Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  XIII

  When Alex and Lojacono left the apartment building, once they had completed the lengthy ritual of inspection of the scene of any and every murder, the sun had already set.

  The cold slapped them in the face, leaving them breathless. The victims’ apartment was unheated, and it hardly seemed imaginable that it could be even colder outdoors. But it was. Lojacono decided that the North Pole must offer, more or less, the same delightful weather.

  There was still a squad car parked in front of the apartment house entrance, but it wasn’t Stanzione and Ciccoletti’s car; they’d clearly been relieved at the end of their shift and now they were snug and cozy in the warmth of their homes, mulling over the challenging day they’d just had, ruined by their run-in with the Bastards of Pizzofalcone. Their lucky successors, who had the heater going full blast, didn’t even bother to greet Lojacono and Di Nardo, doing no more than to wave their gloved hands from behind the rolled-up windows. Nor did they bestir themselves when, out of a couple of panel vans parked just beyond the barrier constituted by the squad car with its flashing rooftop hazard lights, there emerged three women and two men, looking chilled to the bone, warmly bundled up to their eyes and armed with TV cameras; the two policemen preferred to pretend they were deep in a romantic conversation, eyes locked. Lojacono sent them a silent curse.

  One of the female reporters walked up to the lieutenant and stuck a microphone under his nose, clutching it with a gloved hand.

  “Good evening, we’re going out live, this is live: you’re one of the investigators handling the double homicide on Vico Secondo Egiziaca, aren’t you? Tell our viewers, have you come to any conclusion? Do you have any leads?”

  “Talk to police headquarters,” was the terse answer she received.

  Lojacono tried to move past her, but the reporter must have been accustomed to pursuing reluctant interviewees, because with an agile sideways leap she was instantly blocking his way again. The lieutenant shoved the microphone aside with a brusque gesture, so at that point the woman tried to play the card of female solidarity, aiming the mike directly at Di Nardo.

  “Is it true that both murders were committed with tremendous savagery? We have heard a description of a cranium shattered and crushed and the rape of a young woman.”

  Only the police had had access to the crime scene, aside from the three young men who had been questioned, and all three had been prevented from leaving the apartment. Alex wondered whether it was Stanzione who had leaked those details. She replied, with some annoyance: “Didn’t you hear my partner? We aren’t making any comments.”

  The reporter waved her hand toward the cameraman, and once the little red light had flicked off, she snapped: “What the fuck, don’t you have even a speck of fellow feeling for people who are just doing their job? Hours and hours in a fucking panel van that’s cold as a meat locker and you can’t give us so much as a word?”

  Now Lojacono was really irritated.

  “Fellow feeling, huh? Fellow feeling, you call it. There are two dead bodies upstairs. And for all we know, their friends and family are listening to your bullshit. Fellow feeling.”

  He made his way through the crowd and walked off, followed by Alex, while the two men in the squad car continued their conversation, focusing their utmost attention on making sure they saw nothing.

  After a walk that lasted several minutes, leaning into the wind and wordless, they arrived at the police station. The glass door shut out the chill behind them, and they found themselves suddenly immersed in a tropical clime.

  Guida, the uniformed officer who was almost always on duty at the front entrance, snapped to his feet.

  “Buonasera, Lieutenant! What do you think? I fixed the heater. It works now.”

  Officer Guida felt a strange three-part mix of emotions toward Lojacono, one part reverential fear, one part unconditional devotion, and one part holy terror. The day of his arrival in Pizzofalcone, the lieutenant had in fact upbraided him forcefully for his slovenly manners and his rumpled, down-at-the-heels uniform, recalling him to values and standards that he seemed to have forgotten. That episode had reawakened a sense of pride in Guida, and in his bald cranium a determination had arisen to win his superior officer’s approval, whatever the cost, in order to convince him that he had misjudged his underling.

  In the context of projects designed to achieve this objective, since Guida had overheard Lojacono’s muttered complaints about the cold, the officer had armed himself with screwdriver and monkey wrench and had spent half the morning in the boiler room, until he had managed to reproduce what he naively believed to be an approximation of the genuine Sicilian climate. The result was that it now felt as if they were in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest in the heat of the summer.

  Lojacono gasped like a fish, and quickly stripped off as many layers of clothing as he could.

  “Guida, have you lost your mind? Lower the temperature, otherwise when we go outside we’ll catch our deaths. I can’t imagine why the glass doors haven’t shattered: there must be a twenty-degree difference between indoors and out.”

  A look of dismay appeared on the officer’s face.

  “Oooh, I’m sorry, lieutenant. I’ll take care of it right away, at your orders! It’ll take a while to let the heat subside, the boiler’s been going full steam since this morning, and—”

  Alex chuckled, as she was unbuttoning her overcoat.

  “Nice. If they don’t shut us down for prior violations, they’ll do it for the heating bill.”

  In the office, the situation was only slightly better, thanks to a window left slightly ajar, letting in an icy draft. Pisanelli, directly on the trajectory of that draft, felt as if half his body was in the Arctic and the other half in Cambodia, and he wryly claimed that he was quite comfortable, on average. The aged deputy chief informed Alex and Lojacono that the commissario had been summoned to police headquarters—apparently the double homicide had made quite an impression in the higher reaches of police administration—but would be back soon.

  Ottavia confirmed that report.

  “He asked us to wait for him to get back before discussing the case. He wants to hear your report before briefing you on what we’ve managed to put together here.”

  Lojacono threw both arms wide.

  “The only thing we know for sure is that there are two dead kids, and it wasn’t a pretty death for either. In any case, the forensic squad has completed its investigation, and Piras dropped by as well.”

  At the far end of the office, Romano and Aragona were deep in conversation: they seemed to be in disagreement about something.

  Alex’s curiosity was piqued.

  “Hey, you two, why all the mystery? Are you planning a surprise party?”

  Aragona was about to deliver a retort, but Romano grabbed his arm and squeezed it tight.

  “No, it’s nothing. We were just discussing a crosscheck we completed.”

  Before Alex had a chance to reply, the commissario entered the room, busy trying to unwrap the long scarf he wore around his neck.

  “Ah, so you’re all here. Excellent. Mamma mia, it’s freezing outside and boiling in here, it’s enough to give you a heart attack. It’s like a Swedish sauna and accompanying ice bath.”

  Lojacono huffed: “That Guida, I almost liked him better when he was a slob and a slacker. Well, Commissario, what did the high muck-a-mucks want?”

  Palma had laid his jacket and overcoat over the back of a chair, and now he was rolling up his shirtsleeves, as was his habit.

  “The usual. They don’t trust us. They tried to get me to say that we’re not up to handling such a major case, that we’d rather hand it off to someone with more experience and dodge the responsibility. Television news crews and radio reporters have lunged for this thing like a dog with a bone: big-city violence; dangerous streets and now people aren’t even safe in
their homes; the usual criminal element; the Bronx comes to Italy, and so on and so forth.”

  Ottavia looked at him with a hint of concern.

  “Well?”

  “It would serve the purposes of plenty of people if we were to admit we weren’t up to the job, which would mean that other investigators who are dying for the chance to preen in front of the news cameras would finally get their chance. The idea is that everyone would feel reassured if the case could be put into the hands of real investigators, skillful and competent ones, instead of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone.”

  Aragona’s eyes opened wide: “Did they really say that, chief?”

  “Not in so many words. But they were acting all solicitous: Palma, are you sure you can handle this? Palma, don’t worry, we can take it off your hands. Palma, no one could say a word against you, don’t sweat it, after all, with the human resources you’ve been given . . . ”

  His imitation of the self-important, falsely confidential tone of the police chief brought smiles to everyone’s lips, in spite of the uneasiness they all felt. The stain, the scarlet letter. When would they ever be able to scrub it away?

  “So what did you say to them?” asked Pisanelli.

  “What was I supposed to say? I listened to them with respect and attention and didn’t say a word. Then I said no, thanks, we don’t need anything, and we certainly don’t want extra help. That my team is very competent and capable of handling any emergency. That this is a police station, in a precinct like all the others, and that if anything happens in our precinct it’s up to us to take care of it.”

  The commissario’s words dropped into a strange silence. Everyone was staring at some inanimate object or other—tables, chairs, computers—avoiding the eyes of their colleagues. They felt a blend of powerful sensations: pride, self-awareness, even fierce determination, but also fear, a sense of inadequacy, and anxiety. Each of them was hoping that Palma was right. And each was afraid that he wasn’t.

  Only Aragona, his face transfigured by an ecstatic smile, as if he had just beheld an apparition, exclaimed: “Bravo, chief! Bravo! We’ll make them spit out those insults, we’ll make those sons of—”

  Palma raised his hand.

  “Arago’, don’t you dare, remember, we’re talking about our superior officers. I actually did ask them for a little help: to shield us from the media, which will keep us from having to waste time on that. The department spokeswoman told me not to worry, that she’d take care of it. She knows her business, but she’ll only be able to stave them off for so long. As for the rest of you, do me a favor, and don’t breathe a word. They’re going to try to interview us, try to wangle information out of us: so no one say a thing. To anyone.”

  Lojacono asked: “What do you mean, ‘she’ll only be able to stave them off for so long’?” Palma stroked the short, bristly beard on his chin; when he was at a loss, that’s what he always did, Ottavia thought to herself.

  “What I mean is that unless we come up with something fast, they’re going to take the case away from us. This is too big. Two kids whose father has a prior murder conviction; the small network of university students from out of town; and what’s more, the young woman was attractive, we’ve all seen her on the internet. A lot of leads to chase down, in other words. We need to pin down something fast, be able to say that we’re following a lead.”

  Alex spoke up from the back of the room.

  “Well, then, we’d better come up with this lead, hadn’t we?”

  Palma agreed.

  “Why don’t you start by telling us everything you know.”

  XIV

  As he woke up, he felt a terrible chill. It was very cold.

  He looked around, in the dim light, without recognizing the room. There was a strong, bitter smell, and he had the impression that his torso was damp. He touched his chest. His fingertips sensed a sticky substance. He realized that he had vomited in his sleep.

  He reached his hand out on the side of the bed and hit something that produced the sound of glass. A familiar sound. He’d drunk himself stupid, and then he’d passed out.

  Freedom. Freedom. This isn’t what he’d been dreaming of, he thought. It wasn’t this.

  His mind strayed to the whore, a black woman he had picked up on the street the night before; luckily he’d had the presence of mind to make sure she left, otherwise she would certainly have rolled him, taking wallet and cash. Instinctively, he patted his pocket and felt the familiar bulge of his wallet. He’d paid her what he owed her and seen her out the door. Good work, you were smart for once. At least you’ve learned a thing or two.

  When you’re behind bars, he thought, you dream constantly of freedom, you think you can perceive it in its concrete form. As if it were a cool breeze, or the memory of a taste. And you give it a first and last name, as you draw up the list of things you’ll do when no one can tell you, with a long piercing whistle, that your hour of exercise in the yard is over and it’s time to head back to your cell.

  For the first ten years in prison, he had thought of his wife and children. Then he had come up with the idea of the black whore and he had cultivated that fantasy. It had come to him when his wife had fallen sick and had stopped coming to see him in the visitors’ room, to keep him from having to look at Death, riding on her back, eager to carry her off.

  A black whore, he kept telling himself, there, behind bars, is just a piece of life. You have your fun, you pay her, and you send her away. She’s not a real woman, she has nothing to do with the woman who stood beside you in real life, with the mother of your children.

  A black whore doesn’t resemble that girl dressed in white who shone in the June sunlight, a thousand years ago.

  You can’t confuse a black whore with the smiling woman who greeted you when you came home from work, and at the mere sight of her you felt like taking her in your arms even before you had a chance to wash your hands.

  You don’t hold a black whore by the hand for a solid hour while she gives birth to a ten-pound baby boy, all the while smiling at you nevertheless, even through the pain and suffering.

  You don’t caress a black whore while she sleeps, thinking that your life depends on hers.

  You don’t even recognize a black whore, because all black whores have the same face. You fuck them and you send them away, and that way you’re free to practically drink yourself to death.

  Outside there was no sound of traffic. He tried to remember where he’d wound up, in what corner of that absurd city, but his memory was too tangled up.

  He got up and went over to the window and his back twinged in a stabbing burst of pain to which his head responded with an immediate, terrible pulsating ache in his temples.

  He felt like an old man. In prison, the difference in age didn’t matter. Young or old, they were all behind bars, brothers in sorrow, strangers in flesh and soul. Now though he felt like an old man.

  An old man is a sad thing, he thought, as he looked out at the pitch darkness outside the smudged dirty panes of the windows in his room. Unless he has a family.

  A family. He saw in his mind’s eye the young woman in the white dress in the June sunshine: back when she was still alive, then he had a family. But now she was dead. She had died without him. She had died while he was still behind bars.

  A family. A wife, of course, but also children. What’s left to a man, if they take his family away? There was someone in prison, maybe a professor, who spoke as bright and clear as mountain air; he had murdered his wife and her lover, and never regretted having done it, far from it. Well, the professor had explained the meaning of the word “proletarian” to him: someone who is poor, extremely poor, a man whose only wealth is his offspring, from the Latin proles, meaning offspring, posterity, in other words, his children.

  Proletarian.

  He’d had two children when he’d gone into prison, and when he g
ot out there was only one waiting for him, his daughter; then she too had abandoned him. What else was he supposed to do? He’d gone to fetch her home. That’s what.

  He thought that he had two children, but instead he found himself face-to-face with two strangers. His son, that young asshole, had even gone so far as to threaten him: Beat it, or I’ll call the police and have them throw you back behind bars. I brought you into this world, he had replied to the boy, and I can send you straight back out of it. And the girl, the girl who bore his name, the girl who was so similar to her mother when she had danced all in white in the June sunshine—the girl was just as rotten as the boy. Just so she could chase after her lazy good-for-nothing boyfriend, she’d started waving her bare ass around for all to see. Offspring. Nice offspring that he had.

  Then a guy reacts without thinking. Then a guy gets himself into trouble he can never get out of.

  God, what a terrible headache. He dragged himself back to the bed, in his eyes the vague recollection of a broken, intermittently flashing neon sign: a fifth-rate pension over by the train station.

  He didn’t have much left from the money he’d had when they released him from prison. Maybe back home he could find work in the fields, again; that’s not a job that can change much in sixteen years. Even though everything else in this world seemed to have gone insane, he thought, people everywhere tapping on the cell phones in their hands, flat, gleaming television sets even in the bars and cafés, cars that all look identical.

  He didn’t have much money left, but he did have a little. His wife—before dying far from him, what a prank you played on me, what a miserable prank, to die like that—had even set aside some money and had hidden it in their usual place, the jar under the old shoes in the cellar. When he had found that money, old banknotes rolled up tight, whose value he couldn’t even place yet, he hadn’t been able to withstand the emotion. He had broken down crying like a fool. It wasn’t much, but it was still a message that came from the afterlife.