The Crocodile (World Noir)

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  “Prego, signora, prego. Come right in. Was there something you needed?”

  She walked into the office hesitantly. “I was looking for Inspector Lojacono. Is he not here?”

  The man’s disappointment was obvious. “No, he’s not. I’m Sergeant Giuffrè, his colleague. If I can be helpful in any way . . .”

  Letizia stepped closer. The man was courteous, and perhaps he could provide her with some information.

  “My name is Letizia and I own the trattoria in the Via San Giuseppe, not far from here. Pepp—uh, Inspector Lojacono always dines with us in the evening. Since he hasn’t been around in a few days, well, we, that is, the staff and I, we were a little worried. The young people wondered if he was sick, or if . . . uh, that is . . . whether he might have had to leave town because of something that happened back home, where his family lives?”

  Giuffrè knew the way the world worked, and to some extent he knew women as well. It didn’t take him much more than a fraction of a second to figure out that the concerns of the restaurant staff were all concentrated in the person now standing before him.

  “No, signora, you can all rest easy at the restaurant. Lojacono is fine, he hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s working on a case right now, and it’s taking all his time. He’s working hard, that’s all, and most of the day he’s not in the office at all.”

  Letizia nodded, both reassured and puzzled. Finally she screwed up her courage and asked, “A case? Are you sure? It’s just that, you see, he told me . . . he told us that he wasn’t supposed to work . . . that is, he wasn’t assigned to investigative work. In fact, he said that he was strictly relegated to office work.”

  The sergeant’s curiosity was piqued. Such a good-looking woman, not only attractive but also the owner of a restaurant that everyone was talking about, one of the few fashionable establishments in that part of town. And she was so unmistakably smitten with Lojacono, a man who was always threadbare and rumpled and had a personality that was as prickly as a cactus. There’s no explaining it: women are an unfathomable mystery and that’s a fact, he decided.

  “Well, he told you the truth, signo’. But then what happened is that, in this particular case, he turned out to be the only one with any idea of how to proceed. Of course, he and I did talk it over, and I have to say, all modesty aside, the most important insights probably came from yours truly. However it happened, the prosecutor in charge decided to bring him in on the investigation directly and she summoned him to police headquarters. And that’s where he’s been ever since, practically full-time.”

  Letizia took in this new information, once again with mixed feelings: Peppuccio was finally back doing the kind of work he felt he’d been born to do, and she knew that he had missed it much more than he’d ever been willing to admit. But now he was in close contact with that female prosecutor, the one about whom he had said: “she’s not just pretty, she also knows what she’s doing.”

  She felt an urgent need to leave and hurry back to the safety and tranquility of her trattoria.

  “I understand. Well, if you’d be so kind, please tell him that I dropped by when you talk to him.”

  She turned on her heel, took a few steps, then stopped and came back.

  “Actually, forget about it entirely. Don’t tell him anything about me coming by. Ah, these are for you, thanks again and arrivederci.”

  She fled, leaving Giuffrè behind her, openmouthed at the unexpected and twofold gift of a tray of pastries and the sight of a marvelous derriere disappearing into the distance at a trot.

  CHAPTER 51

  The mansion block where De Matteis lived was part of an elegant complex in the most exclusive quarter of the city. As Piras rode along the tree-lined streets, designed to ensure that the flats were shaded by leafy foliage, she reflected on the fact that isolation and privacy might sometimes be to the detriment of security, as the facts had made so sadly clear.

  It was an observation she’d already had occasion to make when she’d participated in the forensic investigation of the scene of Giada’s murder. Lots of greenery, lights that illuminated only the sidewalks, a large dark area where a recently built swimming pool awaited its summertime inauguration: dozens of places where a wrongdoer could lurk in hiding.

  As her driver approached the front door where the girl had been murdered, Piras thought about the sound of De Matteis’s voice on the phone when she had called her to ask for a meeting: metallic and distant. She felt as if she were talking to an answering machine. She was almost tempted to think that the woman didn’t care a damn about what was going on around her, including the investigation into her daughter’s murder.

  She spoke her name into the buzzer and went upstairs to the second floor. A black woman in a checked dress and white apron opened the door and ushered her into a large living room. One of the walls was glass from floor to ceiling, offering a spectacular panoramic view.

  Even on a grey day like this one, tormented by a relentless rain of varying intensity, the sea, the mountain, the peninsula, and the island, whose silhouette was reminiscent of the profile of a woman’s face with her hair cascading down, were a canvas whose beauty clutched at the heart and took your breath away. Piras thought to herself, as she had many times before, that the city looked out at that landscape with a certain impatience: the way an old and unsightly woman might open an armoire and gaze at the dress, now yellowed with age, that she’d worn to her debutante ball.

  De Matteis walked in, saying goodbye to someone on the phone and making no secret of her annoyance as she ended the conversation.

  “Excuse me, dottoressa. One of my so-called girlfriends, who keep persecuting me with their fake comforting phone calls. All they really want is a little gossip to trade during their hour-long chat fests. I know, I’ve done it myself: car crashes, divorces, bankruptcies, cheating husbands and wives. Always the same dance, as long as there’s some nugget worth sharing. Please, make yourself comfortable.”

  Piras took a seat on the sofa, facing De Matteis, who had sat down in an armchair. She was no longer wearing dark glasses and Piras could finally scrutinize her gaze, but it didn’t do a lot of good: the woman’s eyes were completely devoid of expression.

  “Signora, you may well be wondering what else we have to say to each other after our initial meeting in police headquarters, and why I asked to see you at your home. The reason is simple, and I’ll come right to the point: I am here to ask for your help. We have a new development that might possibly bring us close to a solution, and you may be able to provide us with some crucial information.”

  De Matteis heaved a sigh. “Dottoressa, I’m so tired. No, it’s not only that I’m tired. It’s that I don’t care anymore. My heart is dead. I wake up, I get dressed, I keep everything in order, as you can see, the apartment, my help. I fill my days, I talk to my accountant, I supervise the charitable activities of the foundation named after my father. I use every minute of my day, to try to fill up the space . . . the space that’s been left empty. I always try to have something to do. But if I look inside myself, I find nothing. If I look up, peer beyond the next urgent thing, the practical nature of whatever I’m doing, there’s nothing left. I have to watch out because if I stop and ask myself the reason, the motive for doing all this, then my only option is to put an end to it all, there and then.”

  Piras understood perfectly. She remembered the days and weeks that followed Carlo’s death as if in a dream, a life lived through a mist of fog; she could clearly recall how unreal it felt to do a thousand trivial daily things while constantly bearing that immense burden in one’s heart.

  “Believe me, I have some idea of what you’re going through. I went through a loss of this kind many years ago, and I can remember the feeling very well. But we’ve got a murderer to catch. And we need your help to catch him.”

  De Matteis grimaced. “I really don’t see what help I can provide. You see, in the past several days I’ve thought deeply, and I’ve discovered a terrible truth ab
out myself: I’ve lived my life based on two emotions, which, when all is said and done, were two faces of a single emotion. Love for my daughter, and hatred for her father. The two things that sustained me; my only two topics of conversation. Giada’s education and upbringing, my responsibility for seeing to that alone; and my constant resentment towards this man who humiliated me as a woman and as a mother, abandoning us to flee to another country in the company of a cheap prostitute. Now, suddenly, I’ve lost everything. My daughter, and my pride in watching her grow up to be beautiful, caring, sensitive, and intelligent; and paradoxically, at the same time, her father, whom I no longer have any reason to loathe. I not only lost my daughter, dottoressa, I also lost myself, the person I’ve been until now. So let me tell you, I am deeply indifferent to anything you might be about to tell me, believe me.”

  Piras smiled sadly. “I asked to see you here, in your home, for a specific reason, aside from the fact that this is an informal meeting. Let’s call it my womanly wiles. A hostess in her own home cannot simply turn and walk out of the door the way you did at police headquarters; here, in your own living room, you’re obliged to hear me out. And I do have something to tell you.”

  As raindrops carried by a listless wind streaked the plate glass, distorting and defacing the view of the bay, Piras recounted the story of a nurse who had an affair with a married man; of a doctor, still young and ambitious, who wanted an office in the fashionable center of town. She told her about an address on a nondescript street in a transient neighborhood, about young women eager to rid themselves of what they’d come to think of as nothing more than a burden. She told her about the duo’s four years working together, about how that period came to an end with an awkward, unplanned pregnancy that resulted, however, in a baby boy who was wanted and loved, in spite of all the challenges.

  De Matteis sat bolt upright, listening, without any change in expression. When Piras had finished speaking, she sat for a moment in silence.

  Then she said, “How ironic. Just think, Rinaldi’s now famous all over the city for his fertility treatments. It’s entirely possible that among his clients are some of the girls who went to see him back then for the opposite problem.”

  “In any case, if Inspector Lojacono’s theory is correct—that the Crocodile’s intended victims are you three and not your children—then you’re the missing piece of the puzzle. I’m here to ask you to make an extra effort, signora: I’d like you to try to remember whether, in the years between 1992 and 1996, you had any contact with this business of Lorusso’s and Rinaldi’s. Any interaction, direct or indirect. Please.”

  The silence dragged on. Piras couldn’t tell, as she looked at De Matteis’s rigid expression, whether she was making an effort to remember, or if she was thinking about something else, or whether she was simply searching for the right words to put an end to the conversation. At last, she spoke.

  “I never got my degree, and I had absolutely no interest in education. But my father did set one condition on the money he gave me: I had to study. So I was still enrolled, technically, and I’d make sure to sit my course exams every so often until, in the end, I got married in 1998 when I was pregnant with Giada. At that point, my father had resigned himself to the situation, too.”

  Piras waited, relieved that De Matteis was finally reconstructing her memories.

  “Back then, we had a lot less fun. We tried things out a little at a time. It wasn’t the way it is these days; today, a fourteen-year-old girl could teach us things. Why, I’ve read text messages that girlfriends of Giada’s sent her that would . . . But let’s forget about that. We got started at an older age, and we were far more naïve, and as a result some of us got ourselves into trouble. And among the girls of what we used to call good families, it was a much more common occurrence. Of course, we couldn’t go to a hospital or a private clinic; our parents were sure to find out, and they’d have heart attacks at the very least. They belonged to a generation that was much less open than we are to dialogue and forgiveness.”

  She paused to take a sip of the tea that the housekeeper had brought in. The two women looked as if they might be talking about the weather, or their holidays.

  “It had never happened to me, until Giada. And at that point I wanted a home of my own, and he was handsome as could be and rich to boot, so why not? But it did happen to plenty of my girlfriends, many of them now anti-abortion crusaders. There was an address and a phone number circulating among us, though none of us knew exactly who the doctor was. I’d heard that he was good, fast, and, most important, very discreet.”

  Piras took in every word, her attention focused closely. She was afraid that if she asked questions, the woman might shut down again. But still, she needed to narrow the field.

  “And thinking back to that period, do you remember having contact with any woman who might have known him in any way?”

  “I never went there, not even to accompany any of my girlfriends. I vaguely remember that it must have been on the street you mentioned, and I remember that fact because it wasn’t far from the university, but at the same time it wasn’t so close that you might happen to pass by, and I decided that the choice of location must have been intentional. But it could have been a different street number, and we might be talking about two different things, I couldn’t say.”

  Piras made one last desperate effort.

  “And can you remember if you recommended him to anyone, possibly a girl from outside your social circle? I don’t know, some girl you’d only met once or twice, at the university or at the beach, anywhere else . . .”

  De Matteis, who was finishing her tea, furrowed her brow. She carefully set down the cup and dabbed at her lips with an embroidered napkin. Then she turned to look at Piras as if she were seeing her for the first time.

  “You know, now that you make me think about it . . . I couldn’t say exactly when, but not too long before I quit school entirely, so it must have been in 1996 when I sat my last exams . . . There was a girl there, cute, from out of town. She was young, much younger than me, I’d say early twenties, maybe twenty-two. We used to hang out, chatting, with a bunch of other girls, and we hit it off. We never saw each other off campus. One day she called me at home. I didn’t even remember who she was—she had to remind me. And she told me that . . . yes, in short, that she needed that address and number.”

  Piras held her breath. A gust of rain splashed against the plate glass.

  “I remember her: a little wisp of a voice, a delicate face. She wasn’t from here. You could hear the accent, but ever so slight.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  De Matteis shrugged her shoulders.

  “I decided to give her a hand. I felt sorry for her. Who knows what son of a bitch had wormed his way into her heart. I got the information and gave it to her.”

  Piras gave a long sigh and then asked, “Do you remember this girl’s last name? Or the town she came from, or anything else that could help us to find her?”

  De Matteis shook her head decisively. “I don’t think I ever even knew her last name. We were taking different courses and anyway, like I told you, I didn’t spend much time at the university. It’s been so many years, I can’t even imagine how I came up with the memory just now.”

  Piras couldn’t conceal an expression of bitter disappointment. She had felt she was so close to the solution and now she saw it slipping through her fingers again. How could she track down that girl and complete the circle without more information?

  Then suddenly De Matteis said, “But I do remember her first name. She had the same name as the main character of my favourite novel, Il resto di niente. Her name was Eleonora.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Eleonora finishes writing and gets wearily to her feet.

  Her fever has been rising relentlessly over the past few days. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness has grown flimsy; she can no longer distinguish between thoughts and dreams.

  Earlier, she’d
been stretched out on the bed, flat on her back. The pain has faded from stabbing to dull, as if her weakness and listlessness had struck some sort of pity into it. She should have taken her medicine but the scrap of paper with the name of the antibiotic that the doctor dictated over the phone is still at the bottom of her purse, forgotten.

  She looks around: her bedroom looks like a dump. Remnants of food she tried to eat, half-finished drinks, dirty clothing. It’s obvious from every detail that she no longer has any desire to live, Eleonora thinks.

  It’s odd, what happened to her. Until she made her way to the address that her classmate at the university gave her and she climbed the stairs of that building, deep down she’d never really thought about the baby. She’d only thought about the man she’d loved, about what he’d given her and what he’d taken away. She’d thought about her father and her mother, about how they’d react, about what they’d say to her. She’d thought about herself, about what would become of her, about what she ought and ought not to do. She’d even thought about the people from her hometown, about the gossip that would undermine her parents’ respectability.

  But she’d never thought about the baby.

  A clump of cells deep in her belly, like a piece of undigested food, something to be expelled as soon as possible, and then forgotten.

  A piece of lost love, or a piece of love that never really existed except for in her imagination, the fantasy of a small-town girl living in a big city for the first time.

  A mistaken dream, an idea of happiness posited at exactly the wrong moment.

  An impediment, an insurmountable obstacle lying between her and the attainment of her dreams.