Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Marco’s heart stopped: Why had she looked at him? What was she trying to tell him, with that look?

  Perhaps she meant for him to understand something. Perhaps the short conversation with the pestiferous child had been designed for his use and consumption, to tell him something about her.

  He sighed, enchanted, lost in a reverie.

  In the meantime, however, something had wormed its way into his brain, forcing him to think of the kidnapped child. Was it because of the little boy who had asked the indiscreet questions? No. It had been something else, like a dark outline moving beneath the surface of a pond, rapid but unmistakable.

  What was it? What had jogged his mind?

  Smiling at the wonderful Irina, who was bringing him a double corto espresso in a large mug, the light illuminating her from behind, Corporal Marco Aragona began, deep in his subconscious, his working day.

  XLIII

  Well? Anything yet?”

  “No.”

  “The boy still has a fever, though I think it’s come down a little. I gave him the antibiotics.”

  “It’ll pass. That’s certainly not our fault.”

  “Yes, but he told us that nothing was to happen to him . . .”

  “He also said that he’d call twelve hours ago.”

  “Something must have come up.”

  “Something that’s lasted twelve hours.”

  “Do you think something could have happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. He’ll call. Let’s just wait.”

  “What does that mean, you don’t want to talk about it? What could have happened?”

  “Nothing. He’ll call.”

  “No, now you’re going to tell me why you’re worried! I threw my old life away to do this job with you. Nothing can go wrong!”

  “Stay calm. I told you he’ll call.”

  “You’ve been sitting here since dawn, drinking and staring at that fucking cell phone on the table, you look terrible, and you’re telling me to stay calm?”

  “Fucking hell, he’ll call! I said that we need to wait, and we’ll wait! Do you want to ruin everything just because a stupid phone call’s a little late?”

  “What if . . . Let’s say they figured it out, that someone found everything out. Let’s say the police . . .”

  “Shut up, you slut! The police haven’t figured anything out, no one’s going to figure anything out, and everything’s going to turn out perfectly, according to plan!”

  “Then why isn’t he calling?”

  “He’ll call. You’ll see, he’ll call. You said it yourself, no? Something must have come up.”

  “And you answered: Something that’s lasted twelve hours?”

  “Okay then, what do you want to do? What do you think we should do?”

  “Have we come to this point? Do we need to come up with a Plan B?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Oh, yes, you did.”

  “He’ll call. We . . . we have the kid. He’ll have to call.”

  “Or else the police will show up and throw us in prison. And we’ll never get out again. Do you know what they do to people like us who kidnap a child? It’s what they’re most afraid of, to them we’re all gypsies . . .”

  “Shut up. I told you, he’ll call.”

  “Even in prison, they don’t leave people like us alone. They’ll throw us into solitary, they’ll . . .”

  “Fuck, that’s enough! That’s enough! Dammit, shut up! You got me into this mess, and now you’re telling me that instead of going to South America to live like a king I’m going to wind up in prison! What did we do wrong? We followed his instructions to the letter, we’ve been perfect. So he’ll respect the agreement, won’t he?”

  “Listen, raising your voice to me isn’t going to solve anything. And when I offered you the job, you accepted immediately, I didn’t put a gun to your head, so don’t blame me. We need to start thinking about what to do if things don’t work out. Getting drunk and angry won’t do any good.”

  “He’ll call. He’ll call. It’s just a matter of waiting.”

  “And thinking. Thinking fast.”

  “He’ll call. We have the kid, don’t forget.”

  “Exactly. Which is the serious thing, the dangerous thing. Remember that he knows who I am, he knows my name.”

  “Shut up. We have to wait, I told you. He’ll call.”

  “You wait. I’ll think.”

  XLIV

  The phone call came first thing in the morning, unexpectedly, like everything one anxiously awaits.

  Alex was reading the file on Mario Vincenzo Esposito, also known as Marvin, the heavily tattooed Pilates instructor and Signora Susy Parascandolo’s presumed boy toy. A story just like a thousand others she’d seen in her time. He’d quit school in fifth grade, been arrested for shoplifting here and there, had snatched his first purse at age fourteen, been put in a group home, had been set free and then again arrested, a brief but intense stay in a reform school, a little drug dealing, and then his first grown-up crime: a burglary in an apartment in a well-to-do neighborhood.

  The heist had been reasonably well organized: They’d lowered themselves from the second highest floor, the only one without bars on the windows, and they’d gotten in through a balcony. Too bad that in the building across the street a retired magistrate with insomnia was looking out his bathroom window, sneaking a cigarette without his wife’s knowledge.

  Three years later, after a few mistaken summonses and time off for good behavior, here was Marvin back out on the street, determined to stick to the straight and narrow. At least as much as possible.

  The cell phone vibrated on the desk just as she was closing the file. Alex had saved the number under the name “Forensics,” in a pathetic attempt to keep the relationship professional, but her heart, unaware of that admirable intention, leapt into her mouth.

  She waited for the third ring, at once hoping and fearing that this would turn out to be a wrong number. Pisanelli was about to go out; Ottavia, deep in thought as always, was typing furiously at her keyboard; Aragona and Lojacono were talking in low voices about the kidnapping. She decided to go out into the hall to answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Ciao. Is this a bad time?”

  “No, no, not at all. I’m at the station house, but I stepped out of the office.”

  Idiot, she thought. I’m an idiot. What the hell does she care, that I left the office? And after all, why should I leave the office to take a work call? She also realized that she’d addressed a chief administrator with the informal “tu” without asking permission.

  She tried to make up for it: “Forgive me, Dottoressa, ma’am, I used the informal ‘tu’ without thinking . . .”

  Martone laughed. God, she had a beautiful laugh.

  “Come on, of course you should be informal with me. And I’m glad that you left the office to talk.”

  There, she’d noticed, of course she had. Doing her best to make up lost ground, Alex assumed a flawlessly correct tone: “So tell me.”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you, and then perhaps you can report to Lojacono, all right? Now then, as I’d mentioned before, I ordered a second, more thorough, inspection of the Parascandolo apartment. And we hit pay dirt. In certain rooms, especially the bathroom and bedroom, we found both partial and complete fingerprints that belong neither to the couple nor to the housekeeper. And the fantastic thing is that we actually have these fingerprints on file. They belong to an ex-con, who answers to the name of . . .”

  “Esposito, Mario Vincenzo, born in the city on March 16, 1987, convicted of burglary in 2009, out of jail since February of last year.”

  Martone seemed disappointed: “You already know? How did you find out?”

  “Let’s just say we figured it out by chance. So his finge
rprints are actually there? You’re saying that Esposito left traces of his presence everywhere but on the safe he broke into?”

  “So it would seem, at first glance. But the prints we found are from before the burglary. Esposito is a somewhat, shall we say, intimate . . . guest of the house.”

  “Which means?”

  “Some of the prints are on the headboard of the bed; bilateral, by the way. We can therefore safely assume that our ex-con, before going into the bathroom, grabbed the top part of the couple’s bed with both hands. And pretty forcefully, too, judging from how strongly the fingerprints were impressed onto the wood.”

  Di Nardo thought it over while she responded to a wave from Romano, who was just coming back in.

  “Yes, in fact we suspect he’s Susy Parascandolo’s lover.”

  Rosaria snickered: “Well, he could also be his lover, judging from the probable position.”

  The explicit reference to a homosexual relationship struck Alex, who felt her stomach do a somersault.

  “No, no, we’re pretty sure that the relationship is with the woman.”

  Martone laughed again. “I was kidding, Di Nardo. I was only kidding. Anyway, now you have your evidence. Esposito can’t deny that he was there, and with his priors it won’t take you long to pin it on him.”

  “Yes, though we still need to figure out what role the woman played: Did he drag her into it or did she organize the burglary herself, with the young man’s help.”

  “Certainly.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Alex wondered whether she should say a formal goodbye or go with a more casual one and, weighing her options, said nothing. Rosaria too fell silent.

  At last, in a low voice, the chief administrator said: “You got my text yesterday, didn’t you?”

  Alex’s mouth went immediately dry.

  “Yes. I got it.”

  “But you didn’t answer.”

  She needed to let her know how ridiculously happy that message had made her. She needed to tell her that she’d spent the rest of that night staring at the ceiling, fantasizing about the spectacular body she’d guessed at under the lab coat.

  “No. But I . . . I was very happy. Very.”

  Again, silence. Then: “I know who you are, Di Nardo. I understood it the minute our eyes locked. And you know who I am. Am I right?”

  Alex would have given her whole paycheck for a glass of water. Ottavia, who was walking down the hall on her way to the bathroom, gave her a puzzled look. Everything okay? she mouthed. The young woman gave her a thumbs-up, but couldn’t keep herself from blushing.

  “That’s true. Yes, that’s true, that’s how it is. But I . . . I don’t talk about it, you know. It’s something I keep to myself.”

  Had she lost her mind? Here she was, confessing to a stranger, on the phone, something she wouldn’t have told anyone else on earth, not even under torture.

  Martone replied with a kind of veiled sweetness: “I know. I understand. I don’t advertise it either. It can be tough, sometimes. But certain sensations, certain glances, are rare things, you know. Very rare. And it’s not right to let them slip away. That’s all. That’s why I texted you that message.”

  Alex felt relieved.

  “Thanks. Thanks for the text, and for this phone call. For everything.”

  “You’re not getting off that easy, you know, Officer Di Nardo. You owe me a pizza, at the very least. I’ll call you some night.”

  “Yes. Some night. But it’s my treat. I’d better keep you happy, you’re a chief administrator, after all.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find some way of keeping me happy. Kisses, see you soon.”

  XLV

  That morning, before leaving home, Giorgio Pisanelli had had a long conversation with Carmen. He did it all the time, but always taking proper precautions. He’d turn on the stereo and put on one of the symphonies by Mozart or Tchaikovsky that she’d so loved to make sure his neighbors wouldn’t assume that loneliness had finally driven him crazy. Then he’d open the door to the bedroom, where he liked to imagine that she sat listening to him, and speak to his wife as if she were still alive. Of course he didn’t raise his voice to make sure she heard him, and he didn’t go in every five minutes to make sure she was resting easy, as he almost always had in the last few months of her life; he spoke in an undertone. There had to be some advantages to being in the afterlife.

  He had told her about Signora Maria Musella, and of how he had picked her out of all the other potential future victims. You’d be surprised, my love, to know how many people there are in the neighborhood who make use of psychotropic drugs. They’re the opposite of the tranquilizers you used to take to keep from suffering, do you remember? Oh, lord, not exactly the opposite, because these, too, in the end, put you to sleep. In fact, Signora Musella sleeps a lot, and most of the time she’s in no danger.

  This, he had told her, has been my crucial insight: I have to try to prevent another murder; to try to figure out where the killer’s going to strike next. It’s pointless to try to prove that those faked suicides are actually homicides; I’ve had to give up on that. Because you know, my love, whoever he is, he’s really good, he’s sly as a fox. He won’t give himself away, he never uses the same method twice. He’s good.

  How can I be so sure that these are actually murders, you ask? I’ve explained that to you a thousand times, my love: I just know. These are people who lack the strength to live, but who haven’t yet made up their minds to die. Not like you, when you couldn’t stand it for one day, when you couldn’t take the pain. Not like you.

  And so, since everyone condescends to me and thinks that I’m just a senile old man, I focused on a potential victim, and I identified the individual who was, among all those who live close to the largest pharmacy in the neighborhood, the most dependent on drugs. I had to start somewhere.

  Blowing Carmen a kiss, he’d left and gone by the office to see what was new. Palma, Romano, and Aragona had briefed him on their meeting with the Borrelli family the night before. A sad story: There are misfortunes that ought to bring people together, unite them before a shared sorrow, but often it’s the reverse that happens. Even Carmen’s death had created a chasm between him and his son Lorenzo. Though they still spoke on the phone every three days, the calls had become as automatic and perfunctory as the punching of a time clock; they were feeble moments of contact between two people who shared nothing but a sweet memory.

  He’d chatted a bit with the Chinaman about Tore the Bulldog, the loan shark. An interesting character, Tore, in his way a modern entrepreneur, who’d expanded his tried and true tactics beyond the neighborhood’s narrow confines. He organized full-fledged joint ventures with his colleagues from outside of the city, pooled operations, and cross-invested. Deputy Captain Pisanelli had explained to Lojacono that they’d been investigating Parascandolo for years, but the very fact that most of his earnings came from illegal lending done in other regions of the country had allowed him to get away with it. The fact that I’m supplying certain entrepreneurs, the Bulldog had explained in his high-pitched voice to a magistrate during a deposition, doesn’t mean I know to whom they endorse their checks. And so all the clients of loan sharks on this side of the Alps wound up anonymously listed on Tore’s accounts, while his victims turned up who knew where, and the cooperating banks looked the other way.

  Giorgio Pisanelli liked Lojacono. And generally speaking, he liked the new atmosphere in the precinct since the restaffing. There was a healthy desire to get theirs back, the pleasure of being back in the thick of things, and Palma was putting everyone to use according to his or her skills and personality; even Aragona, who had at first seemed unserviceable.

  He had the impression that the wrinkles furrowing his forehead were relaxing a little at the thought of the young man. There was some good in Aragona, he was sure of it. Though you did have to
look hard for it.

  He left the office, in the intoxicating May air that seemed as full of sparkling bubbles as a bottle of prosecco. He was determined and hopeful as he hadn’t been in quite a while. He’d been working on the mystery of the suicides for years, but for the first time he felt he was getting close to the solution.

  Not even a hundred yards from Musella’s home, Giorgio Pisanelli ran into a good friend.

  And the solution vanished into that air, deceitful and fragile as the scent of flowers in the spring.

  Brother Leonardo was hurrying up a hill for the second time in two days. He was in a rush, and he’d be very irritated if he had to change his plans.

  Signora Maria, who was all set to meet her fortunate fate—becoming, ahead of her time, and by Leonardo’s hand, an angel of the Lord—would have to be removed from the ranks of his beneficiaries. So much effort, hours and hours of talking and reasoning in the cool air of the parish church, heavy with incense, careful study of the dosages of various drugs—all of it would go up in smoke. His friend Giorgio’s stubborn obstinacy was threatening to become really annoying.

  And yet, he said to himself, taking heart, he ought to be pleased, because he really had dodged a bullet. If his friend the policeman had seen him enter Musella’s home and then emerge, and if the woman had then been found dead from an overdose, beside her a suicide note—a note that by the way he still had in the pocket of his habit—it would have been difficult to come up with a convincing explanation. Not impossible, but difficult.

  The Lord, however had decided to help him by delaying Giorgio’s arrival, or perhaps by moving up his by a couple of minutes, ensuring that they met just a hundred yards or so from Musella’s apartment—further evidence of the sacred nature of his mission. His friend, delighted, had dragged him into a café, bought him an espresso, and proceeded to tell him his improbable but accurate theory. And just how accurate that theory was, no one could know better than Leonardo.