Free Poisonville by Massimo Carlotto Page B

chance.” The Contessa had been impeccable in her introductory speech. She had dominated that audience of criminals and convicts with a style worthy of a sadomaso dominatrix. Then she had given the floor to her son, who had spent fifteen embarrassing minutes struggling to deliver a short speech that he had committed to memory along with a fistful of sedatives. It was like watching a pathetic Christmas ritual, with Filippo playing the part of the timid and intimidated child reciting a saccharine little poem, continuously seeking his mother’s approval, as she fed him word after word, her lips moving in silent unison.
    That woman was a remarkable piece of work: one minute she was Margaret Thatcher addressing the House of Lords, a minute later she was a worried mother, looking down at her badly brought-up son with a look of beautiful concern.
    As Beggiolin made his way through the spacious drawing rooms of the Villa Selvaggia, he had no illusions. He was expecting the tigress to greet him by clamping her fangs down hard, not certainly by licking the back of his hand.
    He obediently trailed along behind the butler, doing his best not to let the bloody scenes of hunting depicted on the villa’s walls unnerve him excessively. His legs were beginning to shake. He hoped he wouldn’t have to remain standing during the interview.
    Luckily, it only lasted five minutes. And it turned out fine. Firing a shotgun blast into the crowd; that was his specialty. That was basically what the Contessa had said to him. Of course, she hadn’t used those exact words. What she had really said was: “The important thing is to take a clear stand. Unsettling things are happening in town. Elderly women have been attacked in their homes over the past few months, and the police are no closer to catching the culprit than they were before. Why don’t you talk about that? Perhaps poor Giovanna ran afoul of these same cowards. It’s only a hypothesis, of course. Other ideas can be developed. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job. I leave the details to you. One last thing: the young Francesco Visentin will soon be cleared of suspicion, and it strikes me that, when the time is right, he deserves to have his reputation fully and amply rehabilitated, don’t you agree?”
    He sure did think so. The Contessa had given him the scent, and he had charged off like a pack of bloodhounds in full bay. The following morning he was in the office early, and he worked until the middle of the afternoon to put together a blue-ribbon report announced by teasers throughout the broadcast day.
    It was 8 P.M. , and the prime-time television news was coming on. His piece was the opening report, and in the town tavern, the Osteria Dalla Mora, the fans were cheering as if at a championship soccer game.
    For Beggiolin, it was like attending the premiere of a film he had directed.
    As the special report on the home invasion gang was being broadcast, he watched the audience react in unison just as originally intended. Their anger was being goaded to a fury, channeled in precisely the direction desired by the Contessa. “Outsiders,” “people that aren’t from around here,” blacks, Albanians, and Moroccans. They were obviously the guilty parties, they were the ones that the police and the Carabinieri simply refused to go after.
    Beggiolin knew his audience, and he knew it well. Small businessmen who had become arrogant with the rivers of cash they had made in the eighties and nineties, and who were now wetting their pants at the prospect of being swept away by their hungry and ambitious Chinese rivals. It’s always these fucking Chinese. First they were Communists, now they’re capitalists, and all the while the factories are laying off workers, closing down, moving out of the region or out of the country. Craftsmen, businessmen, restaurateurs with increasingly empty wallets. A vast populace that hadn’t appreciated their good luck while they had it, who had felt