“So take my car,” and he handed the keys over to Italo. “It’s the Lancia parked right over there, you see it?”
“You mean, we were talking on the phone and the whole time we were . . . ?”
“Fifty feet apart. You, Antonio, stay on Berguet. So this is the shop?” and he looked straight ahead out the windshield.
“That’s right,” said Scipioni.
The sign on the shop window read: “HeyDiddleLiddles! Everything you need for your HeyDiddleLiddles. From zero to ten years of age.”
“Can anyone tell me what a HeyDiddleLiddle is?”
“A kid in a nursery rhyme?” Scipioni ventured.
“Good work, Antonio! How on earth did you come up with that?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I’ve been sitting here looking at the shop window for the past half hour puzzling it out.”
“And who knows how much longer you’re going to have to stay here. Okay. So get going, Italo.”
“And what are you going to do, sir?” asked Pierron.
“Umbrella?”
“In the back,” and Scipioni pointed to the rear compartment. Rocco turned around, grabbed it, and opened the door. “You get any news, call me,” as he got out of the car.
“Hold on,” Italo stopped him.
“What do you want?”
“Is there gas in the tank?” he asked, holding up the keys to the Lancia.
Rocco rolled his eyes. He reached for his wallet and pulled out fifty euros: “Here, fill up the tank, keep the change, and don’t bust my chops again!” And he stepped out into the lashing May rain.
All it took was the two puddles he centered immediately and Rocco Schiavone could kiss goodbye the eleventh pair of Clarks desert boots he’d owned since he moved to Aosta.
“Fucking hell!”
To make matters worse, Scipioni’s umbrella, clearly of Chinese manufacture, had already lost three of its stretchers. It was flopping in on itself like an unsuccessful omelette, letting splashes of water gush onto the deputy chief’s loden overcoat and down his collar.
“May God and all the Saints curse this city, this rain, this wind, and this fucking cold!”
Police headquarters was no more than a hundred yards away. He only needed to cross the street. Cars went sailing past on Corso Battaglione Aosta, leaving wakes of frothy water like so many speedboats. There were no pedestrian crossings, but that had never presented a problem for a Roman. The natives of the Eternal City, and Rocco was one of their number, are used to crossing even very high-speed, high-traffic, seven-lane arteries right around a blind curve. Then again, it must be admitted that an unusually substantial portion of the city’s health care spending is devoted to caring for people hit by reckless drivers. Reckless Roman drivers who—as has been duly noted and even mentioned in guidebooks for tourists—refuse to brake at pedestrian crossings, though they may be occupied by a ninety-year-old woman with a walker.
Without a second thought, Rocco stepped off the sidewalk. The cars honked and flashed their brights but given years of experience on Roman streets, the deputy chief was able to thread his way, as elegant as a daring toreador, and enter the office unharmed. Aside from his Clarks desert boots, of course, now basically a pair of mouldy orange peels not even worth composting, the only real victims of the rain.
“Sure, sure, I know . . . what can you do about it? Anyway. . . .” Furio was getting closer and closer to the end of his rope, after sitting for hours in the Bar Settembrini on the street of the same name, in Rome’s Prati quarter, listening to Adele’s relationship problems. The topic was this: things between her and Sebastiano seemed to have come to an insuperable impasse. Furio had tried without success to defuse the situation, arguing that Seba was just that way, distracted as he might seem, he still loved her every bit as much as the first day he’d fallen for her. But Adele wouldn’t listen to reason. She talked and talked and talked, and by now Furio was utterly indifferent to the fate of that couple.
He kept saying, over and over again like a broken record: “Sure, sure, I know . . . what can you do about it? Anyway. . . .”
It was one o’clock. Sitting at that wobbly round café table since ten in the morning, he’d completely savaged his stomach with three espressos, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and an enormous chocolate muffin. Where did Adele even find the energy? He watched the young woman’s lips moving, forming words, but he could no longer grasp the meaning of what she was saying, now an incessant background noise without any intrinsic logic.
“Sure, sure, I know . . . what can you do about it? Anyway. . . .”
He can just go fuck himself, thought Furio. If Adele wants to dump him, then she should just dump him. All things considered, he’d been trying to tell Seba this for some time now, he and Brizio and even Rocco: “Look, unless you shape up, she’s going to dump you. You don’t show her any special attention, you never make her feel special.” Seba spent his time at home in a bad mood, slumped in front of the television set or else surfing the web. And Adele? He’d basically forgotten about her, Adele, who had a line of men stretching out the door, eager and willing to step into Sebastiano’s shoes. “He’s worse than a bear these days. And he takes no care about his diet. Have you seen how fat he’s gotten lately?”
Actually, as far back as anyone could remember, Seba had always been fat, but to avoid a squabble, Furio just went on nodding.
“Sure, sure, I know . . . what can you do about it? Anyway. . . .”
“I even tried to make him jealous, by going out with Er Cravatta. That lasted two days. Then he went back to being his usual self.”
Suddenly, to break that monotony, to break up the cadenced, slightly somnolescent rhythm of her laments, Adele grabbed Furio by both hands. “Furio, help me!” she implored.
“Help you? How am I supposed to help you?” Furio knew that if he found the answer, he’d be free to go. What was needed was a drastic solution to the problem, something that would restore his friend’s hope and get him free from that café table where he had already been gathering moss for far too long. “Why don’t you leave town?” he suggested.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“To your mother’s, to your brother’s place in Brescia. Just go, don’t say a word to him, and power off your cell phone. If he asks me, I don’t know a thing.”
“My brother’s not in Brescia anymore. They transferred him to Berlin. I’m not going to my mother’s, not if you put a gun to my head.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“In Rome.”
“No, not in Rome. He’d find you if he set his mind to it.” Then a crazy idea popped into his mind, but he said to himself: why not? It might even work. “Go stay with Rocco.”
“In Aosta?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Rocco would back your play.”
“Furio, I don’t know about that. I haven’t talked to him in months.”
“Try giving him a call. His phone number hasn’t changed. Go up there and take it easy. I’ll take care of Seba. And I’ll let you know how he reacts, whether or not he starts tearing his hair out. At least that way you can make up your mind once and for all what you want to do.”
“You know, it’s not a bad idea.”
“Right?”
Furio was pleased. He’d found the solution, and now Adele had a smile on her face. Which meant he could finally leave the Bar Settembrini and, with his stomach doing flipflops, go have a bowl of spaghetti all’amatriciana at Stella and Brizio’s, in honor of their second anniversary.
The hours slipped by and Chiara Berguet was in ever greater danger. Hopefully, the demand for cash had already taken place, the agreement had been worked out, and the machinery of the ransom was already in motion. But he could no longer delay, the time had come to talk to the judge. Baldi had listened to him for a solid quarter of an hour. Never nodding, never stirring, like a mongoose observing the cobra before lunging at it, jaws snapping. Or the other way around, with Baldi the cob
ra and Rocco the mongoose. When Rocco was done laying out the situation, Baldi took a nice deep breath. And exhaling all at once, he spat out the words: “Why did you wait till now?”
“Because I wanted to be convinced. And now I am.”
“But what if it’s too late?”
“I doubt that.”
“What makes you doubt it?”
“She disappeared late Sunday night. Today, maybe, they’ve established contact.”
Baldi, hyperactive as he was, leapt to his feet, walked across the office, and without a word left Rocco sitting at his desk. But the policeman wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d become used to the magistrate’s surreal reactions. He noticed that, after many months, the photograph of the man’s wife had reappeared, a sign that Baldi’s conjugal relations had perhaps been restored to their prior state of serenity.
When Baldi came back and sat down, he had a pastry in his hand and was chomping loudly. “Want some?”
“No, thanks.”
“It’s disgusting. I got it from the vending machine. So what moves are you making?”
“I’ve got two men tailing the girl’s father.”
“Mm-hmmm,” and the judge took another bite out of the little pie. “There’s no criminal complaint. I’d have to order a wiretap without any criminal complaint.”
“Would that break any laws?” asked Rocco. The judge didn’t even bother to reply. He balled up the plastic wrapper from the pastry and tossed it into the trash can. The wrapper bounced off the edge and rolled across the floor.
“Plastic . . .” said Baldi. “We’re all going to be suffocated by plastic until we die, you know that?”
Rocco nodded.
“Somewhere in the ocean there’s an entire island made of plastic, and it’s the size of Europe. And yet it would take so little.”
There was not a single topic, be it political, environmental, or military in nature, for which Judge Baldi hadn’t already come up with a solution. From the salaries of parliamentarians to the problems of retirement or arms trafficking, the public debt, and unemployment—as far as he was concerned, everything could be tied up in a neat and simple knot.
“Do you know how we could defeat the rising tide of plastic on this planet? You just fire it out into deep space, far past the earth’s orbit. Every continent can build rockets and, instead of sending satellites into orbit—we have more than enough of them, after all—use them to launch tons and tons of plastic into the immense void. After all, what’s a continent of plastic the size of Europe if it’s just drifting through the galaxy? Nothing, a drop of water in the ocean. And for us it would be a lifesaver!”
“It strikes me as a very good idea, and a very expensive one,” Rocco retorted.
“Why expensive? If the government builds the rockets, it would just be the cost of the raw materials and the rocket fuel.”
“What about labor costs?”
“All you need to do is draft the fuckoffs with steady government jobs who spend all day in the office without lifting a finger. Already just here in the district attorney’s office, I could give you ten names.”
“Wouldn’t it be quicker to outlaw plastic packaging?” the deputy chief suggested.
“Let me give that some thought . . . To get back to us, I’m in agreement with your plan. Let’s keep a low profile. Without kicking up a fuss. We can’t run any risks.”
“All I’m asking you is to authorize an investigation into the assets of Edil.ber. I don’t think they’re doing particularly well. Also, I want to understand exactly what relationship they have with the Vallée Savings Bank. The director is called. . . .”
“Laura Turrini. I know her very well. What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. But if a company has been picketed by their workers and the unions for failure to meet payroll and then things suddenly all work out, well then, clearly, someone must have fronted them this money.”
“And so what you want to know is whether it was the bank, logically enough.”
“Logically enough.”
“What makes you think it might not have been the bank?”
“Because I wasn’t born yesterday, and this isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with this kind of a situation. You know—and I know—that businessmen often run short of cash.”
“So you suspect that it wasn’t the bank that got them out of their fix?”
“That’s right, Dottore.”
“The newspapers are full of these stories, Schiavone. But let me inform you, you’re taking a wrong turn here, and you couldn’t be any more wrong. Turrini is an eminently moral person, and the bank that she represents is a gleaming mirror of honesty. In all these years, I’ve never seen anything that would arouse even the slightest suspicion.”
“Still, it’s a lead, isn’t it?”
The judge pulled open a drawer and extracted a plastic water bottle. He unscrewed the top and drained half of it at a single gulp. “Ahhh . . . that’s disgusting . . . Now, what I’d like to do with the bank, though, is check to see if any money has been moved around. If as you say the girl has been kidnapped from home, then Pietro Berguet is going to have to figure out some way of paying, right?” With a second gulp, he drained the water bottle and sailed it straight into the trash can, this time hitting dead center.
“I don’t think they’ve paid already. It’s too soon.”
“Very true, Schiavone. You’re right. And after all, people who own large companies like Edil.ber might be using foreign accounts and funds. In other words, they’re not just going to the teller at the bank to withdraw two million euros.”
“No. Kidnappers want cash, not a damned wire transfer.”
“For real?” Baldi asked sarcastically. “It’s going to take them a while to find the cash. It’s not something you can do in a couple of days. And maybe they’ll draw on more than one account here in Italy, and most likely outside of the country as well. All right, let me get busy and see what I can do in those areas. You keep tabs on the family.”
Rocco stood up. But Baldi stopped him. “You know? Edil.ber is competing for a very big contract here with the Valle d’Aosta regional government. We’re going to have to move very cautiously.”
“That’s why I checked things out before coming to talk to you, Dottor Baldi,” the deputy chief replied.
“Smart move. Who knows about this at police headquarters?”
“Me and my most trusted men.”
“Laurel and Hardy?” Baldi asked, referring to Deruta and D’Intino.
“No, not them.”
“If anything leaks to the press, I’m going to hold you personally responsible.”
Rocco looked the judge in the eyes. “And I could say the same thing to you. Who can guarantee me that here in the district attorney’s office some dickhead doesn’t decide to develop a very deep throat?”
Baldi sat there for a few seconds and stared at him. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“No, make sure you did. If the big mouth was at my house, you’d have read all about it in the papers today.” He grabbed a copy of La Stampa, and slapped it under Baldi’s nose. “And there’s not a word of it in here.”
Baldi nodded. He smiled. He took the paper.
“It seems to me that you and I will go far together.”
“I don’t know about that, Dottore. I personally don’t want to go any further than a beach on the Côte d’Azur where I can bake my bones in the hot sun till the day I die.”
“Why don’t you do like me. Instead of thinking about a house on the beach, why don’t you concentrate on a boat, instead? With one of those, you can change the beach every day.”
“I hate boats, I hate waves, and I hate the smell of seaweed. I need to be able to walk and I don’t even have a boating license.”
“Sooner or later I’m going to get a two-masted sailboat straight out of a dream, you’ll see, and then I’ll sail straight for the horizon once and for all.”
&
nbsp; “I’ll leave you the address of the beach where you can find me. But maybe you can give me a hand. I need to nose around in a shop, it’s called HeyDiddleLiddles.”
“What did you say it was called?”
“HeyDiddleLiddles,” Rocco said again, with no change in his expression.
“What the hell kind of name is that?”
“According to one of my officers it’s a combination of Hey Diddle Diddle and Liddles, as in kids.”
“Then why not HeyLiddleDiddles?”
“Maybe because that sounds like a public urinal, or something worse?”
“True. Hey Diddle Diddle for Littles?”
“That’s too long. And then, you’ve got a double-t and two double-d’s, and then you’ve lost your pun, as well as any sense of fun.”
“Deputy Chief Schiavone, don’t you think that we’re sinking into a logical quagmire that’s pure nonsense?”
“I get the same impression.”
“So, HeyDiddleLiddles. And just why do you want to know more about this shop?”
“Because our man Pietro Berguet is there. At a time like this, doesn’t it strike you as odd that a businessman should be out shopping for clothing for children from ages zero to ten years old? After all, Chiara is his only daughter and she’s eighteen years old. Don’t you agree?”
The judge thought it over. “No more than an hour and I’ll send a well-drafted fax to you at police headquarters. Right now, Judge Baldi has some work to do.” He got to his feet and extended his hand toward Rocco. Who had no choice but to shake it.
“Take it from me, Schiavone, absolute radio silence. A girl’s life is at stake.”
“But I just told you that in the first place.”
“I was only suggesting that you make use of methods more in keeping with the rank you represent.”
“I’ve never done any different.”
“That’s not true and you know it perfectly well.”
“May I have my hand back now?”
“Of course you may.” And the judge finally released his grip.
How long has it been? How many days? Where is it that I read this, or maybe I saw it on TV. The longest you can go without water is a week. How long is it I’ve been here? Two days? Three? It’s getting dark out again. Night is falling.
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