Three, Imperfect Number

by Patrizia Rinaldi

  “I hadn’t thought of that, it might be. But why wouldn’t they have told me?”

  “Maybe it strikes them as unimportant. When Vialdi died, a lot of people lost their jobs, and now they have other things to worry about. Maybe there are people who think of work as something more than a place to work on puzzles.”

  “Yep, you’ve been spending too much time with Martu­sciello.”

  “Now I’ll call him, so I can tell him all about Verona and the time we wasted.”

  44.

  Rosina Mastriani wasn’t expecting an unannounced visit from a police detective and she had no intention of letting him in.

  She looked at her messy apartment and her arms, riddled with cuts.

  “I don’t have to let you in.”

  She was laboriously won over by Liguori’s insistence; he pretended to take no notice of the tangled welter of drinking glasses, clothing, newspapers, and dirty dishes.

  Rosina Mastriani turned off the television set and, with her back to him, covered her arms as best she could with her three-quarter-length sleeves.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “I was plowing the playground. What do you want? Let’s get this out of the way, I have things to do.”

  “I want to know if you attended Vialdi’s last concert.”

  “No. Arrivederci.”

  Liguori shoved aside a pile of clothes and got comfortable on the filthy couch. “I’m not trying to scare you, but you’re not in a very comfortable position.”

  Rosina Mastriani laughed. “Neither are you, the springs on that couch are broken. I don’t even know what a comfortable position means. I’ve never known and it’s no clearer to me now. You see, my dear handsome detective, prison doesn’t really look all that bad. I’m about to lose the apartment. I’m unemployed and lately I’ve had to add Person of Interest in a Murder Investigation to my CV, and that doesn’t help much in an already challenging job market. The press has had a lot of fun at my expense.”

  “I could help you.”

  Rosina Mastriani laughed harder this time:

  “The last time somebody said that to me I wound up with a car I couldn’t afford and I lost what little I had to my name.”

  “What car?”

  “This one,” the woman pointed to a picture. “I put it up for sale, but no one wants it.”

  “I’ll buy it from you.”

  “And what do you want in exchange?”

  “Nothing.” The woman walked Liguori to the door:

  “Do you really want to buy the car?”

  “Yes, tomorrow I’ll bring you a down payment.” Without even knowing why, Rosina Mastriani decided that the detective really was going to.

  Mara Scacchi didn’t look up and automatically repeated her query—prego?—to the man standing at the counter.

  “I’m Detective Liguori, we met at the Pozzuoli police station, about the Vialdi case.”

  “I have nothing to add to what I’ve already told you.”

  Liguori picked up a box of analgesics from a display case next to the cash register.

  “Are these good for headaches?”

  “Yes, that’ll be seven euros fifty.”

  “Fine. So we’ll see you tomorrow at the police station. And do me a favor, don’t come in before eleven. You understand, with these migraines . . . ”

  The pharmacist lifted the hinged section of the counter top and invited the detective to follow her back to a private area, crowded with shelves and drawers. Her father took her place serving the public, after giving her a hard stare.

  “Spare me the trip. Whodunit? The Pharmacist? is already a book title I’m sick and tired of reading.”

  “Did you go see Jerry Vialdi’s last concert at the Audito­rium?”

  “Yes, I went. I didn’t want to deny myself a healthy helping of musical gall. Vialdi used to invite all his women. He liked to scatter music and glances.”

  “Did you notice anything you’d like to tell me about?”

  “Nothing special: if you’ve seen one of the Maestro’s concerts, you’ve seen them all. You know, it almost scared me the way he could repeat himself, exactly the same every time. The only thing that would change was the beginning. He’d sing two or three numbers from his latest CD, then the rest never varied. You could even predict the pauses, they always arrived at the exact same moment. Stuff that would make anybody want to kill him.”

  “We can’t seem to track down the recording.”

  “Don’t ask me about it.”

  “Would you help me find it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because if you weren’t the one who mixed up the stuff that killed him, it might be nice to have your name cleared of murder.”

  “You’re not going to find anything in the recording, don’t get your hopes up. And even if there was something inopportune, Vialdi’s staff would already have taken care of any surprises. They’re good, you know, and if there’s one thing they hate it’s approximation.” The pharmacist, her father, came toward the shelves and Mara Scacchi held out her hand to Liguori to get rid of him with a handshake.

  The detective noticed her dilated pupils.

  Liguori parked outside Nini’s friend’s house and sat in the car waiting for his doubts to disperse.

  Blanca had told him about Tita’s fear for her mother, but she’d told him in the dark, out of a nagging personal worry.

  She’d told him about her visit, the apartment and the woman’s tension. She’d also asked him to keep that information to himself.

  The detective’s hesitation lasted the duration of three songs by Nina Simone, then it was replaced by his usual impatience to take care of things. He knew very well what the urge to rummage through things, look for missing pieces was all about. Ever since he’d chosen his job, work that Martusciello considered an aristocratic luxury, he was all too familiar with the desire to conquer his own disorder, and life in general.

  He got out of the car and headed toward the apartment building where Tita’s mother lived, already imagining Blanca’s reaction when she found out about it. So he came up with a remedy.

  “Signora Datri? Buon giorno, I’m Deputy Giuseppe Càrita from the Pozzuoli police station. Sergeant Blanca Occhiuzzi asked me to drop by.” The woman met Liguori on the landing. Her housedress was flapping open and she didn’t bother to button it, her arms were dangling at her sides and her eyes looked helpless.

  “I’m not feeling well, is this going to take very long?”

  “Of course, my apologies. I’d just like to know if by any chance you attended Jerry Vialdi’s last concert at the Auditorium.”

  The woman assumed an enchanted expression, she didn’t even feel the need to nod. For Maria Datri it was unthinkable that she could have missed any chance to chase after the destiny that was custom stitched to suit her.

  Liguori decided he’d made an unproductive trip that Blanca wouldn’t have appreciated: the woman wasn’t sound of mind.

  “Do you know anything that might be useful to our investigation?”

  “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  The detective regretted having this urge of his to rummage through weak disorders, even in those who, perhaps because of those very disorders, might have killed.

  45.

  Martusciello got a tighter grip on the handrail. A jerk of the subway train had caused him to stumble over the suitcase of a traveler who had boarded with him at the central train station, while he was asking for information about the Campi Flegrei stop.

  A man in a threadbare jacket felt obliged not only to count the stops between there and Campi Flegrei, but also to give a tourist, in a broken mix of languages, a rundown on the history and geography of the place, both seismic in nature.

  “Flègo: to fire. To set the fire, to burn, to catch fire. Phl
e­graean Fields is a big crater, kilometers and kilometers across, I don’t recall now, but maybe twenty, to compare Vesuvio, do you know Vesuvio? it’s a child dragon, un drago creaturo, spit only a little fire. Ci sono nato. I was born here, qua, settantotto anni fa, almost eighty year. Tanto tiempo. Do you know tanto tiempo? The station where you have to get out is so beautiful, bella assai. Once real trains came here too, which was right, mi pareva pure giusto, because the station of Mergellina, the trains went there, and the station of Campi Flegrei is much more expressive—espressivo—than the central station, even if now they have put in it the stores that you can find anyplace, da tutte le parti. Chi è nato qua, who was born here, knows that they are always on top of a train with the binary, the . . . the . . . the tracks of fire. They know, there’s no need for the mamma to explain. Mother knows.”

  The tourist didn’t understand a word of it, but he was appre­ciative of the effort and the smile from under the hat tipped in farewell, before getting out at the Campi Flegrei stop.

  Martusciello didn’t follow him toward the exit. Instead he went over to where a side track terminated and smoked a cigarette in the company of a line of abandoned subway cars.

  The call was an interruption. The phone flashed its useless alerts.

  “Funicella, all these mysteries knock me off balance. If you want to talk, just talk and be done with it. And try to call me with a SIM card my phone recognizes, because this ‘unknown caller’ is starting to ruin my health.”

  A short while later he walked into the gambling parlor. He climbed up onto an uncomfortable stool facing screens with a blend of soccer players and racehorses.

  He had the whole morning to wait for the lawyer.

  Experts, commentators, kids, opinion-mongers, dilettantes, ordinary-looking women with grocery bags waiting in corners alongside bookies, white slaves, clerks, moneyless spectators, and retirees: all of them launching into solo performances like so many seers with an array of preconceived certainties. They warded off bad luck with improvised weapons, speaking without saying a word to anyone else.

  The lawyer came over and placed one foot on the crossbar of the uncomfortable stool.

  He stared at the captain. Martusciello returned his insistent stare: he ran his eyes over the grey suit, a little too tight around waist and legs, the tieless shirt, the week’s growth of whiskers that somehow didn’t manage to add years to the facial features, regular and marked by recent neglect. He considered the skinny face and body, the brisk, unselfconscious movements that would have been beyond him even when he was the same age as this young man.

  The lawyer went on staring at him.

  “I’m Luigi D’Amore. Were you looking for me, Captain?”

  “How would you know?”

  “In gambling parlors, word gets around, it’s the way they work.” He put on a smile, and the smile refused to go away.

  “Does the way they work also involve providing controlled substances to a singer recently found dead and tangled in the net of a soccer goalpost?”

  The lawyer started delivering a sermon against addiction. The lesson he was laying out for Martusciello followed a sensible structure. The lawyer’s perennial smile only became sunnier with terms like pathological condition, loss of control, rootlessness, and personal weakness.

  The captain interrupted the lecture but couldn’t do anything about the smile.

  “Were you taking care of Vialdi’s interests?”

  “In part, I’m a point of reference for the people who run the parlors, I only met Vialdi because he liked to bet regularly. That’s all.”

  “Large sums?”

  “It depends, to someone like him who got paid thousand of euros just to take a breath, they might not have been big sums. To me they were.”

  “You are a paragon of moral rectitude, Counselor.”

  “Necessarily. I attended law school on the earnings of my mother, who worked all her life as a waitress.”

  “Vialdi wasn’t exactly born into the lap of luxury either, I believe.”

  “Jerry Vialdi was already a rich man when I was still shoplifting university textbooks.”

  “Ah, you see, you’re capable of the occasional misdemeanor yourself. I’m glad to hear it. I’m afraid of people who say they’ve never cracked an egg.”

  “Sure, I’ve cracked a few in my time, but we’re on the same side, Captain.” The smile faded on the drawn features, but it brightened almost immediately.

  “I’m glad to hear you know what side I’m on, most of the time I don’t even know myself.”

  “I’m at your complete disposal, Captain.” He handed Martusciello a business card, but the captain still wasn’t done.

  “How did you know I was going to drop by here?”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself, your tenacity is well known, at least in the circles where you move. In any case, even if you hadn’t come looking for me where you found me, I’d have come to see you.”

  Counselor Luigi D’Amore’s sunny helpfulness landed on Martusciello’s aching feet, and in his irritation he tried another shot in the dark.

  “You’re also a lawyer for the Sconciglio family, aren’t you?”

  “Well, not for the whole Sconciglio family. I’m Giovanni’s lawyer: he operates legally licensed gambling parlors just about everywhere.”

  “Ah, so you’re the lawyer for Don Giovanni. Then I was right, it’s more or less like representing the legal interests of the whole family.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “That can happen, sometimes there are a lot of different roads that lead to the same destination. So what do you have in mind when you say ‘just about everywhere’?”

  “Campania, Lazio, Lombardy . . . ”

  “Veneto . . . ”

  “Sure, Veneto too, I think.”

  The lawyer’s smile remained in place while his hand reached around for the handle of his briefcase.

  46.

  Rosina Mastriani tidied up her apartment, got dressed and ready, and sat down to wait for the detective and his money.

  She opened the windows and was astonished at the fresh lightness of the breeze, so different from the air that so often oppressed Pianura. The leafy breeze from the trees in the adjoining Park of the Astroni had begun to blow on a day that Rosina Mastriani would not soon forget.

  She found the courage to phone home and ask about the children. Her husband told her that she no longer had the right.

  “Let me see them.”

  The woman recited a litany of her faults and misdeeds, she talked and talked until the cuts that she inflicted on herself on a daily basis began forming new flesh.

  “I don’t believe that they don’t want me anymore.” Her husband laughed and hung up the phone.

  Rosina Mastriani relived her capacity to always display the worst parts of herself, to take punches in silence to keep from waking the children, the daily violence of her husband’s return home, unwilling to answer her prayers never to see him again, never never again. She revived in her memory her broken prayers, the nauseating lack of courage to do anything, the spare change left on the night table, mortifying her, worse than being kicked, and the illusion that in Jerry Vialdi she’d found a little bit of heaven.

  I can’t say a thing to you. The whore that left home is me. And I can’t shout the curses that fill my mind: even the children were yours, as well as the rest of the pain and grief, and in my joy I didn’t even want them anymore. It’s all disgusting, I know, but you’re part of it just as much as I am.

  Liguori noticed the change in the woman, even more unmistakable than the new face that the apartment had put on. He handed her the down payment on her car and confirmed that before the week was up he’d be done with the change in title.

  Rosa Mastriani was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, her arms showing scars and fresh cuts.
By now she’d made it clear to herself: she wouldn’t be able to make it on her own, she might as well display all the fear she was capable of.

  “By law, am I allowed to see my children?”

  “Have you already completed the divorce process? Have you been denied parental custody and visiting rights?”

  “I’m not legally divorced. I simply left.”

  “I can introduce you to some people who can help you. But now why don’t you flip the picture and tell me exactly who Jerry Vialdi really was and where the hell I can find the recording of the concert.”

  As she was answering, Rosina Mastriani considered how her words were venturing into places and thoughts that before she opened her mouth she hadn’t thought she knew. The woman told him about a fragile man, who went searching for courage in the applause, in the desire to please no matter the cost; even the chemicals he ingested were a way to keep from disobeying that role.

  The singer’s arrogant bullying was different from her husband’s: the way he inflicted it was by denying her his presence, triggering the malaise of need. He let her chase after him. And she’d been only too glad to do the chasing. The need she’d given in to was her third mistake as a mother.

  Liguori watched Rosina Mastriani’s facial features change as she went on talking. They put on or shed years. The red of her hair and her freckles took part in the transformation.

  The information about the possibility of looking for the recording prompted a flat conclusion:

  “Ask his personal servant, ask Gatta Mignon. And don’t believe her for an instant when she starts meowing, she has a cast-iron head.”

  When Liguori left, the woman thanked him in her mind for having delved honestly into all those memories that had once been so blurry to her eyes, thanked him as many times as was necessary, and finally managed to break into tears after an endless lifetime that had been condensed into three years.