Martusciello quickly threw on his jacket and left the officer, practically running headlong into Chetruli.
“Captain, I was waiting for you. Is it true that for the Vialdi murder you’ve already questioned three likely serial murderesses? We’ve heard rumors that among the suspects there is a good-looking and slightly perverse woman from out of town.” Chetruli pronounced “perverse” with gusto. “Tell me everything. I want to know.”
“Detective Liguori will be delighted to help your scratch your humanitarian itches. Deputy Giuseppe Càrita is here merely to show you the way. He lives for such occasions.”
17.
At the front door of the police station, a chilly north wind reinforced Martusciello’s decision to walk to the auto repair shop/theater.
The sudden chill helped him to put a certain enjoyable distance between himself and the unpleasant summer, the creaking swing of boredom that would accompany him all the way home.
Santina was spending more and more time at her conferences at the History Institute, and she usually came home late. He’d eat dinner, alone, watching a game. What I’d like to know is why she wants to spend all her time with those egghead women, he thought. Forty-year-old babies who live in dorms, four or five to a room, their groceries all split up and marked in the refrigerator, their shares of the rent stretched out, and the barley shake watered down to nothing by the end of the month, the bathroom adorned with different brands of toilet paper. To each her own: separate needs. It’s not their fault, sure, I understand that, it’s the fault of these betrayals of homeland and country, but I’m sick of all this innocence already going into retirement. And perhaps they really have infected Santina with their years of stale adolescence. Now she’s fixated with Benedetto Croce, and she studies. She has this fascination with legends. Santina studies and studies and never thinks of the cross. And I’m sure she’s doing the right thing, let everyone deal with their own disasters. I never thought I’d wind up like this. I never imagined it. I held tight to some sense of pity and a tufa-stone heart. Spongy. I must have forgotten it somewhere, or else it wore itself out after all the times it’s been slammed face-first into the wall. You complain about having too much, you’d probably say. And you’d be right, Santina. You got rid of the ugliness of life, hid it from your eyes, while I practically made love to it. One minor satisfaction would be the opportunity to wreck Malanò’s plans, ruin the fun he’s hoping to have with this carousel of serial murders. Make him slip and fall on his ass, trip over a bitter piece of hard motive, ideally money, because in the end money tends to hang its murders on the hook next to the usual set of scales for weighing gold. Every so often, yes, someone kills out of love, an argument with a neighbor, or even by mistake. But money still takes the top podium and the Olympic gold. Even your little schoolmarm friends would cut each others’ throats for a house by the sea like Vialdi’s. Whatever. Instead of the unspeakable appendage that they took from me at the Ultramarine clinic, they should have removed certain scars. I’ve seen too many things, I have. Even still, I keep reaching out for Santina, but I don’t know what’s become of her either. It’s okay, I’ll be able to deal with it. Let’s go see if we can’t wreck Malanò’s plans.
The captain’s feet were freezing in his thin socks. The brutal north wind turned them into chunks of ice.
The shops were filling up, the chill had caught light shirts and sandals unawares. Pedestrians were seeking shelter.
The captain wandered away from the noise of the little shops to climb the hill to the women’s prison. The building was a fifteenth-century convent that had been turned into a penitentiary. There it stood, still intact, beautiful and immortal, in spite of the frequent seismic shocks and the bones contained within.
Martusciello stopped outside the entrance, lit a cigarette and murmured to himself always save women and children first. He smiled nastily and reflected that the two prisons, one on Nisida and the other in Pozzuoli, managed to remain still in the midst of all this beauty, even though it seemed as if they were about to vanish from one moment to the next.
The sea responded by hurling huge, dangerous waves onto the quay, chasing away everyone on foot.
The auto repair shop/theater reeked of dampness, grease, gasoline, and insecticide. A blend that clutched Martusciello’s empty stomach and squeezed it into a clenched fist of vomit. He looked around, but nobody asked him anything; often relatives acted as spectators for other relatives on the hard road to art.
The school was located in a space that must once have been a storage area. You walked down into the room by a rickety worm-eaten wooden staircase. On the walls were a series of mismatched mirrors, taken from a succession of dressers and credenzas from different eras, all reflecting the groups of aspiring actors. Because of the dank air, the women were wearing old-fashioned leg warmers and headbands and shawls and light skirts over heavy woolen stockings, in a crèche-like arrangement that had been assembled at home and was out of season. The men wore jackets and ties fished out of storage: sleeves too wide, trousers too tight. All of it churning in a hubbub of excitement that struck Martusciello as even more out of place and out of season than the manger scene.
The theatrical maestro showed up, decked out in Borsalino hat and oversized radio. He clapped his hands a couple of times.
“All right, kids!” When he heard the word “kids,” the captain’s stomach was released, the fist unclenched. If anything, he wished he could land that fist square on the maestro’s skinny face. “Those other actors, the ones at the other garage/ theater school, are getting a bigger enrollment than we are. We have to shake off the humiliation. This performance will have to be perfect. I want the theater to collapse from the applause. Tonight, we’re going to do an extra fifteen minutes, it’s my gift to you.”
“What luck,” Martusciello murmured under his breath.
18.
To keep from giving in to his anger and melancholy, the captain walked out into the alley.
He saw Giuseppe Càrita arrive, afflicted with a skintight tracksuit.
“Ah, so you’re not wearing a tuxedo.”
“No, I’m one of the leads. I have to be dressed differently. It has to be obvious.”
“So you decided to dress as a worm.”
Giuseppe Càrita puffed out his chest in pride:
“I’m Time dancing on History.”
“Ah, I see. I’d missed that detail.”
“You said it yourself, sir, lately you don’t understand a blessed thing. Right down to the soles of your feet, you have a bitterness about you that smacks of gall and wormwood. Begging your pardon for the observation.”
“Be careful when you tread those boards. They’re looking mighty creaky.”
Martusciello smiled and lit himself a cigarette. Ever since he’d rescinded the order to smoke no more than three of them he enjoyed the pleasure of tobacco from the moment he stuck his hand into his pocket in search of his lighter. And he repeated the act every time he felt the urge, offending his spongy heart with the appetite that he was about to gratify.
Funicella Corta came in half an hour later. He pretended he hadn’t seen the captain and tried to rush into the auto repair shop. Martusciello stepped in front of him.
“What’s this, Funicella, have you already forgotten you know me?”
“Captain, with due respect, you are not easily forgettable.”
“Let’s go get a cup of coffee. I miss the stories you tell. Love will do that to you.”
“I have theater class.”
“Have it the way you prefer. Then we’ll talk tomorrow at the police station. If you’d rather, I can send an officer with a squad car to pick you up.”
“I suddenly feel this urge for coffee.”
The two men headed off toward a bar. Along the way, neither man spoke, Funicella keeping a safe distance from the captain.
“What are you g
oing to have, Funicella?”
“What are you thinking?—it’s my treat. Captain, what do you want to know?”
“Let’s see if you can guess.”
“I’m going to ask you to do me this favor, let’s not start up tonight with these half-baked daisy chains of questions designed to wear me out, I’m not sure I’m up for it this evening.”
“And you have a point, but that’s just the way village donkeys do. They have the patience of centuries as beasts of burden, nothing to be done about it. But did you seriously ask me what I want to know, Funicella?”
“I give up. You want to know about Vialdi.”
“You may not be much at handling explosives, but to make up for it you know how to read minds. That’s something, anyway.”
“I hear that he was murdered by a killer from out of town. One of the ones that get off on seeing dead bodies, and so when they don’t have one handy they start thinking about it all on their own. On the Internet there’s lots about this kind of stuff.”
“Actor, killer, Internet. Aren’t you becoming sophisticated!”
“Captain, I have to try to keep up with the times, I only have one life to live.”
“Not me, I’m reincarnated on a regular basis, the only thing that remains each time is the feet, which is why they’re so worn out. Funice’, who do you think this killer from out of town could be?”
“How would I know! It could even be one of the women who’ve passed through your hands.”
“Ah, I see that you’re well informed, as always. But do you remember when we came to pick you up, half dead, outside of the shop?” The man waved his fingerless hand in front of the captain’s face. “I set two officers to guard you at the hospital: whoever sent you to burn down that shop was probably interested in making sure you lost your tongue as well as your fingers. I arranged to circulate a rumor that you hadn’t talked and that you weren’t about to. So you were able to do your prison time without poison. I caught your bosses, the ones who were responsible for the arson, but you came out of it clean as a whistle.”
“You were like a father to me.”
“Funice’, I have a daughter and a niece, and they’re enough, way more than enough. I’m going to repeat the question: what can you tell me about Vialdi?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Everything I know?”
“Sure, but add anything you can imagine to the mix. Let yourself go. You know, I never believed that you screwed up that bomb yourself. I always suspected that they gave you a little help in getting your calculations wrong, on account of that scheming heart of yours. You were already evolving, even before the theater and the Internet. In fact, now you’re working for the Sconciglio family, just think of that, you have a new boss.”
“What are you trying to tell me? I don’t get it.”
“Then let me make it a little clearer to you. You snuck into the household of another boss so you could pilfer information about the cash flows in and around the port of Naples. Everyone has their own bridge over the Strait, their own infinite horizon. You were willing to stoop so low as to become a hired arson-hand, just so you could pass yourself off as a willing gopher for the Sconciglios. Funicella, I don’t think you’re a two-bit discard. I think you know things. So I think you want to tell me what you know.”
“It’s not your case. It belongs to Malanò from Fuorigrotta.”
“You see what an amazing amount of things you know?”
“Captain, I deal a little pot for Sconciglio. You’re getting it all wrong.”
“Maybe so. So why don’t you get everything wrong too, and start talking?”
“Captain, I’m working on imagination here, but if you ask me, success went in Jerry Vialdi‘s mouth and dissolved all his natural prudence: women, men, cars, lots of money, a little bit of excellent dope, excursions out of the country, horses, whopping bills, an insult here, an insult there. Maybe he started to think he was a little too independent and he forgot where he came up from. He started out singing at first communions, you know that. He’d specialized. At the time, he earned two million lire a night. Tax free. He was born in the Sanità neighborhood, his mother was Concetta Mangiavento known as Sette Carceri—Seven Prisons—because every one of her seven sons was in a different prison. The fathers had no fixed address or even any established identity. Once Vialdi achieved success, he took mother and brothers and flew them off to South America, more to get them out of his hair than out of any great love of family. He wanted to wash his face and spruce up his image so he started working with that ugly thing, Gatta Mignon, poor woman. She’s the one who helped him make the great leap forward, and she tended to him like a priest tends to his altar. She even taught him how to dress, she put the right words in his mouth. In other words, she gave birth to him all over again, better than even Sette Carceri could have done. And that’s that.”
“Your fantasy is incomplete. Why was he killed? What you’re telling is all stuff I already knew, it’s not enough.”
“I can’t help you there. Let’s go back to square one, maybe it was a bloodthirsty killer,” he said, leaning on the exotic English word.
“The same mistake as always. Everyone makes the same mistake with me. They see me as the village donkey and say to themselves now I’m going to see if he’ll swallow some unlikely story, after all he’s nothing but a stupid donkey! Not the horse, the horse can’t be that stupid, but the donkey, sure: he’s always there, at the edge of the cliff, takes a beating but won’t step aside, doesn’t kick when they pile a load on his back that’s no good to him, so there’s no question: the donkey must be stupid. Funicella, in this land of ours, the bloodthirsty killers, the ones who do their killing strictly to satisfy a gluttonous whim, are in clear danger of being towed out to sea and abandoned to the currents that run south to Africa. A certain independence in terms of managing the easy disposing of troublesome headaches is afforded to Chinese businessmen, but in order to gain that independence they’d had to pay import tariffs on their counterfeit designer labels. The Nigerians, provided they don’t overstep their bounds and they keep to their assigned territory, are permitted to do as much street vending of this and that as they want, if they pay of course a hefty indemnity, while the Albanians pop into and out of the negotiations, but strictly with a few historic families with a stinking reputation and escutcheon. No two ways about it: all of them are obliged to pass under the gallows of the native bosses around here. Sure, there might be an occasional exception, but even though I am a donkey, it still strikes me as very odd that a recording artist, the son of none other than Sette Carceri, as it happens, should just happen to run headlong into the one unsettling exception. I don’t believe in it. Who do you think he is, John Lennon?”
“But listen, Captain, if a restless killer gathers his courage and wants to eliminate someone who neither helps nor hinders, why should certain surnames take it the wrong way?”
Martusciello froze. The time he spent with Blanca had taught him a thing or two about tones of voice. The voice of his confidential informant was unmistakably veined with traces of sincerity.
“Is this fantasy or history?”
“No, Captain, I told you before, this is all pure fantasy. I still have one hand, the only thing the other one is good for is to brush away the flies of stray thoughts in my brain.”
“Sure, I follow you, you only have one life and one hand.” He pulled a crumpled business card out of his pocket. “And also one telephone number, my personal line. Let me know about any fresh fantasies, the minute they arrive. Ah, and if by any chance you happen to run into the head of the Sconciglio family, please tell him that this serial killer nonsense is trying my nerves. Let’s have him abort all the nonsense circulating inside Malanò’s head.”
“Let’s see if that’s all the nonsense there is there.”
On t
he way back, Martusciello told himself that feet and head had both obeyed the imposition of new ideas. So, obliging them to do a little exercise had been beneficial.
He got off at Piazza Garibaldi, and took the long way home, which allowed him to walk past the Albergo dei Poveri, Naples’s old poorhouse.
In the eighteenth century, paupers didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in the underpasses of the subway system; rather, there was a building equipped to house some eight thousand homeless people.
The monumental white façade made the palm trees below look like slender blades of grass, and the present-day even thinner than the palm trees.
He limped off, poetic justice inflicting a sharp pain to his heel.
Santina welcomed him home with a relaxed smile, Benedetto Croce must have done her good:
“Where have you been till this time of night?”
“At the theater.”
19.
What did you do?”
Sergio looked at Blanca, sitting next to him in the car.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He thumbed through the MP3 player hooked up to the car radio and stopped on Killers, by Iron Maiden.
“Put in your earbuds, Sergio. I can’t take it.”
“Oooh, aren’t you in a sociable mood. Nini told me to tell you that you’re going to have a guest: one of her girlfriends, Tita, will be staying with you. Nini, Tita: never a girl with a name like Assunta or Patrizia.”
“Tita is the diminutive of Assunta.”
The kid stuck a single earbud in his ear. After a short while the other earbud, dangling on his chest, droned: A voice inside me compelling to satisfy me. Blanca traced the sound, grabbed the earbud, and stuck it into his other ear:
“I told you I can’t take it.”
Three, Imperfect Number Page 6