He started with Vinnie.
“What was your relationship with Biagio and Grazia? Did you spend a lot of time together, did you socialize, did you have friends in common?”
Vinnie shrugged.
“No, not really. Biagio was a pretty reserved kind of guy, he kept to himself. He never went out, he stayed at the university where he either studied or wrote, or at least, we never saw him doing anything else. Grazia, on the other hand, went out a lot. I couldn’t say what she got up to. Buongiorno and buonasera, in other words, was all we said to each other. And the only mutual friend we had was Renato.”
Lojacono turned to look at Forgione, who was gradually regaining his natural color, even if from time to time he’d shoot glances at the door as if he expected to see his colleague with the shattered skull come walking into the apartment. The young man didn’t wait to be asked.
“The reason we know each other is because this apartment, by which I mean both units, belongs to me. That is, to my family. To my father, to be exact. And I was in charge of finding tenants among the students from out of town.”
Vinnie gave an ironic little laugh.
“Tenants, if you want to call them that. Paco and I pay rent, but I don’t think Biagio and Grazia did. Am I right?”
Renato blushed.
“Biagio and I had been studying together since we first entered the university. At first he was staying at a boarding house with a bunch of other people, we’d see each other at my house, then the other apartment here became available, and I offered it to him, among other things because his sister wanted to come and see him, and . . . ”
Paco commented: “And taking her in cost him dearly, as you can see.”
His words astonished everyone. Up till then, after all, the young man dressed in black hadn’t had much to say, and now he prompted a shrill exclamation from Vinnie.
“Paco! What are you talking about, have you lost your mind?”
Lojacono didn’t want to scare the young man, but then he had no intention of dropping the matter, either.
“How did you happen to come to that conclusion?” he asked matter-of-factly.
Paco turned to look at his tunic-wearing friend; he was probably already regretting what he’d said, but he couldn’t retract it, at this point. He replied in a low voice.
“Don’t you see the way things worked in there? Nobody had it in for poor Biagio, that’s for sure. The argument was about her, yesterday. And that guy, her boyfriend . . . one time, downstairs by the street door, we caught the two of them smacking each other, for real. Don’t tell me that the thought hasn’t occurred to you, too: Biagio would still be alive, if his sister had just stayed home in her shithole town.”
Renato and Vinnie had no particular reaction, they just limited themselves to dropping their eyes. Lojacono let a few seconds go by, before, more or less, asking everyone: “So who is the girl’s boyfriend? Does anyone know his name?”
Slowly, Renato looked up.
“Biagio never talked much about him. For that matter, he never talked much about his family, either. I think his name was Nick, I know that he wants to become a singer. To make ends meet he works as a waiter in a pub, I don’t know which pub though. Every once in a while I know that he performs there.”
Vinnie added to that information, shooting grim glances from time to time at his partner, who was now looking out the window.
“We caught a glimpse of him a couple of times, including the time that Paco remembers so well. An odd guy, with a huge head of rasta dreadlocks. Cute, though. Nice piece of work.”
He’d uttered the last sentence while staring at Paco, as if spitting the words at him. Paco didn’t even seem to notice.
Alex, clutching her phone, had left the building in search of better reception. As soon as she appeared in the street, the two uniformed officers had stopped talking and had given her a hostile glare, which she had calmly ignored. Over time, she’d gotten used to certain idiots, slaves to prejudices and ignorance, though that didn’t make them any less annoying.
The fact that Vinnie and Paco were homosexuals had been clear to her even before she focused on the way they were dressed and how they moved, even before hearing them speak. She’d perceived it from the electricity that sparked between them, the complicity that bound them together, the way they occupied physical space. And she had understood it from the small surge of pride, empathy, and jealousy that she herself had felt. A sensation that was becoming increasingly common with her. The frustration at her inability to be herself, incapable of looking life in the eye and telling everyone who cared to listen exactly who she was and what she felt.
Because Alex Di Nardo, newly minted police officer, was a homosexual, too. A lesbian, she thought to herself as she punched in the number for the police station and waited for the call to go through. The right word is lesbian.
She’d discovered it when she was just a teenager, at boarding school. It hadn’t been a phase, and it wasn’t just a product of circumstance. It hadn’t been the result of a romantic disappointment, a boy who had dumped her, or a rape or some rough sex. She chuckled bitterly to herself when she heard religious throwbacks on TV talking about homosexuality as if it were a disease. The disease, her disease, was the fact that she lacked the courage to say it out loud.
And for that matter, as that idiot Stanzione had so clearly shown, they were still a long way from being able to count on universal understanding. There was always someone snickering, elbowing their neighbor in the ribs, putting on a show of distaste. There were even those who stated, in no uncertain terms, that a lesbian was a pervert, a sad excuse for a woman, a freak of nature. Someone who, out of a defect, a vice, a perverse taste for sin, befouled an honorable surname with the foul stench of shame.
That is what her father would no doubt have said, had he ever found out. And he would have retreated into one of those horrible, persistent silences that sometimes lasted for days and months. But actually, in that case, the silence was likely to last forever. The news might even kill him, the General. The man without foibles or faults. The soldier without hesitation or doubt, who had gone out on international missions and had come home loaded down with decorations, the infallible marksman—in fact, to get closer to him, she, as a young girl, had developed a love of guns. Her adored, admired, worshipped, hated father.
It was his face that she saw before her when she gave in to her lusts and went out to get herself a little sneaky sex, perhaps with young married women on the prowl for the forbidden in out-of-the-way clubs. It was his face that she imagined when she was seized with the desire to shout out over the rooftops that she liked women. It was his face that she pictured to herself when it became clear to her that she didn’t even have the strength to go out and live on her own, finally leaving behind her the oppressive atmosphere of a home as somber and tidy as the chapel in a funeral parlor. A temple consecrated to an all-powerful god, now retired, where the officiant tending to the shrine and the holy rites was his wife and her mother, a mute priestess, deprived of any and all individual free will.
Just the one daughter, Papà. A girl, and a lesbian, to boot.
Perhaps the reason her mother never answered back was a sense of guilt: guilt for never having produced a male in the image and semblance of the General himself. If you only knew the truth, Mamma, maybe you’d feel a sadistic twinge of vindication, at least: after all, you didn’t get me entirely wrong.
At last, Ottavia answered. Alex reported in to her on the victims, their father, the neighbors, and the young man who had first found the dead bodies. Her colleague never interrupted with pointless questions, she took notes quickly and efficiently. Ottavia knew her job and did it well. She wasn’t her type: too much of a heterosexual, too maternal, too romantic, and too sensitive. But they could have been friends.
Her colleagues in that cesspool where they had tossed her after sh
e’d accidentally fired her pistol inside the police station where she used to work previously were turning out to be much better than expected. The Bastards of Pizzofalcone—the subject of wisecracks and the butt of jokes told by policemen all over the city, misfits rejected from all the other precincts—actually turned out to know how to do their jobs, in the end. And she was a member of that team.
Certainly, they all had their shortcomings: but then, who doesn’t? Romano, with his outbursts of rage. Lojacono, who had been accused, back home, in Sicily, of conveying privileged information to known Mafiosi. Aragona, as irritating as a mosquito and remarkably skillful at sidestepping every opportunity to keep his mouth shut. Pisanelli, obsessed with suicides, and of course, even Ottavia, with that son of hers, about whom no one really knew anything much and because of whom Ottavia was occasionally forced to hurry out of the office on her urgent way home. They all had their crosses to bear, crosses of various sizes, some small and others large, penitences none of them would ever finish paying. Each had her or his own, and perhaps each carried a small portion of each of the others’ burdens.
Ottavia assured Alex that she’d call her back, unless she and Lojacono had already returned to the police station by that point. Alex imagined that Ottavia would immediately charge off down the online information trails leading to and from the names she’d just supplied her with, while Pisanelli would start making phone calls, asking and receiving nuggets of intelligence from the myriad of friends and acquaintances he had in that quarter. They both left the office only rarely, those two, but they were as valuable as an entire operations control center.
She ended the phone call and noticed that her fingers were strained, numb, had almost lost all feeling. The phone slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground. She bent over to pick it up, but someone else beat her to the punch.
She looked up and found herself staring into a pair of warm, luminous eyes, the color of cherrywood.
“Ciao, Di Nardo.”
It was the low, intense voice of Rosaria Martone, the chief of the forensic squad.
The woman Alex had fallen in love with.
IX
Romano broke the silence, teeth clenched: “You did the right thing by reporting this to us.”
He now felt a burning sense of guilt, after having read the passages from Martina Parise’s essays that were marked out in red. He hadn’t believed that story when he’d first listened to it at the police station, he still hadn’t believed in it when Palma had ordered him to check it out, he’d continued not to believe it when Professoressa Macchiaroli had accompanied him and Aragona to see the principal, leading them through the hallways of the building like a couple of troublesome pupils.
But now he thought that the caution both women had displayed was, if anything, excessive; that they ought to have intervened earlier. He also felt great pity for the young girl, whom he imagined to be reluctant to accuse her father, perhaps terrified at the thought of how he would react. And by extension, he felt within him a powerful, dark rage toward a father who had dared to place his lustful hands on his own God-given child.
Aragona, too, was churning with impatience. He’d already forgotten his firmly held opinion that the matter was a complete waste of department time and energy. To say nothing of his disagreement with Palma, now a thing of the past. Now what mattered most to him was projecting an image of himself as a tireless and determined guardian of the law, and making a strong impression, if possible, upon the school principal whose lovely legs were, alas, concealed beneath her desk.
Heading straight toward Principal Trani, he removed his blue-tinted glasses with the notorious, contrived gesture he’d stolen from a policeman he’d watched on television.
“Wouldn’t it be best, at this point, to push a little harder with the mother? I mean, I get it, you have to be careful not to ruin the family harmony and all that, but it seems to me that what’s written in that essay is pretty unequivocal.”
The woman disagreed.
“Yes, we know that. But if the young woman refuses to confirm the things she wrote in that essay, if she continues to insist that she simply made them up, what do we do then? We are educators, we’re supposed to oversee our students’ learning experience, not pry into what’s happening with their families. We’ve found ourselves faced with a case that tests our consciences so we decided to turn to the experts.”
At the sound of the word “expert,” Aragona sat up straight in his chair and dropped his tone of voice by a good solid octave.
“And you did the right thing, my dear Signora. I believe that the best thing to do now is to talk to the girl again.”
Principal Trani’s face lit up with gratitude.
“We were hoping you would say that. But I wouldn’t tell Martina who you really are, she’d curl up like a porcupine and we wouldn’t be able to get another word out of her. We could introduce you as a pair of administrative investigators from the school board: you heard about these essays and you asked to talk with her.”
Romano was baffled, and he would gladly have throttled the life out of Aragona.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. You see, Signora, there are specialists who are trained to draw a great deal of information out of a conversation with an adolescent. I think it might be best to inform the family court and have a lady psychologist who’s in regular rotation on this sort of issue assigned to the case. We don’t have any of the professional skills required to—”
The principal exchanged a worried glance with the schoolteacher and interrupted him.
“No, no, I’m not going to let that happen! We’ve already had experience with that sort of approach, in other situations involving . . . pathological issues, shall we say, and the outcome was by no means what we’d hoped for. The students refused to talk, and your specialists came up with nothing. So they decided there was nothing they could do, and matters were left just as they’d been found. The students were worse off than when we started. If you have no intention of proceeding, so to speak, without headlights, then we thank you for your time and interest but, in that case, we’d rather take Parise’s last answer at face value and accept that she just made it all up.”
Aragona coughed gently and gave Romano a sidelong glance.
“Well, maybe we could give it a try anyway. Let’s talk to the girl and try to figure out whether or not it’s work proceeding with the mother. Doing nothing at all after what I just read goes against my instincts.”
Romano felt as if he were surrounded. He had a moment’s hesitation, then said: “All right, let’s talk to her. But I continue to think that it might be better to turn to a genuine professional in this sector.”
Principal Trani got to her feet, clearly relieved.
“It’ll only take a few minutes: it’s just a matter of finding the key to bring out the truth. And maybe it’ll turn out that she made up the whole thing. Emilia, if you’d be so kind, go call the girl.”
Once the schoolteacher had left the room, silence fell. Romano felt uneasy: the situation had taken an anomalous twist. He’d never been the sort of officer who was a stickler for standard procedure, but this time he felt that it might be best to stick to the rules. All the same, he couldn’t allow that young girl to be subjected to certain indignities, if indeed that was what was happening. Aragona, for his part, had already made up his mind that the molestation was a reality, and his romantic notion of the heroic policeman meant that it was up to the two of them to solve the case then and there, not turn it over to some ineffectual bureaucrat who’d let the culprit off the hook, just because of some trivial quibble.
Not five minutes later, they heard a light knocking at the door. Professoressa Macchiaroli entered. Behind her was Martina Parise.
She was slender and attractive, of average height for her age, rather well dressed in a sweater and a pair of jeans which Aragona’s eagle eye immediately pegged a
s bearing an expensive trademark. Her features were pleasing and her smooth chestnut hair hung to her shoulders. She didn’t seem a bit surprised to see the two men sitting in the principal’s office. Her large hazel eyes darkened momentarily. She bit her lower lip, but her face turned expressionless again almost instantly.
The principal was the first to speak: “Ciao, Martina. We asked you here because these gentlemen have read your esssays and wanted to ask you a question or two. You see, they work in a . . . supervisory office, and from time to time they happen to read things written by the very best students.”
Romano caught the ball at the first bounce.
“That’s right, Martina. Congratulations, you’re quite the writer, those are some first-class essays. Listen, the part about your family, the situations you write about—”
The girl interrupted him with great determination.
“I just make up the character I write about. I explained it to my teacher and to the principal, too. That’s not really my family, at all.”
Her tone had been decisive and conclusive. Romano, who had no familiarity with adolescents, fumbled, unsure of what to say next. Unexpectedly, Aragona came swooping in to the rescue.
“Exactly, that’s just what we wanted to talk to you about, because your character, the girl who’s narrating the story, is great. We like her. Do you think we could use her in a TV series? What do you think?”
Everyone turned to look at the young police officer, in stunned surprise. Romano struggled to remain seated. Martina bit her lip again, curious in spite of herself.
“A TV series? For real?”
The policeman nodded, removing his blue-tinted eyeglasses with his usual sweeping gesture. Not even in the presence of a twelve-year-old girl did he know how to restrain himself.
“Certainly. It’s a gripping, profound character, and it tells us a great deal about the malaise afflicting young people today. For instance, and this is what my partner wants to know, what’s going on in the family? Can you tell us about it?”
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