The Bastards of Pizzofalcone (6 page)

The young woman shook her head as she poured out the coffee. Everyone has their obsessions. The signora collected those horrible glass spheres that, when you shook them, unleashed a fake blizzard over the landscapes and figures inside. She loved them so much, the signora did, that she wouldn't even let Mayya dust them: she would do it herself, slipping on latex gloves and devoting an entire morning every week to the job. It was the only time that she seemed truly happy, surrounded by hundreds of little glass globes that seemed like so many soap bubbles.

The signora's collection was famous. Whenever her friends traveled, they'd be sure to bring back at least one item to add to it. Once a journalist even came, to take pictures of her surrounded by her snow globes, and the signora had proudly displayed the magazine with her photograph to Mayya. She'd even told her that someday, she was going to have an exhibition somewhere, and that she'd donate the proceeds to charity. Truth be told, Mayya thought it was ridiculous that anyone would pay money to see those objects, but people, she knew, did all sorts of strange things.

Moving slowly with her tray through the partial darkness for fear of falling, she went into the signora's bedroom; in the light that filtered through the shutters, she saw that the bed was still made and that there was no one in the bedroom.

Strange. Very strange.

If she'd had to leave suddenly for some reason, the signora would have called her: when she had any urgent news to communicate, the signora always used her phone; she always asked if she was bothering her. Why would she have forgotten to alert her, this time?

She headed toward the study with the snow globes. Maybe, she thought, the signora had fallen asleep in an armchair, with a book in her hand, in her favorite room. The wind was moaning in despair as it ran up against obstacles that hindered its blind gallop. The sea was hurling itself ferociously onto the street, doing its best to invade the space from which it had been barred.

The armchair was empty. A cloud hurried away from the face of the sun, and a beam of light illuminated the floor of the room, coming to rest on a shard of glass glittering under the chair.

Mayya realized that it was one of the glass globes with snow inside, and she wondered what it was doing on the floor.

Then she realized that there was something else on the floor: the signora's dead body, the back of her head shattered and a puddle of clotted blood around it.

The tray clattered to the floor with a crash of broken porcelain, scattering cookies and
caffe latte
everywhere.

Mayya brought both hands to her face and let out a scream.

D
eputy Sergeant Ottavia Calabrese left the precinct house, shooting Guida, the officer standing guard at the entrance, a distracted nod. She almost failed to recognize him: his tie was knotted impeccably, his hair was brushed, his jacket was perfectly buttoned, and he was sitting up straight, his eyes trained firmly before him. She'd always seen him as a kind of funny ornament, a papier-mâché statue depicting a drunk in uniform reading the sports section; now he actually looked like a real policeman.

She had to admit that something in that place was changing. All credit to the commissario. A man out of the ordinary: she'd thought that from the very first time he appeared at her office door, asking permission to enter, smiling at her hesitantly like a little boy joining his class for the very first time at a new school.

Ottavia had liked Palma from the start. His rumpled appearance, his unkempt hair, his rolled-up sleeves. And the cheerful, youthful atmosphere that he ushered inside those cracked old walls. Moreover, there was no wedding ring on his finger: who knew why, who knew whether he was a bachelor or divorced, or maybe a widower. But widowers often continued to wear their wedding rings.

She wore a wedding ring. And she wasn't a widow.

Before boarding the funicular, she stopped in a
rosticceria
, a local takeout place. She wasn't up to cooking that night, and it was late already. She always seemed to leave the office late. Not that she minded: she did it on purpose. For so long now, work had been the best part of her day. A woman's work is never done; for policewomen, it's even worse.

In the crowded funicular car, with her purse on one side and the packet from the
rosticceria
on the other, she could find nowhere to sit. A kid, sprawled out on a seat, looked up at her defiantly and then turned up the volume in his headphones; then he turned to look out the window, chewing gum, his mouth wide open.

Ottavia felt someone move behind her, and an irritating pressure against her derriere. She sighed: every night it was the same thing. The crowd, stuffed into the car like sardines in a can, and some idiot ogling her and rubbing up against her. She was well aware that she had a generous figure and a healthy, taut body that she tried to conceal under sensible, unfashionable clothing, but there was nothing she could do: someone always noticed.

She didn't turn around, that would only make it worse. Instead, she looked down, identified the tip of a black loafer, took aim, and jammed her foot down. A single blow with her heel, smashing down on the man's big toe. A surprised gasp, a muttered curse; now Ottavia turned around, stared at the dirty old man behind her, and said: “I beg your pardon. Would you care to let me have your other foot, so I can finish the job and make it nice and symmetrical?” The man pushed away into the crowd, glaring at her, in search of other, more compliant, asses, less willing to defend themselves.

It was about a kilometer from the funicular to home. The shops were all closed, but Ottavia still took longer than necessary. My feet, she thought, give my heart away. She pulled her keys out of her purse with an exaggerated calm, imagining that she was moving underwater. Then, with a sigh, she opened the door.

“Is that you, my love?”

How the fuck he managed to be so cheerful, loving, and affectionate, even after a hard day of work, Ottavia truly couldn't understand.

“Yes, who else would it be? It's me.”

Her husband Gaetano appeared at the kitchen door with a cheerful expression on his face.

“
Ciao
! Have you seen the wind? The dish antenna is swinging around like a flag, we're only getting cable. You want an aperitif?”

As she was taking off her necklace and her earrings, Ottavia replied in a weary voice: “No, thanks. I'm shattered. I picked up something in the
rosticceria
; I just don't feel like cooking tonight.”

“Cooking? Are you serious? I've already taken care of everything, my love. Just wait, it's delicious! Fettuccine with mushrooms and cream, and lemon chicken scaloppini. I got a bottle of red, too, an Aglianico, the kind you like. It'll be ready in five minutes, just relax until then.”

Ottavia, standing in front of the bathroom mirror where she had gone to remove her makeup, thought to herself that being married to Superman was a curse greater than she could possibly bear. A highly respected and deeply educated engineer, he earned an enormous salary, had fifteen people reporting to him, and still found the time and energy to buy a bottle of Aglianico and cook
fettuccine ai funghi
. In any civilized country, she mused, he would have been executed by firing squad in the public square.

She went into the dining room and shot a look at the sofa. Riccardo was there, as usual. As usual, with a pen in hand. As usual, doodling on a sheet of graph paper. As usual, closed up in a world that excluded everyone else.

Gaetano walked in with a steaming tureen in his hands, and a fleck of cream on his cheek.

“Dinner's ready! To the table, family! Riccardo, sweetheart, did you see? Mamma's home!”

Slowly, the boy lifted his face from the sheet of paper and looked vacantly around the room; then his eyes stopped on Ottavia, and in a cavernous voice he said:
“Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mammm
. . .
”

From the corner of his mouth hung a streamer of drool. His hand went on methodically tracing circles on the sheet of graph paper, all of them concentric, all within the margins of the little squares, as if drawn with a compass.
Mamma
. The only word that he'd uttered in an intelligible manner in his thirteen years of life, amidst the indistinct murmurs he made as he watched his television shows. Nothing else. Nothing, ever. No window into the world of which he was the sole inhabitant.

Ottavia went over to the boy and caressed the face that so closely resembled her own. She helped him to his feet and walked him to the table where Gaetano, chattering on about his wonderful day, ladled into each bowl a quantity of fettuccine that would have sated an entire soccer team, second-string players, too. Ottavia wondered what Commissario Palma was having for dinner that night.

Mamma
,
mamma
, said Riccardo. Gaetano looked at her lovingly.

Ottavia began eating, thinking how much she hated them both.

P
alma had turned the old precinct house cafeteria into their new joint office by knocking down a drywall partition that someone had put up to transform a nice big bright room into two small dark depressing ones.

The six desks had been arranged to as to allow each of them a certain degree of privacy if they spoke quietly on the phone; but each could easily attract the attention of the others. Lojacono, settling in by the window overlooking the castle jutting out into the sea, mentally recognized the commissario's strategic skill in the deployment of resources: the only way to create solidarity of any kind in such a diverse group of people was to keep them together for as much time as possible.

He noticed that the first to arrive had been Pisanelli, the deputy captain who was a veteran of Pizzofalcone. He'd hung a large corkboard behind his desk, and he was carefully pinning a series of photographs and newspaper clippings to it. Noticing his bewilderment, Calabrese, who was busy with the cables of two computers she was setting up on her desk, widened her eyes and whispered:

“It's an obsession of his. Those are all the suicides that have taken place in this neighborhood over the past ten years. He's convinced that they're actually murders, and he's been gathering material to prove it.”

Pisanelli, from the back of the room, turned to look at them.

“I heard you, you know, Ottavia. I know that you're saying that I'm just a nutty old man.”

He didn't seem upset. If anything, sad. Calabrese replied: “Why, no, I'm saying no such thing, Giorgio. I was just explaining to him what all those newspaper clippings and photographs are for. Otherwise, Lojacono will think it's to do with some complicated international plot.”

The man spoke directly to the lieutenant, in a soft voice.

“The problem, my dear Lojacono, is that sometimes we can't see past the tips of our own noses. We just take the easiest route. If someone wants us to think that someone killed themselves, all they need to do is leave a suicide note and there you go. I don't think it's right that just because a person is alone in the world, and maybe depressed, you can throw him out like a dirty old rag. I think that everyone deserves an investigation, a little research. That's all.”

Aragona, the suntanned young man, was carefully placing a silver paperweight, which wouldn't have looked out of place in the Italian president's office, on his desk; there, it simply made no sense. “As you can see,” he commented acidly, “there's no real work for us to do here. If we're just going to investigate suicides and pretend that they're murders, then we might as well start playing contract bridge.”

Pisanelli looked at him with unmistakable annoyance: “In that case, I hope that you live for a good many years, my friend. And that you turn into a lonely old man, like many of these here, on my bulletin board. And then, if someone ‘suicides' you, you'll be filed away in a hurry and no one will ever think of you again.”

Ottavia opened her mouth as if to intervene, then shut it again and went back to untangling the welter of cables.

The quiet girl, whom Lojacono remembered as Di Nardo, spoke in a low voice to Pisanelli: “And have any connections emerged to link the suicides? Have you found anything?”

She seemed to be genuinely interested. The man studied her for a moment, making sure that she wasn't just making fun of him. Then he said: “No, there aren't any direct connections so far. And anyway, this is something I work on outside office hours. I keep most of the material at home; still, there are some details that make you think. The repeated use of certain words, in the suicide notes. The fact that many of them were written on a typewriter or a computer, which is something a person would be unlikely to do at such a desperate moment. The disconnect between the ways that some of the people . . . well, the ways that they did it, with respect to their personalities, their psychological profiles. A series of things that . . .”

He was interrupted by Romano; the huge man had let himself flop down onto a chair and was now looking intently out the window: “If someone kills himself, then he kills himself. It's cowardice, it means they don't have the courage to go on living. You have to face life head-on, no matter how shitty it is.”

His voice sounded like distant thunder. Aragona snickered.

“So you're saying that if someone jumps off a viaduct a hundred feet in the air, he's a coward. And so is someone who puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, or drinks a bottle of acid. It seems to me that it takes more courage to die than to live.”

As Romano was preparing a comeback, Palma ran in hastily, a sheet of paper in one hand: “Guys, we're in business. And this one's major: a woman was murdered on the waterfront, the wife of a notary. Lojacono and Aragona, you're up.”

L
et's see: what time is it?