“Papà, I’m begging you, don’t send me away. I’m happy here. Don’t send me back to Mamma. I want to live here with you. I’ll never lie to you again, I swear it, just don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me alone again. Please.”
Lojacono’s expression never altered. He headed off to his own bedroom. At the door, without turning around, he said: “It’s been a long day. I’m hungry. Make dinner, please.”
The cold, be careful, you might not even feel it.
Distracted by the humdrum events of your life, caught up in the pointless daily grind, you might not notice the cold.
We might not even stop to think, we miss the signals that come from outside.
We might continue gazing at our belly button as if it were the center of the solar system, all the while failing to notice that the cold is all around us.
That’s when the cold envelops us, catching us off-guard.
And that’s when the cold wins.
“Hello? Alex? Ciao, it’s me. Congratulations, you’re a superstar.”
“Oh, come on, what are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.”
“Oh yes you did. Everyone’s talking about it: Did you see what the Bastards managed to pull off? And it would seem that, if it hadn’t been for you, the two victims’ father—”
“Rosaria, the investigation wasn’t over, that’s all. Then the right evidence surfaced and we just drew the logical conclusions.”
“I love it when you act all modest. You’re even sexier. But I know exactly what’s there, behind all that delicious shyness.”
“Hey, cut that out! What if someone hears you?”
“So what? Are you ashamed of me?”
“No, I’m not ashamed. But you know as well as I do, we have to be careful, this isn’t a relaxed work environment.”
“I don’t give a damn about the work environment. I already told you, this isn’t just some ordinary thing. I’m not kidding around, Alex. And I want to see you again, right away.”
“Rosaria, I . . . today I can’t do it, I have to have dinner with my folks.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Please, let’s let a few days go by. If it were up to me, I’d already be there at your side, you know that, but . . . ”
“Do you mind if I ask what the problem is? If the two of us are happy together and if—”
“It’s not just that. I . . . my folks don’t know that . . . I mean to say, they don’t know about me. They don’t know that . . . ”
“Do you understand that this just doesn’t make sense? Do you really think this is possible? You’re the wonderful woman that I know and you hide behind a—”
“That’s not the way it is, you can’t talk about things you don’t understand. I . . . it isn’t easy. It’s not easy at all.”
“Okay. I get it. Well, I’m not interested in—”
“No, Rosaria, don’t be like that, please: it’s not that I feel—”
“I’m not interested in a woman who doesn’t have the strength to look at herself in the mirror: much less the strength to have a genuine love affair in defiance of all conventions. So just cling to your—”
“Rosaria, I’m begging you—”
“ . . . cling to your little life. If you make up your mind to be yourself one day, give me a call. Even though I can’t promise you that I’ll be here waiting for you.”
“I’m begging you, don’t do this. Please.”
. . .
“Please.”
Because the cold has this effect.
It’s only just arrived but it seems as if it’s always been here. That it’s never made way for sunlight, laughter, and the desire to be together.
The cold makes you want to shut yourself up indoors, never to see another soul.
Everything seems threatening in the cold. Everything seems terrible and dark.
The cold erases the future.
Francesco Romano was back in his car. Once again the cold was numbing his limbs, his nose, his ears.
Once again he was looking up at the windows of Giorgia’s mother’s apartment, unable to tear his eyes away.
He was turning an opened envelope over and over again in his hands, and inside that envelope was a sheet of paper. A single sheet of paper, and it wasn’t even fully covered with writing: a scant half page of type.
More powerful than an air conditioner, that half page of type. More powerful than an air conditioner running full blast. Chilling, freezing.
A light blinked on. Romano visualized the guest room in his mind, where right now Giorgia would surely be staying. Who knew what his wife was doing. His wife? Yes, his wife. She was still his wife.
He hefted the envelope, as if the bulk of that fraction of an ounce of paper somehow corresponded to the words written on it. Mamma mia, how light it was.
He shifted in the seat, to keep his muscles from going to sleep. You’ll have to come out at some point, he thought. You’ll have to come out, sooner or later.
And you’ll have to speak to me. You’ll have to confront me and tell me to my face what’s written on this piece of paper. And you’ll have to convince me that it’s true.
Because marriage is a serious matter, and you know that yourself. If someone agrees to live with someone, with no other commitment, they can leave whenever they like, and no one can say a thing. You don’t stand up and make any promises to anybody, when you’re just living together. You just set up housekeeping together, and that’s that; all you need is a suitcase, to put an end to things. Holy matrimony, on the other hand, is a binding together of two hearts before man and God. You can’t unravel that bond with a misguided backhand smack.
I don’t believe it, Giorgia. I don’t believe that you only want to see me again in front of a lawyer to hammer out the terms of our divorce.
I don’t want a divorce, understood? I don’t want that. I’m not ready to live without you.
He looked up at the window with the light burning behind it once again.
Sooner or later, you’ll have to come out. And talk to me. Without any fucking lawyer between us.
You’ll have to tell me, looking me right in the eye, that you no longer love me.
And yet, sooner or later, the cold ends.
Just when you least expect it, a morning dawns with a different gust of wind, a wind that smacks of the sea, for a change.
A special feel to the air, slipping under your skin, numbed by the cold, a strange lust for life. A feel that makes you think, after this long winter, that tomorrow may come after all, and that it may not be so bad.
The cold ends because that’s how the world works. There’s no real reason, but it ends.
And everything starts over again.
Aragona pretended to look out the plate-glass window that in the winter protected the roof garden of the Hotel Mediterraneo from the chilly north wind.
He’d spent a long time making his preparations. His expression was supposed to be the dreamy gaze of a man remembering extraordinary adventures, experienced in far-away lands, and who at the same time scans the horizon in search of new exploits and a brighter future. The gaze of someone who sees beyond the wall and beyond the present day, the gaze of someone who shoulders the responsibility for other people’s safety.
Unfortunately, no one was looking at that gaze.
The other tables were all occupied by businessmen just passing through or conference attendees busy reading reports and newspapers, and typing on their cell phones; but Aragona’s expression of a superhero wasn’t meant for them.
It had only one target.
Irina, the waitress he was in love with, pirouetted light-footed and discreet from one table to the next, serving the various distracted guests. Aragona wondered how it could be that they didn’t all get up en masse to give her a standing ovatio
n when she emerged from the kitchen carrying a trayful of cappuccinos. She was beautiful, her blonde hair pulled up and gathered beneath her white cap, her eyes bright blue and sparkling, her body lithe and appealing, and her accent exotic and thrilling.
She had already approached him once, and he, his voice warm and overbrimming with ulterior meanings—he hoped that she would catch them, those ulterior meanings—had addressed her with his usual, loving phrase: a double-shot espresso, ristretto, in a large mug, thanks. He suspected that the young woman was merely pretending not to remember what he ordered every morning just to give herself the opportunity to listen to the words anew, those loving words of his, the way you do with your favorite song on a record. He, too, he had to admit, even though he had carefully tracked out of the corner of his eye her every step, acted as if he hadn’t even noticed her approaching, so that he could hear her ask, once again: Can I bring you something hot to drink, Signore?
Now he was waiting, scanning the horizon through his blue-tinted eyeglasses. It took the time that it had to take, he mused. A double-shot espresso, ristretto, in a large mug, after all, was no simple thing to make. The mug, for starters, had to be just the right temperature, and the espresso needed to be ristretto, of course, which means that it had to drawn in just the right amount and with just the right interval. But eventually Irina would return, and when she did, she would find him in that alluring posture, painstakingly perfected right down to the tiniest detail.
He heard the clinking of the cup and the woman’s sensual voice uttering the long-awaited words: “Here you are.”
He pretended to emerge from his important thoughts, gave her a distracted but enchanting half-smile, and replied as he always did: “Thanks.”
There, it was all over. Now he’d have to wait until tomorrow for another intense exchange with the woman who had taken possession of his heart. The day, he mused, was nothing more than this: an interlude between a “thanks” and a “here you are.”
Then the unbelievable came to pass. Irina stopped, turned around, and came back to his table just as he was shoving a cookie into his mouth. She was luminous as a summer day.
“I saw the gentleman on television, yes?” she asked.
She had seen him! She’d seen him smiling like a fool, behind Ottavia as she read the press release drawn up in coordination with police headquarters, along with old man Pisanelli, beaming with pride, and Hulk as he looked around grim-faced, and Alex, who seemed to want to stand off to one side, and the Chinaman, expressionless as always. She had noticed him!
“Mmmpfff,” he replied, spraying cookie crumbs into the air and all over the table.
Irina nodded, and moved on.
Aragona drank a sip of water, which allowed him to gag down the cookie and save his life.
Once he had resumed a normal rate of respiration, he turned his eyes, streaming with tears, to the horizon.
It turns out, he thought, that the weather was getting nicer after all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Bastards grow with the fundamental help of a number of wonderful people.
Fabiola Mancone, Valeria Moffa, Gigi Bonagura, Paolo Cortis: the angels of the city, and my own personal guardians.
Giulio Di Mizio, for everything that concerns the job of the medical examiner and our conversations about death and life.
Sister Rosa from the Convent of the Thirty-Three (Monastero delle Trentatre), for her patient efforts to instruct a perfect ignoramus on religious topics.
Roberto de Giovanni, for leading me through the mysteries of biotechnology, and Giovanni de Giovanni, for having kept me company during the writing.
Stefania Negro, who stitches one book to the other with extraordinary care.
I Corpi Freddi, who are inside every one of my stories.
Severino Cesari, Francesco Colombo, Paolo Repetti, Valentina Pattavina, Rosella Postorino. This and other novels belong to them more than to the author.
Maria Cristina Guerra, for her heroic support.
The late Gigi Guidotti: I don’t know how I’ll travel this road without him.
And once again, she who is at the source of all my writing and who lets me wander off, since I know she will be there to greet me with a smile once the river stops flowing: my Paola.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maurizio de Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi books are bestsellers across Europe, with sales of the series approaching 1 million copies. De Giovanni is also the author of the contemporary Neapolitan thriller, The Crocodile, and three installments of the Bastards of Pizzolfalcone series. He lives in Naples with his family.
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