The Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Ottavia felt someone move behind her, and an irritating pressure against her derriere. She sighed: every night it was the same thing. The crowd, stuffed into the car like sardines in a can, and some idiot ogling her and rubbing up against her. She was well aware that she had a generous figure and a healthy, taut body that she tried to conceal under sensible, unfashionable clothing, but there was nothing she could do: someone always noticed.

  She didn’t turn around, that would only make it worse. Instead, she looked down, identified the tip of a black loafer, took aim, and jammed her foot down. A single blow with her heel, smashing down on the man’s big toe. A surprised gasp, a muttered curse; now Ottavia turned around, stared at the dirty old man behind her, and said: “I beg your pardon. Would you care to let me have your other foot, so I can finish the job and make it nice and symmetrical?” The man pushed away into the crowd, glaring at her, in search of other, more compliant, asses, less willing to defend themselves.

  It was about a kilometer from the funicular to home. The shops were all closed, but Ottavia still took longer than necessary. My feet, she thought, give my heart away. She pulled her keys out of her purse with an exaggerated calm, imagining that she was moving underwater. Then, with a sigh, she opened the door.

  “Is that you, my love?”

  How the fuck he managed to be so cheerful, loving, and affectionate, even after a hard day of work, Ottavia truly couldn’t understand.

  “Yes, who else would it be? It’s me.”

  Her husband Gaetano appeared at the kitchen door with a cheerful expression on his face.

  “Ciao! Have you seen the wind? The dish antenna is swinging around like a flag, we’re only getting cable. You want an aperitif?”

  As she was taking off her necklace and her earrings, Ottavia replied in a weary voice: “No, thanks. I’m shattered. I picked up something in the rosticceria; I just don’t feel like cooking tonight.”

  “Cooking? Are you serious? I’ve already taken care of everything, my love. Just wait, it’s delicious! Fettuccine with mushrooms and cream, and lemon chicken scaloppini. I got a bottle of red, too, an Aglianico, the kind you like. It’ll be ready in five minutes, just relax until then.”

  Ottavia, standing in front of the bathroom mirror where she had gone to remove her makeup, thought to herself that being married to Superman was a curse greater than she could possibly bear. A highly respected and deeply educated engineer, he earned an enormous salary, had fifteen people reporting to him, and still found the time and energy to buy a bottle of Aglianico and cook fettuccine ai funghi. In any civilized country, she mused, he would have been executed by firing squad in the public square.

  She went into the dining room and shot a look at the sofa. Riccardo was there, as usual. As usual, with a pen in hand. As usual, doodling on a sheet of graph paper. As usual, closed up in a world that excluded everyone else.

  Gaetano walked in with a steaming tureen in his hands, and a fleck of cream on his cheek.

  “Dinner’s ready! To the table, family! Riccardo, sweetheart, did you see? Mamma’s home!”

  Slowly, the boy lifted his face from the sheet of paper and looked vacantly around the room; then his eyes stopped on Ottavia, and in a cavernous voice he said: “Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mammm . . .”

  From the corner of his mouth hung a streamer of drool. His hand went on methodically tracing circles on the sheet of graph paper, all of them concentric, all within the margins of the little squares, as if drawn with a compass. Mamma. The only word that he’d uttered in an intelligible manner in his thirteen years of life, amidst the indistinct murmurs he made as he watched his television shows. Nothing else. Nothing, ever. No window into the world of which he was the sole inhabitant.

  Ottavia went over to the boy and caressed the face that so closely resembled her own. She helped him to his feet and walked him to the table where Gaetano, chattering on about his wonderful day, ladled into each bowl a quantity of fettuccine that would have sated an entire soccer team, second-string players, too. Ottavia wondered what Commissario Palma was having for dinner that night.

  Mamma, mamma, said Riccardo. Gaetano looked at her lovingly.

  Ottavia began eating, thinking how much she hated them both.

  XI

  Palma had turned the old precinct house cafeteria into their new joint office by knocking down a drywall partition that someone had put up to transform a nice big bright room into two small dark depressing ones.

  The six desks had been arranged to as to allow each of them a certain degree of privacy if they spoke quietly on the phone; but each could easily attract the attention of the others. Lojacono, settling in by the window overlooking the castle jutting out into the sea, mentally recognized the commissario’s strategic skill in the deployment of resources: the only way to create solidarity of any kind in such a diverse group of people was to keep them together for as much time as possible.

  He noticed that the first to arrive had been Pisanelli, the deputy captain who was a veteran of Pizzofalcone. He’d hung a large corkboard behind his desk, and he was carefully pinning a series of photographs and newspaper clippings to it. Noticing his bewilderment, Calabrese, who was busy with the cables of two computers she was setting up on her desk, widened her eyes and whispered:

  “It’s an obsession of his. Those are all the suicides that have taken place in this neighborhood over the past ten years. He’s convinced that they’re actually murders, and he’s been gathering material to prove it.”

  Pisanelli, from the back of the room, turned to look at them.

  “I heard you, you know, Ottavia. I know that you’re saying that I’m just a nutty old man.”

  He didn’t seem upset. If anything, sad. Calabrese replied: “Why, no, I’m saying no such thing, Giorgio. I was just explaining to him what all those newspaper clippings and photographs are for. Otherwise, Lojacono will think it’s to do with some complicated international plot.”

  The man spoke directly to the lieutenant, in a soft voice.

  “The problem, my dear Lojacono, is that sometimes we can’t see past the tips of our own noses. We just take the easiest route. If someone wants us to think that someone killed themselves, all they need to do is leave a suicide note and there you go. I don’t think it’s right that just because a person is alone in the world, and maybe depressed, you can throw him out like a dirty old rag. I think that everyone deserves an investigation, a little research. That’s all.”

  Aragona, the suntanned young man, was carefully placing a silver paperweight, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Italian president’s office, on his desk; there, it simply made no sense. “As you can see,” he commented acidly, “there’s no real work for us to do here. If we’re just going to investigate suicides and pretend that they’re murders, then we might as well start playing contract bridge.”

  Pisanelli looked at him with unmistakable annoyance: “In that case, I hope that you live for a good many years, my friend. And that you turn into a lonely old man, like many of these here, on my bulletin board. And then, if someone ‘suicides’ you, you’ll be filed away in a hurry and no one will ever think of you again.”

  Ottavia opened her mouth as if to intervene, then shut it again and went back to untangling the welter of cables.

  The quiet girl, whom Lojacono remembered as Di Nardo, spoke in a low voice to Pisanelli: “And have any connections emerged to link the suicides? Have you found anything?”

  She seemed to be genuinely interested. The man studied her for a moment, making sure that she wasn’t just making fun of him. Then he said: “No, there aren’t any direct connections so far. And anyway, this is something I work on outside office hours. I keep most of the material at home; still, there are some details that make you think. The repeated use of certain words, in the suicide notes. The fact that many of them were written on a typewriter or a computer, wh
ich is something a person would be unlikely to do at such a desperate moment. The disconnect between the ways that some of the people . . . well, the ways that they did it, with respect to their personalities, their psychological profiles. A series of things that . . .”

  He was interrupted by Romano; the huge man had let himself flop down onto a chair and was now looking intently out the window: “If someone kills himself, then he kills himself. It’s cowardice, it means they don’t have the courage to go on living. You have to face life head-on, no matter how shitty it is.”

  His voice sounded like distant thunder. Aragona snickered.

  “So you’re saying that if someone jumps off a viaduct a hundred feet in the air, he’s a coward. And so is someone who puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, or drinks a bottle of acid. It seems to me that it takes more courage to die than to live.”

  As Romano was preparing a comeback, Palma ran in hastily, a sheet of paper in one hand: “Guys, we’re in business. And this one’s major: a woman was murdered on the waterfront, the wife of a notary. Lojacono and Aragona, you’re up.”

  XII

  Let’s see: what time is it?

  By now they’ll have already found you.

  It would have been the housekeeper, the Bulgarian woman. She must have searched the house for you—the kitchen, the bedroom. Maybe she tried the handle of the bathroom door, to see if you were in there. And the door would have swung open, into silence and darkness.

  The apartment must have seemed deserted. Nothing, except for the wind shrieking outside. Not another sound.

  Then she’d have walked down the hallway, uncertain. Maybe she assumed you’d left.

  I wonder what it would be like, if emotions hung in the air like a smell. If the scent of your sad smile, the last time I saw your face, was still suspended in the room. What sort of a scent would it have had, your smile?

  She must have gone looking for you, the Bulgarian housekeeper. Moving circumspectly among the furniture and the carpets, taking care not to knock anything over in the dark. Maybe she wouldn’t have even turned on the lights, for fear you might be fast asleep somewhere and she’d wake you up.

  But there’s no real risk of that, is there? As far as waking you up goes, no one on earth can do that.

  Who can say what she did, when she finally came face-to-face with you. Or face-to-face with what was left of you, to be exact. A bundle lying in the semidarkness of the windows, shuttered to preserve the last scraps of night.

  I look outside. The wind is still blowing, and big black clouds are being shoved across the sky. It’s not raining, now.

  Instead, just a few dozen yards from your dead body, the sea spray is still whirling through the air, covering the walls of apartment buildings and the balconies with salt. But all around you, everything is inert. Motionless.

  Your snow globes, for instance. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Shelves filled with them, arranged according to that odd system you seemed to prefer. With fake snow, lying nicely and obediently at the bottom of the globe, just waiting to be shaken up. What will become of them now, of your snow globes? We’ll have to think about what to do with them.

  With all of them, except for one. That one, I think, will follow a different path. It will go on its way through crime labs and courtrooms; it’ll wind up in a big cardboard evidence box, archived on some forgotten shelf. And there it will sit for years and years, until it’s finally thrown away. That snow globe is special. Unique. The one with the girl playing the little guitar. The one with your blood smeared on its surface.

  The one that ripped away your last truly happy smile, and then ripped away your life.

  I wonder what she’ll do, the housekeeper, when she finally understands. When she realizes that it’s you, or that it used to be you, now lying there in a pool of blood with your head bashed in. She’ll scream, I think. Or maybe not. Bulgarians are tough.

  Now starts the hard part. For me, for those of us who are still here.

  Not for you.

  For you, it’s all over.

  Too bad. If only you’d been reasonable.

  If only you hadn’t turned your back on me.

  XIII

  As soon as Palma finished, Aragona sprang to his feet, ready for action. Lojacono, on the other hand, turned a gaze of mute supplication in the commissario’s direction; his commanding officer took great care not to meet his eyes, studiously looking elsewhere.

  “I’ll drive, I know exactly where that is,” the young man had said, grabbing for the sheet of paper with the directions.

  Palma had shrugged: “Do as you like, there’s no hurry; two squad cars are already on the scene, and the medical examiner and the forensic team are on their way. This time of day there’s a lot of traffic.”

  Lojacono, putting on his coat, replied sardonically: “Oh, there is? When you have a minute, could you draw up a chart for me of the times when there isn’t a lot of traffic in this city? Maybe on August 15th, when the whole city’s at the beach?”

  They’d taken a compact, unmarked car that had been parked in the courtyard. Aragona had the engine running before Lojacono got in the car, and he screeched out of the parking spot before the lieutenant’s feet were in the car.

  “Aragona, have you lost your mind? Are you trying to run someone over? The way you’re driving, our first official act in this precinct will be to run over a few locals, and you know how much they love us already.”

  The young man drove as if the streets were empty, causing the pedestrians in their path to bolt. Out of the corner of his eye, Lojacono saw a little old lady darting to one side just in the nick of time, with a leap worthy of a classical ballerina; he agreed wholeheartedly with the stream of angry dialect she showered in the driver’s direction, even if he couldn’t understand a single word.

  “Calm down, Loja’, don’t worry. I took a course in performance driving, I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Just where did you take this course, in prison? You heard him say there’s no hurry, didn’t you? Why the fuck are you going so fast?”

  Aragona kept his foot on the accelerator.

  “It’s quite an honor to work with you. Fuck, the man who nailed the Crocodile! For weeks, no one in this city talked about anything but you and how you made all the other precincts working on the case look like pieces of shit. You’re a legend!”

  Clutching the door handle, Lojacono said through clenched teeth: “Not that it did me a lot of good, though. It’s not as if they let me go home.”

  “Eh, well, that’s a horse of a different color. From what I’ve heard, someone back home thinks that, even if there’s no evidence against you, you must have been in touch with those people somehow. But don’t give up hope, if you do a good job, maybe they really will send you back home.”

  Lojacono looked over at his colleague’s profile, watching him as he did his best to kill anyone who threatened to hinder his rapid progress.

  “What do you know about my me and business, Arago’?”

  “Ah, I know plenty, actually. I told you before, I used to work at police headquarters. That’s where all the documents wind up, and if you have the right connections, you can find out anything you want to know. For instance, when this opportunity opened up in Pizzofalcone, I read the files on all the characters the various precincts had volunteered in the hopes of getting rid of them. A fine assortment of losers.”

  “In that case, why on earth did you volunteer? From what I’ve heard, you could have found yourself a much more comfortable berth somewhere else, no?”

  “No, for me this place is perfect, believe me. Just think: a very serious crime took place here, which ruined the whole department’s reputation. They wanted to shut this precinct down, and sure enough, they sent us the worst cops they could lay their hands on. Are you with me so far?”

 
Lojacono had noticed that, when Aragona spoke, he slowed down ever so slightly; he decided he could stand the kid’s ravings if it meant saving the life of some innocent pedestrian.

  “I’m with you. Keep talking.”

  “You know what they call the people who work here, the other cops in this city? They call us the Bastards of Pizzofalcone. Don’t you think that’s great?”

  Lojacono shrugged his shoulders: “I don’t think it’s anything, personally. What’s so great about it?”

  The young man looked hard at Lojacono and just missed a bicyclist, who veered sharply away and rode right up onto the sidewalk.

  “What’s great about it is that if we do something good, then we become heroes; and if we don’t do anything at all, then things remain as they were.”

  “Listen, Aragona, don’t you care anything about doing a good job? What if someone wanted to be a cop just so he could be a cop?”

  The officer put on an offended expression: “Why on earth would you say that? Of course that’s the most important thing. It’s just that a person has to think about his career too, doesn’t he? Certainly, if you’re someone they’ve put out with the trash—someone like the four of us—it’s harder to prove that you know how to do your job right. But that’s exactly why it’s so exciting.”

  “Put out with the trash? That’s overstating things, isn’t it?”

  Aragona turned serious.

  “Listen to me, I’ve seen the files. I can tell you for sure, every one of us is tarred by some black mark. Take Di Nardo: the quiet girl, the one who loves guns. You know you’re not supposed to carry loaded weapons with the safety off inside the station house: that’s against the rules. Well, she actually discharged her firearm inside the building. And she came that close to killing another cop. Can you imagine?”