The detective inspected the shed, called the forensics team, and alerted Captain Malanò.
Blanca reached out for Martusciello’s hands and helped him to his feet. She’d found him sitting on the ground, his back resting against sheet metal.
“Are you all right?”
“I need to go home. I want to wash up.”
26.
The next day a heavy silence descended over the Pozzuoli police station. But the excitement only increased in the Fuorigrotta police station.
Malanò organized a press conference and drew up a semi-official list of the journalists who were welcome, making it clear that he’d already cleared that list with the chief of police.
With the confidence of one who had guessed the past, present, and future he placed a telephone call to Captain Adami of Verona, inviting him to join forces with him in a productive working alliance.
“Buon giorno, colleague, this is Rosario Malanò from the Fuorigrotta police station, Naples. I’ve already had an opportunity to converse with one of your detectives, Francesco Coppola, a fellow southerner, but I’d prefer to speak directly with you.”
“Francesco reported to me, sorry, but as you can imagine, I’m swamped on account of recent events with which you’re no doubt familiar.”
“Yes, I can imagine. You must work hard up there.”
“Naw, not really. It’s a quiet province we live in.”
“No, perhaps you don’t follow me, Adami, I meant you work hard in general.” Adami continued not to follow him. “Anyway, as soon as this storm, both media storm and otherwise, passes—because the journalists are jumping around like crazy here—I’ll come see you for a conversation about this very interesting case.”
“If you can’t come up, I’ll be glad to send you any and all useful documents. We are expecting the autopsy results.”
“Yes, we’re waiting for the results on Vialdi’s death too. But you know how things are down here: I’ll bet that your results come in before ours do.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Thanks, Adami, courteous as always. Talk to you again soon.”
“Talk to you soon.”
As soon as he hung up the phone, Malanò felt the need to inform someone sitting in his office of the differences in levels of professional skills to be found in the north and south of Italy.
Detective Liguori pestered chorus girls, criminals, recording technicians, costume makers, impresarios, dancers, dealers, waiters, and a considerable number of other people who had crossed paths with Vialdi. After each conversation, which the detective always managed to pass off as a chance encounter, he jotted down in his smartphone every word spoken, every impression received. In the end he noted: “No recording of last concert.”
He was looking for something new but he continued not to find it, everyone confirmed more or less mechanically a picture of a personality and habits that Vialdi hadn’t bothered to conceal. He saw an order of circumstances and impressions far too emphatic for his tastes. The confirmation of a serial killer at work in the midst of a complicated life, according to script, struck him as a signature in block letters, clearly legible and therefore completely odious.
Blanca waited for Nini in the kitchen, standing and eating her breakfast. She told her that she’d overheard them talking about Tita’s fears and that unfortunately they couldn’t be ignored, especially after the murder of one of Vialdi’s lovers and the killing of the night watchman who had found the man’s body in the stadium. She wanted to talk to the girl’s mother.
“If Tita finds out about my meeting with her mother, tell her that I heard the two of you talking, and you’re free to blame me for being nosy. Don’t alarm her past a certain point, but explain to her that I had no choice but to question her mother. Inform her that this is a legally required procedure.”
“She’ll hate me.”
“Probably so. I’ll have to go to Verona, I’ll ask Sergio to come keep you company.”
“I don’t need a babysitter. I’m grown up now, I’m fifteen years old.”
Blanca lowered her voice in the forceful tone that Nini knew all too well.
“I didn’t ask your opinion and I know how old you are.”
Nini made one last stab by adopting a conciliatory tone of voice. But no was still no.
After a night spent pacing back and forth on his balcony, Martusciello shaved with the bathroom door open, listening with one ear to the morning television news. The irritating words had broken out of their cages.
One special explored in depth the history of serial killers in Italy:
The case of the Neapolitan serial murderer . . .
No doubt, they’re showing a montage with a photo of him and his certificate of residence.
. . . offers one striking geographic fact: up till now the phenomenon of serial killers has been almost entirely unknown in southern Italy; the comparable cases, of which half have been brilliantly solved, occurred in northern localities.
“Northern localities. What is this guy, a real esate agent?”
Advanced industrialization and prosperity, according to the psychiatrist Dr. Di Buni, tend to encourage aspirations to necromania in developed societies.
“What developed societies? Developed into open sewers, is what they are. You’ve all lost. You understand that, don’t you? Progress has been nothing but a con job, an illusion of wealth. Assholes. Them and us both. And so we’re becoming emancipated in the south, we even have our own Bocconi business schools. Degrees in murder. As if our own native industries weren’t enough.”
Now let’s move on to an examination of the suggestive position, clearly sexual in nature and intent, in which the dead body of one of Jerry Vialdi’s lovers was found; Vialdi, a popular neomelodic recording artist, was also found dead . . .
“Santina, would you shut that damned thing off! Hell’s bells and dead slut bodies! There they are, rats like yesterday’s, scurrying around unearthing rotten scabs.”
Santina turned down the sound and stuck her head in the bathroom door.
“They’re just chasing after ratings. That’s the way it works. Just thank your lucky stars they didn’t broadcast the pictures, the way they did with the latest murdered dictator.”
“Hmmph, this detached attitude of yours, scholar that you are, with your finger marking your place in the book, is enough to shatter my nerves.”
“And for me your shattered nerves just bring me back into an acceptable state of normality. Ever since the operation you haven’t . . . ”
“I don’t want to talk about it and you know it. I’m leaving.”
Santina waved farewell to her husband with relief and with equal relief greeted solitude and the new day.
27.
Tita lived at the bottom of the long road running toward Coroglio. Blanca asked Sergio to describe the view from the panoramic road to her.
The smell of the sea and the impending business trip with Liguori demanded a reliable external space, scanned by fully functional eyes. Blanca wanted to escape her own senses, far too partisan at that crucial moment.
For years her work in Liège, Belgium, had made her competent, unfettered, and quite undomesticated. She earned her daily bread by concealing her difficulties. She’d never been interested in complaints, explanations, warnings. She preferred to turn her back and head elsewhere.
Since Nini had come to live with her, she’d had to do without that particular resource. In Pozzuoli, she did more than just work with wiretaps and listening devices, and her daily interactions with Martusciello and her other coworkers kept her from fleeing across the moats of isolation.
The return to Naples had blown solitude sky high: it had crumbled into rubble and the detritus had left accessible passageways.
“Maybe that’s why love has begun to infiltrate,” Blanca mused, then turn
ed to Sergio: “What can you see from here? Tell me.”
“And what can I tell you? The blue sea, the sun, boats, terraces, pine trees, villas with views of Capri, and lots of traffic.” Blanca wondered if she too would get so used to the sight of the sea, the precision of the hues, the laziness of being able to squander pictures, taking only the part you wanted and discarding the rest with a haphazard blink of the eye. She didn’t know how to answer.
She was afraid that the capricious flash would pay her another visit, but this time the epiphany of light left her in peace.
“I’m Sergeant Blanca Occhiuzzi.”
“Please, come right in, I’m Maria Datri, I’m Tita’s mother.” A bright shadow projected from the far side of the room, there must be a glass wall or a wide French door.
From the kitchen came the clatter of pots and pans, the smell of onions and oil.
“My apologies for the timing.”
“I prefer it this way; Tita isn’t home from school yet.”
Blanca explained that she had to meet her: she considered Julia Marin’s murder a grave oversight on the part of the investigating detectives, and therefore on her own part as well.
She expected reluctance, but instead Tita’s mother unleashed a flow of words.
“I knew Julia Marin. When she came to Naples I’d spy on them. They’d go off to stay in a hotel in Mergellina, and I’d sit in my car out front until Jerry came out and went home. He knew I was there, and once he even waved to me from a distance. He was laughing. His shirt was all rumpled and untucked and his eyes looked younger. It was clear that he was happy when he was with her. Julia Marin wasn’t like me, she never objected to anything. I followed her right before her death. She was beautiful. I watched her board the train, her and her goddamned calmness. I envy her. Even though she’s dead I envy her. The lunatic who murdered them united them. You may be thinking I’m a mother with a daughter, that the things I’m saying are scandalous and so on and so forth. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Vialdi was a person who . . . ”
“Definitions are no use to me, please don’t try. What Vialdi had was the ability to go to people in their nothingness and take them somewhere far away. That was his skill. And maybe that was because he knew it so well, nothingness. Would you say no if someone offered you a chance to wake up for just a few hours after years and years of wandering in a daze?”
Blanca thought of Liguori and Nini: maybe she should try to find some excuse to avoid the trip to Verona.
“Tell me about the singer’s love of gambling.”
“He racked up debt, he enjoyed losing everything he had. I don’t know if it was because he loved starting over, or if he was trying to intimidate even himself. He turned to the same dealer to make bets and for cocaine.”
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know the name of the lawyer, which is what he always called him, but if I did I’d tell you. All I know is that when I was in Pozzuoli he’d send me away whenever he needed to see him. The lawyer always came to his place. Jerry liked, I don’t know exactly how to put this, but Jerry liked being on edge.”
“Did the lawyer know about you?”
“About me, you’re asking?” Blanca nodded. “Of course he knew, everyone knew about me and Jerry.” Maria Datri picked a handful of ornamental stones from a bowl and started handling them uneasily.
“Even your husband?”
“Yes. It was the only good thing that I ever managed to do for Tita. I stayed and I let my husband play the part of the good guy, but I hope you’ll understand if I prefer not to talk about all that.”
Blanca shifted her shadowed gaze away from the direction of the woman’s voice. Before going away she wanted to fix in her mind the variation of tones in the woman’s words.
To Maria Datri it seemed as if the police sergeant were staring at a painting on the facing wall.
“It’s a Medusa head by a nineteenth-century imitator. This Medusa’s gaze is false, it wouldn’t turn anyone who looked at it into stone.”
“I was never in any danger.”
After Blanca left, Maria Datri’s husband joined her in the living room:
“My compliments for the thorough confession. Did she absolve you? Lunch is ready.”
“Wait for Tita and eat with her. I’m not hungry.”
28.
Blanca called Martusciello and told him about the meeting. The captain focused with special attention on what Maria Datri had confided to her about the lawyer.
“I don’t have anything specific. I can’t help you there,” Blanca said.
“Okay, for starters I’ll ask Marialuigia Moreno, maybe she knows something.”
After giving a faithful account, the sergeant added the impressions she’d taken from the questioning session. She didn’t bother about logic, and the captain was glad to indulge her, in fact he welcomed her lack of precision.
By the time Martusciello realized that an insignificant drizzle had accompanied him on his walk, he was already drenched.
When he looked up, he saw that the plants on Vialdi’s terrace had a general appearance of disorderly neglect. He wasn’t sorry to see it.
The horizon line of the sea was close in and grey. An expanse of sheet metal.
He was overcome by a fit of agitation; it had taken the place of indolence ever since he’d found the night watchman’s body.
At night, his heart kept him awake. It demanded attention with the perpetual motion of obsession, pounding the kettledrum of heartbeats.
The summertime line for the swing had became a race through gray fog.
The captain rang Marialuigia Moreno’s buzzer, and in a very short time, she was downstairs in the street.
“Let’s drive. Sorry if I didn’t invite you to come up.”
“I won’t take up much of your time. Did you know that someone murdered Julia Marin?”
Marialuigia Moreno started the engine and pulled out, heading toward Pozzuoli. The rain started falling harder, Martusciello’s wet clothes contributed to the misty patina spreading on the interior of the glass.
“I didn’t find out until last night.”
“Did you know her?”
“Not very well, just like I didn’t know any of the others very well. I’m not taking anyone’s side here, but it seems understandable to me that a successful man, with plenty of interaction with the public, should be a frequent and inclusive dater. Vialdi made no promises of emotional stability and that was not something he was looking for. I’m positive about that. I think it’s about time we stopped investigating the sexual habits of consenting adults of any kind.”
“You can’t breathe in here.” Martusciello rolled down his window. “We need to investigate and certainly not out of any delight we might take in chastising the lustful, but because there’s a murderer at work, and one who takes a certain delight in the theatrical. As far as that goes, I don’t have a lot of experience: I still love, after all these years, the same woman. Only, I guess, not as well as I once did, perhaps with longer silences and with a temperament that seems determined to get worse with the passage of time. It’s something that happens.”
Marialuigia Moreno smiled at the unexpected confidence he’d just made. It was better suited to a more simple, sentimental place. She’d have liked a routine, even a boring one; she’d have preferred it to the words, the concerts, and the adrenaline that was hardly hers anyway.
Martusciello changed his tone of voice, feeling awkward about the confidence he’d made, unexpected even to him.
“Who is the drug dealer Jerry Vialdi referred to as ‘the lawyer’?”
Awkwardness made him set his foot wrong. Generally the captain came to the point after a long time spent beating around the bush.
In fact, Marialuigia Moreno stiffened.
“And who told you
that Jerry had a dealer?”
“He had one all right. You yourself confirmed that the Singing Maestro made use of controlled substances . . . ”
“He never had to go buy them, Captain, he enjoyed home delivery, just like with the women he dated. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” Martusciello repeated, remembering that the first time they met Marialuigia Moreno had also shut herself up behind a That’s all. “You’re true to your words.”
“Yes, to my words.”
29.
Martusciello headed for the subway station. A man was buying an umbrella from a street vendor:
“Don’t you have one that’s black?”
“Dottore, it’s raining here and the fact itself is dark enough, why don’t you take this one with a bright pattern?”
“Because it’s horrible. That’s exactly why we’ve lost everything we’ve lost: instead of concealing the ugliest things we put them on display. The years we still haven’t emerged from teach us all the wrong things, and intentionally so, for ideological reasons. Even misdeeds used to dress themselves up better than they do now.”
“Do you want the umbrella or don’t you?”
“I’d rather get drenched.”
Martusciello stepped closer:
“Liguori, must you even make life harder for poor street vendors?”
“Captain, what a pleasure, if I’d only known you were here I’d have redirected my energy to making life harder for you.”
“You could pretend you never saw me. Ciao. I was just leaving.”
“Me too. I dropped by the office, and now I’m going to pay a call on your good friend Malanò, and then back to the RAI. It seems odd to me that there’s not a trace of Vialdi’s last concert.”
“Clearly, they’re just trying to conceal the ugliest things instead of putting them on display. Liguori, don’t indulge his mania for serial killers.”
Three, Imperfect Number Page 9