Three, Imperfect Number

by Patrizia Rinaldi

  Martusciello felt a flush of contentment. The summer was finally over.

  “Well, one thing’s certain, you know how to put together a compliment, there aren’t a lot of police officers like Occhiuzzi and Liguori.”

  55.

  Blanca sat trembling on the sofa, next to Nini. This wasn’t like her. She decided that, if she went on doing things that she didn’t feel she had any right to do, her universe would turn head-over-heels and she’d plummet headlong into the sky.

  Nini caressed her hand:

  “I don’t want this to turn into a habit. I’m the daughter here.”

  “I heard you when you were talking to Tita and called me your mother.”

  “Why am I not surprised? You hear everything.”

  “When I can’t go on but I have to go on, I make use of the following exercise: I order my thoughts to go take a rest, a sort of labor of love. The stupid advantage of a limitation, which it would be best in any case not to have. I’m accustomed to husbanding my strength: I’m going to need it the next time I stumble, guaranteed to be soon. Or else, I have no time to waste, I can’t say which. Half an hour of pain is sufficient, a rapid blenderful of a dozen or so tablespoonsful is more than enough. And after all, what do you know, even joy has its shortcomings. Often it trips me up, makes me think I could even see the moon or what the hell else, I don’t know. So stupid. Voices betray me less often, yours, when you were talking with Tita, even gave me an extra supply of courage. I’d like to train you to recognize them, I certainly understand that I learned out of necessity, but if I could teach you to decipher the sentiments of sounds, my misfortune might serve a useful purpose. Because we need to do it, Nini, we have to protect ourselves and translate the damage, otherwise the imperfections will win, until they make us enjoy a pain we never asked for.”

  “You’re preaching now, you’ve turned back into a mother. What were they looking for, Blanca?”

  “I don’t know. I’m racking my brains to figure it out. We don’t have anything at home that’s important enough to justify this much work and anyone who knows how to work at this level is well aware of exactly what they’re looking for.”

  Sergio knocked at the door of his own bedroom.

  “The detective is here and he wants to talk to you.”

  “Let him in.” Nini started to get up from the sofa. “No, stay here.”

  Liguori didn’t look like himself either.

  “How are you? No, I imagine that you’re fine, all things considered.” He broke off. “No real damage, and no one was home when they . . . ” He broke off again. “But I also thought that you . . . ” He broke off for the third time. “In other words, that you . . . ” The detective wasn’t accustomed to this kind of awkwardness, and he didn’t know how to dilute it into a flow of words.

  “Thanks for coming.” Blanca came back to the recent events in order to help the man get free of his overwhelming embarrassment. “Nini and I were just wondering what they might have been looking for.”

  Liguori recovered.

  “Did you bring home documents, police reports, wiretaps or recordings, or any other material that might be of interest to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Do you generally record notes or other information on the cases you’re working on?”

  “My memory is adequate, even excessive at times.”

  “Did you receive any mail, say from Verona, just as a for instance? Did Adami send you anything?”

  “Nothing, I get all my mail at the office.”

  Nini stood up from the couch to pull a receipt out of the pocket of her tight jeans.

  “No, that’s not true, you got this. I forgot to give it to you.”

  56.

  The morning subway had become a train again. The change, apparently irrelevant, was a sort of resurrection for Martusciello. The passengers with faces puffy from sleep had become travelers again, they could still take part in any given surprise, however passively.

  “Swings don’t have a future, trains do,” he murmured toward the hat on the head of the woman with sad eyes who’d managed to find a seat for her morning commute. “Because, you see, my dear sad woman, swings come and go, like trains, but they only cover a restricted, weary space. The future, on the other hand, as far as I’m concerned, must have a certain margin for derailing from the obvious, the future must be familiar with the word despite. Despite the tricks, the denials, the slabs of asbestos, the betrayals performed and suffered, the deaths, the social climbers and their sharp elbows, despite a time that refuses to bring us old age, despite a vast array of outrages. Every so often, my dear woman, a despite breaks free and establishes itself. It climbs down off the swing and catches a train. What I feel isn’t exactly hope, no, rather I would call it surprise, a jack-in-the-box that springs out of its box and goes cuckoo peekaboo: I am in spite of everything.

  “And then there’s the issue of Liguori,” he whispered to the same woman who was looking out at the sea with an indignant expression, just catching sight of it as it appeared from behind the ugly buildings, still steel-mill black. “I still confuse work and friendship. This has brought me certain disadvantages, but if I’ve failed to correct this bad habit before now, it’s at least worth my while to take the good with the bad when I realize that I wasn’t entirely wrong when I sensed that there was someone on my side. For once, the horseman climbed onto his horse, shoved the motorcyclist and my doubts aside, and went.”

  He put off his arrival back at the police station. In order to celebrate in his manner the enchantment that had turned the subway into a train, he went to the terrace of Villa Avellino. He walked through the park, remembering Liguori’s long diatribes about the Roman cistern incorporated into the villa. After his transfer to the Pozzuoli police station the two men frequently met there.

  He breathed in the salt air that was wafting up to embrace the citrus trees in order to rid itself of a majestic odor, disturbed, but only to a certain extent, by the sulfurous wind coming from the Solfatara.

  “I’ve always said: stench mixes with perfume. And that’s the way it is.”

  Carità was waiting for him at the front door of the police station.

  “You’re late.”

  “Did we have an appointment?”

  “Not with me, Captain, but there’s an important lawyer upstairs waiting to see you, Luigi D’Amore.” Martusciello wondered how his newly rediscovered reluctance had managed to invade new territories, this wasn’t the first time that it had happened to him and in this circumstance, too, he could think of no answers. D’Amore had bothered to come in first thing in the morning, and that struck him as a good sign.

  “Explain it to me clearly, is he important because he’s a lawyer or why?”

  “Captain, why don’t you explain to me: what exactly do you seem to find that I ought to be saying to you?”

  “Carità, I hear with pleasure that you’re bringing back your good old tangled grammar.”

  “Of course I have, you told me that you were going to have me transferred. What a disgraceful thing to say, with all due respect. No one but you knows that I have two different families on two different floors of the same apartment building. In spite of this, you’ve told me that you’re going to have me sent away. What are they going to do without me?”

  The deputy, during the same case that had brought Blanca and Nini together, had revealed to Martusciello, and to Martusciello alone, that he had, along with his own children by his wife, another child with another woman; the woman’s husband had left for reasons that had nothing to do with her betrayal and so Carità now found himself managing an intricate situation, unaccustomed and delicate, with an extended family on two different landings of the same stairwell.

  “Well, what are they going to do! What do they do now, Peppino. The salary would be the same even if they transfer you to a different
region. This may have escaped you, but we still live in Italy. Leaving aside the stew, of course.”

  “You woke up in a good mood this morning, I’m happy to see it. Well, why don’t you go upstairs, the important lawyer is still waiting for you.”

  “You still haven’t told me why he’s important.”

  “Let’s just say this: he’s not important. He’s a lawyer, period. In fact, he’s not even a lawyer. Captain, there’s a certain Luigi D’Amore waiting for you in your office.”

  “In my office?” Martusciello tried to remember whether he’d taken the keys out of the lock in his desk drawer. “Just why did you let him into my office? Wasn’t the waiting room good enough for him? Oh, wait, I almost forgot, he’s an important gentleman. When will we down here in the Kingdom of Naples ever get rid of our collective inferiority complex, I wonder.”

  “Captain, I wish the best of health to you and to the thousand questions that you ask: but why are you so damned insidious when there’s joy in your heart?”

  57.

  While Martusciello contemplated the transformation of the subway into a train, Liguori was waiting for Blanca downstairs from Sergio’s apartment.

  In the car, they didn’t talk about what they’d be likely to find. Liguori and Nini had studied the receipt down to the finest detail and they had made all conjectures imaginable. There was nothing left to do but wait.

  The detective looked at the woman in the bright morning sunlight: Blanca hadn’t slept well, and the skin of her face, even paler than usual, let the network of veins beneath show through. Her movements had lost all sense of harmony, deprived as she was of much needed rest in a domestic environment; and Blanca showed, with her seeking hands, the darkness that at other times she so adroitly concealed.

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’re just as pretty as ever,” Liguori said, more to himself than to her.

  They stood in line outside the locked doors of the postal office. Behind them extended a line of elderly people who looked as if they were waiting for a bus to come take them on a field trip. Even the grumbling about waiting in line rang with sounds of a greeting.

  Liguori led Blanca past the sliding doors. They walked up to the service window and presented the receipt. They managed to resist the urge to open the package they’d just been given.

  They went to Liguori’s apartment. Blanca, despite her impatience, familiarized herself with odors she’d never forget: the scent of Gay-Odin chocolate, antique wood, musk, tuberose, and dust, lots and lots of dust.

  “You don’t open your windows much, do you?”

  “There’s not a lot of fresh air in Piazza Sannazzaro. Maybe at night, when the traffic from the grotto quietens down.”

  They sat down on a couple of chairs overlooking the sea that was invisible to Blanca. The detective slipped on a pair of thin gloves and opened the package, taking care not to rip the wrapping paper, and lifted like a belated trophy the recording of Vialdi’s last concert. The dedication read To my Julia, whom I adore, Gennaro.

  “While I was driving myself crazy to find it, this damned thing was fast asleep, waiting for us just a short walk from the police station. Thanks to Nini. It was mailed from the post office closest to the Piazza Garibaldi train station.”

  “Listen, we should just be grateful that Nini didn’t lose the receipt. Organization isn’t her strong suit. Julia Marin must have mailed it to me just before catching her train back to Verona. Before going to meet her death at the Bentegodi stadium. ‘Or else I’ll surprise you, who can say?’ is what she said to me during our first and only conversation. She surprised me all right, and how. There are so many things I wish I could ask her. I wish I could talk to her.”

  “That won’t be possible. Now we can only listen.”

  “We’ll listen to it the first time together, then I’m going to need some suitable headphones.”

  “All I have are these MP3 earbuds.”

  “They may not be particularly suitable, but my good ones are buried under the rubble.”

  The recording was of poor quality, and certainly justified the idea that someone had judged it inadequate for selections for a live album.

  Liguori came away with nothing, except for the clear idea that he’d never buy the record.

  Blanca was transformed, her complexion shifted to a light pink hue, her movements once again came to match her intentions. Toward the end of the recording, she froze.

  “Go back a minute.” Liguori did as he was asked, for all the “agains” that followed.

  It seemed to the detective that Blanca was interested in a meaningless detail. At the end of the concert, a male voice asked Vialdi: He’s waiting for you, do you want me to talk to him? And Vialdi replied: Gigi, be a good boy, you know that after the concert I always want to be alone.

  Blanca slipped the earbuds into her ears, let Liguori’s hand guide hers to the controls, and sat there in a state of enchantment deciphering something that struck her as impossible.

  58.

  Counselor Luigi D’Amore welcomed Martusciello as if he hadn’t been waiting for him to arrive for close to two hours.

  “I wonder if this guy takes that smile off at least to go to sleep,” the captain thought, then picked one of his own that didn’t turn out very well. “Buon giorno, Counselor, you came to call on me earlier than expected.”

  “Buon giorno, Captain, I imagine you’re referring to the time of morning. I know that you’re an early riser in terms of your arrival in the office, so I chose to come a little beforehand, but I haven’t been waiting long. Even though I’m hardly a slave to duty, I do have office hours to keep, hence the haste.”

  “I was referring to the date, we only met recently.”

  “I wanted to inform you that after our recent chat I went over the documentation of my client, Jerry Vialdi, with some care, and I happened to notice a number of notable variations in terms of his personal wealth.”

  “Ex-client, Counselor, but I’m sure Vialdi will forgive the mistake: the dead are very even-tempered.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I was just saying that, even as you keep front and center the important lead of a serial killer, perhaps it’s possible to extend your line of investigation to include a likely extortion.”

  “Explain this to me clearly: you’re saying that you’d noticed that your client’s accounts were seesawing in a way that you found inexplicable?”

  “That’s exactly right, Captain.”

  “Damn, better than a CPA!”

  “Captain, I was responsible for all the interests of my ex-client.”

  “I understand. So you believe that the victim was laying out substantial sums for what would appear to have been a case of blackmail.”

  “I can even tell you more about that: there had been a lawsuit underway for plagiarism, then the recording company that was bringing the suit decided to withdraw it. That’s as far as the courts are concerned, more than that I couldn’t say.”

  “That’s right, the dead don’t hold grudges. I thank you for this spontaneous offer of information, which by the way opens a whole new calzone that has nothing to do with me; I would invite you to report this new information to Captain Malanò, who I feel sure will be appreciative. For the moment, I’m looking into a burglary. You know, a small crew of professional thieves broke into the apartment of Sergeant Blanca Occhiuzzi and wrecked the place. This slap in the face of a close colleague, legally blind, by the way, really ticked me off, so let me assure you that I will neither sleep nor rest until I track down the guilty parties, who of course had nothing to do with the death or your client.” He gave Luigi D’Amore a long hard stare. “Or am I wrong?”

  It dawned on the lawyer that Martusciello was less of a village donkey than rumor would have it. The captain was either offering him a deal or laying a trap for him.

  “And you want me
to tell you?”

  “Yes, I prefer to determine myself the terms of any bartering that may take place.”

  Martusciello was left alone to ponder the conversation that had just taken place. He told himself that they must have something that they didn’t realize they even had. That must be the explanation: otherwise the lawyer would never have put the information about Vialdi’s personal wealth on display, nor would he have tried to draw attention to an extortion attempt that made no sense whatsoever.

  59.

  On the other hand, killing you was simply dictated by circumstances, my dear lady. A whirlwind already set spinning, a slight shortness of breath after a long run.

  No amorous wrath for you.

  I never could stand your benign calm, you accepted your jailer’s infamous words and turned them into a lullaby.

  All the same, your young teacher of wicked hopes never spared you the infliction of his wounds, it’s just that before his eyes you broke them down and turned them into slight misdemeanors, sheer momentary distractions from a higher good.

  You beautified a poverty-stricken landscape, every encounter for you was beautiful. Simply beautiful.

  You stripped away the foliage of his mistreatment the way you might with a vegetable. You told me that yourself. So long, betrayals, insults, small-time annoyances, goodbye as well to the distasteful depth of lies, abuses, and crimes. So long, insults, certainly less than what he had offered me. What remained to you was the little jewel of the juicy flesh, and you swallowed it, letting him know that that was the only meal he had ever offered to you.

  And he believed you.

  I was following you and the other idiot who was following behind the two of you. Just think of it, it’s almost funny: a two-bit parade. Jerry and Julia, a couple off the top of a wedding cake, Maria Datri, the mother of a none-too-numerous family, chasing after you, and me bringing up the rear of the procession.