Still, tonight I miss your embrace. Tonight I wish I could feel your body next to mine.
And lose myself in a long, endless embrace.
XXXII
There is one moment of the day that is unlike any other, and yet it’s the same in every home. That moment is dinnertime.
First of all, dinner is different from lunch, because after lunch you have an entire afternoon and most of the evening ahead of you, still to be lived and experienced, and the many thoughts of the day still to come only serve to distract you.
It’s also very different from the evening’s return home, when you hurry into the bathroom or to your computer or the television set, with a hasty hello or at most a passing, grazing kiss.
But not at dinner. At dinner you look each other in the eye, you tell each other how the day went.
And if you have plans for the next day, then you talk about them at dinner.
Marinella put a fistful of pasta in to boil, while humming under her breath the refrain of a song she had heard in the street.
If there was one thing that enchanted her about that city, it was the music. Everywhere you went, whatever the time of day or night, there was music. She remembered hearing her father describe it as a source of annoyance, an absurd intrusion on his personal space, even if only an auditory one, but she actually loved it.
This wasn’t the only point on which she was in disagreement with her father, concerning that city. To put it simply, she disagreed with her father about pretty much everything concerning that city.
He continued to see it as a sort of prison, a place he had been sent to serve out an unjust sentence. While the place he had come from was an earthly paradise where it was always summer, where the weather was never cold, where the air was saturated with the scent of flowers and the sea was within reach all year round, a land inhabited by cordial people who draped a garland of flowers around your neck everytime they saw you in the street, a Hawaiian lei: Aloha, Papà.
But what she remembered was three movie theaters in a radius of a hundred kilometers, a blistering heat that never let up, gossip, backbiting, and worst of all, the fact that everyone knew everything about everyone else.
When she and her mother were left there, all alone, after Lojacono had been transferred away on account of that murky accusation, a chill had descended around the two of them, even though they’d had nothing to do with it. Compared with that chill, the cold they were suffering now, in that wintry season, was nothing but a lovely springlike cool breeze. Everyone had turned their backs on them, refusing to speak to either of them; in fact, even most of their relatives had grown distant.
The reasoning was simple and straightforward: if it was true, as people were saying, that the lieutenant had passed confidential information to the Mafia, then he was a traitor and a turncoat; if it wasn’t true, then he was dangerous. In either case, best to have nothing more to do with him, or anyone connected to him.
At first, moving to Palermo had seemed like a solution, but instead it had merely brought to the surface another, very serious problem: the relationship between Marinella and her mother, Sonia. A treacherous, silent battle that culminated with the daughter running away to the city where her father was serving out his sentence. At that moment, anything seemed better than those constant, unending Sicilian quarrels, fights that made the air unbreathable inside the home and out.
She’d always got along well with her father. Not that they were all that close, he wasn’t much of a talker, but they did resemble each other, in personality as well as physically, and they understood each other on the fly, without any need for too much chitchat. What’s more, he represented a point of reference, a safe harbor: and of course she would seek a port in the storm. It had been natural to think of going to stay with him.
Her Papà hadn’t sprung any surprises on her, he was the same as he had always been. The real surprise had been the city.
Marinella had entered a world that seemed to have been waiting for her all her life. Even the things that her father considered defects, and which truly and objectively were, met with her approval: the chaos, the mess, the cheerful mischievousness, the art of getting by, the tendency to face the worst with a smile, these things too amused her.
The day before, she had beheld a scene that struck her as pure art. A guy at the wheel of a black Mercedes had turned down a narrow one-way lane, traveling in the proper direction. His car only barely cleared the walls on either side. About a third of the way along the lane, he came face-to-face with a badly dented compact car, driven by a woman who was clearly a terrible driver, proceeding up the vicolo, traveling in the wrong direction. Well, the guy in the Mercedes, probably guessing that the other woman would take an eternity to back up the narrow lane, had turned off in a spectacular gymkhana, wedging his way past the fruit stands and the chairs of the aged, black-clad women, so that the lucky woman driving the wrong way was able to proceed on to the main thoroughfare. In exchange for his kindness, he had received from the woman a dazzling smile, to which he had replied with a cordial ah-go-fuck-yourself.
How could you help but fall in love with a place like that, Marinella thought to herself.
Then, of course, there was the music: radios, bootleg CDs, pirated MP3 files, car radios blasting at full volume, with pounding bass lines that could be heard a hundred yards away. A cheerful cacophony, a kaleidoscopic soundtrack. You only had to choose what to listen to, ruling out, as far as possible, everything else.
The young woman asked herself how big a role Massimiliano played in the instinctive love she felt for that city. Probably a pretty big one, she had to admit.
The young man lived in the same apartment building as Lojacono. Marinella presumed that her father’s choice of that building hadn’t had anything to do with the fact that the young man lived there, but she was grateful to the whims of chance for that choice, all the same. Because Massimiliano Rossini, majoring in literature and an aspiring journalist, as well as the eldest son of a very likable woman from whom Marinella had borrowed sugar, salt, and pepper on three different occasions, strictly for purposes of research, was the handsomest and most charming young man in the entire northern hemisphere.
The two young people had crossed paths several times on the stairs, until one day Massimiliano, attracted by that young female tenant with a dark, almost goth edge and strange, almond-shaped eyes set above intriguing high cheekbones, had started up a conversation. Marinella felt as if she had won the lottery—for that matter, she could hardly keep on borrowing cupsful of condiments, and she wouldn’t have known what other maneuvers to undertake in hopes of approaching him—and for a little while she had actually considered the possibility that he was just stringing her along, because she deemed it impossible that anyone like him might seriously be interested in anyone like her.
It hadn’t been easy to get much past the standard greetings: ciao, how’s it going. She’d talked it over at some length with Letizia, who had soon become her friend, even more than her father’s. Letizia, ironic and amusing, never intrusive. Letizia, beautiful, welcoming, and comforting. Letizia—if only her mother had been like Letizia; trust her father to be such a knucklehead that he failed to notice the woman was in love with him. Instead, he was all agog over that unlikable Sardinian woman in a skirt suit.
In any case, Letizia had recommended a few minor, decisive moves that had promptly led Massimiliano right into the jaws of her trap. A refined strategy made up of failures to say hello, words half uttered, and sudden dazzling smiles after lengthy silences, from one balcony to another or else downstairs, in the lobby. And at last—on the exact timetable and in the very manner foretold by the wonderful witch, who simply ran a restaurant when she wasn’t casting spells—he had invited Marinella to go out. Just the two of them. Alone.
Now the problem had taken on a different coloration, quite another degree of difficulty, passing from yellow to red. There was a t
owering obstacle to be overcome, and its name was Giuseppe Lojacono. The sky could fall, the world could collapse, but at eight on the dot every evening the lieutenant returned home to spend the evening with his little girl, who joyfully made him dinner; at the very most, occasionally, he might go eat at Letizia’s. To tell him loud and clear that she intended to go out on a date with a young man she’d met was out of the question. To him, Marinella was still in the midst of her childhood, and any such statement would throw him into a state of panic, with a wide array of entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable reactions: he might even choose to confront Massimiliano face-to-face, and that would surely spell disaster. No, she’d have to proceed with extreme caution.
And so she had devised a complex system of interlocking lies that called for the participation of not one but two of her female classmates and their respective mothers, standing by to field any phone calls her father might make to check up on her. D-Day was tomorrow, when Massimiliano planned to take her to the movies for the very first time. Now, during dinner, she only had to toss out the piece of news, as if incidentally, the impending and terribile math quiz that had been scheduled for that week and the nocturnal study session that the three girls would engage in, at the home of the girl who sat next to her in class. She drained the pasta, heaved a deep sigh, and walked into the dining room, driven by the worst possible intentions.
Dinner.
The perfect moment to tell the whole story.
The perfect moment to confide our innermost thoughts to our families, and receive the caring advice of those who love us.
The perfect moment to put our hesitations and scruples behind us, to just be ourselves.
The perfect moment to come out into the open.
Alex sat down at the table before a bowl of noodle soup, stifling the vomit impulse that always rose treacherously at the back of her throat. She despised noodle soup, she found the broth disgusting and she found the broth even more disgusting when paired with the tiny star-shaped noodles, and yet, for more than twenty years now, punctually, once a week, she had swallowed that junk down to the last mouthful, feeling as she did so, the General’s eyes, monitoring her at regular intervals, checking up on her sound nutritional health. Every so often she would return his glance, feigning enjoyment.
Sometimes she thought of herself as a sort of latter-day Dr. Jekyll, with a monster hidden deep inside her, ready to pounce out at a single leap, to the unreasoning terror of all those around her.
Her distaste for the noodle soup was only accentuated by the terrible slurping noise her father produced with every spoonful, followed by a dull grunt of pleasure. If Alex ever decided to run away from that apartment, after shooting both her parents to death, it was bound to happen the evening noodle soup was served. About that, she had no doubts whatsoever.
The dinner proceeded in utter silence, according to the etiquette she had learned growing up: if anyone had anything to say, they could do so in the two-minute interval between the end of the meal and the turning on of the television set. She waited for that moment with utter calm, slicing with painstaking and irritating care the slab of meat that followed, anemically, the equally tasteless first course.
At last, at the appointed time and with the bothered, discontented tone of someone who is unable to get out of a distasteful duty, she informed her parents that the following evening she’d have to take part in a meeting at the police station about the double homicide she was investigaing.
She mentally begged the forgiveness of the two murdered kids for having used them in such an unfitting manner. But they were all victims, together, and they had to help each other out as best they could.
The General muttered something about the fact that the department was asking too much in exchange for the pittance of a salary, but Alex’s finely tuned ear caught the undertone of pride for a daughter working to solve such an important case, a case that had been the talk of all the news broadcasts.
Alex imagined herself in bed with Rosaria Martone, in the aftermath of a dinner comprised of oysters and white wine, with brightly lit candles and the scent of incense, and she had to make an enormous effort to keep from smiling down at the apple she had just started to peel.
Marinella waited under her father had finished eating. He seemed more silent than usual, slightly ill at ease, but perhaps he was just tired.
She felt a surge of tenderness: there were times when he seemed so terribly old. For a moment her conscience stung her at the thought of leaving him all alone, even if only for an evening. Then she thought about Massimiliano, his dazzling smile and unruly bangs, the strong hands that gripped his backpack as he trotted down the stairs, and all her doubts were rapidly swept away.
She was about to open her mouth and begin her well rehearsed description of the math quiz, the challenge of the problems, and the importance of sufficient study time with the help of her girlfriends, when her father beat her to the punch.
“Listen, sweetheart, would you be very upset if I didn’t come home for dinner tomorrow evening? An old friend of mine from the police academy, another Sicilian, is in town for a course he’s taking, and since he’ll be done late I don’t want to invite him here for dinner, but I’d still like to see him, I haven’t spent time with him in a long time. I’d ask you to come along, but I know you’d just be bored. You know the routine: memories, the old days, and so on and so forth.”
Marinella was tempted to leap onto the tabletop and break into a dance, but her father might have put a negative interpretation on such a reaction.
“So where are you going to take him, Papà? To Letizia’s?”
“No, he . . . he doesn’t know his way around the city, it would be too hard to give him instructions to get to the trattoria. By the way, about Letizia, I asked her if you could go over there; I don’t feel like leaving you all alone here in the apartment. She’s expecting you at eight o’clock, but if your homework keeps you from getting there right on time, don’t worry about it.”
A minor stumbling block, thought Marinella, but one she could certainly get around: Letizia was on her side, it wasn’t going to constitute a problem.
“All right, no sweat, after all I’ve got lots of studying to do: the day after tomorrow, we have the math test. I’ll eat at Letizia’s.”
Her delight at having encountered such a soft landing where she had been anticipating a hard thump kept the young woman from asking herself about her father’s mysterious evening out, something that she certainly would have done otherwise, if she hadn’t had plans of her own.
She reached out for an apple, seized it, and bit into it with gusto.
Dinner.
The best moment of the day for a happy, united family.
The best moment of the day for utter sincerity.
XXXIII
For once, they all showed up at the police station at the same time, well ahead of the usual hour for the start of their shift. For some of them, like Ottavia, this was nothing new; for others, such as Aragona, the event bordered on the miraculous.
The tropical heat was not yet pounding through the building, because Guida had only just started up the boiler that steam-heated the radiators. Romano, who had no problem with the cold, stripped down to his shirtsleeves; Alex, on the other hand, kept her jacket on.
Palma looked around with some satisfaction, but on his face there was no mistaking the vein of worry that almost never seemed to subside lately.
“I’m happy we’re all here, because that means we can hold a little war council all our own at the start of the day. You know the way matters stand, whether we consider it to be lucky or unlucky, nothing else much has happened in the past few days, and now the press is all over us on this case of the murder of those two kids. The truth is that we’re not making a great deal of progress. We haven’t flushed out the father yet, in spite of the fact that we’ve put out all-points bulletins with
mug shots. I’m just wondering how a guy the police know so well can vanish into thin air like that.”
Ottavia was disconsolate.
“Unfortunately, it happens. A couple of times a day I talk to the carabinieri in Roccapriora, who have been put on emergency alert and are keeping a close eye on the family’s few friends, relatives, and acquaintances. I even dug down into a couple of harebrained escapades pulled off by Foti, the Varricchio girl’s young gentleman friend, but really they were just stupid pranks, in the worst cases. So, all things considered, we have nothing to show in that connection.”
“And what about Cava, the guy from the modeling agency, do we have anything new on him?” Alex asked. “He made a terrible impression—on me, anyway.”
“I did a few searches from my computer at home, after you all called me when you were done with your meeting. There’s not a lot to report there: he’s been married to the same woman for twenty years, they have no children; she was a model and was pretty well known, but then she quit. Which is something that happens. I found an article in a scandal sheet from ten years ago or so that talked about a tremendous scene during the summer in some club near the beach. It seems she was drunk and accused him of cheating on her with another woman, also a model, but nothing else seems to have happened.”
Pisanelli butted in.
“The agency is fairly well known. I asked a friend of mine who’s a fashion journalist, and she told me that it’s one of the biggest agencies in southern Italy, if not the biggest outright.”
“Which means that it ranks about two hundredth nationally,” Aragona grumbled. “Like all the other companies around here.”
Pisanelli shrugged his shoulders.
“All the same, it has a pretty good reputation. I checked it out with the local courthouse and there don’t seem to be any lawsuits pending against it in the labor courts, which is pretty unusual for a company in that line of work. Ironclad contracts, and everything seems to be done in the light of day, withholding and worker’s comp and all the rest of it.”
Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 19