Bologna Boogie

Bologna, summer 1947. Commissioner Polo has just got off the train, coming from distant Granada. His mission: to investigate the disappearance of a compatriot, Guillermo Sola Bosch, a law professor who was staying at the Colegio de España. A jazz-loving Catholic who, according to some, may have simply gone on a spiritual retreat, and according to the police, is a murderer. Thus begins a detective search in which more corpses will appear -that of an individual nicknamed the Pole, that of an old widow...-, spies of both sides in the incipient Cold War, informers, monarchists and neo-fascists, conspiracies, connections Vatican and in the background the boogie woogie, the fashionable rhythm that, like so many things that fascinate in postwar reconstruction Italy, has come from the United States with the occupation troops. Nobody tells the whole truth. The investigator moves in a reality in which faithful and exemplary officials apply the principle that, in certain situations, the crime is an act of service to the State. Or, as Polo says, "the State consents to its servants acts that it would never allow if it did not consider them necessary for the preservation of the State".