Out of Season

by Antonio Manzini

Pain was added to pain. She’d gotten used to breathing slowly but her body had become a stiff mass pierced by pinpricks.

  I need to sleep. If I sleep, it all gets better. If I sleep, I no longer feel the ants, my temples, the fire.

  I need to pee. Still? Again?

  She had to pee. She’d been holding it for a good long while, but now she couldn’t resist.

  What am I going to do? It hurts too badly. Please, I’m begging you, come take this hood off my head. Come let me breathe. Come give me water.

  Thirst and the need to pee at the same time. That had never happened to her before.

  I have to pee. Now. Maybe that way I’ll be able to drown all those damned ants. Maybe I’ll be able to put out the fire. For sure, if I pee I’ll put out the fire and I’ll drown them.

  Go on, do it, what do you care? Pee on yourself, said the little voice. It’ll all be over in a flash.

  Sitting down? I’m supposed to pee on myself sitting down? I’ll get all dirty. It’ll be such a mess. I can’t do it. I really can’t just pee on myself.

  It was a nightmare that had haunted her nearly every night of her first few years of life. She’d wake up with the terror that she’d wet the bed. But that was an ancient thing, done now and finished. She hadn’t thought she was going to have to go back there.

  Come on, hurry up, it’ll only take a second.

  She kept holding out. But she wouldn’t be able to much longer. She was about to explode, she had to give in.

  What about the smell? The smell will kill me!

  She compressed her lips and let go. She could feel the rivulet caress her thighs and slowly run down her legs, to her calves and then into her shoes. Then Chiara started crying again.

  She peed on herself! She peed on herself! Chiara peed on herself. The voice made fun of her. Ha ha ha . . . for shame, for shame, for shame, eighteen years old and she pees on herself!

  “Shut up! Shut up!” she shouted through her tears. “Shut up!”

  Isn’t your mamma here to clean up after you? Where’s Dolores? Did they leave you all alone?

  “You need to shut up, I told you!” she shouted, her voice choked by sobs.

  Now it’s all sticky, isn’t it? It’s sticky and it smells . . . worse than a stable . . . so what are you, a cow?

  “Leave me alone,” said Chiara in a tiny, faint voice.

  I don’t want to listen to you anymore. Go away. Get out of here. And the ants haven’t budged. They’re still right there. And it burns worse than ever. I need to sleep. If I can sleep, the pain will go away, the stench will go away, and I can breathe. And when I wake up again, I’ll see Mamma and Papà.

  Or whoever it was that brought you here.

  Who?

  It’s not as if you got here under your own steam.

  A little water. Just a mouthful. One tiny mouthful and I’d be fine, I could sit here and be a good girl.

  Water? You want a little water? How much would you pay for a glass of water? Would you give me your ticket to see Alt-J?

  “I’d . . . give you . . . my house. . . .”

  Her head stopped pounding, Chiara’s eyelids sank shut, and the girl dropped into a deep, dark pit.

  Tuesday

  He’d only been sleeping for an hour or so when the intercom crackled. Rocco sat bolt upright, his breath caught in his throat. He looked around wildly. He was in his bed. In his bedroom. At home. Outside the sky was inky black. What could have awakened him? It was the second squawk from the intercom that cleared up his doubts.

  “Well, fucking hell . . .” and he looked at the time on his alarm clock. A quarter to one. “Who is it?”

  He got out of bed and, walking barefoot, made it over to the intercom. Hiking his boxer shorts up a little, he lifted the receiver. “Who is it?”

  “Deputy Chief?” came a man’s voice. “I’m sorry about the time. This is very urgent.”

  “Can I ask who this is?”

  “Pietro Bucci Rivolta.”

  “Who?”

  “Pietro Bucci Rivolta. We met at Nora’s party.”

  Oh no, not fucking this, thought Rocco. The architect. The one who he’d thought was Nora’s lover and who, instead, was Anna’s. What does he want? No! Some jealous tantrum at one in the morning was more than he’d be able to take. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s very important . . . I know it’s late, and I hate to bother you, but. . . .”

  “Well, you’ve already bothered me. I’ll come downstairs. Give me five minutes.”

  He went back to his bedroom and quickly got dressed.

  A dark wind had sprung up, driving the temperature down. The street was deserted. Pietro Bucci Rivolta was bundled up in his heavy jacket. On his head he wore a checkered flat cap. As soon as he saw Rocco come out of the street door, he walked over to him with a broad smile. A sign that he was here on a mission of peace. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, extending his hand. Rocco clasped the hand and shook it. “But this is something that’s not letting us sleep.”

  “And now it’s not letting me sleep either. What’s happened?”

  “First of all, how’s Nora?”

  “Fine . . . I think she’s fine.” The question had caught him off guard. The architect was certainly taking the long way round. The question he’d been expecting was: how’s Anna?

  “Give her my regards when you see her. But I came here to tell you something very important. You’re a policeman, and a very good one from what Anna tells me . . . do you remember Anna?”

  Rocco put a vague expression on his face, as if he were searching in the drawers of his memory for who knows what object he hadn’t thought of in years. “Nora’s friend? With dark hair, right?” he asked, blushing at the squallid pantomime he was putting on. But also proud of the fact that Anna considered him a good policeman in spite of everything.

  “Exactly. And it was Anna who told me to come see you. I apologize again for the time of night. But I think it’s very serious.”

  Rocco Schiavone looked at the architect. He felt like a piece of shit in the presence of this man—so innocent, distinguished, well-dressed and groomed and easy on the eyes.

  “I need to talk to you, Schiavone. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “At this time of the night? Where are you going to find anything open in Aosta?”

  “Ettore is still open. There was a bachelorette party.”

  “All right.” With a yawn, Rocco bade a farewell to his night’s sleep which was now well and truly gone.

  “Hold on a second,” the architect told him. He turned and waved his hand. The passenger door of a Mercedes parked a short distance away swung open and a girl with long hair got out of the car.

  The young woman shut the door behind her and, hands plunged deep into the pockets of a skimpy short jacket, came walking over to Rocco and the architect. She wore a pair of ankle-height light hikers. As soon as she reached the two men, she smiled. “Hi.”

  “My daughter. Giovanna,” said Bucci Rivolta.

  “Hello,” Rocco said. And looked at her. She was an unreasonably beautiful young woman. So beautiful that you couldn’t even really class her among other beautiful young women. By all rights, she needed to be promoted to the category of Lovely Creatures, superior beings that have nothing in common with common mortals.

  “The reason I’m here,” said the architect, “ . . . is for her.”

  Ettore had brought over a couple of glasses of white for the grownups and a Coke for Giovanna. It had been the architect’s choice to sit at the table farthest from the door. He too was a regular at the café, since his office was on the piazza. And he’d probably even witnessed the jealous scene that Nora had made, if he’d chanced to look out his window. Who could say? Rocco still hadn’t entirely digested the idea of the enormous difference between a city of forty thousand and a metropolis of more than four million.

  “All right, then, Dottor Bucci Rivolta. . . .”

  “Pietro.”

  “Okay.
Pietro, what’s happening?”

  “Giovanna, tell him.”

  The young woman, encouraged by her father, took a sip of her Coke, set down the glass, and looked at Rocco with her emerald-green eyes. She brushed back her long smooth hair and started talking. “The fact is, I think there’s some kind of problem with Chiara.”

  “Who is Chiara?”

  “She’s my best friend. Last night, we went to Sphere.”

  Rocco’s eyes were twin question marks.

  “It’s a discotheque on the road to Cervinia,” Giovanna explained.

  “It was me, Chiara, Chiara’s boyfriend Max, and Max’s cousin, Alberto, who came down from Turin.”

  Rocco gestured as if to say, “Go on.”

  “It was a very nice evening out. At the end of it, Max took Chiara home, and Alberto came with me.”

  Rocco looked at the architect who looked completely unruffled. He was listening to his daughter.

  “Alberto took me home and then went over to Max’s house to sleep.”

  “And up to here . . .” said the deputy chief.

  “Exactly. Except, today Chiara didn’t come to school.”

  Rocco shrugged. “That happens. Maybe she’s sick.”

  “No. Because today there was a test in Italian. The final. And this year we’re having the full array of finals. So Chiara couldn’t possibly miss that class. I just assumed she must be sick, myself.”

  “And did you try calling her?”

  “Yes. Her phone has been turned off since last night. So I went over to her house. But she wasn’t there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her mother told me that she wasn’t there. I asked her where Chiara was and she told me that Chiara was at her grandmother’s.”

  “I imagine,” Rocco said, “that you went and talked to the grandmother as well.”

  “That would have been difficult,” the architect butted in, “since, of Chiara’s two grandmothers, one died six years ago and the other one lives in Milan.”

  “Then maybe she went to Milan. I don’t really see the problem here,” said Rocco, who was starting to run out of patience.

  “She wasn’t at her grandmother’s in Milan. I called,” said Giovanna. She finished her Coke and looked at the deputy chief again. “Chiara’s grandmother is at Abano Terme. The housekeeper told me so.”

  “Well, listen to the way I’m guessing it went,” said the deputy chief after draining his glass. “Chiara spent the whole day with her boyfriend, Max, and then dreamed up a lie to tell her mother to keep from getting caught. She turned off her cell phone to keep her parents from catching on and, this morning, that is, a few hours from now, you’ll see her back at school, happy and well rested.”

  “No, sir. Max hasn’t seen her since last night either.”

  “Tell him, Giovanna.”

  The girl looked at her father. “Chiara has a cell phone, an iPhone. And it has a case with the American flag on it. I saw her cell phone on the table by the front door at the villa when I was talking to her mother.”

  Rocco nodded. The architect looked him in the eye: “An eighteen-year-old who’s willing to go without her cell phone for a whole day?”

  “It’s even worse than that,” added his daughter. “I know she had the cell phone last night at the club. So she definitely went home. But where is she now?”

  “I think there’s an answer. And I believe. . . .”

  “That’s not all,” the architect interrupted the deputy chief. He put a hand in his pocket and showed Rocco two colorful stubs of cardboard.

  “What are these?”

  It was Giovanna who answered the question. “Tomorrow night there’s an Alt-J concert in Milan. Chiara and I have been waiting for it for months now. Chiara wouldn’t dream of missing Alt-J, for anything in the world. Do you know how long it took me to find these tickets?”

  “All they ever talked about was this concert, Dottore. Believe, something’s not right. What it is, I can’t say. But I don’t like this one little bit.”

  “In other words, you think that Chiara is now a missing person.”

  “Chiara is a missing person,” Pietro Bucci Rivolta agreed, “and her parents won’t say anything about it. I’ve known Pietro and Giuliana for years. I’ve worked with them, too. I came up with some excuse and dropped by their villa at nine thirty. Pietro wasn’t in, and Giuliana wouldn’t show her face. I just had a chat with the Filipina. Their daughter’s cell phone wasn’t on the side table where Giovanna had seen it earlier, and what’s more, the Filipina suddenly burst into tears for no good reason. Trust me, Schiavone, something’s not right.”

  The deputy chief stood up from the chair. He took two steps toward the door. He spread both arms wide. “This family. . . .”

  “The Berguets?”

  “Exactly. Tell me more.”

  “Pietro and Giuliana Berguet have a daughter, Chiara, and a company, Edil.ber. Construction. Like I told you, I worked on a couple of projects with them. They build houses, apartments, bridges, they even worked on the airport. . . .”

  “That was a brilliant piece of work,” Rocco commented.

  “Right,” Pietro admitted. The airport had been a notorious boondoggle, a veritable bridge to nowhere. “In other words, they’re builders.”

  “Are they rich?” asked the deputy chief, who was starting to come up with an idea.

  “Very.”

  That word, “very,” was a punch to the gut for Rocco. “In that case.” He pulled out his wallet. He paid the check. “What time is it?”

  “Almost two in the morning, Dottore.”

  “All right, let’s put this down in the official record,” Rocco said with a solemn demeanor. “At two in the morning on a Tuesday in May, Deputy Chief Rocco Schiavone, stationed in Aosta now for nine seemingly endless months, has been saddled for the umpteenth time with an authentic pain in the ass of the tenth degree!” he said in a loud voice. Pietro and Giovanna stared at him in bafflement. They had no way of knowing—as everyone who had worked or had dealings with Rocco Schiavone since September knew—that the deputy chief had a ranking all his own of the things he classified as pains in the ass. That is to say, the duties and run-of-the-mill daily occurrences that upset him and made his life a hell on earth. Italo Pierron was actually collecting an encyclopedic list of them which he planned to post on the glass-front bulletin board at police headquarters to make sure everyone was clear what they should and should not say to the “boss.” The hassles or pains in the ass started at the sixth degree and rose from there in a clear hierarchy. Among the least dire, that is to say, in fact, pains in the ass of the sixth degree, there were plumbers or bricklayers who tended never to live up to a promised schedule, the multiple zeroes in bank routing numbers, motorcyclers without mufflers, old pens that were out of ink when you needed to jot down an urgent note. Pains in the ass of the seventh degree included dogshit on sidewalks, losing your place in a book you’re reading—back when Rocco still read books, anyway—and the barbarous fad of finger food. Among the pains in the ass of the eighth degree he included letters from the tax authorities—though after Rocco brought a lawsuit against an Equitalia employee, those letters had become rarer than a snow leopard—having to attend Mass, something he hadn’t done since 1980, sand in clams, wine that tastes of cork, and having to eat lunch later than two o’clock. The ninth degree included all the furies of the weather, be they tropical downpours, bitter cold, snow, wind, storms, and hail, and then idiots in general, having to go vote, and tooth decay. But reigning sovereign and imperial over all was the pain in the ass of the tenth degree, the worst that life could thrust upon him: the murder case that duty chose to hang around his neck. And on that early Tuesday morning in May, Rocco had just realized that before him there now loomed, immense and undeferrable, a pain in the ass of the tenth degree.

  When they stepped outside it had just started raining.

  “Do you want a ride home?” the architect asked.
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br />   “Home? What for? After all the stable door is wide open and the horses have bolted. Just take me to police headquarters, if you would.”

  He climbed into the architect’s Mercedes and they headed off to the office.

  It was 2:12 a.m.

  Standing at the door was Officer Casella. A smile appeared on his face the minute he saw the deputy chief: “Sir? What are you doing in the office at this time of night? Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “No, I couldn’t. And if I’m not sleeping, someone else shouldn’t be either. Where are Deruta and D’Intino?”

  “I have no idea. You sent them out to scour the city, and if you ask me, they’re both at home, fast asleep.”

  “Wake them up and tell them to get moving!”

  It wasn’t any real need for the comical duo that drove the deputy chief to issue that order; it was a thirst for revenge, plain and simple.

  “Should I tell them to come to headquarters?”

  “No, tell them that they haven’t reported in to me and that what we need now isn’t for them to rest, it’s for them to get out there and hunt down the thing we talked about.”

  “I’ll convey that message!” Casella said as he picked up the receiver.

  Rocco strode into his office. He grabbed the phone. After a substantial number of rings, someone picked up on the other end. “He . . . hello, who is this?”

  “I hear that your voice sounds much better, Inspector Rispoli. Did you take the clothespin off your nose?”

  “S . . . sir, is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me, and it’s two twenty in the morning. Has your fever subsided?”

  “Last night, that is, a couple of hours ago, I had a temperature of . . . 99.5.”

  “So what is it? Are you taking antibiotics?”

  “No, echinacea. I’m using homeopathic treatments.”

  “Do they work?”

  “They do with me.”

  “I cured a cold once with bryonia. Have you ever tried it?”

  “Excuse me, sir, but are you calling me . . . to find out how I’m feeling at two twenty in the morning?”

  “Well, what if I was?”