At the words remote infinitive Blanca smiled, and in fact Liguori could not tolerate the poetic license.
“You, on the other hand, have a truly stunning understanding of the remote infinitive.” He stretched out his legs. “A marriage between Kantian category and third grade textbooks.”
“The marriage between your mother and father led to the birth of this masterpiece of applied science. Let it go, Liguori: relax.”
“I’d like to, but what exactly are you smoking?”
“Fine, okay, let’s do this: you can be fully in charge of the case of the serial killer, where the series for now is stationary at the number one. I will investigate from here the interesting life of the famous singer, and Blanca can give me a hand in my research and put up with Giuseppe Càrita.”
“Agreed, as long as Blanca can give me a hand as well.”
Blanca stood up to go into his office.
“Three is an imperfect number,” she said.
6.
Rosina Mastriani did her best to be even tempered and sunny with Dottor Criscuolo at the employment office.
She couldn’t spare any more time. She wanted a yes or a no, and she wanted it immediately.
Rosina was in a hurry. After moving away from home, she’d been fired from the only job she’d been able to find, at the Call Center N.D. (“Insure Your Life and Life Will Smile Back”), because:
she hadn’t obtained results;
she wasn’t fast enough;
she wasn’t alluring enough;
her voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard;
she had once or twice broken into tears while talking with a potential client;
she never accommodated the psychological requirements of the potential client;
she was unable to explain the crucial importance of insuring the lives of others, much less her own, at a minimal level;
it was obvious from miles away that she wasn’t enthusiastic about going all the way to San Giovanni a Teduccio every morning at seven and returning home with darkness in the sky and in her eyes;
and because she lacked optimism.
The Executive Leader, Technical Support, Mario Apicella, known to his underlings as “Stress ’em Out,” in his rare moments of interpersonal interaction, wanted to be referred to as “The Boss.” Mario Apicella was thoroughly familiar with the behavioral norms expected of the call center employees. The notification of redundancy was communicated by Dottor Apicella to Rosina with merciful rapidity, in a charming tone of voice, respectful of the psychological requirements of his interlocutor:
“Mastriani, you’ll find a better position, wait and see. After all, the work you’re doing is well below your educational level.”
Rosina bit violently into the inside of her cheeks to keep from uttering the rapid sequence of words that her tongue was on the verge of spitting out.
After the exit interview she returned home and sat there, alone, racking her brains: there must be another opportunity out there somewhere, however hard it might be to find.
Equally difficult to find was her own automobile, which she had parked on the sidewalk. When she finally spotted it she realized that she had been parked in by two other cars. Immediately afterward she read a sign on her windshield warning her not to try to move her vehicle: the police had clapped a wheel clamp onto the car.
As soon as she climbed onto the bus she set out to count all the shades of gray and brown along the Via Marina. She took advantage of the opportunity as well to count all the months of rent that she could still afford to pay: three, tops, if she also stopped eating.
A very polite gentleman stood and offered her his seat. But it was just an excuse to rub up against her arm. So she waited patiently, stood up, smiled at the very polite gentleman, and pulled the cord for the next stop. The very polite gentleman eagerly accepted the implicit invitation, as well as the place in front of the door. As soon as the bus doors swung open, Rosina counted to three, coincidentally the number of months she could pay rent, and shoved him off the bus.
By the time the very polite gentleman got back to his feet with a curse, the doors had already closed. She blew him a kiss out the window.
“On days like this I learned that it’s possible to murder someone, and you just chose the wrong day.”
Then she thought about how they’d found Jerry Vialdi’s corpse.
Ninety minutes later, she got back to her studio apartment in Pianura. She turned on her computer and put both car and wheel clamp up for sale.
“Jerry Vialdi, even now that you’re dead, you continue to draw down curses on my already amply cursed existence. I can’t afford to keep the car you gave me. The next one I buy is going to have a sunroof. Every time I look up I’ll laugh loudly, right in your face.”
She wondered who she could turn to for a job, where she could go, and what the hell remained for her to try now; she bit into an annurca apple and tried not to think about her kids, who didn’t even want her anymore, and the memory of all that she no longer possessed.
She turned the apple-scented knife over and over in her hands and slowly cut into her knee.
“Signora . . . ” Dottor Criscuolo was reading the CV, “ . . . Signora Mastriani, you know, at your age it’s hard to find a position. Your university degree is actually a hindrance. The slightest possibility of successful placement is . . . is . . . In any case, we’ll let you know.”
“But I know your exact placement. Right here.” And Rosina Mastriani held her hand up against her throat.
Then she left the office, moving nicely. That was something she knew how to do. She considered the way in which she’d beaten someone to the termination point, the way she always seemed to do, whether it was with women or men. And she decided:
“Fine, that just means that if I can’t find an easy job I’ll have to get a hard one.”
Mara Scacchi put on her lab coat roughly and awkwardly: a button flew under the eighteenth-century cabinet. She stretched out on the floor to reach the button.
That was how her father found her: as she was trying to stretch her arm out all the way to the wall.
“Mara, what are you doing?”
“I’m filling a prescription. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Well, well, calm and courteous as always. Yesterday, when you were out God knows where, a couple of policemen dropped by to ask questions. They wanted to check our sales of psychopharmaceuticals in the last month. I’d have to guess it had something to do with the murder of your friend.”
“He wasn’t my friend, he was my lover.”
“Thanks so much for setting me straight. Did you kill him?”
Mara Scacchi did her best to keep her implacable legs under control, though they were determined to go elsewhere.
Father and daughter looked at each other for a long time, in a silent duet of ancient resentments.
The warehouse man called the pharmacist to ask him for a pro forma invoice.
Mara blessed her rescuer, went to the bathroom, locking the door behind her, and put her wrists under cool running water for a while. Then she reached into her lab coat pocket and found a surrogate for the peace of mind she’d just lost.
7.
During the break between classes, Nini switched on her phone. Ever since Blanca had hired Sergio to go places with her, the girl had kept her phone turned off during classtime. Before that, no; before that, despite the rule that no one followed anyway, she just kept the ringer muted and continually checked the display.
One time her high school teacher, Prof. Trisurname, officially registered with her employer as Professoressa Miniati Greco Valsassi, had even disqualified her classroom essay:
“Russo, what are you looking at under your desk? Bring me your classwork and your cell phone. Disqualified and confiscated, respectively.”
Prof. Tr
isurname had no idea that every time Nini heard her last name, a ferocious rage surged up deep inside her, a rage that she’d learned to conceal.
Her father, Gianni Russo, was doing time in prison, for her mother’s murder. Blanca had explained to the girl that her father was innocent: he’d been forced to confess. Orders from above. Nini replied that the word “innocent,” applied to her father, just made her laugh. She’d failed to add that from the day her mother’d fallen in love with the son of the man who owned the factory where she worked, Gianni Russo had been killing her anyway, on a steady diet of fists and threats.
Nor did she remind Blanca that her father had kidnapped her and left her at a girlfriend’s apartment, all the better to drive her mother insane. All this, when she was twelve years old.
Carmen, the factory worker who was one of her mother’s close friends, had secretly gone to get the girl. She had secretly conveyed her to the sergeant’s home.
There was no need to tell Blanca the things she already knew. She’d cracked the case herself, together with Martusciello and Liguori, she’d lost her service dog in the process, and she too had come frighteningly close to being killed.
Then finally the foster parenting request had been approved: Nini could live with Blanca by law.
The categories of DNA did not include their story of daughter mothers, non-mother mothers, young old women, old young women, desperate embraces in search of other embraces to replace those that had been lost.
There was plenty more that Prof. Trisurname failed to comprehend.
While her classmates crowded into the high school café, Nini was finally able to read Blanca’s text message:
“I’ve gone back to work on an important case. On the top right shelf in the refrigerator there’s an escarole pie.”
Nini smiled: when Blanca told her where things were, she became very detailed and specific. As if the girl too had problems with her sight.
Sometimes the kind of phrases that emerged were: look out for the third step going up after the elevator, there’s a section of marble tread toward the handrail that’s wobbly. They’ve moved the bus stop ten steps over to improve access to that idiot’s driveway.
For Nini, that precision in the enunciation of difficulties she’d never faced only became another rediscovered embrace.
The smile vanished from Nini’s lips: Tita, the girl who sat next to her in class and had gone with her on their first summer trip, was weeping at the counter, in front of everyone.
Nini made her way through the crowd to Tita with some difficulty, took her by the arm, and led her outside:
“What’s the matter?”
“Someone murdered Vialdi. My mother is in danger.”
8.
Captain Malanò climbed onto his Ducati Multistrada after checking carefully to make sure it was exactly as he had left it when he parked it. Intact.
At forty he still felt like a boy: studio apartment with a galley kitchen on Via Posillipo in the space that was once his father’s ground floor concierge booth; a rapid climb upward through the ranks thanks to remarkable scholarly exploits integrated with, and actually carried out during, police operations; civil service exam passed successfully and on to the next thing; undergraduate degree achieved with the same techniques: studying at night, working by day, and vice versa.
Small daisy chains of discreet favors performed helped him along the road to, first, his degree, and afterward, the captainship of the Fuorigrotta police station.
Now life lay before him: he was multistrada, suitable for both paved and unpaved roads, just like his flame red Ducati; the serial killer case was sure to shorten his wait in the bureaucratic antechamber for the position of deputy police chief.
Here’s what people had to say about him:
“Handsome and amiable, let no one deny it, easy on the eyes and easy to talk to. But don’t you ever try to get between him and whatever stewpot he has his eyes on, because he’ll tear you limb from limb, or have you torn limb from limb by someone he sends to do the job.”
And here’s what Malanò had to say about himself:
“My life begins at age forty.” He liked nothing so much as a trite cliché. “As a boy I studied and I helped my father, then I had to beef up my shoulders, bowed from years of studying, then I went on working and studying, and progressed from that to studying and working. All this after being orphaned of my mother at age six. Only one love in my life, a bastard woman who’s still lodged firmly right here, in my heart.” Malanò was no fan of sophisticated lyrics in music. “So much the better, it just means that all the other bastard women on the prowl will find that vacancy occupied. Now my life, finally, belongs to me.”
He revved the bike and shot off toward the morgue. He meant to have a conversation with Dr. Grimaldi about the autopsy performed on the notorious corpse, which fate—well aware of the sacrifices he had made—had been so kind to lay on his doorstep. Fate, duly informed of the situation, had chosen one particular doorstep, smack in the heart of the soccer stadium where, in the earliest days of his career as a cop, choruses and choruses of soccer fans had hollered into his face chi non salta celerino è, è!—an old anti-cop soccer fight song.
Captain Malanò couldn’t have explained how or why he was happy when he rode his motorcycle. Just, very simply, that he was happy.
The beltway gave him a turbocharged itch for speed, an itch he was all too happy to scratch, with gusto. He started singing Vialdi’s biggest hit: Tu, solo tu, sei tu. Sei il sole al mattino, la luna la sera. Tu, solo tu, sei tu. Il mio cuore sbagliato se ne va e poi ritorna. Perchéééé tu, solo tu, sei tu. Because it’s you, only you, just you.
Dr. Carmine Grimaldi welcomed Malanò like a thorn in the trachea.
There was nothing he liked about the man: not the unseasonal leather jacket, not the oversized motorcycle, not the bandanna, an even brighter red than the motorcycle, not the beefed up body with its bulging bands of muscle, not the swagger, not the hand that kept wandering back to the holstered pistol as if it were a woman’s breast, reassuring simply because it had chosen him. Him and no one else but him.
He also didn’t like the words the man used: they came out of Malanò’s mouth with their party suits rumpled and torn. Those rips revealed threadbare, filthy linings.
Grimaldi’s almost seventy years made him think that the police captain of Fuorigrotta had a long-term goal that was the fruit of irritating ambition and unremarkable intelligence.
“You’re here,” was his greeting. “I can tell you immediately that the results will take a while, we can’t seem to establish the cause of death. From a quick initial glance I’d be inclined toward heart attack, but further investigation is called for. One thing is clear: the singer experienced sleep, followed by death.”
“And that’s it?”
“And that’s it.”
“Why can’t you identify the cause of death?”
“Why do most murders go unsolved?”
“The same old story, Grimaldi. You say the same thing every murder they bring you, you’re getting old.”
The doctor looked down at his hands. He studied, as if they weren’t his own, the spots, the wrinkles, the skin that folded over the clenched knuckles and the fragility that was consuming his fingernails.
“Right. Unless you have any other questions, I’ll be going.”
“Wait! Wait. Is it possible that the corpse was transported from the road to the stadium goalposts by a single person?”
“Anything’s possible. I’ll provide you with a full report on the facts, you all can have your fun with your theories.”
“It’s more than a theory. A dead body propped up on a soccer goalpost with grass stuffed in its mouth necessarily makes one think serial killer. Come on!”
“Ah, so you really like this idea of a serial killer: you’re forgetting where we are, even killer
s need someone to issue a permit of residency. And you’re not the office they turn to. Take good care of yourself, Malanò.”
The captain returned to his red motorcycle and checked it before throwing his leg over the seat. He did it again. He did it every time.
9.
I didn’t have a lot of options. Perhaps I was always pushing them away with my own hands. Who can say? Certainly not someone with my blood, someone who doesn’t even know where the highborn blood has flowed to.
When I decided that my inadequacy in life could be something to brag about, a knife I could seize from the blade’s end, I started to show off my memory and knowledge.
Lalalalà, I remember all the fragrances. The trifling offenses of rotten peaches and two-bit martyrdoms.
Lalalalà, the clothes I’m wearing are inadequate to the gigantic desire for revenge, so I buried them in a drawer.
Lalalalà, O you who still bear love for me, understand that I know it’s only a love of injuries.
Lilililì, there’s the sewer down which I pour all my knowledge.
Lilililì, on that lightless table I stripped books and learning of all their varnish, with the use of a blowtorch and a welder’s mask.
Lilililì, in those hues I trilled like an eerie hoopoe and reeled off names to be remembered by those who, unlike me, will live on.
Lilililì, around the corner of the day before yesterday, I was the magister militum hiding under the bed.
Three, Imperfect Number Page 3