Three, Imperfect Number

by Patrizia Rinaldi

  “I practically never indulge anyone, but you have to admit that the second murder confirmed Malanò’s mania. I know, it’s irritating for you.” The captain looked off in another direction. “It irritates you, right? In any case, once Blanca and I get to Verona we’ll be able to provide you with useful information about the Marin murder too.”

  Martusciello hunted through his pockets for his lighter. He tumbled it through his fingers before striking a flame.

  “It won’t do a bit of good to go to Verona, but I have more important things to discuss with you: has it occurred to you just how little the death of Gioacchino Rizzo, the stadium custodian, smacks of a serial killer? A nice clean kill, leaving aside the disgusting aspects of rats and general despair. Not a clue: forensics reports that a professional killer covered both shoes and hands. A precise, rapid piece of work, 9 mm. The kingpins around here seem to prefer foreign weapons, therefore the signature is even more credible. They added in bloody handwriting: we didn’t do this.”

  “Captain, you’re drawing patterns that are harder on the eyes than even that ugly umbrella.”

  The two men descended to opposite platforms. The subway train for Fuorigrotta came by a short while later. Liguori waved at Martusciello through the window, pretending to tip the hat he wasn’t wearing.

  The captain, in his turn, pretended that from where he was standing it was impossible to see into the subway car.

  He knew perfectly well that Julia Marin’s murder confirmed Malanò’s theory, but hearing it from Liguori only increased the urgency to find the drug-dealing lawyer and other, less ready-made clues. He left the station, bought the umbrella at which Liguori had turned up his nose, and went in search of Funicella Corta.

  He climbed Via Solfatara and at a crossroads headed off down the hardscrabble slope that the rain had turned into mud.

  The fumaroles high above amused themselves by staging a dress rehearsal that spattered the territory below with water instead of lava. The rain smelled of sulphur and exhaust fumes.

  A recently installed heavy iron door blocked entry to the farmhouse where the informant’s family lived.

  A woman came to the door and informed the captain that her brother had left. She didn’t know where he’d gone.

  “I’m supposed to tell you that when he comes home he’s going to come see you and that the shambles inside the stadium was not the only one.”

  30.

  Blanca was packing to leave for Verona. Generally it was something she did well ahead of time. Generally, while she was packing her clothes, recognizing the fabrics by touch, the desire to stay home surged within her.

  What became indispensable was the return home at the end of each day, eating without any regard for restraint, classical music against the racket of the day, the smell of her little patch of quiet, the disorderly sleep that was suddenly broken to find her free, and alone.

  She mused that this time she wouldn’t be able to give up her relative degree of autonomy. More than the other times. Three days with Liguori would mean little relief and the constant tension of making up for shortcomings.

  Relative degree of autonomy, good one. Yes, yes, that was nice: a manifesto of shortcomings. This time I can’t do it, more than at other times in the past. I’m tempted not to go at all, Blanca concluded, as she slipped into the suitcase her light dressing gown, the one that made her skin feel so smooth.

  She heard the front door open and walked toward the sound. Nini asked forgiveness in a low voice as she greeted her with a kiss. She was with Tita, who started in with a harsh indictment.

  “I just dropped by to thank you for the state of war now in place where I have to live. Not that there wasn’t warfare before, but now it’s even better! The disgusting mist of resentment and words that are broken off whenever I walk into a room where those two geniuses have just finished ripping each other to shreds. My father’s got it stuck in his mind that my Mamma’s latest act of idiocy has now exposed us to physical danger, he says that the policewoman said it loud and clear, he says that you warned her. What the hell did you say to her? What could the two of you even know about it? You sit here chatting away in your tree house while dogs pee at the foot of the tree.” Tita turned to go, reaching for the door handle.

  Blanca reached out and held her hand, swallowed the agitation of departure and the uncertain promise that the light dressing gown carried with it.

  “Calm down. Nini has nothing to do with any of this.” She dropped her tone of voice to a lower register, without making it any more understanding. “I was listening to you. I was hidden. I had no choice but to warn your mother she might be in danger. If you want to go ahead and have it in for the rest of the world, be my guest, but don’t kid yourself that it’s going to make you feel any better. Just do what you want. The two of us know all about that and then some, so if you’re looking for backs to whip in your righteous anger, do us a favor and go find them somewhere else.”

  Tita squinted.

  “I don’t want to live there anymore.”

  Blanca invited the girl to come stay with them for a while. She had to leave on a business trip, but Tita and Nini could stay there with Sergio. She offered to call her parents to ask permission.

  “There’s no need. The only good thing about the hellhole I live in is that they let me do whatever I want.”

  “Well, that’s nice. Go home, get whatever you need. We’ll wait for you here. Ah, the rules here are that you do your studying, you respect the schedules, and the residents of the apartment are presumed innocent until proven guilty. You can go now.”

  Blanca and Nini remained alone. The woman asked the girl to help her pack her bag.

  The windows and walls in Blanca’s bedroom were specially built, designed to be as soundproof as possible. Sounds penetrated anyway, but at least at an acceptable volume. When it was relatively quiet outside, as it was now, the woman could better distinguish the rustling and movements of those who were with her. She stretched out on the bed and concentrated on Nini as the girl moved from place to place, choosing her clothing, reminding her of the colors, and then folded and packed them into her suitcase.

  “Thank you, I didn’t want Tita to come talk to you, but I didn’t really know how to get around it. That’s the way she is, she gets angry, but then she gets over it.”

  “Even understanding needs to have its boundaries, Nini. If there are problems, let me know and I’ll come straight home.” Blanca laughed. “Maybe you should tell me anyway, so I can rush home from this demanding business trip.” Nini pulled the silk nightgown out of the suitcase so she could fold it more neatly.

  “Don’t you like taking trips?”

  “I like it and I don’t like it, Nini, the way I feel about almost everything.”

  “So what do you like and just like, period?”

  “Not much in the world: you, Mozart, the smell of bread, certain intelligent minds, parts of the work I do, parts of certain emotions. Come here.” The girl dropped the dressing gown and walked over to the woman.

  Blanca ran her fingers over Nini’s face: she ran them over her hairline, the shape of her forehead, the gentle arch of her closed eyes, the gentle slope of her nose, the form of her smile, the slight asymmetry of her ears.

  She told herself that she would be able to go away and return home, not everyone was given such a beautiful anchor.

  31.

  Rosina Mastriani checked the want ads every morning. Obsessive hunting was the hundredth cut.

  Even before Vialdi, her days hadn’t really been her own. She tenaciously monitored the hours of other people. Her children’s, the hours of the man she’d married whom she now feared. She always felt she was under examination, she obeyed all requests with military precision, anytime she fell short she was filled with fear. The meticulousness she aspired to was impossible to attain, she chipped off pieces of her rigid will, fa
r from any emotional sweetness.

  She’d gradually been emptied of consciousness and surprise. She’d gotten her first taste of the future a few days after the birth of her first child. Her compulsive sobbing had first started while she was changing its diapers, on the changing table in the bathroom. The baby cried to attract attention and she had cried along with it, but without the same expectation.

  She’d locked the door behind her, so that she couldn’t be seen, and she’d gone over to the window.

  A number of buildings cluttered up the horizon. A patch of ground, however, had still survived all the construction work. Rosina identified some apples scattered on the hay in the little clearing; they were ready to be placed in wooden crates and taken to market. In the future she told herself that those apples had saved her and her baby’s lives.

  The windows of the other buildings were holes, cells, niches. The clotheslines were links. For some reason, there was no movement in the other houses, no distraction of people; there were no voices. The asphalt in the enclosed space between buildings rose toward her and bid her take a step out, told her it wasn’t that hard to do, just one or two little steps, maybe with the baby in her arms. The laziness of her body suggested that it was impossible to make any effort, even to lift her baby, even to take a single step toward the courtyard. Her spine no longer had any structural integrity, her vertebrae were made of butter and the child’s screams were a noise that didn’t concern her.

  She needed orderliness, or at least chronology. She asked her own will for help, but it was nowhere to be found.

  She muddled up her years, months, and days, until she couldn’t remember whether it was evening, afternoon, or morning. She couldn’t connect events and she put spring after summer. Even her despair belonged to some body that wasn’t her own. The razor was right there. To feel her arms, she decided to wound them.

  She would have gone on to her wrists, if she hadn’t noticed a man bent over, packing the apples into a crate. The sheer indecency of her imagination recognized on her fingers the smooth peel of apples. As if those were her hands down in the tiny field. She smelled the bitter scent of annurca apples and the heedless response of life itself took over.

  She shook herself, the days promptly went back into place; she finished dressing her baby boy who had lain there all the while diaperless on the changing table. She concealed the cut, she dried her eyes, and she opened the bathroom door.

  She glimpsed the eyes of the man she’d married, closed her own, and braced for the blow.

  “Don’t ever lock yourself in.”

  At the time of the second baby’s birth, her husband was already spending practically no time at home. He devoted himself to gambling, betting, other women. Rosina knew that she ought to leave but she didn’t know where to turn or how she could feed her children. The words of her middle school teacher often returned to her memory: “The first freedom is the freedom from want.”

  Maybe the teacher was having a hard time making ends meet too. Rosina clung to her school days, which she remembered as a wonderful time.

  She left the Rione Sanità every morning and went off to the Art Institute at Oltremare. She liked everything about it: in her dense language of an adolescent girl, she left behind the history of burial and the fascination of the stones where she’d been born and gave herself up trustingly to the progress that art promised. Nothing was going to stop her; she was going to be able to change. She’d shaved her red hair into a boy’s crew cut and felt she had the power to achieve anything. She learned with glee, and she was good.

  When they told her that there was no money to attend university she went off to look for work in Rome. She found a furnished room in an apartment building nicely lodged at a distance from the city center. To get to the capital she traveled in the opposing direction every morning, from the glass boxes of progress she migrated on a daily basis back to the fascination of stones, a fascination which, however, roundly ignored her: her day was spent in a cellar that someone had decided to glorify with the name of kitchen, cooking meals for tourists. The place not only taught her the disgusting array of substances that it was possible to pass off for food, it also made her yearn again for her stones back home and the grimaces and sneers of life and death, the entrance to the Quarries, the Fontanelle cemetery, the catacombs and the basilicas, the early Christian art, but also the little corner store where she could settle her bill at the end of each month, the doctor who was willing to take an espresso at the bar in payment for an after-hours office visit, or her own language, the tongue that had nursed her, protected her, defended her.

  She returned home. She disguised herself as a girl who’d never gone away. She took on a slovenly appearance, to a far greater degree than before she’d ever left for Rome, and adjusted the content to match the appearance. She wanted to be like all the other girls. She wanted to fit in, to disappear. She stopped shaving her hair and chose a nice cropped pageboy like a leper from the edge of town: she’d lost all and any ambitions to be considered a member of the tribe of artists. She took a job as a clerk in a shirt shop, and was paid in cash.

  She was almost immediately recognized by the boy who would become a man, the man that she married.

  She pretended to be a woman and an obedient wife, and then became one.

  No question, an untamed and fiery part of her was still alive, but when it emerged into the open, despite all Rosina’s training to rein it in, it was greeted with kicks and punches from her husband.

  32.

  Liguori passed by the sergeant’s apartment building on his way to the Fuorigrotta police station.

  He looked up at Blanca’s balcony with stadium view:

  The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness / And in the taste confounds the appetite. Ah, Juliet, feel free to empty over my head all the chamber pots of Verona. What poor taste, to travel to a cliché of love with murder as a pretext! It’s not my style. But what is completely typical of me is that, try as I might to come up with something original, I still wind up smack in the middle of the most bestial commonplace. Bah. Far better to express offensive sentiments toward the outside world, and right now the most outside place on earth is none other than Malanò.

  The detective stopped to watch a few officers of the Financial Police who’d stopped some ticket scalpers under the sign reading Upper Bleachers—Entrance—Gate 20.

  Three men on scooters started off after meaningful glances with those who had been arrested, possibly to warn the others selling counterfeit bills. Among those arrested, Liguori recognized Nino Sparaco, who was a resident of Lucrino and a frequent if unwilling visitor to the Pozzuoli police station.

  Contradictory signals are arriving. Maybe even Malanò looks up every so often and sees past the certain horizon of the serial killer. I’ll keep this to myself, too, because it doesn’t do Martusciello good to have any kind of confirmation: if he stops thinking of himself as the sole village donkey in history, he loses heart. He stops in his tracks. I’m doing it for his own good, the detective mused before walking into the police station. Malanò couldn’t see him right away. The detective took advantage of the wait to ask around, dropping questions with the apathy of someone not really interested in the answers. He wanted to know how the captain had reacted to the death of Gioacchino Rizzo and he wanted to know before he saw him.

  Malanò was very familiar with Liguori’s reputation and part of him feared it. The detective came from a noble family that had failed to rise courageously to a position of leadership, but to make up for that had held on to the threads of the right connections with both hands, to that genteel reserve of caste and wealth that operates clandestinely, to the contrived elegance that strives to build up walls and the closed circle of selective, elitist knowledge.

  Captain Malanò had no way of knowing that Liguori, in becoming a policeman, had replied no to his birthright: the only duke the detective cared abou
t was thin and white and was a singer. He had taken with him the knowledge and tastes of his birth and had ventured down from Via Palizzi to mingle in the borderland of Mergellina between ghetto and salt water.

  Liguori stubbornly insisted on examining the chain of events, trying to identify in the exasperation of impulses that leads to crimes a certain order he could impose on his own restlessness. At least partway.

  Perhaps the comfort he’d experienced recently could be attributed to a sort of surrender, the amused glance that he cast in the direction of what remained in any case incomplete.

  Malanò didn’t know of this, and since he was tenaciously weak with those he judged to be strong, he welcomed Liguori into his office with an excessive cordiality.

  “Detective Liguori, what a pleasure to see you again.”

  “Thanks,” Liguori replied, staring at the captain’s campero boots, verging on the yellow. The captain noticed the look before going to take a seat behind his desk.

  “Sergeant Occhiuzzi came to see me.” Malanò took care not to express his own opinion about Blanca. “How is she?”

  “Of all our staff she’s solved the greatest number of cases, so I’d imagine you’d be pleased to have her assistance. We’re traveling to Verona together.”

  The captain’s face lit up:

  “I only just received the autopsy results from Adami, the captain in Verona who’s in charge of the case. Perfect, precise, and very fast. Death by poisoning: a fatal blend of pentobarbital anesthetic, which is what veterinarians use.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, it was used recently for an execution in the United States, triggering outrage.”

  “Yes, they also use it in places where euthanasia is legal. In other words, it’s a famous poison.”

  Liguori cracked his first half-smile of the meeting. “Right, I heard they plan to give it an Oscar.”