The Crocodile (World Noir)

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Her family and her hometown surface in her mind. And she realizes how long it’s been since she bothered to think of them. What used to seem like a prison, an entangling net of pointless constraints, appearances, and formalities, suddenly looks like a safe haven, but too far across stormy waters to be reached. Perhaps she was wrong to leave. But now it’s too late, in any case.

  She changes her clothes, every gesture slow and listless. She’d happily flop down on to the bed again, to sleep and sleep, to see if she could burrow into a place of peace amid her convulsive, agitated dreams.

  But she can’t do that. She has to solve her quandary, at least in part. The most important part, the most urgent part. How paradoxical, she thinks: being left without him has given her the strength to do what he wanted in order to stay with her.

  She starts laughing, softly. Soon her laughter grows in strength, until she is left wrung out and collapses on to a chair, bursting into tears.

  At last she recovers and gets to her feet. She picks up her handbag, rummages inside it, and finds a crumpled scrap of paper. On it is a name and a phone number. She remembers scrawling down that information with a pencil.

  A sunlit morning at the university, her merry classmate catching up on missed studies. Wealthy, happy, and full of irony—one of so many female students spending the winter at school. Daddy’s happy to foot the bill, and in any case there’s a line on Italian identity cards where you’re supposed to state your occupation: you have to put something down.

  Between classes, a group of girls would chat about life, professors, and men. Not that Eleonora much enjoyed loitering there and engaging in that kind of conversation; her fellow students really did act like a flock of dumb birds. Still, that day the sun was warm and there were no dark clouds on the horizon. It was so agreeable to kill a little time like this, well aware that none of the tragedies the other girls were talking about would ever even graze her. To think about it now, sitting on the edge of her bed with that scrap of paper in her hand, prompted a stab of melancholy in Eleonora’s heart and a surge of regret at her lost happiness.

  Her classmate was the oldest girl in the group. She acted like the queen of the world, well versed in everything. She knew the city and all its most prominent citizens; she boasted that she could reach out to anyone at any time of the day or night. And she had told them, as a demonstration of her power, a story that now came rushing back to Eleonora—as arrogant and abrupt as a slap in the face.

  She turns the scrap of paper over in her hands. She tries to recall what thought, or what premonition, had led her to jot down that girl’s name and number. Once or twice she’d passed her in the halls of the school, and they’d exchanged a fleeting smile. Nothing more.

  And now, she muses, here I am. You’re right. In the end everyone, sooner or later, needs something.

  Eleonora gets to her feet and walks over to the phone.

  CHAPTER 36

  The old man gets up from the desk.

  As long as he’s been in that room, he’s done nothing but write, sleep, change his clothes, and use the bathroom. A few well-defined paths in the intervals between the long hours spent staking out places, monitoring and taking note.

  Dabbing away at the perennial tear dripping from his left eye, the old man stands motionless. His thoughts run to what he has done. Slowly, methodically, he archives it all and focuses on his next moves.

  He’s done the same thing every time: freed his mind of all the details that are no longer needed, all the things that have become superfluous, mere redundancy in light of what remains to be completed. Order, he thinks. First and foremost, order.

  The boy, the student, was in a certain sense the easiest job of all to polish off. He had calmly catalogued his movements and activities, discovering to his relief that the boy was as methodical as he was, with strict routines from which he never wavered. And one in particular: Friday night.

  Let the sky fall if it must, the boy went to his girlfriend’s flat every Friday night and only returned home quite late. First he spent time studying, then he’d shower, change, head downstairs to the garage to get out the car, drive to the far side of the city, and go up to his girlfriend’s flat. The old man suspected that the boy’s father knew nothing about the girl; from his usual safe distance he had observed the young couple arguing frantically, as she insistently begged him to do something and he assumed a wait-and-see demeanor. Given the life he led as a student, a steady routine of home and university, and the fact that the old man had never seen the girl come to his house, she could only be demanding one thing: an official introduction. Times change, the old man thinks, but only to a certain extent.

  Most likely the boy wasn’t telling his father the truth. He was probably telling him he was going over to his study-partner’s house to revise until late. It didn’t much matter: the important thing was that on Friday night he could count on the father turning in at midnight as usual, unconcerned by his son’s failure to return home.

  The old man reviews how he came to the decision that the garage was the perfect place to settle the matter. The garage door closed automatically, a minute and forty seconds after the car exited the villa’s front gate, which in turn remained open for one minute. In short, he had about fifty seconds to walk unhurriedly into the front yard, along the driveway on the side where the surveillance cameras were blinded by unpruned tree branches, check to make sure that no one was watching from the windows above, and slip into the garage.

  He’s already done it three times: dress rehearsals for a murder. A smile flits across his face at the expression. Funny.

  The inside of the garage turned out to be ideal. Spacious, big enough for two cars, though only the boy used it, because his father parked his in the space in front of the villa. Lots of clutter, a tool cabinet, and a motorcycle covered with a tarp. The old man had in fact opted for the space behind the motorcycle: a foot and a half from the driver’s door, no more. He’d promised himself never to fire from more than a yard’s distance. After all, his handgun—equipped with a silencer, to make the aim even more unpredictable—lacked the absolute precision he needed for the job.

  This time he had had a little extra assistance from the garage door remote control. Maybe the batteries were low but, for whatever reason, it only worked if held outside the car, not from the interior with the door closed. So the perfect moment had been when the boy, already behind the wheel with his seatbelt fastened, used the remote control to open the garage door before swinging the car door shut.

  Perhaps, the old man reflects, the hardest part was having to wait till dawn so he could watch the father come downstairs, still in his pajamas and with those ridiculous clogs on his feet, see him walk into the garage and come face to face with that grisly spectacle. But it was necessary, of course. Then he’d finally been able to head back to the hotel, leaving the property by the garden path, and remembering to put on his gloves. The last thing he needed was to screw things up by leaving a thumbprint on the release button of the gate, even though he knows perfectly well that his fingerprints, like his DNA, will be of no help to the cops if they have no prior records with which to compare them. But you never know, right? You never know.

  Caution, in this phase, is of the utmost importance. Caution is the key to going the distance.

  The old man has to admit that the outcome of all his work is entirely satisfactory. Everything has turned out perfectly, an impeccably clean job. But the most interesting part starts now.

  He turns to the armoire, walks solemnly towards it, and pulls the door open. He lifts the wooden base and reaches into the false bottom: a plastic tub is suspended from a hole cut into the floor of the armoire. The cleaning woman is sloppy and distracted but still, you never know, right? You never know. So it’s always a good idea to assume the worst.

  He pulls the pistol out of the plastic tub—a Beretta 71 with interchangeable barrels, specially modified to take the silencer he constructed himself, from instructions he foun
d on an English-language Slovakian website. Another brief smile at how he struggled to translate the English instructions into Italian—a much more challenging task than constructing the silencer itself. He disassembles the weapon and lovingly cleans it, oiling each part on a cloth laid out on the desktop. He must be able to rely implicitly on the gun’s flawless operation. He can’t run the risk of it misfiring at the critical moment. He reassembles it with precision, checks it methodically. He loads it. As he does, he reflects that he’ll only need to use it two more times. Not a lot of use, all things considered. He puts the gun back into the plastic tub and replaces the container where it was, hidden from the sloppy housekeeper who comes to clean the room every other day.

  He pays his bill every four days, staying under the radar of the girl at the reception desk. He has calculated that four days is the right interval to convey an impression of transience and ward off the suspicions of the staff. The old man on the third floor, always about to check out, but lingering on, resting up for his health.

  He takes a deep breath, standing in front of the armoire. Once he’s cleaned and oiled his pistol, removing all traces of its last use, he similarly sweeps clean both mind and memory, eliminating every detail concerning the student’s death. Every scrap of information is methodically removed—no longer needed. Then he catalogues everything he’ll need to know for his next project, information that he’ll flesh out in the next few days with the surveillance and investigation of even the smallest details. If you’ve come up with a technique that seems to work, he thinks, there’s no point in changing it.

  For that matter, even the television used the moniker “the Crocodile.” I’m a crocodile. Therefore, my chief characteristic must be that I’m cold-hearted.

  With one last sigh, he turns towards the window. He walks the six feet separating him from the curtains and, for the first time since he moved in, he pulls them apart, just the narrowest of openings.

  And he starts watching the opposite side of the street.

  CHAPTER 37

  Di Vincenzo returned a few minutes later. The clamoring horde of reporters, their earsplitting cries broken only by short intervals as they waited in vain for answers, had left the captain deafened. His face was ashen and expressionless. He had no idea which way to turn.

  Giuffrè had learned from his friend in the admin department that Piras would be coming sometime that morning, and that she’d called ahead to let the captain know that she expected to find him at his desk. The atmosphere was grim to say the least.

  Lojacono had waited a reasonable amount of time before he ventured out into the courtyard, where he struck up a conversation with the bespectacled young woman who had grabbed his arm for an interview on the way in. She was now sadly putting her half-empty digital recorder away. Prefacing the conversation with a disclaimer that he knew nothing about the Crocodile that she didn’t know already, he’d asked her what information she had about the latest murder.

  The journalist, a freelancer named Ornella Cresci, accepted his invitation to swing round to the local café for an espresso.

  “This story is fantastic,” she told him. “It comes at a time when—leaving aside the occasional Camorra murder in the usual parts of town—nothing interesting is going on. And all of a sudden a serial killer pops up, preying on kids, and he practically leaves a signature on the crime scene, to say nothing of the fact that he weeps as he kills. Just think about it. I see a journalism award; I see a story that goes down in history. And the cops—no offense, but it’s the blessed truth—the cops are digging into the Camorra, while the Camorra are caught completely unawares. The whole thing is a gift!”

  Lojacono prodded further. “And this last murder? What information do you have about the victim?”

  Ornella was tiny and rail-thin. Her oversized glasses probably accounted for a full third of her body weight. But once she’d established that the inspector was paying, she’d grabbed a slice of pizza and now she was devouring it ravenously.

  “Oh, he’s an ordinary kid. Outstanding student, high grade point average, but also the son of a famous doctor, and we all know how professors and chief physicians trade favors, right? He was keeping up with his coursework, no bad company that we know of, he spent his life at the university, at home, and with his girlfriend—a nice girl from out of town he’d been dating for a couple of months. Only child of a widowed father, as the saying goes. Can I have another? I forgot to eat dinner last night.”

  “Please, please, be my guest. Take your time, you’ll choke if you bolt your food. What about the father?”

  “Thanks. A glass of mineral water, sparkling, thanks. The father? A wealthy and respected gynecologist, the first choice of footballers’ wives and top-flight professionals, and a magnificent clinic in Via dei Mille, you can imagine. And you should have seen him this morning. He came out to ask us to let up the pressure a little bit, to let him grieve in peace. He was a wreck. He must be around fifty, but he looked at least a hundred. This was his only child; his wife died twenty years ago or so, and he never remarried. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from this blow. You wind up in this sort of situation and you have to wonder what the good was of devoting all that time to money, fame, and a successful career.”

  Lojacono nodded. A recurring motif.

  “And the actual murder? How can you all be so sure that this was the work of the Crocodile?”

  Ornella burst into laughter, scattering a mouthful of pizza in all directions. One elderly customer, receiving a direct hit on the lapel, glared over at her in disgust.

  “Are you joking? It was all there: the tissues, the shell casing. And, as you cops like to put it, the MO: an isolated place, a lengthy stakeout, the late hour, the quick, clean kill, plenty of time to get away, undisturbed. Nothing was missing. It was him, as true as I’m sitting here about to order a caffè macchiato. No, wait, a macchiatissimo. Or better yet, a cappuccino. May I?”

  Lojacono waved to the man at the cash register that he’d be picking up the tab. The cashier nodded, his eyes widening at the woman’s voracious appetite.

  “And how did he gain access to the garage?”

  “Ah, that’s an interesting detail. He waited for the boy to use the remote control to open the garage door the last time he put the car away, at about two in the afternoon according to what the father said. And he must have slipped in after him. From what we learned from one of your colleagues on the forensics squad who worked on the crime scene, he sat behind a motorcycle, parked and covered with a tarp. That’s where they found the tissues. This cappuccino is delicious, but maybe another spoonful of sugar or two. It appears that he waited there until about nine o’clock, when the boy came downstairs and opened the garage to get his car and go out, and that’s when he fired a shot right into the side of his head.”

  “Just one shot?”

  Ornella took a long slurp of her cappuccino. “Just one, obviously, like all the other cases. In part because, whether it’s intentional or pure luck, he always seems to be firing point-blank, just inches from the victim’s head. This time it appears that he was no more than a yard or so away. Excuse me, could you add a little more milk? Oh, you can leave that here, thanks. And the great thing is that he walks off, free and easy, on foot because they found no sign of tire tracks on the driveway except for the doctor’s car and his son’s.”

  “What do you know about the tissues?”

  “Just ordinary tissues—the kind that the African guys sell at intersections. Nothing special about them. And as far as they’re able to tell at this point, he doesn’t seem to be crying after he fires the shot, the way a real crocodile might do, not that real crocodiles shoot guns, obviously. It’s just that his eyes seem to be tearing up, which might be a case of conjunctivitis. I have allergies so I can sympathize. But what about your boss? From the little he told us, I get the feeling he’s at his wits’ end; he doesn’t know which way to turn. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Lojacono shrugged. “I co
uldn’t tell you; that’s not my line of work. And anyway, it doesn’t strike me as all that easy to get to the bottom of a case like this. You need to run down the links between the kids, establish what relationships there might have been, any other connections. Assuming there is a link, of course. This could perfectly well be a psychopath, a maniac who leaves the house with a gun in his hand and conceals himself in dark corners, waiting for someone to walk by so he can put a pistol to her head. We live in exceedingly strange times, you know.”

  Ornella had finished her cappuccino and was starting to pick absentmindedly at the savory bar snacks the barista had laid out on the counter for the fast-approaching aperitif hour. The cashier made a theatrical show of his exasperation by throwing both arms wide.

  “I guess that’s a possibility, all things considered,” Ornella said. “Anything could happen. But the idea seems to be that this guy, the Crocodile, is carrying out a plan of some kind. He doesn’t seem like someone operating on a whim. He appears to be highly organized. Don’t you think?”

  “Let me repeat: I don’t know anything about it. I was asking purely out of curiosity. Excuse me, but I have to get back to the office now. Do you want anything else?”

  “No, thanks. I try not to overeat. If you ever want more information, you could take me out to lunch or dinner. Here’s my card.”

  When he got back to the police station, Lojacono found Giuffrè swaying so much he was on the verge of leaping into the air.

  “Well, Loja’, where the fuck have you been, if you don’t mind my asking? Di Vincenzo has sent people looking for you three times now. He wants to see you in his office—immediately.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Orlando Masi thought about his father, dead now almost ten long years. He’d been a pillar of the community, a rigid man, difficult to get along with, a stranger to elation, indifferent to displays of affection. Someone who stirred fear in all those who had anything to do with him.