Rosaria thought that she was going to have to guide her friend toward the world of the senses, unfolding her little by little like the petals of a flower, accustoming her to think of herself outside of social conventions and inhibitions. She didn’t know that Alex had crossed those barriers years ago; there were radically different limitations that her complex psychology imposed upon her. Rosaria didn’t know about the miles and miles driven, the mask she wore to induce a fleeting sense of bodily peace in dark private clubs. She didn’t know about the frustration, the sacrifice, the fantasies that she cultivated in silence in her own bedroom while her jailer slept.
And most of all, she didn’t know how hard she’d had to work to force herself to be there, that night, and how once she had achieved that determination, she had immediately passed on to imagine what was going to happen there.
For her part, Rosaria was willing and ready. She wanted to be involved and was fully intrigued, she was no longer satisfied by passing relationships sparked by chance meetings in bars with people seeking that and nothing else. She wanted someone to share tears and laughter with, someone with whom to share the emotional journey of enjoying a good film, someone to have a healthy argument with. She wanted someone she liked from top to bottom.
They made love for hours, in every way imaginable. They experimented with each other’s bodies, rising to summits they’d never before attained. They understood why love between women is finer, deeper, and richer than anything men can imagine, because there is no end to it, it’s never satiated, and once the anger and fury have passed, it offers gentleness, without ever establishing a difference between taking and giving.
Each read in the eyes of the other the fullness of pleasure and the incipience of renewed desire. They discovered how to play and how to find each other, how to lead the other by hand to a vantage point from which to observe the world from a happy distance.
Now, in the rich scent of the many orgasms they’d freely exchanged, Rosaria’s hand was tracing the outlines of Alex’s face, as if trying to impress into body memory something never to be forgotten.
“I want you,” she told her. “I want you now, and I want you tomorrow and the next day. I can’t stand to think of you far from me.”
Alex listened to Rosaria’s raucous voice the way she might have listened to a new and familiar piece of music. She couldn’t think of anything quite so wonderful either.
“Yes, it’s been beautiful for me, too.”
Rosaria gently shook her head, continuing to caress her face.
“It’s not just a matter of flesh, of chemistry. I want your life. And I want to give you mine.”
Alex said nothing. She listened to her heart racing in her chest.
Rosaria went on.
“I know, this must seem absurd to you. You must be thinking: who is this woman, coming to talk about certain things with me, after we make love just once? But I recognized you. The minute I saw you, I recognized you. I knew who you were and I glimpsed the road we can travel together. I don’t know if it’s a phase of my life, if I’ve lost my mind or I’m just tired of battling against my own indifference. I only know that I love you, and that I want to share my time and my desires with you.”
Alex listened, her eyes half closed, her blood pumping confusedly through her veins. I recognized you too, she wanted to tell her. I too believe that happiness lies here, in this bed, in your hands and in your mouth. I too am tired of keeping my skin and my soul rigorously separate . . .
“I’m certain you’d never disappoint me. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Papà.”
What can I say to make sure I don’t lose her? To keep her from understanding that I’m not as brave as she is, that the chains holding me back are a thousand times more unbreakable?
“I’m not trying to scare you,” Rosaria went on. “You’re young, and your life is organized differently from mine. But if you don’t feel the same way that I do, if you don’t think the way that I do, please, tell me now. I need to know if there might be room for me in your heart.”
Alex narrowed her eyes. In her mind, a terrible tempest was raging. She’d never thought, every time she’d made off with a moment of stolen pleasure in some furtive encounter, that she was doing anything wrong, anything in violation of her principles, even though the places those encounters took place were shady and meretricious.
But now, instead, she felt like a traitor, guilty and faithless. And happier than she’d ever been before.
She opened her mouth to reply, and her cell phone rang.
XLVII
They decided to go separately, each under their own power.
Piras, who had been summoned directly by the police chief, was expecting a car from the district attorney’s office; Lojacono, who’d been alerted by Palma, had his own car.
When it had become clear to them that, for the second time, they were going to have to separate, just when things were about to turn especially nice, they’d indulged in one long last look. Then she had caressed his face and he had given her a fleeting smile.
“I’m right here,” she had said, quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Me either,” Lojacono had replied. And now he was driving through the night toward police headquarters, where he knew Alex would be waiting for him.
He felt he was seething inside. His desire for Laura, the beauty of the evening, and, especially, the cheerfulness, the youthful enthusiasm he’d experienced, had taken him back in time, restoring hope: he could be happy again. But afterward he had been jerked roughly back into the reality of his work as a policeman, who found himself faced on a daily basis with murders and horrors: the big city was a difficult place, and now Marinella, too, was in the big city.
The thought of his daughter came naturally into his mind, as a logical consequence, any time a crime was especially horrific. Every time he found himself investigating the murder of an innocent victim. Every time he had to deal with the effects of madness and evil.
It was just as he was thinking about her that he actually spotted her.
At first, he thought it must be a trick of the mind: your eyes follow a thought and trick themselves that they’re seeing something that’s not there.
He was stuck in traffic at the beginning of the waterfront esplanade, where at that time of night the city’s movida was in full fling and thousands of people were flowing toward the beachside “chalets,” stands and kiosks selling iced beverages, even in the midst of that terrible cold snap. His compact car was inching along in the second of the four lanes, and she was walking toward him, in the opposite direction, about thirty feet away.
A more careful scrutiny, free of extraneous thoughts, confirmed that he wasn’t suffering from a hallucination. It was Marinella, no doubt about it. She was laughing, her hair blowing free in the wind. She was laughing, joyous in a way he didn’t remember ever having seen her. She was laughing, her happy tip-tilted eyes turned upward. Turned up toward the face, vaguely familiar suddenly, of a tall, taut young man who was gesticulating as he told who knows what story.
Behind Lojacono the car horns blared impatiently, and he was forced to put the car in motion.
He looked around in search of a place to park. He was going to run and grab his daughter by the lapels she was clutching close around her neck, he’d demand to know why on earth she was out wandering the streets in the middle of the night in the company of a potential rapist in a city swarming with potential rapists, instead of sleeping peacefully in a warm bed, her arms wrapped around her teddy bear. But there was nowhere to park, nor double-park, or even triple-park—not the tiniest nook or cranny to leave his car. And they were expecting him at police headquarters.
He pulled the cell phone out of his inside jacket pocket, with some difficulty because his fingers were stiff with the cold, cursing under his breath as he fumbled with it. He dialed his daughter’
s number, only to find that that cunning little Lucrezia Borgia had turned off her phone. In the meantime the river of cars had swept him far away.
Bewilderment was giving way to rage. He’d entrusted his daughter to someone. He’d placed his trust in someone. Tapping feverishly at his phone, he found Letizia’s number in his directory. He was moving forward in jerks and starts, urged along by an unfortunate automobile behind him occupied by four young men who were increasingly impatient with his distraction; they’d have much preferred someone with better reaction times in gobbling up the few yards of forward space that opened up from time to time.
It was the waiter who answered. From the music and the voices he understood that, in spite of the late hour, the trattoria was still buzzing.
Letizia came to the receiver. Her voice was upset, or at least so it seemed to Lojacono.
“Letizia? Ciao, it’s me. How is everything, all right?”
“Ah, ciao. Yes, of course, everything’s fine, why? And you, how are you? Are you having a good time?”
“Me? Yes, certainly, thanks. Could you pass me Marinella, please?”
“Marinella? Why? Has something happened?”
“No. I just want to speak to her. She’s there, isn’t she?”
“Here? Of course she’s here. But she had a bit of a headache, so she decided to go to sleep. I wouldn’t want to wake her up . . . ”
Lojacono let a moment of thoughtful silence flow past, then he said: “I think trust is the foundation of any good friendship, don’t you? I think that two friends need to know they can rely upon each other. If there’s no trust, then there can’t be any friendship, either.”
The woman’s voice was trembling with tears.
“Peppe, I never . . . believe me, I love Marinella as if she were my own daughter. I’d never do anything to hurt her, I wouldn’t let her run risks. I—”
The lieutenant felt the anger surge into his brain.
“First, don’t you ever call me Peppe again. Second, Marinella isn’t your daughter, she’s mine. And it’s up to me to decide whether something’s risky or not. I’m responsible for what might happen to her, and right now she’s out on the street with someone I don’t know, in the middle of the night, in a very dangerous city. And all of this is your fault, and my fault too, for thinking that you were different, somehow.”
He hung up, and when not even a second later, Letizia tried to call back, he angrily rejected the call. He had to focus on his work, this fraud concocted behind his back by his daughter and his friend was getting in the way of his professional responsibility: another unforgivable betrayal.
He’d just parked in the courtyard of police headquarters when he received Marinella’s call. In the background, he could hear the noise of traffic and people in the street: obviously the young woman had turned her phone back on and had quickly learned what had happened.
“Papà, ciao, it’s me. I’m sorry . . . ”
Standing, in the gusting wind and right before the eyes of the two policemen on duty at the front door, Lojacono hissed: “Go straight home. Now, do you understand?”
“But . . . Papà,” she stammered, “I haven’t done anything wrong, I went to the movies and got myself a sandwich! All my girlfriends at school go out at night, and—”
“I don’t care what your girlfriends do. Go straight home. We’ll talk later. And as soon as you get there, call me from the land line, that way I’ll know you’re really there.”
“But if I tell you that I’m going, don’t you trust me? You need to check up on me? I—”
“It was you who showed me that I can’t trust you. And apparently I can’t trust Letizia, either.”
Now the strains of frustration could be heard in Marinella’s voice.
“It’s not Letizia’s fault. I’m a woman, Papà, I’m not a little girl anymore, but you don’t want to accept it. For fuck’s sake, I just went out to see a movie! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Lojacono stared grimly at the two policemen, who turned their eyes away.
“I’m responsible for you, with respect to your mother as well. And I have work to do, I can’t chase after you the way a girl your age needs to be chased after. I think it might be better if you pack your bags and head back to Sicily.”
He pressed the red button, ended the call, and strode briskly through the front door.
XLVIII
He was of average height, broad-shouldered, with large, gnarled hands, splayed flat on the table. At first sight you’d take him for a bum. Raggedy whiskers, dirty gray hair hanging low over the nape of his neck, a heavy jacket, an oversized sweater from which projected the tattered collar of a shirt that might once have been sky blue, emanating a pungent odor of curdled vomit. His reddened eyes and the broken capillaries on his nose were hallmarks of a binge drinker.
Everything about him bespoke poverty and hard living.
What contrasted with that picture was the erect spine, and even more so, the expression on the face, the calm, proud gaze, almost defiant, the firm jaw and the straight line of the mouth.
Aside from Lojacono himself and two policemen in uniform standing by the door, there were five other people already in the room when he arrived. Piras, who had evidently found time to change out of her stunning outfit into a more sobersided skirt suit; Palma, who in spite of the late hour appeared less rumpled than usual and actually looked as if he were in the throes of some strange euphoria; the police chief, a bald and corpulent man in his early sixties with a perennially irritated demeanor; a man in his early forties, extremely well dressed and with an off-putting manner, introduced to him as Francesco Gerardi, director of the mobile squad; last of all, an old acquaintance, Commissario Di Vincenzo, the man who had kicked Lojacono out of his old precinct, thereby actually doing him an enormous favor: he had in fact been assigned to the San Gaetano police station upon his arrival in the city, and there he had been languishing without any assigned duties.
The lieutenant shot a questioning glance at Palma, who shrugged his shoulders.
It was the police chief who solved the mystery of that presence.
“Commissario Di Vincenzo is here because we’ve summoned him to lend Pizzofalcone a hand in case the investigation now under way proves not to be moving sufficiently expeditiously in the immediate short term.”
“Which is the most likely outcome, I’d have to say,” added Gerardi, immediately staking out his position.
The forces were deployed in fairly unambiguous fashion. Gerardi and Di Vincenzo represented the faction calling for the shutdown of the Pizzofalcone precinct; Laura and, perhaps, the police chief, the side trying to keep it alive.
“It ain’t necessarily so that we need anyone else’s help,” Palma retorted, stung by the insinuation.
The door swung open and Alex came in; her overcoat was buttoned right up to the neck and there wasn’t a trace of makeup on her face. She nodded a greeting and sat down, off to one side.
Palma went on, with greater equanimity now.
“Now we’re all here. Lieutenant Lojacono and Officer Di Nardo are in charge of the investigation, so let me sum up for them. As you may have realized, in part because you’ve surely seen his photographs on the alerts that have been distributed widely in the past few days, the gentleman sitting here is Cosimo Varricchio, the father of the victims in the apartment on Vico Secondo Egiziaca. He turned himself in voluntarily at police headquarters forty-five minutes ago, and he has not yet been questioned.”
Cosimo Varricchio let himself go a little and flashed a contemptuous smile.
“And with all the photographs you circulated, I still walked in on my own two feet. Nice work.”
The head of the mobile squad snapped.
“Varricchio, keep your mouth shut unless you’re asked a question. Keep in mind that your position—”
Varricchio didn’t
even bother to look around in his direction.
“My position, my good sir, is the position of a father who came to the police the instant he heard that his two children had been murdered. Or am I wrong?”
His voice sounded like metal scraping across ice. The tone was tranquil and the Calabrian accent was very strong.
The police chief tried to steer the interview back onto the tracks of formal procedure.
“No, Varricchio, you’re not wrong. And before anything else, we’d like to express our condolences for your son and daughter. But you must admit, it’s odd that you should appear out of thin air three days after the murder. And seeing that . . . ”
“ . . . and seeing that I’m Calabrian and an ex-convict, you put me at the top of the list of suspects. Isn’t that right?”
This time it was Di Vincenzo who lost it.
“No, that’s not right at all! You’re a suspect because you vanished the same day as the murder and only surfaced now. It’s absurd to claim that you heard nothing about it before this.”
Piras gave Di Vincenzo a chilly glance; she’d never concealed her strong dislike of the man.
“Di Vincenzo, unless the rules have changed without my knowledge, the interview in these situations is conducted by the investigating magistrate. And unless you can show me otherwise, that magistrate would be me. Therefore, unless you have any pertinent questions to ask, keep your mouth shut or I’ll ask you to leave the room, seeing that you are the one with the least legitimate grounds to be here. Agreed?”
The violent verbal attack surprised all those present, and Palma was unable to conceal a smirk of gratification.
Piras addressed Varricchio.
“Signor Varricchio, my name is Laura Piras, and as you just heard I’m the magistrate supervising the investigation into the murders of your children. Will you explain to us, to the satisfaction of Commissario Di Vincenzo and all the rest of us, just why we only have the good fortune of your visit three full days after the fact?”
Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 27