In the end, after Romano threatened to send over a squad car to pick her up if she went off on one more tangent, Signora Lucilla Rossano answered him, in an offended tone, that as far as she knew, Signorina Lena didn’t live alone; she lived with a man from back home, some guy named Dragan Petrovic´, who she claimed was just a roommate and not her boyfriend, at Via Torino, no. 15. They didn’t have a telephone. She didn’t know anything else but if they did happen to track her down, would they please ask her to get in touch by Saturday, because she, Signora Lucilla Rossano, was supposed to meet a gentleman friend, and she needed someone to watch the two little monsters. Could they do her that favor? By the way, Signora, Romano asked her: What color hair did she have, this Signorina Lena? Ah, believe me, I told her the same thing. You looked so good with your original color, that nice dark red. Did you really have to dye your hair blond so you look just like a hooker?
The confirmation of Peluso’s tip reinvigorated the investigation. Palma got on the phone and asked headquarters for two more squad cars, one to send to Via Torino 15 and the other to send to the station house, so that they could be ready if it proved necessary to move quickly on multiple fronts. Then he called Piras and brought her up to speed.
The magistrate wasn’t on duty, but her calls were being forwarded to her cell phone, and he found her wide-awake and alert. She asked questions about every detail, made a note of the names she wanted to plug into the databases at the district attorney’s office, and tried to focus on the situation at hand. “Palma,” she said, “I don’t believe that this Madlena Miroslava just woke up one day, after five years, dyed her hair, and made up her mind to kidnap a little boy she used to take care of. The more I think about it, the more I feel sure that the whole thing was orchestrated by someone in the family, the extended family, shall we say, and that this person was also responsible for writing the notes. We just have to figure out who that is. Now I’ve got to go, but I’ll swing by to see you later.”
When the commissario walked back into the bullpen, Romano was barking the address to the squad car, which was already rolling, while Pisanelli did his best to calm Eva down; the woman, informed by her father of Lena’s possible involvement, had immediately called in. How could we have failed to think of it? she kept saying over and over again. The hair color, that’s all it took to trick us.
Ottavia, in the meantime, was trying to find anything she could on Dragan Petrovic´, but she’d run up against the worst obstacle in online searches: too many hits.
“Dammit, this is like trying to find Mario Rossi, or John Smith. Does everyone in Serbia have the same name?”
The squad car radioed in, confirming that a certain Dragan Petrovic´ did in fact live in a miserable attic apartment, dusty and drafty, at Via Torino, no. 15, and that the Dragan Petrovic´ in question also had a roommate, a certain Lena, once a redhead and now a blonde, the object of the lustful concierge’s frustrated courtship—or so the uniformed policeman had deduced from the dreamy voice in which said concierge had described her. Unfortunately, however, neither Petrovic´ nor the woman was at home. They hadn’t been seen in a week; they’d left with a large duffle bag saying they were going on vacation. As far as could be determined, they didn’t possess an automobile.
Romano told the officer to ask the concierge if he knew anything else about the man. Where did he work? What did he do for a living?
He waited a few minutes, then the officer came back on and said: “He used to be a menial laborer with a full-time job at the Intrasit plant, that’s how he was able to rent the apartment: The landlord only take tenants with steady jobs. Then last year Intrasit went out of business and he found a number of odd jobs—street vendor, construction worker—but basically, according to the concierge, he lives off his girlfriend, who cleans houses in the better part of town.”
Romano passed the information on to Ottavia, who plugged it into her search engine.
“Here we go. There’s a Petrovic´, D. in the list of those laid off by Intrasit and taking unemployment. We could do some digging over at the courts; maybe there’s more information about him in the accounting ledgers of the receivership administrator.”
Palma was disconsolate: “I doubt there’s anything there; at the very most we’ll get a copy of an ID. Let’s send it over to Piras and start the request working, but I doubt it’ll get us much. I wonder where the two of them could be hiding.”
“Maybe they rented a car,” Pisanelli said, “or borrowed one.”
Aragona made a face: “I very much doubt they took the subway to kidnap a child.”
That was when Romano piped up: “A couple of gypsies,” he said. “A couple of piece of shit gypsies.”
LVII
Ask any cop. Any cop you can think of.
He’ll tell you that when the chain of associations finally clicks, it’s like a fireworks display at midnight in the summer.
That it’s absolute perfection, like squaring the circle.
That it’s spectacular, because every tile in the mosaic is suddenly in just the right place; images match words and everything is explained; the mess disappears and suddenly nothing is ambiguous.
He’ll you that it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle. And the things that made no sense just a second ago now fit together perfectly.
He’ll tell you, any cop will, that these are the moments that made him choose this damn profession in the first place, this job that is all miles, dust, blood, and humiliation, all dodged bullets and doors slammed in your face and being made to look like a fool.
He’ll tell you that that fantastic, wonderful sensation is a shaft of light that shoots into the room and dispels the darkness.
Corporal Marco Aragona opened his mouth, shut it, and then reopened it. Then he took off his glasses, pausing mid-sweep, the gesture that had by now become his trademark—but only for an instant; then he set them down, his hand shaking, on the desktop.
Something singular was taking place in his mind, something out of a scene in a sci-fi movie where, by some kind of technological magic, a vast number of perfectly ordinary, innocuous objects suddenly assemble themselves into a deadly weapon at the hero’s disposal.
No one even noticed the expression on his face until he emitted a kind of strangled shout in Romano’s direction, interrupting Palma, who was speculating on where the kidnappers might be hiding.
“What did you just say?”
Everyone turned to look at him. Romano stared at him in surprise: “I don’t understand what . . .”
Aragona had leapt to his feet.
“What you just said, say it again!”
“Aragona, what the hell . . .”
“What did you call them? What did you call that Miro-whatever, what’s-her-name, and the guy who’s with her, Dragović?”
Mechanically, Ottavia corrected him: “Madlena Miroslava and Dragan Petro . . .”
“Goddamn it, answer me!”
“I called them gypsies . . . Listen, Aragona, if there’s anyone around here who’s in no position to preach about that kind of thing it seems to me that . . .”
Aragona wasn’t listening to him anymore. His mind was wandering back to the roof garden of the Hotel Mediterraneo, where a little pest of a boy had called an angel come down from heaven a gypsy, planting in Aragona’s brain the seed of a hunch that had finally sprouted.
He noisily sucked in a mouthful of air: He’d forgotten to breathe. Then he seemed to freeze, his expression one of terrible, bottomless sorrow and, in a very low voice, he whispered: “He was the one who set the whole thing up. Oh my God, I can’t believe it. And he even told us so: last night.”
Corporal Marco Aragona’s metamorphosis was such that for one long moment no one had the courage to ask him what the hell he was talking about.
Then Romano stammered: “No . . . that can’t be it, you must be wrong . . . It just
can’t be . . .”
Palma was about to shout at them both to explain what they were talking about when Lojacono and Di Nardo came rushing in with a stack of bank checks in their hands.
“Boss,” the lieutenant said, “there’s something you need to see. There’s something you all need to see.”
LVIII
The three of them went over. Not only Romano and Aragona; this time Palma insisted on being there, too.
He didn’t do this often; in fact, ever since he’d become the chief of the precinct he’d made it a rule never to let his personal presence cast a shadow over whoever had been in charge of the investigation from the beginning. He’d come up through the ranks and he knew just how exhausting that profession could be: hour after hour spent on stakeouts, tailing suspects, interrogations, questions that went unanswered, dead ends, conflicting emotions, things that didn’t add up, illusory solutions that went up in a puff of smoke like a cloud on a hot summer day.
That’s why it had always struck him as unfair that precinct captains stole their men’s thunder in order to soak up the final applause, the photo op, the interview. Palma preferred to hang back because he knew very well that behind every triumph there was always teamwork, and because he also knew that it wasn’t a genuine success, that there was no real victory in bringing to light the rot that lurks in the souls of men.
This time, though, he’d impulsively grabbed his jacket and hurried out with his two men. He didn’t want them to be alone; he wanted to protect them from the grief. He wanted to be there with them when they were forced to confront that awful, excruciating moment.
There was something surreal about the atmosphere that had settled over Pizzofalcone’s communal office in the wake of Aragona’s hunch and the unbelievable corroboration Lojacono and Di Nardo had unexpectedly provided. Silence, horror, then a strange, disheartened melancholy, as if the darkness of the abyss where evil lurks had suddenly been enriched by a new, painful nuance.
Pisanelli had done his best: “Look, this isn’t proof. A phrase, a misguided comment, for all we know uttered without thinking, certainly doesn’t . . . I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. And then this other stuff, these checks . . . in and of themselves they don’t mean a thing. Sometimes the banks just shut off the taps and then businessmen turn to these alternative forms of financing. I’ve seen things like this happen. No, I don’t believe it. Of course you can speculate, but to go from speculation to saying that . . . You’ll see, it’ll turn out to be something else entirely.”
Lojacono had nodded, tumbling the checks out onto the table: “Maybe you’re right. In other words, this is a lot of money right here, quite a lot, but still it strikes me as unthinkable.”
Ottavia was staring straight ahead, at nothing in particular: “No, no, listen to me. There has to be some other explanation. I can’t believe it.”
Aragona, who hadn’t said a thing since he’d dropped the bomb, who had just been sitting there, eyes wide open, mumbling incomprehensible words as if praying, leapt to his feet: “Let’s stop wasting time. We need to go get this bastard and make him tell us where the fuck they’re keeping the kid. Don’t you see that it all adds up? Do I have to draw you a map? I’m a damn fool, I should have figured it out right away.”
Palma, too, could feel the frenzy mounting within, and he’d said: “Let’s go. We need to check it out, so let’s get going. Dottoressa Piras is coming here: Lojacono, you explain everything and tell her to wait for us. We’ll report back.”
Romano was already galloping down the stairs; he was still as pale as he’d been after his run-in with Giorgia.
On the way over, they hadn’t spoken a word to one another. And anyway, what did they have to say? The only thing left was to get to the bottom of this thing, ask for an explanation of this series of coincidences.
The unmarked car was parked on the opposite side of the street with an unobstructed view of the building’s entrance: The luminous vista out over the bay seemed even more enchanting on that bright May morning.
Palma greeted the officers on duty.
“Has anyone come in or left since the last report?”
“No, Dottore. No activity. They haven’t even rolled up the blinds this morning.”
“Good. Keep your eyes open.”
They climbed the two flights of stairs in silence. But the building, far from traffic and surrounded by greenery, was so silent it seemed abandoned. From one of the apartment doors on the first landing came the short wail of a very young child; The sound pierced Palma’s heart.
They rang the doorbell once, twice. They exchanged a worried glance. They knocked.
While Romano was asking the commissario whether it wasn’t time to kick the door down, the door swung open.
And if they’d had any doubts, the face they saw now in front of them dispelled those doubts then and there.
In the dank, shadowy apartment, reeking of stale food and alcohol, a shambling, tottering silhouette stared at them for a long while, as if he didn’t recognize them.
Then he turned on his heel without a word and went back inside.
The person that the three policemen were looking for was the man before them, Alberto Cerchia, Dodo’s father.
LIX
What a mess, eh? Yeah. A real mess.
Forgive me if I receive you surrounded by shit. Then again, it strikes me as appropriate, because I’ve been in deep shit for a while now. For such a long time; you can’t even imagine.
I’m tired. I’m going to pieces, really. You can see, I drink. I’ve always been a drinker when times were tough: I lose my senses, my mind gets free of its chains, and I start to fly somewhere else, far from problems that have no solution.
I was expecting you, yes. I guess I really should have come to you. But as long as there was hope that we might come out of this in one piece, it was my duty to wait, don’t you think?
I’m not just responsible for myself, you know. I have a son. I have a little man who’s going to grow up and when he does, he’ll ask me to explain what I’m leaving him and why. It’s not like I’m alone in the world. Do you have children of your own? You don’t, do you? Then you couldn’t understand.
The checks. Where did you find them? Unbelievable, the way things come around. They’re for three million eight hundred thousand, those checks. And that’s not all of them; there are others out there, in other people’s hands. The signature is the same on them all, the signature that you read to your great surprise on the drafts: Cerchia SpA, Chief Administrator. In capital letters.
You talk about the economic crisis, what a nice big mouthful of a term: economic crisis. But you can’t even begin to imagine what an economic crisis really is, since you all collect your miserable little salaries at the end of the month anyway; at worst you’ll have to do without your usual week at the beach, or maybe you’ll be forced to miss an installment on your mortgage. If it took the rest of your life, you wouldn’t be able to understand what an economic crisis really means, for someone like me. If you count the salesmen I have more than five hundred employees here, and another three hundred in the other plant, outside of the country. I’m responsible for the livelihood of thousands of people. And I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in three years. I’m too busy searching for solutions I don’t have.
Because it starts so slowly that you don’t even notice it happening. People who owe you money drag out the payments, people you owe money to are asking for payments early; the price of raw materials goes up, but only a little, and the price of the product you sell has to drop if you want to keep selling, but only by a little. And the next thing you know, you need a line of credit. Just a small one.
Then the situation gets out of hand, but it takes months before you realize. Months. And by then it’s too late. The bank officers, who used to line up outside your office, stop taking your calls. And after a whil
e they start lining up outside your office again, but for a different reason.
Then there’s them.
They don’t try to collect their debts with notarized forms and certified letters, you know. They come and get you, and you’re there one day, gone the next, because there’s only one thing they can’t afford: for word to get out that somebody got away with not paying.
Hunt them down, instead of hunting down good people. Wipe them off the face of the earth, and free us of the temptation to go to them. Because after the first time, you can’t stop. It’s worse than cocaine. Worse than alcohol. Worse than anything.
Hope. What screws you is hope. The damn hope that keeps making you think you can get out quick, that everything is going to get back on track, the way it was before.
My father-in-law was a loan shark his whole life. They call it finance; but it’s the same thing. When I thought of this idea, I convinced myself that, in a way, I’d be seeing that justice was done, forcing them to give back their ill-gotten gains. A fucking Robin Hood, that’s what I felt like. I thought to myself: It’ll take me a couple of days and then I’ll take care of everything. I couldn’t see any other solutions. Do you think that if I’d had another way, any other way at all, to get out of the bind I was in, I would have gotten myself mixed up in this? No, I wouldn’t have. I’d never have done this.
My father-in-law, you see, ruined my life.
Maybe I should say that my wife ruined it, even if I think it was really him. Because she’s like him, she has the same horrible personality, the same bitchy attitudes, and she’s also shallow and stupid. Marry a girl from home, the saying goes, your wives and your oxen should come from your own hometown; I should have listened to the proverb.
Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 27