Three, Imperfect Number

by Patrizia Rinaldi

  Malanò laughed too loud and too long.

  “I’m delighted to see that you and your assistant are going to gather useful evidence on the scene of the crime and to determine that the murders of both Vialdi and Marin are the work of the same serial killer. I understood it immediately, from the very first murder: who else would ever think of laying out a corpse like that?”

  “I’m in perfect agreement with you, Captain, perfect. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do, for that matter the request for collaboration came from you in the first place and we are here to follow your orders.”

  Malanò was gratified by Liguori’s hypocritical admission.

  “When the games are over I’ll be delighted to have you working at my side in the new team.”

  The detective recoiled at the words that had just been bandied about and for the second time flashed his half-smile.

  “Now tell me something, what obstacles still remain to a full and final understanding that both murders were the work of a single serial killer? I paid close attention to your press conference, and you left open a few doubts, minor ones, but still you left them open.”

  One of Malanò’s shortcomings was that he was unwilling even to consider the possibility that not everyone was quite as eager as he was to make his way and climb the ladder of success. It never occurred to him that years ago Liguori had willingly left the places where he most wanted to arrive. So he took the bait.

  “What can I tell you, I had no alternative! The first obstacle is Grimaldi, the medical examiner. He keeps repeating like a broken record that he found no traces of poison in Vialdi’s body, and no bullets or knife wounds either. He insists that clinically speaking the singer died from a heart attack. You try and tell him that no one goes to wait for their massive heart attack crouched in a tangled soccer goal net with a mouthful of grass! He’ll tell you that he doesn’t give a damn, that it’s my problem, that he’s never falsified an autopsy report and that he’s not about to start now. He says that the only courtesy he can do for me is to redo his initial clinical investigations, but I suspect he’s just trying to waste my time, because this precision of his will only drag out the official delivery of the autopsy report. The other problem is Rizzo’s murder. To my mind, the death of the night watchman has nothing to do with the other two murders, but the chief of police recommends I go easy on that angle. I might very well be right, but we have to be completely certain, because if a link of some kind emerges later we’re going to look like complete assholes.” Malanò opened his mouth in an enamel-whitened smile. “You know, by now everyone’s attention is focused on these cases. We’re on the front page of the paper every single day, on all the most popular news broadcasts, we even took away the top news slot from the garbage emergency!”

  “Truly a notable achievement.”

  Liguori continued the conversation without even bothering to try to direct it, he’d found out what he needed to know.

  While Malanò continued to burn with enthusiasm for his theory, a police officer entered the room and brought him some documents. He glanced at Liguori compassionately; the captain had spoken of nothing else for days now, and the people who had to spend time with him were heartily sick of it.

  The detective took advantage of the interruption to get to his feet.

  “Well, so long, Captain, I’d better let you get back to work.”

  “Don’t be silly, this is standard routine, come back and see me anytime. We’re going to do great things together.” The officer glanced at Liguori, raised his eyebrows and pinched forehead and nose together into an expression that clearly said: Thank me, brother, I just saved your life.

  Immediately outside the police station, the detective stretched his back and twisted his neck. He’d had a hard time maintaining his posture and his demeanor.

  He phoned Martusciello.

  “Captain, where are you?”

  “Detective, what the hell does it matter to you?”

  “If you’re mean to me I’m going to hang up.”

  “Liguori, you know exactly what I think of you when you’re dying to tell me something but you just want me to beg you. Go ahead, I have no time to waste.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you, but only because I’ve looked around and I can find no worse police captains to go to. Call Grimaldi—no, wait, even better, go pay him a visit.”

  “Why?”

  “My charitable impulses aren’t quite that strong. Find out why for yourself.”

  “Liguori, you wouldn’t recognize a charitable impulse if it bit you in the ass. I heard they arrested Nino Sparaco, good buddy of Funicella Corta.”

  “Really? Well, what do you know.”

  33.

  The passage of time had worsened the malaise that had come to him with his discovery in the shed.

  “I’m becoming a pain in the neck,” the captain mused. “Who knows where I get this inappropriate squeamishness from?”

  Before going into the morgue, he stopped to smoke in the open air. A breeze had sprung up and the palm tree standing guard outside the anodized aluminum entrance was trembling with the change in the weather and the chewing of the red palm weevil. The parasite was attracted in particular by damaged trees and it laid its eggs in existing cuts in the trunk and the fronds. There it ate its fill and awaited its metamorphosis. No cure seemed possible.

  The captain looked around and considered how the structure had deteriorated: the questions asked by surviving family members in flat, bewildered voices; the medicinal smells that refused to be confined by mere walls.

  The parasite was not alone in its gnawing away at life.

  Dr. Grimaldi was talking with a few of his colleagues. He saw Martusciello and came over.

  “My how you’ve aged, Captain.”

  “And a very fine day to you too. Tell me about Vialdi.” The doctor stipulated conditions: what he had to say was confidential. Malanò was pressuring him to have the results, but he still needed time to do some further exams and studies. He’d provide hypotheses only to certain cops, the ones who wouldn’t insist on dictating the words he wrote.

  “Tell me, but let’s step outside, I need a cigarette.”

  “Hadn’t you quit? Hold on, I’ll get my own and we can go smoke outdoors.”

  The two men went off to a courtyard in the back that offered a panorama of closed windows, air-conditioning vents, and dangling cables: one electrical cable was preventing a shoe from completing its plunge to earth.

  “So in Vialdi’s body, I found traces of Lorazepam, a powerful sedative, and Propofol, a widely used anesthetic, intravenously injected. All the same, the levels of concentration of the drugs administered wouldn’t be sufficient to explain the singer’s death, which definitely was the result of a myocardial infarction. There is no doubt about that. In other words, the poison that Malanò is looking for, I was unable to find. Now, because it is unlikely, as our mutual acquaintance reminds me with suffocating frequency, that someone who is experiencing the first symptoms of a heart attack is going to choose not to hurry to the hospital and instead sneak into the stadium, crouch down in one of the goalposts, and start sucking on a blade of grass, I find myself in the position of having to search for something that is quite unwilling to be found. My first hypothesis is that someone injected a pharmaceutical that I just can’t seem to identify. The second is that therefore a heart attack was simulated. The third is that only someone who knows their stuff would be capable of making such a complete fool of me.”

  “The number three is a genuine persecution. Forgive my simple village idiot ways, but couldn’t it be that the killer simply was spared half the work by a weak heart? Vialdi must not have had a very sound ticker, cocaine’ll do a number on you.”

  “Sure, maybe so, it’s another theory, and perhaps the most likely one, but I don’t include conjecture in my clinical reports. So let me get back to
work.”

  “Not long ago I took a little excursion over to the old Italsider infirmary.”

  “I enjoyed working there. Memories embellish even asbestos.”

  34.

  Why so early? We could have moved at a more leisurely pace if we’d taken the train. I’m not sure if I brought everything with me. Is the hotel reserved?”

  “Blanca, let’s save the questions for the others. Let’s just pretend we’re two ordinary travelers. When are we going to have another chance to drop everything and go somewhere together for two nights?”

  “And three days. Okay, Liguori.”

  “And today we don’t have to work at all, that starts tomorrow. What do you want to listen to?”

  “Mozart.”

  Liguori, Blanca, and Mozart left behind the industrial periphery of Naples and the traffic that went with it.

  When Blanca recognized the highway from the smooth ride and the steady speed, she did her best to relax the muscles of her neck and admitted that she had no other excuses to turn back. Every so often she cracked the window and leaned her head into the breeze.

  The vein in her right wrist pounded with the awareness of her eardrums. Since the night before, the woman had heightened the perception of every part of her body. She told herself that there were times when she could detect her own renal functionality, which had been accelerated recently, resulting in frequent trips to the restroom.

  She focused on Mozart and sent him a silent prayer, a prayer that begged for peace with every beat of the vein in her right wrist.

  In some way, Mozart responded and helped her to appreciate the quality of the sound and the absence of synthetic smells in the car.

  Blanca caressed the upholstery of the car door. Liguori noticed the gesture and smiled.

  “Can I change music, Signora? The next Requiem I hear, I’m going to drive under a semitrailer.”

  “Too bad for you if you can’t appreciate someone who’s capable of happiness even in the midst of death.”

  “I’m a simple soul, if there’s one thing I like in life, it’s happiness.” He looked at her hands. “Especially lately.”

  After Rome, they stopped at an Autogrill. Blanca was beside herself, she didn’t want to have to ask for help in moving around in a place she didn’t known, but her agitation had begun to press down once again on bladder and kidneys.

  With a level of intuition far greater than would have been expected, Liguori told her that he needed to go to the bathroom and led her up the steps with the discreet touch on her shoulder that the woman knew by heart.

  The man’s concern for her limitations surprised Blanca in the Autogrill bathroom. It occurred to Blanca that romantic moments were obliged to utilize what was at their disposal.

  Amusement at the thought helped to break down the woman’s defenses. It opened a breach in her capillary protection: blood reached her neck and stained it with an adolescent blush.

  To the delight of the fates, in Blanca’s memory that instant was bound up with the buzz of voices and the clatter of spoons and cups, the scent of bad coffee, thawed croissants, footsteps descending the stairs, and even the ringing of loose change in the attendant’s bowl at the entrance to the bathrooms.

  Liguori walked Blanca back to the car, and then asked her to wait for him.

  In a short while, the man came back with a glass cup.

  “I found the mint tea you like so much.”

  Blanca drank. She knew exactly how to savor a taste; she knew how to be entirely present both in her mouth and in the hot liquid.

  “Good. How did you manage to find Lady Grey and fresh mint in an Autogrill?”

  “All you have to do is ask. It’s amazing how accustomed we are to asking a thousand things instead of the one thing we really want. What do you desire, Blanca?”

  The woman said nothing, but just went on hungrily sipping her tea. In silence.

  35.

  It’s no easy matter to be satisfied with the work you’ve done. No, no. With all the loving attention you can lavish on the most challenging project, carried out with total devotion, it can still be nullified by an unexpected flaw, an excess of contrivance or resentment.

  Because you see, my dear Singing Maestro, the recipe demands a balance between good and evil. Sure, I know, you’ve infected me with meanness of spirit, phrases devoid of meaning, laws poised on the ordinariness of life. You tainted me with the shared pursuit of the least-worst.

  The Least-Worst.

  Acclaimed, pursued, without a thought for the fact that the least-worst does not even aspire to the supremacy of the final concluding roar.

  Now then, pay close attention, or pretend to, since I can guess that you’re not really all that interested. I wish to discuss issues of love and death:

  A bite can be either a caress or an annoyance, the artistry is in gauging the pressure;

  the administration of loving pain demands great precision in the doses prescribed, lest it spill over into the endangerment of life, otherwise the option of flight comes into play;

  the roles of back and stiletto should occasionally be reversed; even in the most successful performances monotony lies in ambush like freshwater seaweed in a lake, wrapping around your ankle during a routine swim;

  the murder of the philosophy of condescension is useful in the celebration thereof.

  Above all, the aversion to freedom must itself come freely, and here I feel certain you fail to follow me. No enforced seclusion, no outright imprisonment can offer the sublime advantages of chosen captivity, of the unconditional offering of one’s own neck to the fangs.

  Maestro, and yet all this ethics of evil and passion was not enough to allow me to complete the task.

  You well know it, and you laugh.

  It is no consolation to me that uncompleted projects are in and of themselves an infinite calling.

  It is no consolation.

  I failed. And I can’t try again. I haven’t been a diligent boy. I’ve been a bad boy.

  36.

  In the hotel they checked into, Blanca couldn’t hear the sound of the river. She called Liguori from her room:

  “Let’s change hotels.”

  “As you please,” the man replied. And it occurred to him that perhaps the rooms posed an obstacle or two too many. When they met downstairs in the lobby Blanca said that she wanted to look for a hotel somewhere near Ponte Pietra.

  “No question, you have a way of barking out orders!”

  “Julia Marin mentioned the sound of the river Adige. It strikes me as a waste not to be listening to it for the whole time I’m here.”

  “Don’t you ever use the plural? Say, the first person plural, when you’re conjugating a verb, for instance.”

  “For the whole time we’re here.”

  “I like that better. At your service, Signora, let’s leave the luggage here, I’ll come back to get it once you’ve bestowed the grace of your decision on where we are to lodge for the night. Let’s get going.”

  Liguori and Blanca walked to the middle of the Ponte Pietra. Standing in the middle of the bridge, the woman rubbed the instep of her foot against the back of her leg to stop the tingling from the cold.

  “Tell me what you can see, Liguori.”

  “Here to one side we have a bicycle leaning against a trash can. The right toe clip and leather strap attached to the pedal are both more heavily battered than their counterparts on the left. This suggests that the bicyclist prefers to mount his bicycle from the right. The bicycle isn’t locked, neither chain nor padlock is present: the owner is a trusting, lazy man. Behind the bicycle seat is a wicker basket, the kind that fishermen use. Wait.” Liguori walked over to the basket, opened it, then came back to Blanca. “It’s empty, so the bicyclist didn’t catch anything: trusting, lazy, and unlucky.”

  “Ah, policemen!
Now stop mocking the way I work.”

  “Do you want a more impassioned description? You have only to ask: pine trees like sighs striving upward, pitched roofs with red terra-cotta tiles, lovely colors: the white of stone, as untouchable as this heart of yours; sunset tinged with hues of pink and azure, colors that only nature can pair, let us confess, or else they become Jordan almonds in the window of a confectionery shop; transparent crystals of cold that melt against my youthful ardor. Do you like that better?”

  “Youthful?”

  “There, you doused my ardor. Now let’s hear from the tour guide: in Verona you can admire the Torre dei Lamberti, the pale campanile of the Duomo, the city’s cathedral, the church of San Giorgio with its majestic gardens and the smaller, but no less enchanting, Romanesque church of Santo Stefano.”

  “And the balcony?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t take you to the balcony. Juliet is just itching to pour every goblet in Verona over my head. She says I’m too predictable, the fool.”

  “Predictable, I couldn’t say, but you’ve certainly done a poor job of describing the world, good sir. Your youthful heart takes the benefit of seeing eyes with all the presumption of a world-weary habitué. By the way, do world-weary habitués eat dinner? If so, let’s find a hotel, drop off our luggage, and go get something to eat.” Liguori found a hotel overlooking the river Adige. Blanca went upstairs to her room and while she was waiting for Liguori to get back with the luggage, she took off her clothes and stood for a long time under the spray of hot water. She increased the water pressure and found to her surprise that it didn’t bother her in the slightest. Probably the sound of the river distracted her skin.

  The detective knocked on the door, Blanca clutched the collar of her dressing gown close to her neck.