Laura was already on her way out the door: “Have them send it by email to the Pizzofalcone precinct house, to Chief Officer Palma’s address, and while they’re doing that, call Palma and tell him to wait for me. I’m heading over; I want to listen to it with them.”
She got there just as Romano and Aragona were returning from their call on Eva Borrelli. The younger officer seemed as giddy as little kid on Christmas: “Dottoressa, you see? The call came in, we’re all set, it’s a kidnapping.”
Laura, climbing the stairs, shot him a glare: “Aragona, I still really can’t make up my mind. Are you insane or just stupid? Sometimes it seems like the one thing, but then I start to think it’s the other. And anyway, I can’t see why you should be so overjoyed.”
Aragona, huffing and puffing his way up the stairs, put on his most contrite expression: “Dottoressa, you always try to embarrass me. I’m not overjoyed, how could you think such a thing? I was just saying that now the situation is clear and we can finally start to work on it for real.”
Laura threw open the door to the communal office, waving a hand in the direction of Palma, who stood waiting, ready to play the recording.
They were all here now, the show could begin.
XXII
Ottavia’s computer speakers broadcast the sound of static throughout the communal office.
This time there was nothing to see, but still Palma was standing next to his colleague, facing the monitor. Laura was sitting at Lojacono’s desk, while the lieutenant was leaning against the wall behind her, arms folded, face expressionless. Pisanelli had taken off his reading glasses; he seemed intensely concentrated, as if he were listening to a symphony. Alex was cracking her knuckles one by one, apparently calm. Aragona and Romano were standing in the doorway, as if they were ready to head out in pursuit of someone on a moment’s notice.
The background noise was broken by Eva’s housekeeper: “Hello, Borrelli residence.”
Silence. Then a man’s voice, deep and hoarse: “Signora, please.”
A brusque, precise tone. A foreign accent was immediately audible. Aragona took off his glasses; no one else made a move.
After a few seconds, there was Eva: “Yes, hello, this is Signora Borrelli. Who’s speaking?”
Every word she spoke throbbed with emotion and worry. A distinct rustling sound could be heard. Then, once again, the man with the foreign accent: “Your son is with us. Don’t be afraid, if everything goes the way it should, nothing will happen to him. Right now he’s fine, he’s safe. Wait for the next phone call.”
Short, terse sentences, fired off like so many bullets. Eva, in a louder voice, said: “But who are you? Where’s Dodo? What have you done to him?”
The sound of static ceased. The conversation had turned into a monologue with Eva repeating, over and over, increasingly distraught: “Hello? Hello?” Until finally, with the phone line still open and the recording under way, she burst into despairing tears.
Then Romano’s voice could be heard, asking: “Was that them?”
“Forty-two seconds in all,” Ottavia said, her voice mournful. “From the beginning to when the call was ended.”
No one felt like talking. Along with the mild spring air, the sound of a car horn came in through the window, followed by a shouted insult.
Romano broke the embarrassed silence: “You heard it, we were there too. I was hoping that there was already a wiretap on the phone, because afterward Borrelli was in no condition to tell us anything: She practically passed out, she hasn’t slept in thirty hours by this point.”
Aragona put on his glasses and, in a satisfied tone of voice, declared: “He’s a foreigner, no doubt about it. You heard the accent, didn’t you? He must be a gypsy or something like that. At least now we have something to go on, though I thought right from the beginning it was likely to be one of their kind.”
Alex shot him a harsh look: “Of course, because whenever something happens, we always know who to blame, don’t we? Just look in the usual places and round up the usual suspects. God, you’re so predictable, Aragona.”
Her colleague looked around for support from the others: “Well, you heard him yourselves, didn’t you? Didn’t you hear from the way he talked that he was a foreigner?”
Palma waved a hand in the air: “This isn’t the time to start engaging in hack sociology. Yes, I thought the accent sounded foreign, but that doesn’t mean much. Leaving aside the fact that you can fake an accent, maybe they just pulled someone off the street and asked him to make the phone call, or it could even be prerecorded, who can say?”
Pisanelli, who was leaning back in his chair as if trying to relax, said: “I don’t think it was a recording. The timing of his responses to the housekeeper and the mother was too precise, and the voice was the same from start to finish. No, that wasn’t a recording.”
Laura nodded: “I agree, and I also agree that this was a foreigner. Slavic, from the sound of it, but I’ll get an expert to listen to it. But there’s another thing: Didn’t you all get the impression that he was reading a text?”
Lojacono, standing behind her, replied: “Yes. You could hear the sound of the page being unfolded, and the slow, flat pace of someone reading.”
Romano added: “What’s more, when the housekeeper answered the phone, he said: ‘Signora, please,’ without the article, but after that he spoke in perfect Italian. He was reading, no doubt.”
Aragona brushed his hair back: “She was horrified. And that was no act, believe me. She was horrified and afraid.”
Palma stared into space and said: “That was just a call made for effect, to create anxiety and fear. That’s what they usually do. Now we’re certain that this really is a kidnapping and in all likelihood there’s going to be a demand for ransom. So we should expect another call about that.”
Ottavia continued to stare at her computer, almost as if she expected it to start talking again: “This is the worst part for the family. Now they know that their child is in the hands of strangers, and that they could hurt him at any moment. Every minute will be an eternity.”
Piras stood up, as if to shake off her anxiety. “We all have work to do, I imagine. I’m going to get busy freezing assets: the father’s, the mother’s, and the grandfather’s. By the way, I think this would be a good time to swing by and pay a call on old man Borrelli.”
Lojacono, still motionless in the position he’d assumed when he started listening, broke in: “I’d take a look at some of the background characters, the housekeeper for example, and the mother’s boyfriend: Whoever took the child did it at the only possible moment, and it strikes me as a little much in terms of pure luck. If you ask me, it’s possible that they knew his schedule and routine in detail.”
“Then there’s the other matter,” Alex murmured.
“Which?” asked Aragona.
“If the man was reading a text, then we need to figure out who wrote it. And why.”
Di Nardo’s voice was little more than a whisper, but her words resounded like a gunshot. An electric shock of determination ran through the communal office. Romano agreed, determinedly: “Then let’s get busy. The countdown has started, I believe.”
“We’ll need to inform the father, too,” Ottavia said, “or at least make sure that Borrelli does. We have to make sure they put their differences aside: we can’t run the risk of having some valuable piece of information slip through the cracks just because those two won’t speak to each other.”
“True,” admitted Palma, “maybe I should call the father. Romano and Aragona can go call on old man Borrelli. You, Giorgio, make some calls to your friends at the banks, see if you can find out the actual financial situation of Eva Borrelli and her boyfriend, what’s his name . . . Manuel Scarano. Ottavia, you coordinate and help Pisanelli with his research online. Di Nardo and Lojacono, if you can get free of your burglary case, maybe you ca
n help us out.”
Laura liked the way the commissario intervened directly, entrusting each member of his staff with a specific task. A proactive approach, ideal for encouraging teamwork and, at the same time, the kind of thing that could speed up the investigation. She’d do the same, to the extent that she was able. Because in the last hour, everything had changed.
Now it was a kidnapping.
XXIII
He wanders around his home like a lion in a cage.
And really, to call it a home is an exaggeration.
It’s nice, of course. It looks out onto every possible shade of blue: the sea, the sky, the silhouette of the island and the peninsula in the distance. But an apartment becomes a home when you live in it. Not just because it has hardwood floors and all the modern conveniences.
Alberto can’t seem to read, or listen to music, or even channel surf. He’s tried, but he just can’t do it.
Dodo.
He thinks of him all the time, he’s like a sound track, like background noise, like the background in a painting. Dodo sneaks into his thoughts even during the confused and agitated sleep he only managed to achieve in the very early hours of the morning, as the night that seemed to have gone on forever was dissolving into dawn.
His little boy.
He walks back into the little room he set up for him, in that impersonal apartment he comes back to every fifteen days, the place that remains, despite his efforts, stubbornly anonymous, where he feels out of place, as if he were in a hotel. Dodo’s room too is anonymous. The bed, almost never used because when he stays over he sleeps in his papà’s bed, of course. The desk, where Dodo never sits because they do his homework in there, at the living room table. The shelves full of new toys because the ones that Dodo really cares about are there.
There. In the other home. And that really was a home.
No thanks to her, to be clear, because she never gave a damn about having a home. But that was where he and Dodo lived together.
He goes to the balcony, leans out to smoke a cigarette and think. The city streams by far away, the river of cars along the waterfront visible but silent at that distance. A city that—with its incomprehensible chaos, its sudden madnesses, its incessant noise—has always been alien to him.
But it’s also the only place he ever even had the illusion of happiness.
His little boy.
A million snapshots, holidays at the beach and in the mountains, first days of school, adoring eyes on him: I’m your giant, you’re my little king.
He runs his hand over his eyes, fogged with grief and exhaustion. A useless giant. He couldn’t stop someone from hurting his little king.
But I’ll fix everything, my little one, he murmurs to the city that streams past indifferently. I’ll fix everything, and we’ll soon forget all about this. We’ll be together forever, I’ll never leave you again. Because we know it, you and I, that we need to stay together. The principle is a simple one: You’re my son, and once you’re free, you’ll come live with me.
He looks out the window toward the apartment where she lives with her boyfriend, that asshole, that useless creature. And then he looks up, where the old son of a bitch is holed up. You see, old man, what useless creatures your daughter and her lover are? You see that they couldn’t even keep someone from taking your grandson, my son, while you sat there helpless in your goddamned wheelchair? Impressive, aren’t they?
He lights another cigarette, barely noticing the way his hands are trembling. He still can’t imagine how he kept from throttling them both the night before, when he went to ask for an explanation of what had happened. He remembers her face, bathed in tears and grief, as she told him the nothing that she knew. He’d have said, You’re crying now, you whore?, and he’d have said it gladly. What are you crying about, now that my son has been taken by strangers? And the boyfriend, that solemn dickhead, standing behind her like a butler, nodding his head. If he’d yelled, “Boo,” the sheep would have screamed and hidden behind the sofa. Coward.
But he’d promised the police that he wouldn’t lose his cool, and he hadn’t.
Those useless cops. They couldn’t find their own noses in the fog.
Oh, how they’ll laugh, he and Dodo, when they talk about him, about Manuel. The big old sheep, they call him, with that head of hair that looks like wool and his complete lack of courage. He’s not like you, Papà, says Dodo. You’re strong, like Batman. He couldn’t even be Batman’s nemesis, because even that takes courage.
I’m going to free you, Dodo, he says to the city. He says it aloud, and a startled pigeon takes to the air with a rustle of flapping wings, setting back down on another balcony thirty feet away. I’ll free you soon, very soon. And when you’re free we can go on vacation together, alone, someplace beautiful, the most beautiful place there is.
Because while it’s true that right now I’m your useless giant, it’s also true that I’ll be your courageous giant again. You’ll see.
His cell phone rings. And his heart leaps into his mouth.
XXIV
Yes, hello.”
“This is me. Did phone call.”
“I know. How’s it going there?”
“He all right. Not eating much, not crying though.”
“And what’s he doing?”
“Talking. Whispering, like prayer. I hearing him talking.”
“He’s talking? But who is he talking to?”
“I think toy. He have toy, little action figure. I think he talking to that.”
“Ah, okay, well, leave him alone.”
“He bothering me a little, seem like praying. I banging fist, then he shut up.”
“No, I’m telling you: Leave him alone. He has to do something, doesn’t he? Tell him he has to eat, though. He shouldn’t lose weight, we don’t want him to get sick. Remember, we can’t do him any harm.”
“Yes, but I need to scaring him. If I not scaring him, he calling for help or running away.”
“Yes, of course. But do it without laying a hand on him. He can’t be hurt, we can’t leave marks. That’s important.”
“You not be worrying. And now?”
“Now you know what to do, I wrote everything down for you very clearly. You need to wait until the time I told you and then make the other phone call. You still have the sheet of paper, right?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Check and make sure, please.”
“I have paper, fuck! If I saying I have, I have!”
“Listen, listen very carefully: don’t you ever dare speak to me like that again. Never again, have I made myself clear? Remember that you’re nothing but a stupid animal, that you’re no good to anyone, and that you’ve had a stroke of luck that you’re never going to have again. Do you understand me, animal?”
“I . . . sorry, you right, I . . .”
“Yes, I’m right. I’m so right that, if I feel like it, I can have you thrown in jail, you and your whore. You have no evidence to tie me to this, and I can prove that you did it all on your own, the two of you, understood? I’ve got you in hand, not the other way around.”
“Sorry, you right, fuck, I making mistake. You not worry, I do like we agree.”
“There, that’s better. Behave like the obedient animal that you are. You don’t have much to do, but you can’t make any mistakes. All right, go on.”
“I making another phone call, tonight. And I saying things written on paper. Today Lena go to boy, she talking to him, she telling him she afraid of me. Then tomorrow we talking, and after that, every six hours.”
“Very good. Very good, my well-trained animal.”
“I no like when you saying I animal. I no animal.”
“No, eh? All right then, I won’t say it again. But don’t make mistakes.”
“I not make mistakes. But you not forget: all the mon
ey promised, and plus two plane tickets to America.”
“Or by ship, if the plane seems too dangerous. That’s our agreement.”
“Yes, or ship. But I like better plane, faster. Okay?”
“There, now you’re even talking like an American. We’ll see; in any case, yes, you’ll get to leave, the two of you. It’s also in my own best interest to get you out of here. You just make sure that everything goes off smoothly, and that nothing bad happens to him.”
“No, nothing bad happening to him. And when Lena going, she convincing him to eat. He fine, no rats in there, I having checked, no cold at night, I giving him blanket, too. Plus he have his action figure, no?”
“Yes. At least he has his action figure. You let him play. He saw you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he saw. He afraid of me, I shouting, banging fist, making ugly, ugly face.”
“It must not have taken much effort.”
“You joking. But it not last much longer, eh? You promised.”
“No. It won’t last much longer, if we don’t make any mistakes.”
“We no making mistakes. But you remembering your promise.”
“I remember. And you remember that nothing bad must happen to him.”
“No, no one harming him.”
“Good. No one is to harm him.”
XXV
Romano and Aragona had called Dodo’s father and asked him to join them at Eva’s place. Now that the situation was, unfortunately, clear, they wanted to come to an agreement about what course of action to take in response to the various eventualities that might present themselves.
When they reached the apartment building, they found Alberto Cerchia waiting for them outside the downstairs door.
“Excuse me, I preferred to wait for you to arrive before going up. I’m not sure I’m ready to . . . I mean, I’d just rather we all go up together, if you don’t mind. Is there any news?”
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