The Bastards of Pizzofalcone (9 page)

Do you feel sorry for me, Giorgia? Do you think I'm pathetic?

His hand had spoken for him. Before he could think, before he could even begin to imagine how to construct a reply, his hand-animal had lashed out. And he'd hit her, with a back-handed smack, straight on those lips pursed in compassion. Now, the morning after, sitting at his new, useless desk, Warrant Officer Francesco Romano, whom his old coworkers had secretly called Hulk, felt the little cut on the back of his hand inside his pocket. The little cut made by his wife Giorgia's left incisor, which, luckily the smack he'd given her hadn't broken.

He hadn't budged off the sofa all night long. He'd heard her sob and sob, in their bed. He'd waited, absurdly, for her to tell him: it's okay, come back, nothing's happened. Come to bed. Let's forget about it. But she hadn't told him any such thing.

When the first light of dawn had become visible through the window, he'd gotten up and gone into the bedroom. She'd finally fallen asleep, a handkerchief knotted around her fingers, wrinkles around her eyes. Her upper lip was swollen where he'd hit her.

God, how much he loved her.

God, how much he hated her.

The door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman stuck his head into the joint office, with that disgusting enthusiasm of his:

“Romano and Di Nardo, come see me. We have a complaint for you to go check out.”

L
ojacono caught up with Aragona in the kitchen, after telling the forensic squad that under the leather armchair was a glass snow globe that had enjoyed a brilliant career, becoming the murder weapon.

The corporal was on his feet with a notepad in his hand; facing him, slumped on a chair with a handkerchief jammed against her mouth, was a lovely blonde, her eyes red from crying. Aragona reported that this was the Bulgarian housekeeper, Mayya Ivanova Nikolaeva, and that she was upset.

The lieutenant joined in the questioning, and discovered that the young woman had been very fond of the late Cecilia De Santis, who was practically a saint, good, kind, generous, etc, etc, that the signora had never found fault with her, that they'd respected and admired each other, etc, etc, that the deceased had been completely satisfied with the work she'd done for her, etc, etc. No, there was no one else working in the apartment: no one lived there but the late signora and her husband, the absent notary. And that said husband frequently didn't even come home at night, he was an important professional and he often had to go out, etc, etc. That the signora on the other hand for the most part stayed at home all day, passionately obsessed as she was with her collection of snow globes, did you happen to notice the snow globes? Which she cleaned and dusted on her own, which she kept neat all by herself. That that day, like every day, she had come in early and fixed breakfast for the signora. That . . .

“
Mamma mia
, I drop tray in signora's living room! I must clean, now all dirty!”

Mayya started to stand up, but Lojacono stopped her with a hand on her shoulder:

“I wouldn't worry about the living room, Signorina. My colleagues are in there investigating the crime scene. But tell me: did you ever hear anything about any threats made against the signora? Or about anyone who, for whatever reason, had it in for her?”

The Bulgarian opened her eyes wide: “No, signora kind, signora good to everyone. Everyone love signora, no one have it in for her!”

Certainly, thought Lojacono. Of course. No one have it in for signora.

“We need the husband's phone number, we need to track him down immediately.”

Mayya shook her head no: “I don't have notary's phone number, I never talk to him, signora talks to him. But office number, written on little blackboard.”

She tilted her head to indicate a small blackboard hanging on the kitchen wall, upon which, in neat handwriting, was a phone number next to the words: Arturo's office. Lojacono pondered whether it was best to warn the notary, thus preventing him from perhaps being given the news by one of his employees, which would allow him to more easily control his reaction. As he mulled these thoughts over he realized that, as always, the husband was the prime suspect.

Aragona surprised him: “We could look for the signora's cell phone. Maybe we'd find her husband's phone number.”

Lojacono agreed: “Right. Maybe it's in the bedroom, since we know it's not in the living room. One more thing: take a turn around the apartment with the signorina, look around as carefully as you can. I want to know if anything is missing, especially any of the valuables.”

As if pursuing a single thought, Lojacono pulled out his cell and dialed the number of the station house. Guida, the officer at the front desk, picked up on the first ring. When Lojacono said his name, the man's voice became clear and alert: the lieutenant almost thought he could see him sit up a little straighter in his chair. Lojacono asked for Ottavia Calabrese.

“
Ciao
, Lojacono, what's up?”

“Are you done setting up your computers?” asked Lojacono.

“I'm ready. How's it going there? What do you need?”

“Everything seems to be more or less under control. The forensic squad is in there now, and the corpse has already been taken to the morgue. Listen, would you do a broad sweep of the Internet for me?”

“Sure. What am I looking for?”

“The dead woman is the wife of a notary, a rather prominent one, I believe, because the apartment is like something out of the Arabian Nights. Her name was Cecilia De Santis, he is the notary Festa, Arturo Festa.”

“Is there anything in particular you're looking for?”

“No, not for now. Just anything interesting you can come up with. Call me on my cell phone as soon as you have a general picture.”

Ottavia spoke distractedly.

“There, the search engine tells me that the notary's office isn't far from where you are: Via dei Mille 32. You could walk there in no more than five minutes. I'll call you in a little while with everything else. Do you want me to say anything to the commissario?”

Lojacono thought it over for a second or two.

“Maybe tell him to get in touch with the investigating magistrate, and alert him that we're on the move.”

“Is Aragona coming with you?”

Lojacono thought he could detect an ironical note in his colleague's voice.

“I'm afraid so. But this time we're going to be on foot. Let me give you a piece of advice: never, and I mean never, get in a car with him. Understood?”

Calabrese burst into laughter.

“Yes, I'd already heard that from a few of my colleagues at police headquarters. Talk to you later.”

Aragona came back into the kitchen, followed by the girl, brandishing a cell phone he held carefully with a handkerchief.

“Hey, I heard you! You're safer in a car with me, going 125 mph, than sitting in this kitchen with a phone in your hand, take it from me. In any case, here it is, the signora's cell phone. It was on the nightstand, turned off and charging. I didn't touch it; that was right, wasn't it?”

The lieutenant sighed: “You watch too much TV, Arago'. In any case, yes, better to be too careful than not careful enough. Now go and see if anything's missing.”

He turned on the phone and waited until it had picked up a signal. Lojacono checked the most recent calls up through the night before, remembering that the doctor had placed the woman's death at the very most eleven hours earlier. There were a couple of “Unknown Callers,” an “Adele,” two “Monicas,” and an “Arturo,” the last one, at 10:10
P.M.

The lieutenant wondered whether it might be a good idea to use that same cell phone to call the notary, but he decided it would be best not to alter the contents of the device's memory. He took down the information in his notebook and handed the cell phone over to his colleagues from forensics so they could check for fingerprints and then send it on for electronic analysis.

Now it was time to head over to the notary's office, at the address Ottavia had given him, hoping someone was already there. He liked to be able to look people in the eye when he gave them news of a murder. People's faces told you a lot of things.

While he was heading for the door he practically ran straight into an excited Aragona: “Lojacono, you were right. A few pieces of silver are missing, things they kept on the living room table, where the corpse was, in the hallway, and near the entrance.”

“Is that all?”

Aragona nodded.

“Yes, in the woman's bedroom everything's still there: the jewel box on the dresser, with all the jewelry still inside, and on the nightstand we found the jewelry that she'd taken off to go to sleep. And in the husband's study, whose door was closed, there was a gold paperweight—that, if you ask me, is worth as much as my entire apartment with all the furniture in it—and a collection of coins in a glass display case that's just spectacular. Everything's there, except for these silver pieces. The girl says that there was a vase, a centerpiece, a couple of framed photographs, and a statuette.”

Lojacono was doing his best to think on the fly. He called Cuomo, the uniformed policeman who had come over from headquarters.

“Take a witness statement from Signorina Nikolaeva, with a list of the objects that she remembers and that are now missing. Make sure, above all, that the list is precise. Then take down her details and her home address, make a copy of her ID, and get the number to her cell phone: we have to be able to get back in touch with her when needed. Signorina, you can't leave the city for the time being. And we have to be able to contact you at any time. Aragona, let's go. We have work to do.”

O
n the way, the conversation was monosyllabic. Both of them were lost in thought; and for that matter, what did they have in common? What would they have had to talk about?

As things stood, Officer First Class Alessandra Di Nardo and Warrant Officer Francesco Romano had nothing in common except for their recent assignment to the same precinct, which had been dubbed—with little affection—the station house of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone in the city's law enforcement circles. Not much of a basis for a close acquaintance. Not the best foundation for a frank friendship, one might safely say.

And so they walked along, in silence and against the wind, on their way to ascertain the reasons for a dismal, dubious telephone complaint. A goddamned telephone complaint. Taken down by a rumpled police officer in a catatonic state sitting at the front desk—a front desk that, in any other precinct house would have been mobbed, but here was as empty as the Gobi Desert.

A woman had made the call, apparently; and despite the customs of the city, she had not chosen to remain anonymous; in fact, she had been very exacting and generous with her details, repeating her first and last name—Amalia Guardascione—several times, spelling out the address and carefully enunciating her phone number. A crazy mythomaniac, Romano had thought to himself, no doubt about it. But since responding scrupulously to every report was policy as far as the vacuum cleaner salesman that he had as a commissario went, there they were, in the street, chasing down what were almost certainly the deranged fantasies of a woman who was probably crazy.

And anyway, this was still better than sitting with his feet up on his desk watching the clouds go by and thinking about Giorgia's swollen upper lip.

Di Nardo felt the reassuring heft of the modified Beretta 92SB that she carried in the pocket of her baggy trousers. She had purchased this weapon on a specialized website and had then registered it; it had a number of polymer components, which made it far easier to handle than its all-metal counterparts. This, as she'd had the opportunity to confirm over the course of her interminable sessions at the firing range, shortened considerably the time needed to draw the gun. No doubt, it required a much firmer hand to avoid any loss in accuracy: but that wasn't a danger that Alex, as the very few friends she kept in touch with called her, stood any chance of running.

Because Alex was herself only when she was firing a gun. Whether it was a rifle, pistol, or submachine gun, Alex was only happy and fulfilled when an extension of her upper limb was ejecting small, lethal chunks of metal. When she was pounding a target to shreds, when she was tattering a silhouette.

Alex practiced shooting constantly. When she was forced to take vacation days, she'd go out to the old farmhouse her family still owned in the countryside, take up a stance behind a window—which had a very narrow firing range—and shoot at targets that she'd carefully prepared in advance.

She'd been taught to shoot by her father, a general in the Italian army, now retired. Captain, later Colonel, and later still General Di Nardo had wanted a son, but destiny and that incompetent wife of his had conspired to give him only that scrawny daughter—not someone who deserved his attention. But once he had taken her to shoot at the firing range, and the little girl had shown such an incredible talent: all things considered, the two of them might actually have something to talk about.

Since that day, Alex had been a shooter. As soon as possible, in whatever circumstances, she shot. In order to be able to talk to her father, to whom she displayed a doglike devotion, she shot. It was the only way she could get him to smile at her. And almost the only pastime she cultivated.

Almost.

They'd reached the address that Officer Guida had taken down. It was one of those working-class neighborhoods that had become fashionable ten years ago, raising prices and ambitions, but the gentrification had stopped well short of completion; the resulting effect was one of arrested development, with a mix of high-end boutiques and middle- to low-end shops, and newly constructed buildings alongside tumbledown relics. The apartment building in which Signora—or Signorina—Amalia Guardascione resided was, all things considered, nice enough, with a clean front entrance and a working elevator.