Martusciello halted his arm, balancing the coffee cup halfway to his lips.
“In force requiring? Do me a favor, Peppino, get the hell out of here.”
The deputy bowed from the waist, turned, and left. Martusciello glanced at Liguori:
“Aren’t you going with him?” The detective shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “Pity.”
“Now then, Martusciello, Captain Malanò wants our collaboration, Vialdi had been living in Pozzuoli for the past few years. You’re not going to answer me? Fine, that just means I’ll draft a report for you on my meeting with Captain Malanò.”
“Excellent, do just that. And draft it in duplicate, so I can make sure to ignore both copies.”
2.
Police Sergeant Blanca Occhiuzzi removed one of the earbuds that were driving Mozart right into the furthest corner of her brain.
She’d detected, in spite of the Mozart, a commotion out in the street, excessive even considering it was rush hour.
She lived in Fuorigrotta, across from the San Paolo Stadium, and she was accustomed to the sound of voices and cars, but that morning the noises outside indicated something out of the ordinary. She pulled the other earbud out of her other ear.
She made her way out to her balcony, and to her eyes the daylight was transformed into nothing more than a brighter shadow. She touched the railing, felt the warm metal. She leaned over.
She was on vacation, and she’d worked all summer long. In August Nini, her foster daughter, had left for London: fifteen years old and this was her first trip alone. Blanca had lost all appetite for vacation and solved a couple of cases instead.
She’d urged Nini to go, and now she was working overtime to compensate for eyes that knew only partial darkness. It wasn’t reasonable.
The first night Nini was away, the sergeant went to sniff her pillow, the wisteria scent of Nini. The surviving senses had sharpened, and Blanca dominated the jurisdictions of sound, smell, and touch. She’d lost most of her sight and a great deal more in a fire when she was thirteen.
She sniffed at Nini’s pillow. Then she promised herself that she wouldn’t do it again.
“You and I have both lost too much already. There’s no need to keep you from seeing everything you deserve to see, just so I can have a part of it.”
The sergeant took advantage of Nini’s absence to seek an assistant, something she’d never wanted before. She came to an agreement with Sergio Manzione, a twenty-something student from out of town. She’d chosen him for his irreverent manners; far better that than the usual unctuous pathos. She bought a compact car and began preparing to loosen her ties with Nini, at least in part.
The sounds from the street grew louder: sirens and screeching brakes and slamming car doors. From below the smell of gasoline and burning wafted up to her, gusts of the odor of frying mixed with the scent of rotting food. Blanca raised the sleeve of her sweater to cover the smell, then picked up the telephone, counted until she got to the speed dial button.
“Sergio, what’s happening?”
“What do I know? I was asleep. Why don’t you ask Nini?”
“Nini’s at school. But don’t you ever do any studying?”
“Don’t even say it, Auntie, I ask myself the same thing all the time.”
“Don’t call me Auntie.”
“Then you stop thinking about my failures in higher education. After all, what good’s a degree in classical literature? Sheesh.”
“Of course, they tied you up and blindfolded you when it was time to pick your major.”
“What can I do for you, Blanca?”
“Come on by here, I have to go downstairs to see what’s going on.”
Sergio knocked on the door fifteen minutes later. Blanca ignored the arm that the young man offered her and they headed down the stairs.
The woman walked with soft footsteps. Her body seemed to sense obstacles before brushing against or past them. Blanca’s beauty lay not in the individual parts, but in the composition of contrasts. Her voice was younger than she was. Her short hair emphasized the femininity of her features. The beautiful sensuous lips protected irregular, slightly protruding incisors; when they opened into a smile it was unclear whether they were offering a bite or a kiss.
“Stay close to me but don’t touch me. I’ll reach out for you.”
“Ah, if they could only hear you now, Auntie!”
“Shut up. You make me nostalgic for my dog.”
“And I love you too.”
The two of them were out on the street. Sergio explained to Blanca that there were policemen everywhere and crowds of people.
The sergeant tilted her head back.
“They’re saying that someone killed Jerry Vialdi, the singer. They found the dead body between one set of goalposts of the San Paolo Stadium. Take me to a policeman, but pick me one who looks intelligent.”
“How on earth did you manage to pick all that out with all this hubbub?”
“I can read lips.”
“Touché.”
After talking with a detective from the Fuorigrotta police station, Blanca Occhiuzzi asked Sergio to take her to her office in Pozzuoli:
“Summer vacation is over.”
3.
Blanca said goodbye to Sergio and reminded him of when she would be ready to go home.
The sergeant waited for the car to drive away.
She wanted to be left alone. She told herself that she was paying for Nini’s new independence with pieces of her own. She concluded it’s worth it: that girl was a daughter to her, more of a daughter than any child delivered in the blood of prayers and curses.
She stunned herself with the salt waves and the tufa-stone coast of the old harbor.
She needed freedom before seeing Liguori again. They hadn’t seen each other in the past thirty-seven days. The precise accounting was not merely a matter of adding up the length of their respective vacation days.
The detective had called his colleague twice during the month of August: I’m in Sicily, I’m in Ireland, and not much more. Blanca had smiled at that need for geographic coordinates and had settled in to wait. Liguori unsettled her, made her feel like leaving and staying. She sensed the danger of his voice: it penetrated into the furthest corners of her brain, almost like the music of Mozart.
The sergeant was a specialist at decoding sounds and intentions in wiretaps and environmental listening devices. She’d trained in Belgium; she’d had excellent teachers, nearly all of them sightless, and a natural predisposition for which she was in great demand.
It wasn’t part of her occupational baggage that allowed her to recognize in Liguori’s voice hesitation, elegance, refined sensuality, and a devastating blend of derision and gentleness from which she would be well advised to turn and flee.
Before walking through the main entrance she took a deep breath, straightened her summer dress, and briskly swung ankles and flat sandals. She couldn’t wear heels, she needed to sense the difference between pebbles and pavement.
Giuseppe Càrita, as all his colleagues, with the exception of Martusciello, were now resigned to addressing him, met her in the lobby:
“Sergeant,” he intoned. He had been taking elocution lessons for some time. “You’re looking particularly magnificent today.”
“Thanks, Giuseppe, how are your theatrical studies coming along?”
“Blanca, with you I can talk the way it comes naturally to me, I’ve found my own personal paradise. How wonderful it is to become different people: kings, lawyers, peasants, sons of bitches, Garibaldi, and Aisauer.”
“Who?”
“‘Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’ Those are his words.”
“Ah, Eisenhower. You’re performing Eisenhower?”
“We’re studying him in the auto repair shop where w
e rehearse. Our maestro . . . you understand who the maestro is, don’t you? He’s the actor who does the commercial for OraPerOra, the diet pill.”
“I can’t seem to recall.”
“Odd that you can’t seem to recall, because he’s famous. Anyway, our maestro takes pieces written and spoken by famous figures from history, blends them together in a phenomenal collage that only he could create, and has us recite them on Saturday evenings in front of relatives.”
“His relatives?”
“No, ours. Modestly speaking, I help to bulk up the audience because I have two . . . I have a large family. The maestro even offers me a discount, and lets me pay five euros instead of seven for the group ticket.”
“Generous of him.”
“I couldn’t say if it’s generous, because I already pay for the course, but True Art isn’t cheap, as you know. And enjoying multiple lives is priceless.”
Blanca had to agree.
She climbed to the floor where the captain’s office was located. The police officers moved silently and encouraged visitors to cause as little noise as possible. They explained to her that Martusciello had come back from his vacation with a dead-tired face and had announced that for the next few months he was going to lead a solitary life in the office.
Blanca was only slightly concerned, if at all. With her, Martusciello exhibited manners that he wouldn’t concede to other, lesser individuals.
She headed toward his office, expecting the faint scent of tobacco, salt air, sulphur, and the aroma of second-rate shaving cream.
She walked past a window. She didn’t see the shop fronts, the strolling pedestrians, three cats stretched out in the sunlight. She didn’t see the ship, in the nearby dry dock, offering the gaping mouth of its broken front hatch. She didn’t notice the women walking arm-in-arm with the last traces of summer.
But she did sense the stirrings of life, down by the waterfront.
4.
They’ll have found you first thing in the morning. I even know who’ll have been the first to spot you, that idiot who reeks of wine and eternal clothing.
He’ll have turned on every spotlight on the field just for the fun of defacing the dawn. Good work, that means he wallowed in the flood of light in the middle of the spectacle. It’s not something you see every day, scoring a goal with a dead body.
Much less yours.
A famous dead body.
The hammock netting will cradle the perpetual slumber of your renowned body. How poetic.
Makes you want to lick your whiskers.
I prepared you beautifully for the show, as per orders received: I set you up in a fetal position, you always used to say that living is already dying a little bit, what a mediocre thought. And after all, you were always such a little baby boy! So I equipped your banality and even delivered you a tidbit, a mouthful of meadow in your mouth. Suckle nicely on your grass nipple. Console yourself for eternity.
The drunkard and his stench will have approached the goalposts closest to the cemetery, I picked them special.
Whoever looks at you has already been infected.
The idiot will certainly be incapable of appreciating the refinement of the thing.
You see all the gifts I give you? Come, give us a peck on the cheek, don’t be shy! Hug me, call me your little man, kid brother, sister, old friend. You’re so fond of rummaging through family names for strangers you never see, that you forget about even as you’re watching them.
Say it to me: genius, angel, friend, dear heart, mother love. Recite once again the rosary of slimy flattery.
Whore. Worm. Scabby wound, sewer of my hatred.
Slap your tongue against your palate to give birth to sounds, songs, grunts of advanced passion. Of friendship that you don’t even know. Of eternity that is beneath your consideration. Of filthy, disgusting beauty.
The lives and lives that you tear asunder.
You turned me into a man who’d been castrated with all his senses wide awake. You turned me into a woman who’d given birth to her own demise. A beast, drawn and quartered. Vertebrae dangling from the meat hook of your ill will.
It’s dull, you know, not to have a face.
It’s difficult to insist with this stump, to go on being alive.
You no longer have this problem. Maybe right now you’re the riveting star of the autopsy session, perhaps the conscientious doctor is plunging in the scalpel as I speak, and it’s just too bad that you can’t feel the sweetness of the slice.
Good night, brother.
5.
Blanca walked into Martusciello’s office and found him there with his hands crossed over his stomach, his head lolling back against the upper edge of his backrest, and his eyes shut.
The captain only noticed that she was there when it was already too late. He snapped into a more decorous position. Blanca made him feel more awkward than he usually did, and always had, from the first time they met. He could feel parts of his body drifting out of place, into disjointed poses and gestures. His movements all went wrong in the presence of a woman who made it clear that she perceived the space around her in a clearly mastered equilibrium.
“Weren’t you on vacation?”
“I was. Then I heard that they found Jerry Vialdi’s dead body at the San Paolo Stadium, in a fetal position, jammed into a corner of the goalpost net. He had a blade of grass clenched between his teeth. It seemed like an excellent reason to come back.”
“I have no wish to pursue the case, nor do I want you to do so. I can already imagine the horde of idiots and prurient rubberneckers that this murder is bound to attract. Plus I don’t want to hear Liguori’s voice in my ears with his theories, I don’t want to be exhausted by his frenzy for coming and going, I just can’t take it. I’ve had a trying summer.”
“I heard that you had an operation . . . ”
“Why doesn’t he get cancer of the tongue? I had an operation and I don’t want to talk about it.” He lowered his voice to a whisper: “Anyway, that’s not the reason.”
“Not the reason for what?”
“I’d forgotten that you can hear a flea cough!”
Martusciello told her the tale of the misbegotten summer that refused to go away. He told her about indelible objects: the swing with its insatiable creaking noise; the restaurant’s neon lights fully lit even though sunset had scarcely begun; sandals on the beachfront with the arid sand, back and forth in an Olympian boredom; the rough sheets that had certainly enjoyed a previous existence as raincoats; the ice cream in the refrigerated vaults.
Blanca smiled, drew close to the police captain and planted two kisses on his cheeks, cheeks that were bristly and did not smell of second-rate shaving cream.
They were still standing there cheek to cheek when Liguori came in.
“Ah, there you both are! Captain, what’s up, are you all better? Blanca, you have curative powers, you’re better than an ointment for . . . ”
“I always ask myself and I never find an answer,” Martusciello hastened to interrupt him. “But why should a citizen, the proprietor of vast properties, with a vast array of books that tell him this, that, and the other thing, a squire without a horse, but with heaps and heaps of cash that could suckle him on crates of wine, why should such an individual land right at my feet? Why, oh why? If you’d decided to be a scientist, if you’d listened to mama and papa, we’d all have led much quieter lives. No, sir, because of that curdled brain of yours you decided to pursue your whim of becoming a policeman. A wealthy policeman. You tell me if such a thing should be.”
While Martusciello went on talking, Liguori had set down his report in duplicate on the desktop, and had then stepped over beside Blanca and with a light touch of his hand to her back had guided her to a chair. Then he’d pulled up another chair, dragging it across the floor to interrupt the captain’s speech and placing it
next to the one where the woman was seated.
The detective’s aroma reached Blanca: a blend of linen, leather, and traces of some feminine scent.
“How’s everything, Liguori?”
“Just fine, thanks. No need to inquire after your well-being, you’re paler and more beautiful than ever. Well, then, what do you say we talk about work? You know, just to remind ourselves of why they pay us a salary,” he glanced over at Martusciello, “which, as you so rightly point out, I don’t even need.”
Martusciello returned the glance, with venom. Liguori maintained his composure.
“Malanò, the captain in Fuorigrotta, wants our assistance. He summoned me to his office to extend a formal request, he tells me that he can’t reach you on the phone. Shameless liars! For the past several years, Vialdi had been living in a rooftop apartment and penthouse on the border between Bagnoli and Pozzuoli. Martusciello, think of the luck: his residence is the first one over the line. Vialdi’s corpse was found—”
“We already know,” Martusciello cut him off. Liguori shot him a half-smile and went on.
“It was found in the goalposts of the San Paolo Stadium, the goal closest to Fuorigrotta Cemetery. A groundsman with a weakness for alcohol made the happy discovery and waited only half an hour before calling the police. Apparently he remained poised in uncertainty as to whether the huddled corpse with the blade of grass in its mouth might not be an illusion conjured up by the glass he’d just downed. The autopsy results are not yet available. Last night, Vialdi played a concert at the RAI Auditorium in Via Marconi, and I went there in person: no interesting news emerged, the usual praise and proclamations in favor of the late singer. No unusual behavior had been observed. Captain Malanò believes that the bizarre funeral rites might have been the work of a serial killer.”
Martusciello turned red in the face, lit a cigarette, and launched into a diatribe against the gendarme and his obsession with imaginary serial killers. He was incapable of logic. He was incapable of curiosity when it came to logic. Malanò had no reasonable relationship with statistics. He couldn’t overcome the tedium of poring over bank accounts and telephone call records. He was incapable of pounding the streets, using good old shoe leather to canvas the neighborhood for information about the victim, asking even the walls. He lacked the subtle violence that could push interrogation sessions from the present to the remote infinitive.
Three, Imperfect Number Page 2