This time, the girl’s voice was excited: “Ciao, Papi. What are you doing? Are you having dinner?”
“No, not yet. I’m running late, they trans . . . I have a new office.”
“Really? Wow! Cool! It’s a good thing to change every so often, right? And after all, it’s not as if you really liked the old place. I could tell that from your voice.”
From my voice, she could tell. Women have antennae, even when they’re just teenagers.
“What about you? How do you think you did on your Latin test?”
“Good, I think I did good. I talked to Deborah about it, she’s really good, and we had the same translation. But that’s not the big news: tonight I’m going to a party! I was invited to a classmate’s birthday, she’s having a party in a club outside of Palermo!”
A party. Outside of Palermo.
“Oh, really? And how are you getting there? And with who?”
“Come on, Papi. What, are you worried about me? Nothing bad’s going to happen, it’s not like it’s a rave. It’s just a birthday party, this friend of mine was held back a year and she’s turning eighteen. It was just nice of her to invite me, until just a few days ago she didn’t even know I existed. And there’ll be boys! And dancing, too!”
Be careful, Lojacono thought to himself. Try not to squelch her enthusiasm, or she won’t tell you anything else.
“And does your mother know about it?”
“Oh sure, as if I’d tell her, she’d make my life miserable. Of course she doesn’t know. I told her I was sleeping over at Enza’s, and she had no problem with that, it just means she can go have her own fucking fun.”
“Mari, don’t talk like that. You know I don’t like it. And I don’t like hearing that you’re lying to your mother. I’m far away, I can’t help you if you need something, and . . .”
Her voice hardened.
“So, what are you saying, that I can’t even tell you what I’m doing? Is that it?”
“No, that’s not how it is. I trust you, you’re intelligent and you’re mature. But there are people in this world . . . if you only knew the kind of things I see every day, from sunup to sundown . . . Anyway, you go ahead. Just make sure you keep your phone charged and turned on, and if there’s anything you need, anything at all, call me right away. All right?”
She was calm again now, but cautious.
“All right, Papi. Don’t worry, I promise. And tomorrow I’ll call you and tell you all about it. Okay?”
“Yes, sweetheart. I’ll wait for your call. And don’t forget . . .”
“. . . phone charged and turned on, I swear. Ciao ciao, Papi. Till tomorrow.”
And suddenly he was all alone again, with a silent phone in one hand and something new to worry about: he wouldn’t be getting much sleep tonight.
As he was walking up the narrow lane, the vicolo, that led to Letizia’s trattoria, he had time to ponder his total lack of emotion at hearing Marinella say: It just means she can have her own fucking fun.
There had been times, up until a few months ago, when that phrase would have gone straight to his gut and lodged in his intestine, making him twist in pain for hours. But now, nothing. A stranger, that’s what Sonia was to him now. It seemed incredible that he had shared so many years with her, projects, plans for a future that would never come now. A stranger. He even hoped that she’d be able to form some lasting relationship, that she’d find a way to temper the resentment she felt for him; that he’d be able to be in touch with their daughter without having to sneak around, in the light of day.
Letizia saw him come in out of the corner of her eye; she was waiting for him, the way she did every night. All she needed was a rapid glance to sound out his mood: she wondered how that could be, since she had never been very good at reading men; and yet she was able to sense Lojacono’s state of mind, even if those almond-shaped eyes never changed their expression. But the corners of his mouth, the way he carried himself, the way he moved his hands—these spoke loud and clear. Maybe it was just a matter of paying attention. Maybe it was because what he thought of as a fine, warm friendship meant something else to her, even though she would never have admitted it, even to herself.
Lojacono took a seat at the corner table that she held for him even when, as was so often the case, there was a waiting list a yard long. Letizia’s trattoria was quite the hot spot, in part because of the proprietress’s physical beauty and personal charm. Her customers loved the traditional cooking, and her full breasts and dazzling smile made a pleasing side dish.
Wives and girlfriends could count on the fact that she never overstepped the bounds of amiable professional courtesy, always keeping things on a cordial but not especially personal footing, and so they packed the restaurant hoping that the proprietress might sing the house a song, the way she sometimes did. They would even joke about her attitude toward the man with the Asian features, the only person in the restaurant who seemed to be unaware that Letizia was in love with him; it was like eating an excellent meal while enjoing a live telenovela. What could be better?
“What’s wrong, you’re worried, aren’t you? Is it about Marinella?” she asked, sitting down at his table and wiping her hands on her apron.
He barely looked up from the bowl of rigatoni al ragù that he was rapidly polishing off.
“One of these days you’re going to have to explain to me what it is you put in this ragù. I can’t get enough, even when I’m not hungry. And as long as you’re at it, you could tell me how you manage to read my mind. She’s going to a party, a birthday party. Tonight, she’s going.”
“So what? What’s wrong with that? A birthday party’s hardly dangerous, as far as I know.”
“That’s what you think, that it isn’t dangerous,” Lojacono replied, his mouth full. “Anything can be dangerous if you’re fifteen years old and you’re a pretty girl. Do you know that the majority of drug users get started at exactly this sort of party?”
Letizia laughed: “Are you crazy? What drug users? Instead of being happy that she finally has some friends! And after all, it’s just a birthday party . . . You ought to go to a party yourself. You’re getting old and dreary, Peppuccio.”
She was the only person who called Lojacono by the nickname his friends had used back home, when he was a kid.
“But if I wasn’t old and dreary, do you think I’d come here for dinner?”
While Letizia was getting ready to fire back a sharp retort, Lojacono’s cell phone rang. On the display the name “Laura” was blinking, perfectly visible to Letizia, too. The lieutenant apologized, picked up his phone, and headed outside, followed by the proprietress’s suddenly black mood and the diners’ curious gazes.
“Ciao! How did your first day of school go?”
The Sardinian accent and the cheerful voice immediately put Lojacono in a happier mood, in spite of the fact that the instant he set foot outside of the restaurant he was buffeted by a violent drenching gust of wind and rain; but for some obscure reason he didn’t want to talk to her in front of Letizia.
“Ciao. You’re well informed, as always, eh? Mind telling me how you know?”
The woman chuckled, and Lojacono felt as if he could see her, dimples and all.
“Don’t forget, I’m a magistrate, and no one can hide anything from me. Especially when I’m interested in something, I always have a way of finding things out. Well, how did it go?”
“Well, what can I tell you? The commissario, Palma, strikes me as a nice guy, and a smart one, too. The rest of them, well, they’re pretty reserved, except for one, an overgrown kid, who seems like a bit of an asshole.”
Piras thought it over: “Mmm, that must be Aragona. Looks like he spends a lot of time in a tanning bed and dresses like a TV detective?”
Amused, Lojacono asked: “What do you have, bugs and surveillance cameras in there? Yeah, that�
��s the one. How did you know?”
“He used to work at headquarters, and they’ve tried to palm him off on everyone; they even tried to assign him to me as a bodyguard. I knew they’d unload him there. He’s the grandson of a prefect, I don’t know where, so there’s nothing they can do to him. Be careful, don’t let him drive because he’s a lunatic behind the wheel; I came close to throttling him once. What about the others. Any women?”
There it is, thought Lojacono. The crucial question.
“Two. A woman who has been at the precinct house for years, and a strange girl, who won’t look anyone in the eye and is something of a gun nut. Why do you ask?”
He imagined her, pensive, lost in who knows what fantasy. They hadn’t seen each other recently, but they often talked on the phone. They were developing an odd friendship, taut as a violin string with the tacit, reciprocal knowledge that they liked each other—a lot.
“No reason. Just curious. Maybe you can find a girlfriend, right?”
Her tone was nonchalant, cheerful; but her intentions were something else altogether.
“I doubt it. At least not in there. Maybe I’ll find one somewhere else.”
Laura laughed and, for no particular reason, he imagined her breasts underneath her blouse.
“Or maybe she’ll find you, one of these days. Let’s talk again soon, Lieutenant Lojacono. That way you can tell me how it’s going at school.”
Cold and drenched, the lieutenant went back into the trattoria; Letizia was sitting at another table now, laughing, with her back to him.
IX
Mayya opened the door, and noticed that today it wasn’t locked the way it usually was.
The notary must have come home late, as he sometimes did, and maybe he’d forgotten to lock up. It had happened before, not all that often, truth be told, but it had happened. She put the grocery bags down by the front door, trying not to get everything wet. A driving wind was kicking up the surf and pushing it right across the street; it wasn’t even clear whether it was actually raining, there was so much water in the air.
Mayya thought back to her hometown in Bulgaria, far from the sea, from waves of any kind, where when it rained it was raining, and when it was sunny the sun was shining; here it was never obvious just what the weather was.
She took off her coat and put it in the front hall closet. It was silent and there was no smell of coffee, which mean the signora hadn’t woken up yet; strange, it was already eight o’clock: she should have been up and about for at least an hour. Perhaps she wasn’t feeling well, or maybe she’d been out late last night.
For the past few days, Mayya had been worried about the signora. Mayya liked her: she was sweet and kind, she never raised her voice; compared with employers she’d had in the past, she was wonderful. And Mayya’s girlfriends, whom she saw every Thursday in the piazza by the train station, made it clear with the stories they told that she really could consider herself lucky.
But her signora wasn’t happy. Mayya was sure of that: something was bothering her, something big. Not that her signora ever confided in her, no: she was a very reserved person, and Mayya was anything but intrusive. Still, silences tell no lies, as they said back home: words do, but silences don’t. And in the signora’s silences, in her absent gaze as she stared into space, there was no happiness. There was something else. Maybe fear.
Maybe it was a good thing that she had decided to sleep in that morning, Mayya thought to herself; sometimes a good long sleep can put your heart at rest, and help you to see things more optimistically.
The young women moved through the darkness, noticing in passing that the windows and shutters, securely fastened, confirmed the fact that no one was up yet. She headed toward the kitchen: she’d make breakfast, a caffe latte and cookies. She wondered whether the notary was at home, and remembered that the man’s overcoat hadn’t been hanging on the rod in the front hall closet. Maybe he’d already gone out; or, more likely, he hadn’t returned home.
She didn’t see much of him, the notary. She left in the afternoon, long before he came home from the office. She’d run into him once or twice in the morning, when she was coming in and he was heading out, and another couple of times on the eve of major holidays, when she’d been asked to work a few hours extra. He was a good-looking man, tall and distinguished, with a thick head of gray hair and a fit physique; but Mayya had never liked him. She’d felt his cold eyes evaluating her, sizing up her body the way a farmer might look at cows at the market. She knew that kind of man all too well; the wrong kind of man to live with her signora.
While she was arranging the cookies on the tray and waiting for the coffee to be ready, she wondered to herself how such a badly mismatched couple could stay together for so many years, and without having children, either. Children bring a couple together, they constitute a topic of conversation that the parents never tire of. Children solidify the partnership between a husband and a wife, and when there’s nothing else, at least they have them. But the signora and the notary didn’t even have that.
It was understandable, at that point, Mayya thought to herself, that people would look around for something else to keep their minds occupied. And their bodies, too, she supposed. The notary who was never at home, what with his work and his card games and his who knows what else, and the signora with her charity drives, her tea parties with her girlfriends, and her social clubs. And her collection of glass snow globes.
The young woman shook her head as she poured out the coffee. Everyone has their obsessions. The signora collected those horrible glass spheres that, when you shook them, unleashed a fake blizzard over the landscapes and figures inside. She loved them so much, the signora did, that she wouldn’t even let Mayya dust them: she would do it herself, slipping on latex gloves and devoting an entire morning every week to the job. It was the only time that she seemed truly happy, surrounded by hundreds of little glass globes that seemed like so many soap bubbles.
The signora’s collection was famous. Whenever her friends traveled, they’d be sure to bring back at least one item to add to it. Once a journalist even came, to take pictures of her surrounded by her snow globes, and the signora had proudly displayed the magazine with her photograph to Mayya. She’d even told her that someday, she was going to have an exhibition somewhere, and that she’d donate the proceeds to charity. Truth be told, Mayya thought it was ridiculous that anyone would pay money to see those objects, but people, she knew, did all sorts of strange things.
Moving slowly with her tray through the partial darkness for fear of falling, she went into the signora’s bedroom; in the light that filtered through the shutters, she saw that the bed was still made and that there was no one in the bedroom.
Strange. Very strange.
If she’d had to leave suddenly for some reason, the signora would have called her: when she had any urgent news to communicate, the signora always used her phone; she always asked if she was bothering her. Why would she have forgotten to alert her, this time?
She headed toward the study with the snow globes. Maybe, she thought, the signora had fallen asleep in an armchair, with a book in her hand, in her favorite room. The wind was moaning in despair as it ran up against obstacles that hindered its blind gallop. The sea was hurling itself ferociously onto the street, doing its best to invade the space from which it had been barred.
The armchair was empty. A cloud hurried away from the face of the sun, and a beam of light illuminated the floor of the room, coming to rest on a shard of glass glittering under the chair.
Mayya realized that it was one of the glass globes with snow inside, and she wondered what it was doing on the floor.
Then she realized that there was something else on the floor: the signora’s dead body, the back of her head shattered and a puddle of clotted blood around it.
The tray clattered to the floor with a crash of broken porcelain, scatterin
g cookies and caffe latte everywhere.
Mayya brought both hands to her face and let out a scream.
X
Deputy Sergeant Ottavia Calabrese left the precinct house, shooting Guida, the officer standing guard at the entrance, a distracted nod. She almost failed to recognize him: his tie was knotted impeccably, his hair was brushed, his jacket was perfectly buttoned, and he was sitting up straight, his eyes trained firmly before him. She’d always seen him as a kind of funny ornament, a papier-mâché statue depicting a drunk in uniform reading the sports section; now he actually looked like a real policeman.
She had to admit that something in that place was changing. All credit to the commissario. A man out of the ordinary: she’d thought that from the very first time he appeared at her office door, asking permission to enter, smiling at her hesitantly like a little boy joining his class for the very first time at a new school.
Ottavia had liked Palma from the start. His rumpled appearance, his unkempt hair, his rolled-up sleeves. And the cheerful, youthful atmosphere that he ushered inside those cracked old walls. Moreover, there was no wedding ring on his finger: who knew why, who knew whether he was a bachelor or divorced, or maybe a widower. But widowers often continued to wear their wedding rings.
She wore a wedding ring. And she wasn’t a widow.
Before boarding the funicular, she stopped in a rosticceria, a local takeout place. She wasn’t up to cooking that night, and it was late already. She always seemed to leave the office late. Not that she minded: she did it on purpose. For so long now, work had been the best part of her day. A woman’s work is never done; for policewomen, it’s even worse.
In the crowded funicular car, with her purse on one side and the packet from the rosticceria on the other, she could find nowhere to sit. A kid, sprawled out on a seat, looked up at her defiantly and then turned up the volume in his headphones; then he turned to look out the window, chewing gum, his mouth wide open.
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 4