“Good to know,” said Lojacono, “but we’re not talking about tax evasion here, and Cava is no Al Capone. He struck me as a very controlled person, maybe even a little too much so, the typical behavior of people with deep-seated obsessions. The profile of the murderer is that of a person subject to outbursts of rage, moments of absolute blind fury.”
“For instance, the young man who sings and plays the guitar,” Romano said distractedly. “You described him as a moody, emotional individual. And since we know he hit her once, you turned him into the favored guilty party of the day.”
Palma spread both arms wide.
“Look, basically we’re just stumbling around in the dark, here. We’re waiting for the final report from the forensic squad, we’re still waiting to track down and question the father, we’re waiting for someone to make a false step. We’re waiting. And while we wait, time passes, and you know that statistics tell us that . . . ”
Aragona finshed his sentence for him.
“ . . . if the guilty party isn’t apprehended in the first twenty-four hours, the odds of catching them drop precipitously.”
The commissario glared at him.
“That’s exactly right. And you aren’t the only one who knows that, they know it at police headquarters, too, where they can’t wait to lunge at us like a flock of vultures eager to take the case away from us. A couple of days, no more than that, and we’ll have to throw in the towel.”
“It’s not over yet,” Lojacono said grimly. “Leaving aside the report from the forensic squad, there are plenty of other elements still missing. We need to understand the reason for the strange sum the Varricchio girl asked Cava to give her, thirty-seven hundred euros; we need to get over to the university to figure out whether the young man, Biagio, had confided in anyone there; and most of all, we have to find the father of the two victims, Cosimo. They can’t take the case away from us before we fill in the picture with those items. We’ll get busy, but you have to give us cover.”
Palma realized that everyone was looking at him. Beat-up bastards they might be, but at least they were a team. And they were a team that wasn’t about to give up the chase.
“I’ll do everything I can. But let me say it again, at the very outside we have two days. I’ll ward off the blows as they come, but if we don’t find anything, at some point I’ll have to give in. Lojacono, make full use of all the precinct’s resources, including me, if there’s anything I can do. And you two,” he said, turning to Romano and Aragona, “unless you have any new developments in the case of the molested girl, close the file and hand it off to the family court, so you can lend a hand.”
Romano shot a glance at Aragona.
“Let us have the rest of the morning, boss, and we’ll be at your service.”
Palma pointed his finger at Romano.
“Agreed, you can have the morning, but then I want your report. Get on it, guys.”
And with that Palma vanished into his office.
Aragona had a rapt, dreamy look on his face.
“God, I love it, when he does that.”
XXXIV
Lojacono’s university experience dated back to a long time earlier, and what’s more, had taken place far away, in another part of Italy; Alex’s own experience was more recent and had unfolded there, in that city, inside a venerable old palazzo with austere stone staircases and marble busts set in niches. Nonetheless, going back to a university campus aroused in each of them the same blend of nostalgia, cheerfulness, and the sense of being an outsider that all adults feel when they find themselves surrounded by kids and young people.
A human tide ebbed and flowed in all directions. Individuals and chattering clusters bumped into each other; apologies flew in all directions. Eyeglasses and ponytails, full beards and ridiculously wispy mustaches, brightly colored mohawks and combat boots: everyone looked different and yet everyone looked similar in gaze and gesture.
Large cork bulletin boards were stacked deep with archeological strata of announcements and ads: jobseekers and apartment hunters, offers of pets up for adoption, scooters and used clothing for sale, tutors touting their services and babysitters with their hourly rates. Clustering like swarms of bees, young people would congregate before a rumpled sheet of paper, tearing off a tab with a phone number, only to buzz off elsewhere.
Groups of students loitered, sitting on the steps of the staircase that led to the upper floors; if the weather had been any different they would have been out basking in the sunlight chatting about challenging exams and love stories; but that day the benches backing up against graffiti-covered walls were ice cold, and the only ones braving the chilly winds were the die-hard smokers whom hall monitors and janitors had brusquely ejected from the atrium.
Lojacono and Di Nardo had asked Ottavia to call ahead and announce their visit, so they could be sure to secure a meeting with both Professor Forgione and his son, Renato, whom they wanted to interview a second time; the morning he had found the dead bodies, he’d been too traumatized to be fully lucid.
The two policemen had come to the conclusion that, unlike Grazia’s world, multifaceted and filled with relationships that led in different directions—her boyfriend, her father, the modeling agency—Biagio’s world was entirely contained within the walls of the building they were now inside.
When they reached the top floor, they emerged into a hallway along which ample windows let in streaming rays of sunshine. The throngs of the lower floors had subsided here. A woman welcomed them into an office stacked high with documents and then walked them through a second, even narrower hallway and up a short flight of metal steps to a door, on which she knocked. Lojacono secretly hoped that they’d have a guide on the way out as well, otherwise they were at serious risk of never finding the exit.
Professor Antimo Forgione, chair of the department of biochemistry in the School of Industrial Biotechnologies, came forward to greet them. He was a solidly built man, well tended and in his early sixties, with a strong resemblance to his son. He wasn’t a very tall man, but his neatly brushed salt-and-pepper hair and the strong set of his jaw gave him an imposing presence, accentuated by the broad shoulders and beginnings of a potbelly that could be guessed at under the extremely well tailored navy blue blazer and regimental tie.
He gave Alex and Lojacono an open, cordial smile, with a faint hint of sadness.
“Buongiorno. Your colleague called the administrative office yesterday. I had a conference here in the city, but I postponed my attendance because I was eager to meet you as soon as possible. What happened to poor Biagio is a terrible thing. Here at the department we’re all devastated.”
The office wasn’t big, and it looked lived-in and a little messy: a workplace, not a front devoted to public relations. With the professor’s help, they cleared the two chairs in front of the desk of the stacks of scientific journals and graphs that cluttered them.
“Excuse the mess, things just seem to pile up at a terrifying rate. I wonder when this blessed digital revolution everyone’s been talking about for years will finally get rid of all this paper. But please, make yourselves comfortable, and tell me what I can do to help the investigation. We assure you that we’re willing to offer our wholehearted cooperation, and by we I mean the university, of course.”
Lojacono thanked him with a nod of the head.
“Professor, rather than searching for anything in particular, we’re trying to assemble as much information as we can. I’d like to get your impressions of the young man, and perhaps the names of everyone he knew and spent time with, as well as whether he had recently had any arguments, any quarrels. That kind of thing.”
“Arguments? Quarrels? Biagio Varricchio? You obviously never met him. He was the kindest and gentlest person in the universe. Courteous to a fault, serious to a fault. There were times he’d come here and I, in the midst of all this mess, simply wouldn’t noti
ce that he was waiting, because he’d just stand there, next to where you’re sitting now, and wait until I asked him what he wanted. No, I’d rule out entirely the idea that there had been quarrels here in the department.”
Alex was taking notes on her pad.
“Had you known him long?”
Forgione furrowed his brow.
“Hmmm, let me think about that: the first time I noticed him was six years ago, during a biochemistry exam he took as a student. He was particularly brilliant. A genuine natural talent. Behind his calm and poise, he concealed a fertile and intuitive mind. There aren’t many others like him, unfortunately.”
“Why do you say unfortunately?”
The professor sighed.
“You see, Signorina, many of the young people who enroll in this department simply weren’t admitted elsewhere. The difficulty of entrance exams for the departments of medicine, pharmaceutical sciences, or engineering means that students who were unable to get in elsewhere just enroll here, only to reapply to the departments where they were really hoping to be admitted. That means we get a lot of first-year students, but then those numbers subside with each passing year. There really aren’t many students determined to devote themselves to our subjects, even though they’re actually wonderful and fundamental, and offer important professional opportunities. But that’s hard to get across.”
“But that wasn’t the case with Varricchio?” Lojacono asked.
“Biagio was here because this is where he wanted to be. I told you, it happens rarely, but luckily it does happen. He chose this as his major immediately after that exam, and I appreciated that too, because he wasn’t doing it to get a high grade: this was his genuine passion. He was like a son to me.”
Alex studied the professor’s face: he seemed sincerely saddened.
“So are you saying that you had a closer relationship with him than with your other students?”
“Yes. You’ve met my son; I’m a lucky father, Renato’s a talented young man and, God bless him, he’s following in my footsteps: he’s one of our most highly respected assistant professors. Well, Biagio was his best friend. They had been studying together ever since their second year in the department and they conducted research as a team. They coauthored several important articles for scientific journals, and a number of projects they began together were adopted by American universities we work with. It’s something I’m very proud of.”
“So you had an opportunity to really get to know him, then, Varricchio?”
Forgione’s face darkened.
“Why, of course, he was always around the house. I wish I had a euro for every time I found him bent over his books at dawn, in my kitchen, after a whole night spent studying with Renato. He always had a smile on his lips, he was always apologizing for being in the way. A young man worth his weight in gold.”
“What exactly were his duties here, in your office, then?” asked Lojacono. “What was his job? Did he teach?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t his main activity. We try to make the best use of all our resources, and Biagio’s strong suit was research, as is my son’s. Together, the two of them were unstoppable, a force of nature. As a father I can tell you that I’m very concerned about the repercussions his death will have on Renato: he basically hasn’t spoken a word in the past two days, he’s in a state of shock. In any case, Biagio spent most of his time in the laboratory, working on tests and experiments on the materials that his research focused on.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
Forgione searched for something on his desktop.
“Well, he took his degree, with me as his advisor, with a very nice thesis on the bioengineering of metabolic enzymes. Rather innovative, not so much in terms of the topic as in the way he identified potential developments. Needless to say, he graduated with distinction. Ah, here it is, I’ve found it.”
He opened a magazine on the desk, color printing, glossy paper. Under the headline of the article, “The Young Turks of Biotechnology”, a photograph of a very embarrassed but still quite alive Biagio Varricchio gazed up at the policemen through the thick lenses of his glasses.
“Here, you can keep it,” said Forgione. “It’s published by the university, and the other students read it. The work done by Biagio and my son gained a certain degree of prestige. They’re doing a research project on recombinant proteins, I hardly think it’s worth trying to explain it to you, but if you like—”
Lojacono held up his hand.
“No, thanks, that won’t be necessary. But, please forgive me if I insist on this point, Professor, but are you sure there wasn’t any, I don’t know, jealousy? Someone who might have been interested in taking over as—”
Forgione interrupted him, in a decisive tone.
“Absolutely not. Everyone does the job that they’re assigned here: there are no rivalries because everyone does different things. What’s more, unfortunately, we don’t have much money, so there’s not any real economic incentive for going to war. Our doctoral students are paid badly, without great prospects for advancement. Theirs is a labor of love, or else they do it as a way of one day getting a job in private industry.”
Lojacono took advantage of the opportunity to bring up a new topic.
“Did you happen to get the impression at all recently that Biagio needed money in any particular way? That he had asked for an advance on his salary, or a loan from anyone?”
Forgione concentrated, trying to remember any episode that might line up with the theory of financial need laid out by the lieutenant.
“Not that I can think of. But I doubt it. I feel sure that if he had really been in dire straits he would have turned to me. My door was open to everyone, and all the more so for him. And then, Lieutenant, the doctoral candidates were always paid very late: he would only have had to ask for an advance on what little was owed him, and just as in other cases we would have found a way to help him out.”
“And you didn’t notice any changes, any shadows, in the last little while?” Alex asked.
The professor thought it over again. Lojacono noticed how he always took the questions asked very seriously; he took nothing for granted and didn’t seem interested in proving that he had everything under control.
“Listen,” Forgione said at last, “unfortunately, as you can well imagine, my job has become more bureaucratic than actually scientific, and these days I’m spending very little time in the laboratory. Though I do try to keep my relationship with my colleagues alive: I inquire as to what they’re working on and periodically meet with them, if only for a chat . . . a good state of mind, mental freedom, and focus are all fundamental qualities in a scientist. If you want to get an answer to your question that’s of any real value, you’re going to have to talk to my son, but if I’m honest, I have to say, yes, in the last little while the young man had started to seem shut off and perhaps even a little preoccupied. The results of his work were still remarkable, but there had been a slight decline, and I have to say that in fact Renato was helping him, increasing his own contributions to the project. They thought I hadn’t noticed, but I know my chickens.”
“In your opinion, what was the cause of this impasse?” Alex asked.
Forgione shrugged his shoulders.
“I couldn’t really say. But, according to my son, it was the arrival of Biagio’s sister, whom I never even met, that brought a degree of . . . messiness into Biagio’s life. Maybe even just a degree of activity and liveliness he wasn’t accustomed to. I imagine that you’re aware that Biagio occupied, rent-free, an apartment we own, and that therefore a certain procession of characters who were rather . . . particular had been mentioned to me by the building manager.”
“Such as?”
“Apparently, a month or so ago, the young woman had a fight with her boyfriend in the atrium. An elderly woman who lives on the second floor was f
rightened by the shouting and lodged a complaint during the condominium board meeting.”
The two policemen exchanged a glance: that must have been the fight mentioned by Paco Mandurino, one of the Varricchios’ next-door neighbors. No doubt about it, the relationship between the late Grazia and Nick Trash had been a tumultuous one.
“Thanks, professor,” said Lojacono, “you’ve been very helpful. Now we’d like to see where Varricchio worked. And we’re going to need to talk to your son again. Maybe something will occur to him that might prove useful.”
Forgione stood up.
“Why, of course. Come with me, I’ll take you to the laboratory.”
XXXV
Antonella Parise emerged from the funicular railway at the end of the line high atop the hill. With her tall, lithe figure, her agile step, her red hair tied back in a ponytail, she stood out in the crowd that flowed through the chilly morning air toward the various destinations of their workdays.
Romano and Aragona emerged from the shadows and came to a halt right in her path.
The woman pretended not to recognize them and tried to sidestep them, but Aragona darted quickly in front of her, barring her way.
“Buongiorno, Signora. We certainly seem to be in a hurry this morning. Wouldn’t you have a moment to join us in an espresso?”
Parise snapped, angrily, “You have no right to go on pestering me. If you won’t stop, I’ll file a complaint with your superiors. Neither I nor my family have done a thing deserving of such—”
“And we’ll be the first to present our apologies directly to your husband,” Romano interrupted her, “since he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what people think of him at your daughter’s school. In fact, you know what? Let’s go see him right away.”
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