Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  The little friar had put on his usual compassionate expression, demonstrating for the policeman’s benefit an affectionate empathy for the latter’s torment. It really was too bad, because it was nice to see the man cheerful and confident that he was right, sure that he’d finally understood it all, in the cheerful air of that May morning. He was almost tempted to go ahead and administer the contents of the vial he had with him to his beloved Signora Maria all the same.

  But he, Brother Leonardo Calisi, parish priest of the church of the Santissima Annunziata and abbot of the adjoining monastery, had a sacred task to carry out, and he couldn’t disregard it just to make a friend, however dear, happy. And so, wishing Giorgio all the best and expressing his hope that his friend’s grim predictions would turn out not to be true, he’d headed off.

  And now? If the Lord, in His infinite wisdom, had decided to give dear Maria a new lease on a pointless life, then He was certainly trying to tell Leonardo something. But what? That very evening the friar had retired to the cloister to pray, sniffing at the fresh smell of flowers opening up to a new life and to spring, and as always God had illuminated him, communicating His will to Leonardo. The task now assigned to him concerned Emilio D’Anna, a faithful member of the parish and a retired schoolteacher, hit hard by the loss of his wife and the indifference of his children, who could barely stand to talk to him and even refused to take his phone calls.

  Yes, the Lord had answered his prayer. And at His suggestion poor D’Anna would begin, with the right guidance, to ask: What meaning does my life have? Why force me to suffer through long years of loneliness and silence, just because my heart stubbornly refuses to stop beating?

  There was no doubt about it: Leonardo needed to pay more frequent visits to poor Emilio. And it was to see him that the pious monk went—his little legs pumping, his habit pulled up ever so slightly to keep from tripping—the following afternoon.

  Delighting in the cool May air, to the greater glory of God.

  XLVI

  Dodo has a fever again, and he’s thinking about his mother.

  Usually he thinks about his papà, but now that his throat is screaming in agony and his body is wracked with shivers, he wishes he had Mamma lying beside him in his little bed.

  That’s what Mamma does. When she sees that he’s not well, or that he’s feeling sad, she lies down next to him and strokes his hair; now and then she puts her lips on his forehead, a gesture that’s midway between a kiss and a way of checking on his temperature.

  She sees without being told that something’s wrong, because he’d never tell her. Going to Mamma with a complaint is something little kids do, children who’ll never grow up; but she notices right away, all it takes is a glance, and then she lies down next to Dodo and strokes his hair. She doesn’t talk to him, she doesn’t tell him stories like Papà does, stories that make you open your eyes wide and hold your breath, but now that his life is a painful waking dream, now that he’s wrapped in a filthy blanket, in a warehouse that stinks of his own poop and hot pockets, what he wishes he could feel is his mother’s hand running through his hair.

  A little bit he thinks and a little bit he dreams, Dodo. He seems to remember Lena waking him up and giving him a pill with a drink of water. Just then, he’d thought she was Mamma, but it was Lena. He was confused by her blond hair, who knows why she dyed it, his pretty nanny from when he was little and used to go stay at his grandfather’s. He liked her better the way she was, but everyone knows that that’s what women do; every so often they like to change.

  His papà told him that that’s why Mamma lives with Manuel now, and not with him anymore. She told him that she wanted a change.

  Dodo doesn’t like Manuel. Dodo’s not like those children of divorced couples who hate their parents’ new partners on principle, and claim they’ve been mistreated even though they haven’t been just to get an extra present or two and another pat on the head. Some of his classmates do it because they know that the other parent is happy when they say that Mamma’s new boyfriend or Papà’s new girlfriend is bad.

  Manuel doesn’t treat him badly. But he doesn’t treat him well, either. At first, Mamma hoped the two of them would become friends, but then she realized that wasn’t possible and she just settled for them not fighting; so many of her girlfriends had new boyfriends who fought with their children. So they started to put up with each other, Dodo and Manuel, and on certain evenings, when Mamma is home, they’ve gotten into the habit of curling up in front of the television, all three of them, even though it’s not that fun, because nobody really has anything to say. So then he goes into his bedroom and plays with his action figures or reads comic books.

  Sometimes, if Mamma can’t do it, it’s Manuel who goes to pick Dodo up at school. The nuns know him, and even if they don’t like him because he isn’t married to Mamma and that makes Jesus cry, they say hello to him all the same. In the car, on the way home, the two of them never speak. Each minds his own business.

  Not Mamma. Mamma loves Dodo, and Dodo loves her back. Of course, she’s a woman, which means there are certain things you can’t talk to her about; and she’s always studying him, trying to figure out how he feels, what he’s thinking. Even when he goes to stay with Papà, either here or on vacation up north, she asks a whole bunch of questions to understand how Papà lives, how much money he has, whether he has a girlfriend. Papà, on the other hand, doesn’t want to know anything about Mamma’s life and never asks a single question. He’s a man.

  Now, Dodo thinks again in his waking dream, Mamma’s the one who should be here. She’d be the one, lying next to him, warming him up with the heat of her own body, to make him smell that special, unique smell, that Mamma smell. Maybe she’d hum that sweet song that she’s been singing to him since he was tiny, a lullaby he’s never heard anywhere else.

  Maybe she’d make him a cup of hot milk with honey, that burns his mouth a little but it’s good and it makes his throat hurt less. Dodo’s always had a problem with sore throats: Mamma says that’s his weak spot.

  He wonders how his mamma is. Who can say how worried she must be, how she’s suffering without him.

  When I’m home again, Dodo thinks to himself, for a couple of days I’ll ask her not to make me go to school and not to go to her club. I’ll ask her if she’ll tell Manuel to stay somewhere else, in one of those places where he goes to play cards, and to give him a little extra money, so he can have fun and not come back.

  I’ll ask her to stay home alone with me for a while, curled up together in my bed, with hot milk and honey and her song, and her Mamma smell in my nostrils.

  With her next to me, I don’t feel hot or cold, Dodo thinks. With her next to me, the temperature’s always just right.

  You know, Batman, I’ll whisper this in your ear and you keep it to yourself as a secret: When I go home, I want to be a little baby again. When I get home I want to hold tight my mamma.

  That’s what Dodo thinks, as he lies stretched out on the floor wrapped in the filthy blanket, in the stench of his excrement and of the stale food. That’s what he thinks.

  And he falls asleep.

  XLVII

  Manuel was looking at Eva, who was nodding off in an armchair. She seemed like another person, someone different from the woman he was accustomed to living with, whose bursts of anger and sudden mood swings he’d grown so used to.

  She was much more like her father than she was willing to admit in the long tirades during which she cursed his personality, his harsh nature, his lack of generosity, before suddenly attacking Manuel for his inability to earn. In general, while he tolerated the cascade of insults as if they were a summer thunderstorm, knowing that it was sure to pass eventually, however intense, he also thought that his girlfriend wasn’t being fair to her old and sickly parent.

  Yes, he was a bastard and a son of a bitch who refused to loosen the purse strings of his immense fort
une, as if he could take the money with him all the way to hell, which was where he would certainly wind up sooner or later, in fact, sooner rather than later, given his health. And he never missed an opportunity to point out what a useless fellow Manuel was, a gigolo that his daughter had taken in like a stray dog, to her own detriment as usual. Through that old witch Peluso he’d also turned off the taps, as if he had no idea that the scum who held his gambling debts weren’t kidding around, and would before long leave him lying in some alley or other spitting blood. He, of all people, a man with a sensitive soul and an aversion to violence.

  All this was true.

  But it was also true that, for now, thanks to the old man’s money, he’d been able to avoid entirely the trouble of working for a living, a vulgar, tawdry consideration that his elevated soul couldn’t bear contemplating. Equally true was that thanks to all that wealth, built up over a lifetime of being miserly and dishonest, he, Manuel Scarano, an artist, had been able to cultivate his own interests without having to worry about how to make ends meet, something that he’d watched his own parents do over the course of their unhappy lives until they’d finally had the good taste to die, thus unburdening him of their awkward, sometimes embarrassing existence.

  He only wished that Eva, his partner, the woman who was meant to share in his aspirations and support him, could understand that creative blocks happen, and that a temporary sluggishness in the market for his paintings was more than understandable, especially given the unscrupulous dealers and whorish critics. But things would get back on track soon enough, and then he’d be revered and acclaimed all over the world. After all, he’d had a solo show in Venice, like all the greats.

  But Eva, who was now sleeping openmouthed, her face still red from crying—mamma mia, though, so much crying, it’s been three days and she hasn’t done anything else—failed to understand the needs and the infinite nuances of the soul of an artist. She didn’t even understand that it had been for her, in an attempt to liberate her from her father’s control, that he’d first started playing cards. So he could get rich quick and slap that old bastard in the face with the full measure of his disgust. Okay, so things hadn’t gone quite as hoped, and now he also had the not insignificant problem of having to steer clear of dark and deserted streets: But no one had had the last word yet. Great souls, thought Manuel, are unfailingly optimistic.

  Suffering ages you, thought Manuel, as he watched Eva toss and moan in her sleep. She looked like a dolente, one of those women who, until the sixties, worked as paid mourners at funerals. But to Manuel, such sorrow was incomprehensible. He’d never much cared for the snot-nosed brat, who had anyway spent most of his time locked in his room with those damn action figures of his. Manuel had often wondered whether the boy might not be retarded, the way he dulled his senses playing war and combat games.

  Perhaps it was a simply that he resembled his father, that obtuse and violent gorilla who had been on the verge of attacking him just the other night. It was obvious why Eva had dumped him the minute she’d met a sensitive soul like him.

  Eva, Eva. I’m sorry to see you suffer, Manuel said to himself, but every cloud has a silver lining. Who knows, perhaps this will mark the beginning of a brand-new life in which we can think about ourselves and no one else. Grief ends eventually, Eva, and it leaves scars that you can learn to live with. And on the way, perhaps, it will give the old man his coup de grâce, finally leaving the two of us free to cultivate our love and my art.

  Perhaps, my love, this grief will actually be a blessing. We can shed some dead weight: your father, that primate ex-husband of yours, the old witch, those goddamn criminals trying to track me down so they can get their money. And to help us forget, we’ll go away, all alone, to some faraway island, like Paul Gauguin. I’ll strike creative gold again and a few centuries from now, in the books they’ll write about me, they’ll tell the story of our lives, and they’ll point out how this tragedy was the necessary preamble to my masterpieces.

  A ray of sunshine came in through the window and struck Eva’s closed eyes. The woman jerked upright.

  “Dodo? Dodo? My God . . . how long did I sleep?”

  Manuel did his best to calm her down: “Just a few minutes, sweetheart. Just a few minutes. I was here beside you the whole time. I’d have woken you if anything had happened.”

  Eva blinked and looked down at her hands. She seemed to be having some difficulty returning to the real world. Then she murmured: “I had a dream. But it was so realistic that I can’t help believing it was something more. I was lying next to him, stroking his hair, the way I do when he has a fever or one of those sore throats he gets at the beginning of every season. I was singing him our song, the one that helps him get to sleep; I was just humming it, softly. And he had the smell he had when he was first born, a scent that only I can smell. Oh God, it was all so precise . . .”

  She started crying, louder and louder, until her shoulders were shaking with sobs.

  Here we go again with the same old lament, thought Manuel.

  And with the appropriate pained smile, he walked over to take her in his arms.

  XLVIII

  They decided to wait for her at the entrance to the gym.

  Alex and Lojacono had talked it over, trying to determine whether it would be better to go formal and show up at home, at the scene of the crime, to talk to her in her husband’s presence and see if she’d give herself away.

  Then they’d agreed that it would be better to meet her alone and confront her with what they’d found out, so that she could choose whether to accept her guilt or else struggle to salvage the life she’d made for herself.

  The first person to get to work at the gym was Marvin. He seemed tense. Something wasn’t going according to plan, and the young man was aware by this point that he’d become a repeat offender, and that, since he’d conspired with one of the robbery victims, his sentence would be even heavier.

  Assunta Parascandolo aka Susy came in half an hour later. Her anxiety was immediately apparent thanks to a pair of oversized sunglasses behind which she seemed to be trying to hide, and the aggressive way in which she berated the driver of a scooter that had come close to tearing off her car door—which she had thrown open without bothering to check her rearview mirror. Lojacono gestured to Di Nardo and they both got out of the unmarked car in which they’d been waiting for the woman.

  They came up on either side of her before she could enter the building. She didn’t seem surprised; her shoulders sagged as if someone had just hit her.

  “Buongiorno, Signora. What do you say to a little chat with us? It might be better for us not to go into the office. It’s in your own best interest; we’re not trying to cause you any trouble.”

  The woman nodded and headed for a nearby café. Alex and the Chinaman followed her in and sat down at a table in a room off to the side.

  Lojacono was the first to speak: “So: At your home the forensic squad has found numerous fingerprints belonging to Mario Vincenzo Esposito, the Pilates instructor we met yesterday at the gym. As you can imagine, that’s some pretty significant evidence. But perhaps you have something to tell us, as far as that goes.”

  Alex was impressed by her partner’s skillful handling of the information. He hadn’t lied, he’d limited himself to the facts they had in hand, but he’d done so in a manner that sounded like: We know everything, that idiot boyfriend of yours left fingerprints everywhere when, with your knowledge, he broke into the safe; now, how do you want to play your cards—toss him under the bus or tell us the way things really went? Aragona was right: You could learn a great deal from partnering with the Chinaman.

  Susy’s expression remained indecipherable—assisted by the dark glasses and the stiffness of her features, which was thanks to extensive cosmetic surgery. Then it fell apart. Her lower lip started to tremble, and the tremor spread to the rest of her face in concentric circles; it looked
like a pond into which someone had thrown a stone. She took off the sunglasses and slammed them down on the little table, shattering them.

  “Asshole. What an asshole. You really have to be unlucky to go from a maniac to an asshole. It’s no good, I just don’t know how to pick men.”

  What she was feeling was rage, not sorrow. Pure rage. Di Nardo turned toward Lojacono and found him in the meditative stance he always assumed when he was intent on listening and reflecting: hands lying on his thighs, motionless, his face betraying no emotion, eyes narrowed into twin fissures. She imagined how that expression might induce in someone an urge to speak, if for no other reason than to shatter that stillness, to provoke a disturbance of some kind. She wondered if he did it intentionally or if it just came naturally.

  Susy turned to Lojacono: “You can’t have any idea, Lieutenant, what it means to be that man’s wife. He chose me at twenty; my father, God rest his soul, owed him. He wasn’t much more than a kid but he was already doing what he does now. He came to see us with a couple guys who worked as his debt collectors, men who were capable of killing without leaving a mark on you. My father had done what he could to keep the clothing store running, but things were going badly; he’d had to fire two shopgirls and I was going in to help out. I can still remember that morning. They showed up and he said to me, with that fucked-up little voice of his: Girlie, pull down the security blinds, I need to have a chat with your father. I looked him in the face, that dog face of his—you know that they call him Tore the Bulldog, right?—and I told him: Pull them down yourself, you asshole. One of his henchmen grabbed me by the arm but he stopped him. He looked me in the eye for a minute and then ordered his men, in dialect: Iammuncenne, guagliu’. And sure enough, they left. The next day, he came back alone, with a bouquet of flowers and all my father’s IOUs.”

  The waiter came to the door of the little room, but Parascandolo waved him away with a brusque flip of her hand, hissing to him that no one else had better come in. She snickered bitterly: “There, you see, that’s one of the advantages of being the wife of Tore the Bulldog. Almost everyone owes him something, and everyone’s afraid of him. Because ever since the day he started, he’s grown a little richer, a little more powerful and little bit more of a piece of shit—every day.”