They knocked on the door and Mayya opened it immediately, as if she’d been standing there waiting.
“Buonasera, please come in.”
They found themselves in a place that looked nothing like the rest of the building. Two long-necked lamps cast a warm light onto the spotlessly clean room, which contained a table and chairs, a sofa and an armchair, a coffee table and a flat-screen television. Photographs hung on the wall, most depicting Mayya with her arms wrapped around a tall, dark-haired, powerfully built man, who wore a serious, vaguely embarrassed expression. The general impression was of a normal middle-class apartment whose inhabitants were neither filthy rich nor lacking in the essentials.
“Signorina,” Lojacono said, “you remember us, don’t you? We met . . . we saw each other a couple of days ago, in the notary’s apartment.”
The girl nodded, her expression pained. Seeing her now, the two policemen realized she looked less young; her face bore the marks of a sorrow that seemed sincere, shot through with faint worry. In that part of town, having two policemen in your home must not exactly be considered good luck.
“Certainly. Please, come right in. I make some coffee?”
The lieutenant shook his head no, while Aragona, rather rudely, wandered around the room studying the photographs.
“No, thank you. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. We preferred to come here, rather than sending for you. It should be quick, no more than a few minutes.”
Mayya ran her hand through her hair—the gesture had to be instinctive because her hair was already perfectly groomed.
“I understand. Okay. Let’s sit here.”
She pointed to a sofa and an armchair, and settled herself in the armchair. Her hands were the only part of her that betrayed nervousness: she couldn’t stop clenching them, separating them, and wringing them together. The rest of her body was still, stiff; no emotions filtered out through her even, somewhat nondescript features.
Aragona, who had stopped near a photo of the dark-haired man, said: “And this gentleman, in this photograph, who is he? Does he live here with you?”
Lojacono noticed his partner’s rude tone; the girl replied without turning around, her voice unflustered.
“That is my boyfriend, Adrian. He works, soon he is home.”
Aragona smirked slyly and looked over at Lojacono, nodding as if he’d just found the guilty party. The lieutenant ignored him and turned to the woman.
“How long had you worked for the Festa family?”
“Two and half years, almost three. Do you want to see work papers?”
Lojacono raised one hand, made a vague gesture.
“No, maybe later. And how did you like it there, with them?”
“Notary was never there, I went nine in morning and then stay till five in afternoon, I only see notary a couple times. The signora is . . . was kind, courteous. I loved her. Very much.”
For a moment, her lips quavered and her eyes filled with tears. Then she gave a short sharp cough and regained her self-control. Lojacono thought to himself that she really had cared for the victim. Or else she was a first-rate actress. Or perhaps she’d just experienced a moment of regret.
“When you got there, in the morning, did the signora let you in?”
“No, I have own keys. So if signora was out, or sleeping, I not wake her up.”
Aragona, still standing behind the girl, asked: “And how long had you had these keys?”
The girl replied, still looking at Lojacono. Aragona’s hostility was unmistakable, and she had chosen the interlocutor she preferred.
“After two weeks, the signora gave me keys. I’ve had ever since.”
The lieutenant resumed: “And the other morning, then, you didn’t find anything strange, nothing out of place or anything like that . . .”
“No, everything like always. I not even notice about silver things, not looked on shelves, went in kitchen, made breakfast, went to look for signora, not there in bedroom, I . . .”
She stopped, gulped, and raised her hand toward her face but stopped, mid-gesture. Her bottom lip began to quiver again and a tear rolled down her cheek. She made a visible effort to regain her composure and then brought her eyes, reddened now, back to Lojacono: “Signora was good lady. Kind to me, kind to everyone. I never remember once hearing her yell, she never angry with me, with no one. I don’t understand who it could be. I don’t understand, how or why. I don’t understand.”
Aragona snorted. Lojacono glared at him and asked: “Did you ever hear Signora De Santis argue with anyone, say, on the telephone? Or did anyone ever come to the house, maybe even for just a few minutes? Did you ever see her argue with anyone, maybe with the notary?”
Mayya thought it over. Then: “When I was there, almost no one ever came. Sometimes girlfriend of signora, the baroness, lady a little bit old . . . And she talk to signora in loud voice, but signora laugh, they didn’t fight. Only baroness got mad with signora, signora never got mad with baroness.” After a short pause, she continued: “Notary, when home, didn’t talk much. He stayed in his office, even when they ate he not talk much with signora. I never hear them arguing, no, not that.”
Lojacono nodded. He could just imagine the baroness denigrating the victim’s husband to her, and the way the woman must have let those criticisms slide off her back. It matched up with the information that they’d already gathered.
“And did she go out often, the signora, during the time you spent in the apartment?”
“No. Sometimes notary’s office car would come get her, with driver, and she went out to buy something. She had passion for snow globes, you saw how many she had in that room. Sometimes she came back with new snow globes, and she’d look at me as if to say sorry. She couldn’t resist.”
At that very moment the door swung open and in came a slightly older version of the man from the photographs hanging on the wall.
He furrowed his brow and turned to Mayya: “What’s going on? Who are these men?”
Aragona walked toward him: “Police. Who are you? Last name, first name.”
Aragona came up to the man’s chest, and the man’s musculature made him look like a bodybuilder, to say nothing of the grim expression on his face, but Aragona’s tone was nevertheless threatening.
The young man blinked rapidly and became cautious: “Florea, Adrian. I live here. Has something happened?”
Aragona looked up at him from his vantage point several inches below; didn’t answer. Adrian shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly uneasy.
Lojacono reassured him: “No, nothing. We were just asking the young lady here a few questions about what happened the other day at the place she works. Do you know anything about it?”
Before the other man had a chance to reply, Aragona roared: “First I want to know where you’re from, how long you’ve been here, and what you do for a living.”
Lojacono started to tell him to calm down but, realizing that the information would come in handy anyway, he changed his mind. Florea shifted his gaze from one to the other and then, evidently accustomed to these kinds of questions, said: “I’m of Romanian nationality. I’m thirty years old, and I’ve been here since I was twenty. I have a small delivery truck, and I transport soft drinks for a company based in Poggioreale.”
He spoke perfect, practically unaccented Italian, which confirmed his story. Aragona stared at him, nodding, as if what the young man had told him was a confession that matched up exactly with what he’d expected. Then he said: “Well, we’ll see about that. ID, please. Quickly.”
The man pulled out his wallet. Lojacono sighed: he disliked Aragona’s attitude, his unmistakable prejudice against the immigrant even though there was no reason to suspect him. But he wasn’t the kind of cop who argued with his partner in front of outsiders. He made a mental note to give Aragona a stern talking-to on
ce they left.
He spoke again to Mayya, who hadn’t spoken up.
“Signorina, there’s something I need to ask you: have the keys to the signora’s and the notary’s apartment always been in your possession? You didn’t lose them, for instance, and then find them again, you didn’t give them to someone, even if only for a few hours, a local deliveryman, the building’s doorman, anyone. Please do your best to remember.”
Adrian, who had walked over and was now taking off his jacket, commented sarcastically: “Of course, it’s only natural. Whenever anything bad happens, if there’s an immigrant nearby, well, then, it must be him. Even if all his documents check out, even if he’s breaking his back to make ends meet, even if he’s well liked. If there’s an immigrant, then nothing could be easier: we know who did it.”
Aragona took a step forward, removing his glasses with his usual flourish and raising his voice threateningly: “Listen up, you: we ask the questions and you answer them, understood? No one around here is saying that anyone did anything. What’s the matter, you have a chip on your shoulder? Why don’t you tell me where you were Sunday night, eh?”
Lojacono got up from the couch: “Oh, oh, now that’s enough out of both of you! Florea, believe me, there’s no prejudice against you. At least not on my part—” and here he gave Aragona a meaningful look; Aragona put his glasses back on. “Let’s try to gather the information we need as quickly as we can, so we can be on our way.”
The man wrapped his arms around his chest, and said, slowly, articulating every word: “On Sunday night I was here, fast asleep. Because in the morning, I wake up at four, and by 4:30 I’m already out in the street, loading up cases of mineral water to transport from one end of the city to the other for pennies. And I thank God I have the work, because there are lots of people who, in order to eat, have had to do things I’ve never done and never would do. But they do it because they need to feed themselves and their children: and back home there’s nothing to steal and no one to steal it from. And there’s something else I want to say: Romanian isn’t the same as gypsy. There are gypsies, and there are Romanians. I’m Romanian, and I work all day long. Doing honest work.”
“Good for you, well done!” Aragona retorted sarcastically. “We have a regular statesman here, who the fuck are you, the president of Romania? All these excuses just make me laugh, that’s what they do. I’ve seen plenty of others like you, and you all act like little lambs, I haven’t done anything, I’m innocent, I’m the best person in the world, I’m a saint! Then, dig down a little, dig down a little deeper, and out comes enough shit to fill a truck twice as big as the one you drive. We’ll check into it, you can count on that. And if it turns out that you or some friend of yours . . . because we know how it works with you people, one of you gets the job and another one pulls it off . . . had anything to do with what happened at the Festa home, I’ll pound you black and blue. In person.”
Lojacono decided that, sometime in the near future, if only in the interests of saving his life, he was going to have to force Aragona to stop going to the movies—unless it was to see cartoons or Italian comedies.
Florea blinked again, and from the height of his six feet three inches spoke down to Aragona’s five feet seven inches in a suddenly halting voice: “But . . . I didn’t do anything, I swear it. I went out early, because just to earn a little extra I work Sundays, too, and so I was dead tired . . . Mayya stayed home, she made me dinner . . . we were alone, just the two of us here, and . . .”
Mayya intervened, calmly. She hadn’t stirred from her chair, she hadn’t shifted, and she continued to stare straight ahead.
“I never let go of keys, always kept them in purse, never lost, never loaned. They are here, if you like I give them to you right now. Anyway, I’ll never go back there. Never again. At night, I . . . every night I see poor signora on floor, with head in blood . . . Never again go there.”
When they were alone again in the car, Lojacono turned to Aragona: “Do you mind if I ask what’s come over you? You assaulted that young man as if you already knew he was guilty.”
The officer shrugged: “If you only knew how many I’ve seen like him, down at headquarters. You have no idea the things they’re capable of doing. They’re a regular tribe, an assembly line: maybe he took the keys, and the girl went along with it, they made copies and then handed them off to someone else, who drove the car with two more in back, and they went over to the woman’s apartment and did what they did.”
Lojacono nodded: “Maybe. And maybe not. Maybe we take them and throw them in a cell, the way we always do, just because they have no one to corroborate their alibis; and then whoever actually killed the signora can relax in the warm sun, maybe on Capri or in Cortina, as the baroness says, with a cocktail in one hand, congratulating themselves for having pulled off a perfect crime, or simply for having gotten away with it. And special thanks to those two assholes Lojacono and Aragona, who were in a hurry so they picked up the first Romanian they bumped into and got him a thirty-year sentence.”
Aragona thought it over: “Let’s say you’re right. I’m just saying theoretically, eh, because when I see these people I always ask myself where they get the money to buy a flat-screen TV, because when I bought mine I actually had to ask my dad for the cash. But let’s just say you’re right. These two have no alibi, in point of fact, because they say that they were alone together that night. And we don’t know anything else: the notary refuses to talk to us, we can’t go question his lover because we have no probable cause, and all we got out of the Baroness What-the-Fuck’s-Her-Face is what a saint the signora was. Well then, can you tell me what we’re supposed to do now?”
Lojacono sighed: “I don’t know. We need to talk to the notary, somehow. But I don’t know how. The fact is, we don’t have anything else to do tonight. Let’s just go home, okay, and we can sleep on it.”
Aragona screeched out into traffic, without yielding or even bothering to turn his head.
XLI
On the landing, Giorgio Pisanelli ran into the Commendator Lapiana, his next-door neighbor. They exchanged a discreet buonasera, but Pisanelli didn’t stop to chat because he was in something of a hurry; he gestured to the envelope he had tucked under his arm, as if that were a justification, and shut the door behind him.
He couldn’t prevent a few drops of urine from staining his trousers. He sighed from the pain of urinating, doing his best to avoid seeing the streaks of blood in the toilet bowl. At last he flushed and watched as the swirling water carried away his worries, his anguish, and a hint of guilt.
He turned on the stereo, and Mozart’s pure soul began to ring out through the dank air of the apartment. Pisanelli had a suspicion that ever since Lapiana’s retirement, his neighbor had been eavesdropping on him. Pisanelli didn’t want to give Lapiana the satisfaction of thinking that he was starting to talk to himself. He had things to tell Carmen that night, and he didn’t want to be overheard.
He put the envelope on the table in the dining room and opened it, dumping out photographs and documents. He began putting them into order, whistling the Symphony No. 40 in G minor as he did so.
You see, darling, he said, a new one. Leonardo says that I have to rid myself of these ghosts; that I’m projecting, that I’m transferring my anxieties, the burdens weighing on my soul, onto other people. But you and I, my sweetest love, know that’s not how it is.
Look at this one, for instance. Last week, well outside the boundaries of the precinct, at Piazza Dante. In the subway: she waited just a second before the train pulled in and then threw herself in front of it. It’s pretty unbelievable, no one noticed a thing: a woman jumps onto the subway tracks at rush hour, thousands of people inside the train and hundreds more on the platform, because we all know very well that with trains running one every fifteen minutes you have to fight to board the cars, and no one notices a thing. Doesn’t that strike you as absurd?
But there are plenty of absurd things, this time as well. Like I was saying: outside the boundaries of the precinct. In that case, you’ll ask me, and I know you’ll do it because you’re so intelligent, how did you find out about it? And how does it fit in with the other “suicides” that are in the other room, the photographs and newspaper clippings pinned to the wall? Well, it’s pretty simple. Signora Carmela Del Grosso, seventy-nine years old, lives, or better, lived on Vico Terzo Nocelle. She wouldn’t have lived there much longer, because she’d received her eviction notice some time ago, and it was almost time for the marshals to come and physically eject her. Well? Is that a good reason to end it all? If everyone who received an eviction notice in this city were to jump in front of a subway, they’d definitely have to up the number of trains they run.
So, what people say to me is this: Pisane’, admit it; the woman did it because she was poor, very poor, she couldn’t pay her rent and she had nowhere else to go. But what I say to them, and you tell me if I’m wrong, my love: does a woman who wants to end it all, who wants to kill herself, take a train all the way to Piazza Dante? And does she take that train to go see a grocer she knows, who doesn’t make her pay for the few morsels she eats, which by the way she had with her in a plastic bag that she left on the platform?
Yes, darling, you’re right: exactly. A woman doesn’t go all the way to Piazza Dante to jump in front of a train. She ends it all at home, and that way those assholes who want to evict her by force find themselves face-to-face with a corpse—and with their own consciences, for once. But instead Del Grosso walks miles and miles so she doesn’t have to pay for . . . let’s see, it’s written on the report . . . two tomatoes, a bunch of basil, an apple, and a tangerine. And a box of individual cheese portions. How much, five or six euros? For a woman who wants to die?
And these idiots, just to avoid doing the paperwork, just to keep from having to ask around a little bit, file everything away in a hurry. Suicide, Pisane’. Admit it. Suicide. And why do they say that? Because there’s a goddamned suicide note.
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 20