The Crocodile (World Noir)

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  You know how it will be: only the guilty, never the innocent.

  I’m certainly no killer: I’m here to do justice.

  And there are only two guilty parties left to punish.

  CHAPTER 66

  Anna Criscuolo, the secretary at Gallardo Construction, would happily have slept for another couple of hours.

  Last night, she let herself get sucked into watching an idiotic TV program, a reality show so beastly and vulgar that she was unable to turn off the set and go to sleep. She’d once read in a women’s magazine that hypnotic subtexts are inserted into certain shows to keep the viewers watching, placidly absorbing every minute of advertising. At the time she’d dismissed it as utter nonsense, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  But there’s one point on which the boss is absolutely intractable: starting time at the office. When he gets there in the morning, he’d better find everyone at their desks, ready to take his instructions for the day before he heads out to the various construction sites.

  Anna has been assigned the task of raising the shutters, as the engineer puts it. She has the keys to the office, so she has to open up, bring fresh air into the premises by opening the windows for a few minutes while the air conditioning system gets going, turn on the computers and photocopiers, start the coffee, turn off the answering service. The engineer has told her that these are crucial tasks, necessary to ensure that as the staff come into work, they all have the impression of a machine already humming along and they’ll get right to work without wasting time.

  Therefore, even though the firm’s offices aren’t officially open for business until 9 A.M., Anna makes sure she’s there every morning at 8:30 A.M. to present that picture of efficiency. It’s an important responsibility, the engineer always says. That may be so, but this morning she’d have happily slept in. Goddamned stupid reality show, she thinks to herself as she rummages through her bag for her keys.

  From the interior, through the door, she can hear the phone ringing. Who the hell could that be, at this hour of the morning?

  She takes her time getting the door open, waiting until the phone stops ringing. Teach them to call at the right time, she thinks with a hint of annoyance.

  Piras looks up at Lojacono and shakes her head. Still no answer. They started calling at 8 A.M., trying every five minutes, hoping that at least one of the employees might be more of an early riser than the rest.

  Piras says, perhaps more to persuade herself than for any other reason, “Maybe this is a different engineer who happens to be called Orlando Masi; or maybe he was nothing more than a friend, the only one Eleonora could think of, and that’s why she gave his name to Rinaldi as a reference; maybe the father of the baby was the old boyfriend from her hometown, the one whose name the brigadier couldn’t remember.”

  Lojacono, inscrutable, sits with his arms folded across his chest. “Maybe not. What with all the mistaken theories we’ve pursued, all the times we’ve ignored the most obvious lead, we’ve done nothing but waste time so far. We have this name and the only way we can make any progress is to pursue it. Come on, let’s keep trying to reach someone.”

  Piras shoots him a magnificent glare of hatred, then dials Gallardo Construction. On the third ring, someone at last picks up.

  As he waits, standing in the shelter of a niche in the wall, the Crocodile listens intently for sounds from the villa. After thinking it over, he selected a space in the wall around a neighboring home, because at that hour the slanting sunlight leaves that side in the shade, making it practically invisible, while still giving him a view of the garage door.

  He’s been there for an hour already, even though he knows with precision the time that the man will get his car and drive out of the gate. For the past few days the variations on his departure time have never been more than five minutes.

  The sky is leaden grey. Maybe it will rain later on, thinks the Crocodile. But later on, it will all be over.

  The conversation between Piras and the secretary at Gallardo Construction was surreal in a way. The woman obstinately refuses to provide any information about the chief engineer: neither his home address nor his cell number. She keeps telling Piras to try calling back later, that Engineer Masi will be in the office at nine.

  Piras does her best to keep her cool, but after a little while she starts to raise her voice. Lojacono notices that as she loses her temper, her Sardinian accent becomes much stronger and more distinct. At a certain point, seeing that the conversation has reached a stalemate, Lojacono has an idea and takes the phone out of her hand.

  “Good morning, signorina, this is Inspector Lojacono of the police department. I fully understand the need to protect the privacy of your employers, you’re quite right. But let’s try this: why don’t you call back, through the main switchboard number here at police headquarters? You can look it up yourself in the phone book. I could offer to give it to you myself but that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? Ask to speak to Dottoressa Laura Piras, Assistant District Attorney of the Italian Republic. That way you’ll know for certain who you’re talking to. Just one thing: let me ask you to please make that call immediately. Otherwise you’ll force us to begin lengthy and unpleasant legal proceedings, and at that point it will be painful for everyone involved.”

  Piras stares at him openmouthed. “Since when have you become such a diplomat?”

  Lojacono shrugs. “It’s just that I know women. As soon as she calls back, get the address and ask her to call the engineer. Tell her to tell him he has to get back to his house, lock himself in, and wait for us to get there. And in the meantime, tell him to open the door to no one. Absolutely no one.”

  Not two minutes later, the phone rings.

  CHAPTER 67

  He watches the man leave the house. Three minutes: right on time.

  He closes the door behind him and heads for the garage. He stops halfway there and looks up at the window of Stella’s room. This too is part of the ritual, the same thing every time it’s not raining.

  At the window Roberta looks down, with the baby in her arms. The Crocodile sees that the woman is already dressed. Excellent. The mother waves her baby’s tiny hand: Ciao, Papà, buona giornata. Have a good day. He blows a kiss in return.

  Now he’s in the garage. The black Mercedes starts up and emerges, as slow and sinuous as a panther coming from its lair. He honks the horn: one last farewell.

  The very last one, the Crocodile thinks.

  The gate opens automatically and the car exits. The woman and the baby recede into the shadow of the nursery.

  The Crocodile breathes slowly, watching.

  Now they have the address; in the end the secretary relented.

  Piras’s efforts to control herself when the woman called back were plain. Lojacono even detected a vein pulsating away in her temple, something he hadn’t seen even during the memorable plenary session with the station captains.

  She even gave them Masi’s cell phone number, but apparently he has it turned off. So they told the woman to keep trying to call him and not to stop, and once she finally manages to reach the engineer, to ask him to return home immediately where he’d find them waiting. They had some questions to ask him.

  Once that conversation is done, they look each other in the eye for a second. With that glance, Piras is asking: Is this necessary? He, with his glance, replies: I can’t say. But what if it is?

  They rush down into the courtyard, summoning a police car with two officers as they gallop down the stairs.

  The Crocodile watches as the Mercedes reaches the bottom of the little hill. He can predict the exact instant when the red brake lights will flash on, yielding to cross traffic before turning on to the main thoroughfare.

  He counts to fifteen and then he goes over to the buzzer. It’s exactly ten steps from where he was hiding.

  He waits another fraction of a second and then he looks around to make sure that no one is watching. He pushes the button. A few seconds later, Roberta’
s voice emerges, sounding vaguely surprised.

  “Yes?”

  The Crocodile replies in a low, slightly agitated voice, “Signora, was that your husband who just left the house? Driving a black Mercedes?”

  The woman replies immediately, “Yes, that was my husband. Why, what is it?”

  The Crocodile, turning his face away from the microphone to give the impression he’s looking down the street, says, “Didn’t you hear the noise? There was an accident with a truck, right at the end of this street. The truck ran the stop sign. He’s trapped in the car. Hurry down!”

  Roberta emits a little scream and he can hear her slam the intercom receiver down into its cradle. The Crocodile retreats to his hiding place and waits. It all depends on this moment. It all depends on what the woman does right now.

  A few seconds later the front door is thrown open and Roberta emerges from the house at a run.

  Orlando turns into the traffic along the waterfront, his mind already focused on the problems that will face him during his workday. Today he’s going to have to go into the local government headquarters to talk with officials there about a construction project that’s behind schedule. He hates the local government.

  Almost immediately he stops in a queue of cars at a red light. He takes advantage of the stop to turn on the radio. Then, as he’s about to switch on his cell phone, the light turns green and the cars start moving again.

  The cell phone will have to wait for the next stoplight.

  Traffic. The usual traffic.

  Lojacono has gotten used to thinking of the city as a wall. Mistrust, indifference, and the constant noise that drowns out words and makes a whispered conversation impossible. The traffic, the silent crowd, the hate-filled glares. A wall.

  The parents of the murdered children, Lojacono decides, have chiseled a crack into the wall. They’ve been willing to remember and to speak, even though it ran counter to their own self-interest. A crack in the wall that’s been keeping him at a distance, the wall that protects the Crocodile. But the wall is capable of closing itself back up, and one tactic it uses in order to paper over the crack is that it produces traffic.

  As if Piras were reading his mind, she says to the officer at the wheel, “Put on the siren. And step on it.”

  The Crocodile moves quickly. He knows that he has only a few seconds, less than twenty if Roberta realizes halfway down the short lane that there hasn’t been any accident.

  He walks quickly, keeping close to the wall, and slips through the pedestrian gate, which Roberta left swinging open behind her. He runs up the driveway and enters the house.

  He shuts the door behind him. And he locks the deadbolt from inside.

  Orlando stops at the second traffic light. Never once is this light green, he thinks. They’re supposed to be timed to move traffic faster, but instead every single one is always red.

  He turns on his cell and it immediately starts ringing. The word “Office” flashes insistently on the display. Damn it, thinks Orlando, I haven’t even gotten in and they’re already busting my balls.

  He rummages around in the glove compartment for his headset. The last thing he needs is a fine from a traffic cop because that idiot of a secretary decided he needed to know some nonsense or other.

  Roberta runs up the street, more and more puzzled. She’s caught between a sense of relief at the fact that there is no accident and annoyance at having been made the object of a stupid prank.

  She looks around to see if there is some little kid laughing behind her back. If she catches him she’ll teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget. She remembers that a few months ago local kids had started pulling the prank of ringing doorbells late at night on their way home from nightclubs, startling her out of a slumber that was already fitful, what with her enormous belly.

  The memory of her pregnancy makes her remember Stella, and with a stab of worry she speeds up her pace.

  The traffic parts like a choppy sea before the wail of the siren. Now they’re moving quickly, but it’s a long way from police headquarters to the address that the engineer’s secretary gave them.

  Lojacono clenches and unclenches his fist without realizing it. He’s anxious to talk to this man. He wonders if he remembers the past, if he ever met Eleonora’s father. If in all these years he ever thought about her again.

  More than anything else, he wants to know if the man has a family. If he has children.

  His heart throbs painfully in his chest, and he thinks about Marinella again: the curve of her neck, bent over as she writes, the two yellow eyes in the darkness.

  Unexpectedly, delicately, Piras’s hand comes to rest on his.

  Orlando’s turned his car around and is heading back home now.

  He’s perplexed, and he’s worried too. An assistant DA, no less. And a police inspector.

  The secretary had seemed cautious and circumspect to him. What can possibly have happened? If it was work-related, they would have been waiting for him at the office. Any legal proceedings would have had to be based on documents, blueprints, surveys and floor plans. Why ask to meet him at home?

  Orlando starts to delve into the past, trying to remember anything that might have attracted the attention of the police, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t come up with a thing. Nothing.

  He accelerates, honking his horn repeatedly.

  Roberta wails in desperation. The door is bolted shut from inside, and her fear for her husband made her rush out of the house, leaving her keys behind her.

  People start crowding around the windows, their attention summoned by the screaming and shouting. Roberta pounds on the door and the sound carries. But no sound comes from within.

  The policeman at the wheel says, “Here we are, dottore, this should be the address, at the end of this little lane.”

  No sooner are the words out of his mouth than they see the woman pounding flat-handed on the door, screaming.

  Piras looks at Lojacono and sees desperation, rage, and helplessness in his eyes.

  Lojacono hurls himself out of the car before it’s fully come to a stop, his hand already groping for the gun in his shoulder holster.

  At the same instant, the Mercedes pulls up with a screech of the brakes.

  CHAPTER 68

  Orlando glances quickly at the police car, parked with two wheels on the sidewalk, and runs to his wife’s side.

  The woman, babbling incoherently, is talking about an accident that never happened, someone at the intercom, and finding the door locked behind her. Lojacono runs up to them, badge in hand, followed by Piras and the two uniformed police officers.

  “Are you Engineer Orlando Masi?”

  The man does his best to understand what’s going on. He’s disoriented and can’t seem to work out what to deal with first. He looks up anxiously at one of the windows on the second floor. He rattles his key in the lock but the door seems to be bolted from within and refuses to budge.

  “It’s my daughter, my baby girl. She’s six months old and she’s locked inside all by herself. The door won’t open. Can you help us to get inside?”

  Lojacono thinks fast. He’s certain the little girl isn’t alone at all. He’s never been one to believe in coincidence. He looks around, trying to find evidence of someone passing by, or watching them from a distance. He realizes that there’s at least one person peering down from every window. Despair and panic always make an especially intriguing show.

  He waves the couple aside and calls the officers over. They try the door. The bigger of the two takes a step back and delivers a stomping kick to the door, right next to the handle, followed by another, and another. Finally the wood begins to give with a crack and the door creaks open slightly.

  The other officer has pulled a crowbar out of the car and is starting to prize the opening wider.

  Meanwhile, Piras is with Masi’s wife, trying to comfort her and at the same time find out what has happened. She glances at Lojacono over the woman’s shoulders
, which are racked with sobs. They were right. But that’s not much consolation.

  The door swings open, banging against the wall. Masi tries to run inside but Lojacono stops him.

  “Stay out of the way. Stay back here with your wife. Let us go in first.”

  In a single fluid gesture he draws his Beretta out of its holster. The two officers step forward and he summons one of them, asking the other one to wait there. But the engineer is driven by fury. He wriggles out of the policeman’s grip and runs into the house, followed by his wife and Piras.

  Lojacono signals to them to be absolutely silent. They stop in the small front hall, at the foot of a flight of stairs. At the top, Lojacono can glimpse two doors, one of them half open.

  Everyone holds their breath. Outside, a bird assays a few notes. From the top of the stairs, as faint as a whisper, they hear a voice.

  “Hush-a-bye baby, oh, I’ll give you a star.”

  The sheer incongruity of the chant, the hoarse, scratchy male voice, the implicit menace in his very presence, cause everyone’s flesh to crawl.

  The baby’s mother falls to her knees with a desperate wail. The father tries to climb the stairs, but Lojacono throws out his arm to block him, gesturing for silence. The man looks the inspector in the eyes and glimpses an expression of absolute determination. He stops, frozen to the spot.

  From the baby’s room the chant continues.

  “Sleep pretty baby, it’s the brightest by far.”

  It is possible to detect a tender smile in the tone of the voice, something that makes it even more chilling. Lojacono starts climbing the stairs, trying to make no noise, his handgun leveled, the other hand pressing against the wall to help him balance. Behind him, equally silent, come Masi and the police officer.