Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  “That’s it,” Pisanelli hissed, “that’s where you wanted to wind up: she has no faith, so she wants to die. Listen, that’s not the way it is, Leona’. A person can do without.”

  Leonardo replied seraphically: “All right, tell me where you see it, all this desire to live that you see in your friend Agnese. Give me a good reason not to be afraid that tomorrow, or next week, in some deeper fit of depression, she won’t decide to turn on the gas or swallow an entire bottle of pills. Talk me into it.”

  Two friends at a restaurant, sharing their weekly lunch. A senior policeman, elderly, weary, and sick, kept alive by an absurd conviction, and a diminutive monk, a caricature who seemed to have walked straight out of a story that grandparents tell their grandkids, harmless to all appearances: no one could ever have imagined that these were the two parties, prosecution and defense, of an occult tribunal where a person’s life or death was decided.

  Pisanelli looked down at his hands, motionless on either side of the sauce-spattered bowl. Then he looked up.

  “The sparrow,” he said.

  Leonardo narrowed his bright blue eyes.

  “The what?”

  “The sparrow, Leona’. Do you remember the first time I told you about her? I told you that I’d met her because she was feeding the birds in the park outside the National Library.”

  Leonardo nodded.

  “Well, ever since then, I’ve been going to the park to make sure that she’s all right. I sit down next to her, give her a smile, and she smiles back. At first, my belief that she wants to go on living was based on a mere perception. She hadn’t spoken a word to me, really. I was afraid she was an ideal target for the mysterious suicider, as you call him, his next candidate.”

  Leonardo was feeling uneasy.

  “Giorgio, listen—”

  The policeman stopped him.

  “No, you listen to me. I told her things, and I’m sure that she listened to me, but she almost never answered me. She just went on scattering crumbs for the birds. Then, yesterday, something strange happened. Already I was amazed that she was there, with the terrible chill in the air . . . ”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Hold on. At a certain point she starts talking. She starts talking to me! And she tells me that a sparrow, one of those sparrows, might just be Raimondo, her son, come there to see her.”

  “Her son? Raimondo? But didn’t she lose him before he could be born?”

  Pisanelli shot a look around the room to make sure nobody else was listening in on the conversation.

  “Yes. But to her, after carrying him in her womb, he was still alive.”

  “It’s absurd, you realize that, don’t you?”

  “Truth be told, you’re the one who insists that a life is a life, in every sense of the word, from the instant of conception on. Or am I wrong?”

  “And you think that Agnese wants to go on living because the child she never had is coming to visit her in the form of a sparrow? You realize that you’re going crazy yourself?”

  Pisanelli slapped his open hand down hard on the table, making the utensils rattle. The other diners looked around.

  “No, I’m not crazy, I tell you. All I’m saying is that we’ve found common ground, I’m finally able to talk with her. And however absurd you may think it is, she’s finally opened up to me.”

  Leonardo sat staring at his friend in silence.

  “You’re taking on an enormous responsibility, you realize that? Maybe we could have her committed to an institution, one of those places where—”

  Pisanelli clenched his hand in a powerful grip.

  “No, no, Leona’. It would be the death of her. She’s rediscovering herself, I’m sure of it. It’s only going to take a little while longer.”

  The monk’s eyes were full of sorrow.

  “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow, I have my spiritual exercises to attend to. I’ll be gone for ten days. My absence is a terrible risk, you understand that?”

  Pisanelli blinked rapidly in confusion.

  “Why do you say that it’s a risk? Who is it a risk for?”

  Leonardo withdrew his hand from the clench and now he was patting the policeman’s hand.

  “For you, my friend, and for poor Agnese. Two souls adrift in this cursed loneliness that is the world out there. What’s more, how will you get by without these lunches of ours? You’ll have to eat my share.”

  “Impossible, Leonardo. Impossible.”

  XLI

  In the street outside number 32 on Vico Secondo Egiziaca, Lojacono and Di Nardo rang the doorbell for the third time on the intercom with the faded nameplate reading “Varricchio—Amoruso and Mandurino,” and for the third time they waited in vain for an answer. The cold showed no sign of relenting, even in the early afternoon, and on that corner where the apartment building that had been the site of the double homicide stood, it was even worse.

  Lojacono’s extremities were tingling and numb: that winter, he felt increasingly sure, would never end. For that matter, the city was reacting very badly to the persistence of that bad weather, shutting itself up in an unnatural silence. You couldn’t hear the usual chorus of voices, no one was shouting, the windows weren’t slamming, and even the car horns seemed to have subscribed to the universal vow of silence.

  They were just about to turn to leave when the street door swung open and Paco appeared, bundled in a plaid blanket. The young man scrutinized them with unmistakable mistrust, pulled the door open a little wider, and, without inviting them in, vanished into the darkness of the atrium.

  “The intercom doesn’t work. It never has. It rings but you can’t hear the person speaking, and if you want to open the door you have to come downstairs.”

  Having uttered these words with a moan, the young man headed back upstairs. Lojacono and Alex trailed after him. Before entering the apartment, they took a look at the front door of the Varricchio home. At the center of the door was a warning from the judicial authorities, fixed in place with duct tape.

  The temperature indoors was only slightly more comfortable than it was out on the street. They noticed that the young men had tried to seal the French doors with rags and bits of felt, but still a draft streamed through the off-kilter aperture that made the electric heater’s ineffectual efforts even more useless than usual.

  Paco took the blanket off of his shoulders, revealing his total black attire from the previous visit, and then brusquely inquired if they wanted any coffee. Alex decided that he wasn’t being intentionally rude: quite simply that was how the young man communicated with his fellow human beings.

  The two police officers politely declined the offer.

  “Please forgive me if I have to waste any more of your time,” said Lojacono. “We just wanted to—”

  “Vinnie’s not here,” said Paco, “he’s at the university. He has a major exam in a few days and he needed to ask a professor a few things. I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”

  “That doesn’t matter, we just wanted a few items of information that you can certainly provide as well. Then, if it proves necessary, we can always come back later.”

  Paco said nothing. He sat down at the table, keeping his eyes downcast. His short hair betrayed a receding hairline and incipient pattern baldness at the top of his head. Without looking up, he said: “It’s just become hellish here. Reporters every minute of the day. If you ask me, Vinnie is having the time of his life, he likes to talk, talk, talk, but I hate it. They won’t leave me alone. I’ll have to tell Renato, if it goes on like this we’ll be obliged to leave.”

  “We can imagine,” Alex broke in. “But considering what happened, it’s only normal that people want to know. You just need to be patient: the same way it started, it will end.”

  “Sure, but right now the situation is intolerable.”

  Lojacono decide
d to get to the point.

  “Signor Mandurino, do you remember anything unusual that happened in the days, in the hours prior to the night of the murder? I don’t know, anything Grazia, or Biagio, might have said . . . ”

  Paco looked up at the lieutenant.

  “Well, as far as Grazia was concerned, it was all always unusual, the things she did . . . In other words, she didn’t have a normal life. She went out at all hours of the day or night, and it was never the same, she’d shout into the phone, laughing, quarreling. And her boyfriend was no better. When the two of them started shouting in dialect, you couldn’t understand a thing.”

  “Was he here during the last few days?”

  “No. We hadn’t seen him around for a while. In any case, if you ask me, he was afraid that he was losing her. And that’s why they fought constantly.”

  Lojacono appreciated the concise manner in which the young man had described relations between Foti and the Varricchio girl.

  “What about the other fight you overheard? You couldn’t understand anything that time either?”

  “No. The only thing I could tell for sure is that there were two men arguing and that one of them was Biagio. It was strange, because Biagio never raised his voice.”

  “What were the Varricchio siblings like, personality-wise?” Alex asked. “Did they get along? Did they love each other?”

  Paco stared at her. Little by little, his expression softened.

  “So, you see, Vinnie has an odd personality. If he likes someone, they become his best friend; if he doesn’t, they become an enemy. It’s just something I have to put up with. Grazia was beautiful, and she was a good young woman. But her beauty either attracted people or repelled them. Maybe it’s hard, being beautiful. I couldn’t say.”

  Lojacono and Alex waited. They knew that Paco, after his fashion, was answering the question.

  “And so the boyfriend, the phone calls, the people on the street. She was forced to be cheerful and strong. But she was neither the one thing nor the other. She was only herself when she was with Biagio.”

  Alex was starting to get curious.

  “What do you mean?

  “They spent a lot of time together toward the end. Before, Biagio always used to go to the university: I’d run into him when he came in or out, and that was all. He’d smile, say hello, he wasn’t a person who talked much. We saw each other occasionally, in the evening, maybe with Renato, but that was it. Then he started working at home, much more frequently. Maybe he was working on a project that didn’t require being in the laboratory.”

  Lojacono tilted his head to one side, as if he were trying to hear a whisper.

  “And the sister, did she stay at home with him?”

  “No, no. She was always out of the house, for one reason or another. But when they were together, they’d smile at each other in a very particular way, as if only they understood each other.”

  The lieutenant followed his own line of thought. Alex wondered what it was he was trying to understand, what he was imagining.

  “How long ago did Biagio start working mainly at home?”

  Paco stopped to think.

  “Vinnie was studying for his Civil Procedure exam, which would mean three months ago. When he’s getting ready for a challenging final exam, he never moves from this table and he’s constantly asking me to fix him coffee. I would take one to Biagio, too, who studied with the door open, the way that we do, to get a little air to circulate; it’s brutally cold out now, but believe me, when the weather is hot, it’s like an oven in here. And so we’d keep the windows open, in both apartments, and the front doors, too. This was orginally one big apartment, did you know that?”

  Lojacono persisted.

  “So Biagio stayed at home to study?”

  “He would stare at the computer screen, take notes, type a little, take more notes, check books and databases that he carried with him back and forth from the university on a portable hard drive, then he’d stare at the computer screen some more, and so on. If you ask me, he was studying. What do you think?”

  Alex thought that unusual way of answering questions was amusing.

  “Didn’t anyone ever come to see him?”

  “No. I’d say not. Every once in a while he’d jump up, check the time, stick his head in, and say: if my sister comes home, tell her I’m at the university, in the laboratory. Then, a couple of hours later, he’d come back and sit back down at the computer. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard.”

  “But you never heard him talk about any disagreement, any quarrels . . . ”

  “Biagio quarrel? Impossible. That’s why we were so scared to hear that shouting in the afternoon, it wasn’t normal. Among other things, let me say it again, he almost never had anyone over, except for Renato, who worried about him and would bring him groceries, that sort of thing. It even happened sometimes that we’d have to answer the door for him because the genius, over in his apartment, had fallen asleep and didn’t hear the doorbell from the landing. One time we found him sprawled over his desk, snoring. We laughed and laughed. No, he really was an easygoing guy.”

  “And when he wasn’t around, the times that he had to go to the laboratory, did his sister bring anyone home? Or did anyone come over to see her? Did you ever happen to see anyone out of the ordinary?”

  Alex thought about Cava, the chilly, remote gaze, arms wrapped around his torso as he stared out the window of his office at the nothing that lay outside. That man, she couldn’t say why, gave her the creeps.

  Paco tried to remember.

  “No. As you’ve seen for yourself, we can’t work the street door from up here. Each of us has their own doorbell on the landing, but the intercom rings simultaneously in both apartments, which means that if someone came to see them, we’d know it, too, and if someone came to see us, then they’d know it, too. Among other things, in here our cell phones get practically no bars, which means that just pressing random buttons on the intercom is the only way to get in the front door. Someone would always come downstairs, we never needed to establish whose turn it was. Worst case, if no one was getting up, we’d shout across.”

  Lojacono was concentrating.

  “So let me reiterate: the intercom rings but that’s all it does, and you get no service with your cell phones, so there’s no way to know who’s trying to get in downstairs and you have to go down to find out. And then no one ever came to see them.”

  “Except for Grazia’s boyfriend,” Paco specified, “but lately he hadn’t even been coming upstairs. When it was him we knew it because he’d ring and ring, like a crazy person, and then she’d go downstairs and they’d fight in the lobby downstairs. So people started complaining to Renato’s father, who owns half the building.”

  Alex asked: “And that afternoon, when did you hear the argument?”

  “Biagio went down to answer the door, and we didn’t see who it was. After a few minutes we started to hear shouting, and after that, the door slamming. And nothing more after that until the next morning, when Renato woke us up because he’d found what you already know.”

  Lojacono was motionless, his narrow-slitted eyes were gazing at a generic, unspecified spot.

  It was Alex who finally broke the silence.

  “Signor Mandurino, what have you come to think happened? In your opinion, who could have committed these murders?”

  The temperature seemed to have dropped even lower in the room. Once again, Paco stared at the tabletop.

  “I don’t know. Her boyfriend may have been violent, but I think he actually loved her. I don’t think you could do anything like that to someone you loved. You could smack them, you could leave them. But you couldn’t do anything like that.” Then he looked up and his eyes met Lojacono’s. “Something like that is because of a betrayal, out of hatred, out of fear. Not out of love. You don’t kill someon
e out of love.”

  XLII

  He opened his eyes again. His head was aching even worse now. The throbbing came violently, as if from outside his head: a goddamned drum pounding endlessly and without any rhythm or beat.

  He’d vomited all over himself again. He felt a surge of disgust for himself, for life, for the world, for that damned city.

  How long had it been since he’d gone out? He’d paid for three days in advance when he’d checked in, and so far they hadn’t come knocking at his door, so more time than that couldn’t have gone by.

  Even if, he thought as he struggled to get up into at least a seated position, they could perfectly well have come and he might not have heard them.

  Maybe that’s what the drum was.

  He got up, walked over to the door, and pulled it just ajar. Outside was nothing but the darkened hallway, with the dirty, ragged carpeting. From one of the rooms he could hear the dull, repetitive thumping of a bed banging against the wall. He was reminded of the black whore who had come there with him, who had steered him to this pensione. Maybe it was her. Maybe it wasn’t.

  He shut the door again, trying to master his nausea and his vertigo. He felt a profound loathing for that place. He felt a loathing for the black whore. But above all, he felt a profound loathing for himself.

  The room reeked of his vomit, but also of mold. There was a diseased heat, dank and oppressive, fed by a heater vent that spewed air from above. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, and he dragged himself over to the window.

  He struggled to get it open; the sash was rusty and covered with dust. He finally tugged it open and the cold poured in like a ferocious beast, taking his breath away and slicing through the torpor that covered him like a blanket.

  In spite of the temperature, the street was full of life; even a scooter zipped past, driven by a man bundled up like an astronaut.

  He took a deep breath, filling his lungs. He liked the cold. The cold was free. In prison, what dominated was heat, the same as it was here in the room: a heat made up of too many people, a grim dreariness, unwashed flesh, and obsession. The only place you could find cold was out in the yard, in that illusion of an outdoors, of a world where if you chose to, you could go back to living or at least dream of doing so.