Three, Imperfect Number

by Patrizia Rinaldi

  And yet for a while your death had placated me, you know that? Even a sense of guilt came around asking after me. Not the guilt you’re thinking of, no. The remorse that I hadn’t kept you alive, but deprived of consciousness. I could have done it, too: I have an impressive mastery of pharmaceuticals.

  I’d be capable of dosing an absence of hydrocortisone.

  I’d be capable of artificially increasing the prolactin supply to the bloodstream.

  I could hold tyrannical dominion over target cells.

  I’d be capable of overwhelming even the autocrine hormones that deactivate the very same nucleus that generated them.

  I would be skillful at vivisecting your genitalia, slowing to a feeble trickle the gushing flow of testosterone that you once sprayed like a foul ointment over the requests of women, men, and of course your own demands. Continuous exhausting demands.

  And in the end I would have been able to monitor the final and fatal stab wound into the hypothalamus, making your daughter tropines vanish into a burst of applause.

  I needed much science, I needed much love to hate you to this point.

  23.

  Rosina Mastriani headed down the street that she knew so well.

  She’d lost weight, the cuts that she had inflicted were also intended to eliminate hunger and exhaustion. She looked around her: the sidewalks, the buildings, the vague mass of people, the buzzing, the colors, the rain, the sweet and salty odor, the cars had all lost their substance. As had she.

  She turned toward the uphill lane where the girl lived, the narrow street was lined with porticoes and balconies, balustrades, shop signs, marble jewels, votive shrines that jutted out among the graffiti and the aging plaster. She counted the steps of the baroque church, someone had hung an umbrella from the bronze skull on the outdoor handrail.

  These were her alleys and lanes, mockeries of life and death.

  She caught herself repeating a childhood ritual: when she got to a certain point along the road she turned around. If she saw a shaft of sunlight toward the mouth of the road downhill, on the main thoroughfare, it meant everything would work out for the best. It was an innocuous superstition, a prediction. A little white lie of hope.

  The people in the distance formed part of a chaotic army, which kept marching, marching toward her. A bit of sun fell and tangled the shapes in a bright blinding fog.

  Rosina Mastriani drew strength from her private oracle and mastered a brisk, decisive stride.

  She walked up steps, down alleys, and wended her way through and around closely parked cars. Her perception of the thinness of the buildings, windows, and loggias did not diminish.

  It started raining again.

  In the fall, sun and water joined hands and danced close; they whirled in alternation on the cornices of the buildings, glared indignantly at the undisciplined parabolas, the seventeenth-century ornaments offended by those borrowed from insolent displays of vanity, the window bars and walls. Sun and water paid no attention to where their consequences would be felt. They hung in suspension, tossing detritus down on the lives below them.

  The woman took shelter from another downpour in a doorway: the concierge recognized her and seized her cheek between thumb and forefinger.

  “It’s you. What a long time it’s been!”

  Rosina replied no with a shake of her head: it wasn’t her, not then, not now. She brushed aside the gesture that brought the years of another life back to her.

  She ran away through the rain and went in search of her husband.

  She reached the gambling den, as she called it. She saw the car. Now all she needed to do was wait. He wouldn’t be coming out before three in the morning. At home with the children, she could be sure she’d find the witch of a thousand insults: Aunt Immacolata, her husband’s wicked old relation.

  She saw his car, picked up a rock, clutched it in her fist. It was music to her ears, the sound it made against the side of the car as she nonchalantly walked past.

  She felt cold. She thought of going into one of those big stores, with air-conditioning, songs, dressing rooms where a person could sit, and escalators, but the streets with that kind of department store were so far away. She remembered of the time she took her infant son to the emergency room at the nearby Annunziata Hospital.

  She reached the hospital and headed toward the seating in the waiting room.

  The place was ideal, she too promised herself a cure and healing that might never actually come true.

  It was mostly mothers with young children waiting for their turn to be seen. Rosina felt in a body-memory the sensation of her own children, as they moved in her womb, a womb that was so unready to house new life. She’d believed that in part she’d tamed her own sense of guilt for having abandoned them.

  Her legs started shaking, she couldn’t go on sitting there.

  She walked out into the courtyard. A light that seemed to come from a flame poured out of a side door. She walked in and stood there breathless.

  What had appeared from the outside to be just another ordinary cellar space was actually an enchanting jewel box: the space, a circular room with eight pairs of columns, was another belly. An ancient womb without sins or convulsions. Perhaps it had witnessed enough things to crucify them forever in the high vaulted ceiling of a grey sky, where the stars were amalgamated into curved lines, glued onto the galaxy of white plaster of centuries past.

  She stood there, at the center of the circle, and tried out her voice. It came back to her as a remote, distorted sound, the sound of illness and wrongs archived over time.

  The watchman told her that he’d have to be locking up. Rosina, stunned by the impression the place had made on her, told him that she didn’t know where else she could wait. She didn’t specify for what or whom. The man invited her to a ground-floor apartment in the Sanità quarter that he also used as an office. She went with him, and drank the hot milk and bread he blithely offered her.

  She calmed down and listened to the man’s stories: he knew everything about the Ruota degli Esposti, the foundling wheel or baby hatch where mothers abandoned unwanted children.

  For the first time in months the thought took shape in her mind that she still might be able to offer something to her children, be it only the error of her ways, the sum of her mistakes.

  When she got back to the gambling den her husband was just coming out. He had his arms around a girl.

  She looked him in the eye.

  “If you go on pitting my children against me, I’ll report you to the police.”

  “Oh really? I’m so scared,” and he climbed into the car with the girl next to him. Rosina put her hands on the hood of the car and didn’t move.

  The man laughed, put the car into first gear, and slowly began to move forward. Then he leaned out the window.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  24.

  After her inspection of the stadium, Blanca didn’t feel like calling Sergio. And above all she had no wish to speak, she wanted to focus on organizing her thoughts about the morning’s events without having to contend with music and words.

  She asked the police officer who had taken her to the San Paolo Stadium to take her to the bus stop now.

  The man hadn’t given in for even an instant to the compassionate manners that Blanca so detested; he had also provided her with essential information that hadn’t yet emerged from the Fuorigrotta police station. She thanked him.

  “No, I thank you, Sergeant. I’m almost tempted to transfer over to where you work; but no, bosses come and go and our jobs stay right there.”

  Blanca boarded the bus, counted the stops, and got out in front of the Temple of Serapis. She followed the iron railing around the hollow of the Macellum.

  She didn’t want to hurry, her feet obeyed her, she felt safe.

  She managed to rise from the depths with
an impulse to climb. Her handhold gave her the necessary strength, she couldn’t have done without it.

  She thought of her sister, who died in the same fire that ruined her eyes.

  “Look at me, you see me? I’m capable of being free again.”

  She looked over and down. From the bottom of the excavations the stagnant water wafted up a scent of a moss-lined well. She felt a giddy hint of vertigo, and the need to lift her head to breathe the salt air from the nearby sea.

  Once again the flash of light. Powerful sunlight shattered the shadows and brought forth statues, columns, and shops.

  An affectionate warmth rose from her stomach to her face; she felt her cheeks heating up and the course of her thoughts proceeding, with great precision.

  She got to the police station and told Carità to ask Martusciello and Liguori to join her in her office. She had news.

  The two men came in together just a short while later. Blanca turned a cool face to their wisecracks about the request for a house call.

  She found determination and flat logic, laying to rest the issues attendant upon the presence of Liguori. The climb she’d just completed had a great deal to do with him as well. She began to recount in great detail the first part of the morning spent in the Fuorigrotta police station. Martusciello started pacing up and down in front of Blanca’s desk.

  “So Malanò told you that the interview with Julia Marin is less important than the other nonsense he has to attend to. We should have known he was going to clutch tight to that honorary second degree for his theory about the serial killer! What the hell does he care if we had a conversation with the victim just a few hours before someone murdered her?”

  “What an idiot,” Liguori piped in, comfortably seated in his chair. “So he didn’t even find out that, on account of it being lunchtime, we decided to question Julia Marin together with Mara Scacchi.”

  “Liguori, this isn’t the right time. Go be a knight in shining armor without a horse somewhere else.”

  Blanca went on as if neither of the two men had spoken.

  “Afterward, I had an officer accompany me to the stadium. I wasn’t looking for anything, but . . . ”

  Liguori spoke in a detestable tone of voice over his half smile.

  “Sure though, the impressions, the voices, the traces of lingering thoughts, and all that sort of thing.”

  Blanca went on ignoring him.

  “It was a good thing I went to the stadium. We ran into a great many members of the security staff, and okay, this may be a normal thing after a murder, but I did find it odd that normal operations would call for only one guard on duty. I expressed my doubts to the police officer, and he told me that the guy who found Vialdi’s body was not only the only security guard present that night, but is also apparently in close contact with the families involved in the soccer betting rings.”

  Martusciello could hardly contain himself:

  “I’m going to talk to him.”

  Liguori, too, got to his feet:

  “On the other hand, Captain, Blanca and I are going to Verona.”

  “To do what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, impressions, voices, traces of lingering thoughts, and all that sort of thing.”

  “Do whatever you like. I have no time to argue with you. You can only stay away three days, though, we’ve got work to do here.”

  Blanca said nothing, her newfound strength had just taken one more shove toward the sea floor.

  25.

  Martusciello went to the taxi stand down by the harbor. He was uneasy, he didn’t want to waste any time. Julia Marin’s murder was on the short list of his mistakes.

  The first cabbie in the line waved for him to get in, but the captain was searching for a driver he knew personally: Viciè Morbide, or according to his license—Vincenzo Coppola.

  Viciè Morbide had won his nickname on the field, or actually, on the sea, because he’d been able to buy his own taxi thanks to years and years of smuggling soft pack cigarettes—morbide, as they were known in Italian—covering the sales territory from Pallonetto to Santa Lucia.

  “Captain, what an honor. Are all your regular squad cars in for repairs?”

  “They’re fine, but out of gas. Take me to the stadium. Then wait for me outside.”

  “They threw quite a party for Vialdi!”

  “What’s the word on the street, Viciè?”

  “I can’t be of any help to you, I’m sorry. In fact, I’m happy to say it: my network isn’t the network, and you know that.” Viciè Morbide parked his white Fiat Punto outside the players’ entrance.

  A security guard stopped Martusciello. The captain sat down on a low wall, told the guard he had all day, and finally wore him out by relentlessly demanding information about the night watchman who had been the first to stumble on Vialdi’s corpse.

  “Let’s just say that Gioacchino Rizzo has taken up residence inside the plant.”

  “Inside the ex-Italsider steel mill?”

  “He used to have an apartment in Bagnoli, but then his wife tossed him out because he’s always drunk. He got in touch with the Chinese who were disassembling the steel mill piece by piece, they left him a sort of shed that was part of the old infirmary. Which they didn’t want anyway, they’re just looking for the steel and iron that they can sell to us. Asbestos is no good to them. That’s where Gioacchino is. Do me a favor and don’t tell him that you found out from me, I wouldn’t have said a word except that you were so relentless. Wait, are you really a mail carrier?”

  “Look at my shoes: instead of a size they have zip codes.”

  “If you manage to find Gioacchino, tell him that if he doesn’t go to work they’re going to fire him. He can say that he’s still in shock all he wants, but sooner or later . . . ”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  The captain went back to the taxi and asked Viciè Morbide to take him to the plant, taking the road that led through Posillipo. When they reached the crest of Coroglio Hill, he told him to pull over: he got out and surveyed the area from above. He wanted to identify the most isolated entrance.

  An expanse of land left the surviving bastions of what had once been a mighty steel mill isolated.

  Once again, Martusciello marveled at the surviving, repurposed beauty: Naples was still a mermaid at a ripe old age, beautiful, teeth clenched down on the silver hook, while the pirates sawed away at the still living tail, glistening with scales and blood.

  The island of the blast furnace incarnated a crucifixion of the sea, the land, and a piece of the history of a quarter that had once vaunted its dignity.

  He selected the most discreet entry point.

  “If you don’t see me come back, call the Pozzuoli police station and alert Liguori or Occhiuzzi. Write down this number.”

  “Captain, if I don’t see you come back . . . easy to say, but you take a long time to do things. Do you still keep your gun unloaded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, that sets my mind at rest.”

  As soon as Martusciello ventured into the abandoned area, his point of view changed; a wall worn away by iron dust isolated the zone at a certain distance from sea and buildings.

  The spirals of barren dirt and scrub led the captain into a landscape befitting a ghost town, thoroughly picked over in the aftermath of the ransacking for precious metals.

  Still, his feet had become obedient once again, and he had a renewed, pioneering patience. At least for the moment.

  From a distance he recognized the infirmary grounds, long ago he’d met a young Carmine Grimaldi there for work at the beginning of his career—at the time he was a substitute physician.

  The sheet metal door of the surviving section of industrial shed wasn’t heavy, and the gentle breeze banged it against its housings.

  He went in, but found that he wa
s disturbing the rats that were grazing on the corpse of Gioacchino Rizzo.

  He walked out to keep from vomiting. Whoever said that the eyes get used to certain sights? He picked up a fallen branch and pounded on the sheet metal from outside. The rats scattered, snouts and paws stained with a faded red.

  The captain tried to work up the courage to go back into the shed. He stalled, taking a great many more minutes than he was able to count. In the meanwhile he kept pounding the branch against the sheet metal, against death, and against the line of work that had been stitched to his back from birth like a shirt of misfortune.

  The echoing sounds of the old steel mill brought back blast furnace flames which seized at his throat.

  He managed to go back in after thoroughly cursing the misery and pain of that sense of duty of his that would never allow him to simply turn his eyes away.

  The rats’ teeth were unable to conceal the cause of death, a bullet hole was still visible on one of his temples, gray matter had spattered the corrugated sheet metal walls.

  The pounded dirt floor was strewn with the glass from broken bottles. Martusciello hoped that Rizzo had had a chance to drain them all dry before dying.

  “Fixing, always fixing. I keep at it. I’m still here letting my head invoke another hodgepodge of corrections in the midst of all this filth.” He walked back out into the open air.

  He fell to the ground there where he stood. A shrill whistle reached his ears and the grey of the steel evaporated into his eyes. His spongy limestone heart gathered a new burst of urgency to leave and his heartbeat set out to run in obedience to that impulse.

  The sound of a siren did nothing to distract his attention from his surrender.

  Liguori and Blanca got out of the car. Viciè Morbide had decided that he’d waited long enough even considering Martusciello’s sense of time.