Two crimes for the careless hero. The Buonvino by Walter Veltroni is back – Corriere.it

His condition, always suspended between love and death, suddenly seemed unbearable. He felt like crying, but he couldn’t. He had never been able to do it: as a child his parents considered crying an inadmissible weakness, then the police stations were certainly not the best place for tears, finally his women always and only expected from him safety and protection, not fragility. In short, the only time Commissioner Giovanni Buonvino could cry was when he was at home alone ».

Giovanni Buonvino, the character invented by Walter Veltroni, is a careless hero. Instead of in a restaurant in via Fratelli Bandiera, at the communion of the son of a boss, he sent his men to a room in via Fratelli Cairoli, at the confirmation of the prefect’s nephew. The mother-in-law had a heart attack, the child was in shock for months, and he was transferred to the Villa Borghese police station: not exactly the front line of crime-fighting; also because the police station of Villa Borghese does not exist, except in the imagination of the author. But since anything can happen in the books, Buonvino in the previous yellows solved a murder, unmasked two unfaithful colleagues, the Morrone twins, set himself against a deviant structure of policemen in the service of Freemasonry, made enemies of the ‘Ndrangheta. There may have been several hands to arm the killer who shot Veronica, also a policewoman, the woman that Buonvino loves and has just married.

In the fourth book of the series that Marsilio publishes today, Buonvino between love and death, Veronica was saved, she lives in a suspended time, is on the verge of shutting down or reawakening. Her Commissioner husband is divided between the care, which she lends with devotion, and the investigation, to find out who shot her. To complicate things, or to clarify them, another body is found in Villa Borghese.

The victim is Giorgio Caruso, a homeless man, son of Pietro Caruso, the questore of Rome in the terrible times of the German occupation. Caruso covered up for the Koch gang who tortured anti-fascists, he violated the extraterritoriality of the basilica of San Paolo to arrest resistants and Jews, he handed over to the Nazis the list of prisoners to be shot at the Fosse Ardeatine. He was shot at Forte Bravetta on 22 September 1944, at two in the afternoon. On the same day and at the same time, eighty years later, his son Giorgio was killed. In the same way: shot. An execution. But by whom? Why? Why was the body found in Villa Borghese, in front of the door of Raphael’s Casina? It is truly a coincidence that in the same place the commissioner Caruso had witnessed the shooting of a mysterious character, Alberto Coppola, fascist, swindler, black market trader, executed in a hurry four days before the entry of the Americans, probably to cover up a mysterious plot ?

Buonvino thus finds himself investigating two crimes. He must find out who tried to assassinate his wife, and who killed the son of commissioner Caruso. He is on the trail of a man with a strange scar under his left ear, which appears in various video fragments and in various photographs together with Buonvino and Veronica. And he reconstructs a story much further in time, linked to one of the most painful and at the same time grandiose eras in the history of our country, the Nazi occupation and the resistance. A time of heroism and meanness. For example, Caruso «defended himself against the accusation on the Fosse Ardeatine by saying that Kappler was pressing for the list, and that he went to the hotel with the powerful Undersecretary of the Interior Ministry Buffarini Guidi, who was asleep, to obtain her consent to provide the list to the Nazis. And he answered him, in pajamas: “What can I do? You have to give it to him, otherwise who knows what happens. Yes yes, give it to him”».

Veltroni builds a microcosm, that of the imaginary police station, and through that he returns a page of history. The police station is more of a family than a team of elite police officers: there are “the one who suddenly fell asleep, the one who couldn’t see, the one who was too fat, the one who was about to retire, and even those two boys who they loved each other but were no longer able to tell each other». Everyone is grappling with a 1944 trial and with a story that is too much bigger than them. The present finds roots in the past, characters from different eras meet, the irresistible professor Antonio Areddu and Italo Calvino’s father in trouble with an anarchist, Gigi Proietti and the rifle that killed Kennedy, the tragic end of Roberto – the ex of Veronica, according to the official version hit by a truck while he was about to unmask the infiltration of the Camorra at the top of the institutions, including the government – and the fascinating figure of Tatiana Schucht, Antonio Gramsci’s sister-in-law and liaison between the communist leader, the party and the family of origin.

Obviously everything will eventually find an explanation and an order, albeit provisional. Those who know the author will find him in an atmosphere that is always poised between fun and melancholy, the smile and awareness of the ineluctability of death. She laughs and cries. We touch the history of the twentieth century and find ourselves having a coffee on the edge of the Daini park, at Ivano’s kiosk: because that really exists.

The presentations in Milan and Rome

On March 7, Walter Veltroni will present his book in Milan, at 6.30 pm at the Feltrinelli in Piazza Piemonte with Cristiana Capotondi and Carlo Verdelli. Thursday 9 will be in Rome, at 6.30 pm, Ubik Spazio Sette bookstore, with Massimo Gramellini and Fiorenza Sarzanini (via dei Barbieri 7; free admission subject to availability, reservations [email protected]).