when dealing with subjects about which there might be a number of different viewpoints, such as the performance of a center-forward, a woman’s familiarity with oral-genital practices, and so on) and said, “Why, don’t you agree? Do you think it’s right for all these people to come here, without papers so you don’t even know who they are, and I’m supposed to believe they’re all decent people? They’re all crooks! They deal drugs, they steal, they think they’re God knows who . . . ”

  “What I meant,” Massimo continued wickedly, “was where do they fit in this time? Can you explain to me why every time something happens you bring up the Albanians, even when that woman had her bag snatched outside the Lomi baths?”

  Gino flushed and for a moment lost the thread of what he was saying. Three weeks earlier, a woman bather had been robbed of her bag outside that particular bathing establishment, and the old man had held forth for two days about the Albanian peril, prophesying every kind of misfortune and demanding that the government take action. It had gone on until the evening of the third day, when it emerged that the thief was the grandson of one of his neighbors.

  ***

  Taking advantage of the moment, Pilade now joined in the debate. “How do you know about the slippers?”

  “Massimo was telling us before you got here,” Gino said somewhat stiffly. “He was the one who found the poor girl.”

  “So now you’ve dropped the Albanians and you suspect me?”

  “You found her, did you?”

  “Not exactly, a guy who was near the trash can found her. When he found her he tried to call the police, but his cell phone was flat. As this bar was the only place open at 5:15 he came here to call the police, only he was dead drunk, so the switchboard operator thought it was a joke and hung up. I went with him to see where the body was, and then I called the police. They arrived five minutes later, they identified the girl within ten minutes, and since they’d already called the doctor they all looked a bit . . . ”

  Massimo broke off for a moment, passed the cloth over the table, and shook it over the bucket. He didn’t have to make an effort to remember that morning: he recalled everything very distinctly.

  He liked Dr. Carli, all things considered, and when he arrived at the parking lot by the pine wood Massimo was curious to see how he would react to seeing someone he knew in the trash can. He did know her, even if only by sight, because she was the daughter of a good friend of his.

  The doctor had lived up to his reputation of being a seraphic person: he had immediately recognized the girl, and had only stood there for a moment, looking at the body, before shaking his head dubiously.

  He hadn’t seemed upset: he may already have suspected something when he arrived. Nobody had had the presence of mind to look him in the eyes after he got out of the car and greeted the police officers. Only after examining the body, with a delicacy that was unusual in him, had he let himself go a little.

  “You know what the problem is?”

  Massimo said nothing, continuing to look the doctor in the eyes—eyes that now betrayed a touch of anxiety. It was clear that he had no desire to go home: most likely, he preferred the role of the efficient doctor to that of the grief-stricken friend.

  “The problem is that I have to tell Arianna.”

  Precisely, Massimo thought.

  “And you don’t want to?” he asked. It was a stupid question, but he couldn’t just stand there and say nothing while the doctor wiped his glasses for what must have been the fiftieth time. The doctor was in his early fifties, very tall, about six and a half feet, with an easy-going face and graying hair, and looked exactly what he was: a doctor at a crime scene. He had a vague resemblance to the singer Francesco Guccini, and seemed as much at ease in that parking lot as Francesco did on stage. He had dressed in great haste as usual: in addition, he had arrived home late from a reception and couldn’t have gotten much sleep.

  “No, but if I don’t tell her . . . Poor thing. Poor things, both of them.”

  He seemed more concerned about the mother than the daughter. That was only natural: the mother was an old friend of his, who always spent at least a couple of weeks in Pineta every year. He probably hadn’t seen the daughter much, just enough to recognize her. Whenever they went out together, the children (Arianna’s daughter, Dr. Carli’s son, and other young people from the area) went out separately.

  Massimo was released from his predicament by the stentorian voice of Inspector Fusco, about whom he had decidedly mixed feelings.

  He had talked about him once with Dr. Carli, as it happened, and they had found themselves in agreement that it wasn’t humanly possible to find anything in Inspector Fusco (or Dr. Fusco as he liked to be called, being a graduate) that inspired the slightest sympathy. After the two men had concluded that Vinicio Fusco was prickly, arrogant, pig-headed, conceited and vain, the doctor had passed judgment:

  “The man is like a book of jokes about Calabrians.”

  And whenever Massimo, who had entirely approved of this conclusion, thought about Fusco he couldn’t help wondering if, thanks to rubbing shoulders with Rimediotti, he wasn’t becoming a bit of a racist. He consoled himself with the thought that when he was at university in Pisa, a Sicilian friend of his, who could be accused of everything except making racial distinctions, had in a drunken moment drawn up “a profile of the perfect idiot”: and among various other basic characteristics that Massimo couldn’t remember, this person had to be an engineer, a supporter of Juventus, and a Calabrian.

  Anyway, Inspector—or Dr.—Fusco had arrived just at the right moment. In a good mood, because he loved his work and liked doing it in front of an audience, he had come up behind the two of them, taking them by surprise, and boomed cheerfully, “So, Walter, tell me everything: age, sex, time, cause, any other business.”

  The doctor looked down at the tips of his shoes, put his hands together behind his back, and said, “Age nineteen, sex female, as if you needed a doctor to tell you that, time of death between two and five hours ago, no more, no less. Cause of death, strangulation. Any other business, the world is full of assholes.”

  Fusco took this full on. He had almost certainly forgotten that Carli knew her. He stood there for a moment, with his jaw jutting forward and his hands on his hips, then he resolved to get on with things to cancel out the fact that he’d made a fool of himself. He immediately began by screaming at the photographers that he wanted the prints before the morning was over, then focused his attention on a dark green Clio parked nearby, with its right-side wheels stuck in the mud.

  “What about that?”

  He went to the car, looked through the window, and assumed the expression of someone who understands everything. Then he pointed at one of the officers and beckoned him to approach.

  Massimo watched in amusement as the officer, a young man as tall as a beanpole, strode up to the diminutive Fusco and stood to attention to receive his orders.

  “At ease, Pardini,” Fusco said, addressing the officer’s chest. “That’s the car belonging to the young man who found the body. The keys are still on the dashboard. Move it away from here, it’s getting on my nerves.”

  “Excuse me, Inspector,” the young man in question intervened. He had been waiting to be questioned, and now felt as if he was the center of attention.

  Fusco raised his hand to silence him. “It’s all right, son, while your car’s being moved we can have a little chat. What time was it that you discovered the body?”

  “There’s something I have to tell you first. That—”

  Fusco gave the young man a truculent look, one he had probably rehearsed for minutes on end, and stood with his hands on his hips. “Son, first you need to answer my questions. I know you have a hangover, so I’ll repeat it slowly and maybe you’ll understand. What time was it that you discovered the body?”