“Got in a scrape.”
The druggie, that Bastiani, is in the ambulance. Apparently, he’s okay. The doctor says he only has a few superficial fractures. They’ll take him to the ER to make sure, but the reason he said those ridiculous things isn’t a concussion, but a hearty dose of heroin that is still merrily circulating in his brain. Enzo listens to him as he watches Ekaterina’s long, slim fingers tending to the patient. Maybe he could take advantage of the moment to ask her if . . .
“Are you doing okay?” the doctor asks him.
Enzo thinks about it.
“Sometimes I have a pain here,” he says, pointing to his left elbow.
“I meant tonight, is everything all right with you?”
“Tonight it’s not bothering me, it does occasionally, when the weather changes.”
“Okay then, we’re off.”
The doctor climbs in. The door is about to close. Enzo has to speak to her. The door is almost shut. Yes, he has to speak to her. Say something to her. It’s closing. I’ll tell her that . . . Closed.
The ambulance leaves.
Shit.
“Are you the one who called for assistance?”
Enzo turns.
The carabinieri.
“I should have said something to her, shit.”
“Sorry, what’s that?”
McClane is standing in the rain. He takes off his cap and wipes his face. Bad night, Lieutenant. But it’s not so bad when it rains. You don’t see this shitty town’s housing complexes, and you can pretend that there are skyscrapers and streets full of cars under that downpour. And there’s always a scene with a policeman in the rain. The cop beside him hands him a cup of coffee. In the end, it’s a dirty job. But someone has to do it, Central.
“Did you hear me? Are you the one who called for assistance?”
“Affirmative, agent.”
“I’m not an agent, I’m a police officer. See the uniform?”
Assholes.
“You just need to rest,” says Alice, who is sitting beside him.
Sandro looks around and doesn’t recognize the room he’s in. It’s all white, and it looks like a spaceship. That guy in the documentary who said he was abducted by aliens described a similar place.
“Just rest,” Alice says again.
Sometimes a young woman whom he doesn’t know is superimposed on her. She has blonde hair and pale-blue eyes. She speaks with a strange accent that comes and goes. She looks at him for a few seconds, then Alice returns.
“You’ll see, everything will be all right,” says one of the two of them.
“Are you an idiot?”
Betti has a vein on her neck that sometimes swells and looks horrible. It usually does that when she’s angry. Maybe it pumps the blood to her brain.
“I was just trying to find that fucking phone.”
“And if he saw you?”
“He didn’t see me! Don’t you listen to me when I talk?”
“How do you know he didn’t see you?”
“Betti, for Chrissake, I told you he didn’t see me!”
“But the phone wasn’t there?”
“No, goddammit. That shitty phone wasn’t there.”
“Okay, but then . . .”
The doorbell. They plunge into silence and look into each other’s eyes. It’s clear who it is. They both know. Betti goes to the window. Just to confirm, merely a formality. Because it’s him. She knows it even before she sees him. Even before she sees his profile in the rain. Standing in front of their gate.
“It’s him,” she says.
“Oh shit.”
“Maybe he just wants to talk.”
“Yeah sure, it seems like just the perfect evening,” says Maurizio. “He definitely came to relive some old memories.”
“Try to stay calm and fix yourself up.”
“I have a cut on my forehead. How the fuck do you expect me to fix myself up?”
“Make up a story then.”
“You know what I’ll do if . . .”
“Stop it!” The vein is pulsing even harder. “I have to open the door.”
Betti turns the knob and presses the button for the small gate. Enrico walks slowly. He doesn’t seem to care about the rain. He climbs the steps. His eyes are wide open, as if he were possessed by a demon. He doesn’t say a word. He goes inside. Maurizio and Betti just stare at him, waiting for him to say something. But he doesn’t speak. He walks slowly into the hall, toward the living room. He leaves a trail of mud in his wake. Betti closes the front door and follows him. Maurizio keeps dabbing at his cut. Enrico stands beside the coffee table. He’s facing the window. His back to them. The curtain does not allow them to see his face reflected in the glass. He remains silent.
“Enrico?” Betti says.
He doesn’t answer. He reaches into his pocket. He takes something out and sets it on the table.
Alice’s phone.
Each glass of grappa burns less, while continuing to deliver that nice warm feeling. Chiara has almost forgotten about everything else. About Gibo, the beautician, her parents who seem to have a big problem with Enrico. Staying here with Peter and the other guys wouldn’t be so bad. Some are from Bulgaria, some from Ukraine, and one from Moldova. They work at a construction site. They’re even working tomorrow, which is Sunday. The sooner they finish the better, because not one among them is a legal employee. They sleep in a warehouse.
And then the door opens.
Black trench coat belted at the waist, red purse on her arm. Her silver hair gathered up in a chignon. The signature pearls on her ears and around her neck.
Gloria closes her umbrella and smiles at Chiara.
Eleven
The rain beating against the windowpanes is the only sound in Maurizio and Betti Germano’s living room.
Enrico still has his back to them. He’s opened the curtain and is staring out the window. The almond tree is now bare. That evening, ten years ago, in that garden, it was in bloom. He was dancing with Betti, Alice was with them. A party, with colored paper plates, colored paper cups, music.
A few hours later Alice would be killed and his life would be plunged into a place he would never climb out of. A crevasse, a well. An abyss. For years he would wonder if he should seek help from his friends. If he should go back and ask them to lighten that load. His friends.
“Maybe it’s time you said something,” Betti says.
Enrico waits. He’s sopping wet. A puddle of water has formed around him on the living room floor. Rain lashes the windows.
“The first thing I asked myself was whether you knew about it.” He brushes the glass with wet fingers. “But you always know everything, don’t you, Betti? So you knew about that too. And you didn’t tell me.”
“If anyone should have told you . . .” Maurizio tries to say.
“It certainly wasn’t you,” Enrico cuts him off. He still has his back turned. “According to what’s in those texts, it seems Alice was the only one who wanted to tell me.” He turns around finally. His face is strained, tense. “Only I argued with her. I didn’t even give her a chance to speak.”
“It’s not your fault if . . .” Maurizio tries again.
“The second thing I wondered is how the hell could you, Maurizio, write her those messages and then look me in the eye. All those ‘I love you,’ all those ‘I can’t live without you,’ all those good intentions to drop everything and go away with her, as if you were a couple of kids running off for the weekend. And I wondered, reading that crap, if you seriously meant it. If you really believed it or were only bullshitting Alice the way you’ve bullshitted me and everyone around you your whole shitty fucking life.”
Thunder. The pounding rain. Betti has sat down. She looks defeated, crushed by a weight she can no longer bear. Maurizio is standing there, holding the cloth to his head and dabbing at the cut. Enrico looks at the bloodstained cloth.
“The security guard says Sandro is okay and that he’s convinced he wa
s hit by the car because he’d forgotten to set the hand brake. Sandro told him that for a moment he thought he saw someone in the car. But he wasn’t lucid, he had too much heroin in his body and kept seeing things that weren’t there. While they were taking him to the hospital, he kept talking to someone, so he must have been certain he’d had another hallucination. I wonder why I’m not so sure, Maurizio.”
The rain. Pounding.
“But he didn’t have it, the phone,” Enrico continues. “His mother had it. Imagine that? It was Luciana who sent me those messages.”
The rain. Beating down.
Enrico goes over to Betti.
“You’re silent, Betti. Usually you’re not. Usually you always have something to say. I know what you’re waiting for. I know you see where I’m going. What the third thing I wondered about is. Am I right? Because you knew about that too. It’s clear now. And I get the feeling you stayed with him despite everything, just to cover up what happened. Because I know that in some way it concerns you. Nothing to say? Still not time to talk? Fine. I’ll go on then. Just think, Sandro’s mother, who kept this phone with her for all these years, convinced that I alone should read the truth about Alice and Maurizio, didn’t understand the most important thing. Because she didn’t know who Mr. Toby was.”
The rain. Beating down.
“It’s one of the messages that was received,” Enrico says, picking up the phone and scrolling through the menus. “You should recognize it, Maurizio, you sent it. That’s why you asked me those things about her phone, right? That’s why you were worried that someone might have it, isn’t it? Go ahead, read it if you don’t remember.” He hands him the phone.
“I remember it.”
“Then would you kindly read it to all of us?”
Maurizio’s eyes are fixed on the text.
“Is there a problem? Something you don’t understand that keeps you from reading it?”
“No. It’s that . . . Betti, do you want . . .”
“Read it,” Enrico orders him.
“I . . .”
“Read the message,” Betti says.
“‘You left Mr. Toby in the bathroom, when you did that psycho number. I’ll bring him to you tomorrow. I love you.’”
“Mr. Toby,” Enrico says with enthusiasm, as if he had just made a sensational discovery. “The very one. Alice’s turtle-shaped pendant. The same one Giancarlo told the police he’d found the Half-Wit holding, which was considered proof that the dumb beast, the monster, had attacked Alice that night in the woods.”
Rain. Beating. Down.
“And there it is, the third thing I wondered as I read the messages preserved in the memory of her phone. How is it possible that Mr. Toby was teleported, all by himself, from your bathroom, where Alice was the night of the party, the night she was killed, to the Half-Wit’s house? Because if he didn’t get there by himself, then it would mean that someone had to have brought him there. Or would anyone like to tell me that the Half-Wit suddenly left the woods and came out here to take it, out of the blue, for no fucking reason? And since you, my dear friend Maurizio who always brought me focaccias, knew where that pendant was, because you sent that message while Alice was probably still in the car with me, one would think that it was you who brought him there. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Why would you have done that?”
“That’s enough,” Betti breaks in. “Maurizio had an affair with Alice and I knew about it. Like I’ve always known about his affairs. But if you think he killed her because she wanted to leave him, or that I killed her because he wanted to leave me, then you’re wrong, Enrico. That’s not how things went.”
“How then, Betti? You have to tell me, it affects me too. For ten years it’s affected me.”
“I know.”
“I need a drink,” says Maurizio. He goes over to a cabinet, takes a glass, fills it halfway, and downs it. “Want some, Erri?”
“Pour a glass for everyone,” Betti says.
“He’s a shit, definitely a shit. But she at times is really hard to take.”
Chiara is in the car with her grandmother. Gloria arrived shortly after Chiara texted her, since she had already left. Because, evidently, she’s better than others at being able to know when someone needs her. Chiara finally manages to get it all out. They took a drive, just to break the ice, after Gloria found her at the bar. Her grandmother told her that she smelled of grappa. Chiara rolled the window down to clear the air, but the rain soaked her so she rolled it back up. Finally, Gloria pulled over on Chiara’s street. Nearby there’s a small park with swings where Chiara always went with her father when she was little. It would be nice to sit there in the rain, swinging back and forth, Chiara thought.
“How can anyone be around her without feeling oppressed by her sadness?” Chiara said to her grandmother. “She’s always like that, always worried, always obsessive. It’s as if there was a cloud over our house. The air is always so heavy that it’s normal to want to get away. So why won’t they let me go, like they let Margherita leave? She got out of there. And now I don’t know why she will not even answer me anymore.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I wanted to know if she at least knew what was going on. Why everything has to be so complicated and difficult. Why can’t we ever talk about you, for example? Why do I have to spend a shitty night like this, and believe me it was really shitty, and not feel like going home even under these circumstances? I had a fight with my boyfriend, who apparently wasn’t even my boyfriend, and the thing that bugs me the most is to have to admit it to her. And him, that shit, with the beautician, can you imagine? That’s why he’s always so tan. How pathetic. Should I tell her? At the very least she’ll have an attack of nerves and I don’t want to be there alone with her when she has a meltdown. Why doesn’t anybody care about my nerves?”
“Is that why you reached out to me?”
“I didn’t know who to call, okay?”
“I don’t mean tonight. You reached out to me because you realized that there’s something wrong in your family and you thought I could help you understand what it is.”
“Yeah.”
“You see, this has been a topic of much disagreement between me and your mother.”
“Then you talk to each other?”
“It would be more correct to say that I turn up, sometimes.”
“She says you always want things done your way, that she keeps you away from us because otherwise we’d all have to do what you say. That you’re intrusive and you want to teach her how to manage her family. That’s why she doesn’t want you around.”
“She’s wrong about a lot of things, Chiara. She keeps getting it wrong. She’s wrong to think she can protect you that way, because she doesn’t understand that by doing so she drives you away. She’s wrong to stay with him, because he’s nothing but a shit, as you say, a pathetic loser. And she did the wrong thing with your sister. She shouldn’t have split you up. You’re part of this family; you should have known everything from the start.”
Gloria seems lost in thought as she talks.
“What should I have known?”
“What’s that?”
“You said I should have known from the start. Known what?”
“I’m not the one who should tell you; they’d never forgive me.”
“She won’t tell me, she never tells me anything. All she does is find fault with me, tell me what to do. What should I know?”
“It’s not right for me to be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“It should . . .”
“Grandma, if you don’t tell me I’m getting out of this car and, like her, I swear I won’t ever speak to you again.”
Gloria seems to count the raindrops falling on the Alfa’s windshield. Then she looks at Chiara.
“What the hell, you should have known a long time ago. After all, you were there that night too.”
“What night, Grandma? What are y
ou talking about? Where was I too?”
Gloria opens the glove compartment and takes out a pack of cigarettes. She offers one to Chiara and lights up. She lowers the window a crack to let the smoke out.
Chiara waits for what’s coming.
“Do you remember anything about the day that girl, Alice Bastiani, was killed?”
“Margherita and I were with you. You took us to the movies, in Rome.”
“Your parents were having a party at their house. So that afternoon I came by to pick you up. I got to town, drove to the bar. You two were there waiting for me. Margherita was confused, angry. She’d found out about something that upset her, in much the same way that you found out tonight. Your father, Chiara. He’s always been the problem. Margherita had discovered that he was secretly seeing someone else. And that he’d told the girl he wanted to leave his family to go away with her. She’d learned about it by accident and had spoken to me about it. She didn’t know what to do about your mother. Just like you. She was really afraid that your father would leave you. That he would abandon you. That he preferred that other girl to all of you. Margherita was a delightful, sunny girl. She knew nothing about hatred. But it was that girl who made her come to know it. The girl who was going to take your father away.”
PART FOUR
AT THE END OF THE NIGHT
One
Chiara is asleep in the car seat in back. Betti had insisted she have one installed and Gloria had eventually given in, even if that childish accessory didn’t match the Alfa’s style. And style is an important element in life. She’d picked up the girls and brought them to Rome. An afternoon of shopping and then a movie, at Warner Village—she and Chiara an animated feature with a lot of little animals talking and dancing, Margherita a film about a madman slaughtering a group of kids with a chainsaw. Burgers, fries, a stroll through the bookstore, and a few games at the arcade, then back to the car. It’s not the long drive that bothers Gloria. Of course not. It’s the strange melancholy surrounding Margherita that worries her. She isn’t talking much, and she’s withdrawn into herself with those earbuds stuck in her ears. It’s clear she’s going through a bad period. For teenagers, it’s the norm. Margherita is a beautiful girl. More beautiful than her mother. Beautiful as only Gloria, in her day, was. The boys will go crazy over her, that’s for sure. But males have the unfortunate quality of being mentally deficient. So as soon as Chiara falls asleep in that silly seat, Gloria decides to try and put the girl at ease. And it works. Margherita tells her what’s been bothering her.
The Night of the Moths Page 17