Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  It was her.

  They had met the week before, just before the mild fall weather deteriorated into a Siberian chill. That day, Pisanelli hadn’t felt like going back home, nor did he much want to linger in the office: the air was too sweet, filled with the scents of the sea, and the warm sunshine was too tempting. He had always had a special love of the little park of the Palazzo Reale, the royal palace, in front of the National Library. He liked watching the children play, the mothers gossip, the students lazing in the sun with a book in hand and earbuds in their ears. They were scenes that smacked of family: they reminded him of the time in his life when he had been happy without realizing it.

  You only recognize happiness by looking backward. That’s the price we pay for our constant, unswerving focus on the future: the days, weeks, and months to come. It’s worth noticing, Pisanelli had once told Brother Leonardo, the diminutive Franciscan monk of the church of the Santissima Annunziata who was his only real friend: we’re only happy in the past. Out of the past emerge memories of a morning, a party, a lunch, perhaps with a beloved person who’s no longer with us, as in my case, or more simply of our lost youth, and sure enough, up surges a stabbing pang of regret. And yet, in that moment you’re remembering right now, were you truly happy? No, you weren’t. You were worrying about your mortgage, the upcoming vacation, a pair of new shoes, you didn’t know that just a few years in the future you’d be looking back on this day with longing and regret.

  Those were the thoughts going through the mind of the senior policeman that late afternoon full of sunshine and scents, when he had spotted her, then too intently scattering crumbs to the birds. And he had instantly recognized those eyes. Lost in the void, in the silence, empty: eyes that saw no future. And he had felt his heart lurch.

  He’d never really been able to explain, when asked, why he was so obsessed with suicides. His maniacal collection of articles and accounts, photographs of the places where so many people had voluntarily taken their own lives, according to the conclusions of all the investigators involved. He’d never been able to explain the reason for what might have seemed like a perversion, a deviant aspect of his personality.

  Carmen, his own beloved Carmen, hadn’t been able to tolerate the pain, a cursed pincer that was consuming her from within. She’d decided to give up, to take to her heels. She had decided to die.

  But wanting to die is one thing, not wanting to go on living is quite another.

  He understood why someone would want to flee the suffering, he could understand that someone might wake up no longer capable of facing up to that climb up the mountainside, a climb that grew steeper and more challenging with every day that passed. That he could understand.

  However the sweet sickness that saps your energy a little at a time, the hollowing out of the heart, the ebbing of desire toward the things around us, the feeling of missing someone, sheer loneliness, none of these things were as ferocious as the pain that afflicted the body, they weren’t sufficient, in and of themselves, to make someone prefer death. The faces that piled up in his file folders, the uncomfortable eyes in the photo IDs or lost in their cadaverous rigidity, were merely weary. A day later, or a month, or ten years later those same people might well have found some new reason to cling to life.

  Or take him, for example. He was old and sick, he’d lost the woman that he loved—he had a son, yes, but Lorenzo was an adult by now, he had his own personal interests and he lived far away, he had no need of a father, nor any need of the limp weekly phone call that they exchanged every Saturday—and yet he certainly had no interest in dying, quite the opposite. He had to go on living, and working, too, if he wanted to find out who had killed those people, deciding that they possessed a power normally allotted only to the Lord Almighty, and why.

  He’d said it loud and clear to Leonardo, the only person with whom he’d ever had an extended conversation on the subject: having a mission is a good reason to go on living; your mission is to save souls, mine is to catch whoever is separating those souls from their bodies. The monk insisted on explaining to him that no one would do such a thing, that it was a matter, rather, of the victory of the pain of living over life itself, but he didn’t believe the man. And he went on delving into those lives in an attempt to identify the moment in which they’d met the gaze and the hands of their executioner.

  For some time now, though, he’d concluded that he would have greater chances of success in his investigation if he tried to thwart the murderer’s moves, rather than trying to reconstruct his homicidal plan by poring over the police reports that had been written by colleagues who felt no need to delve deeper into the matter.

  Since the suspicious cases were concentrated in his quarter, Pisanelli pounded the pavement far and wide in an attempt to identify the potential victims in advance, people who stood out because of the fatigue they displayed as they dragged themselves through their day. Women and men who downed doses of psychopharmaceuticals, who had recently lost someone near and dear, who had fallen ill, who had been forced to declare bankruptcy or shutter their company, who had tumbled, in other words, into the coils of depression.

  He hadn’t had any luck so far. But he had a feeling he was on the right path.

  The week before, Agnese, the woman he’d come here looking for, was dressed as she was today, only the week before it had been at least eighty degrees warmer: a light overcoat, buttoned up to the neck, beneath which hung a long heavy skirt and a pair of thick black socks. Her hair hung lifeless, concealing the features of an expressionless face. She might be any age from thirty to sixty, but she was probably in her mid-forties. She had dark eyes that, perhaps, in some distant past, might even have been pretty, but now seemed blind, wide-open over a panorama they could not see.

  Pisanelli’s attention had been caught by a man with a mustache who was telling the woman not to litter the path with bread crumbs, because they were bound to draw bugs and rats. The harshness of his scolding, and the unmistakable terror of the poor creature, incapable of retorting, had aroused the policeman’s pity, and he had interceded, identifying himself and telling the man that he’d take care of the situation. Sitting down beside her, he had started talking to her in a calm and soothing voice, while the man with the mustache, standing a few yards away and observing the scene, grimaced in irritation. Only after a while had Agnese started replying to him: at first, in monosyllables, then with growing confidence and warmth.

  She’d been married once. The loss of a child during the pregnancy had driven her husband away. He had left her just before she also lost her mother to a sudden illness. She was getting by on the rent money from an apartment that she still owned; she had no relatives, no job, no friends.

  When he spoke to her, Pisanelli had the impression that he was sinking into a dark, deep swamp, from which it seemed impossible to escape. And yet, deep in that unmitigated loneliness, he could detect a glimmer: a desperate determination to survive.

  Agnese dreamed. From time to time, in a half-waking state, she met the son who had never been born and who perhaps, precisely because unborn, had influenced her destiny. She saw him in a kindergarten smock on the first day of school; she heard him speak to her, calling her Mamma.

  She had confessed this to Pisanelli the third time they met, always on the same bench, looking around, afraid that someone else might overhear. She was afraid she might have lost her mind, and that if anyone else realized it they’d lock her away in a mental institution. If that happened, then her little boy, whom she had named Raimondo, would never again be able to come see her.

  Agnese was well aware that Raimondo wasn’t real. But then no one’s ever seen an angel, either, have they? So what was so bad about at least fantasizing, and thereby grabbing for herself a little chunk of the happiness she’d never been able to enjoy?

  Happiness is in the past, Pisanelli had said over and over to himself. In memories or in regrets. He was happy that
the woman had opened up to him, happy to be the life raft that could help to save her from that last, definitive shipwreck. And he’d felt further comforted in his personal conviction: people like Agnese don’t want to die. They want to go on living their life, made up though it is of fragments of that which went before.

  He sat down beside her. The bench was ice cold and the metal bit into his flesh through the cloth of his trousers. He carefully tugged at the tails of his overcoat to make sure he was as snug as possible.

  “Ciao, Agnese,” he said. “Isn’t it a little too cold to be sitting here? Don’t you think you should find some shelter?”

  The woman struggled to tear her gaze away from the empty air in front of her. She was blue with the cold, and yet she wasn’t trembling. She stared at him as if she hadn’t seen him, and then, slowly and irresistibly, from the depth of her thoughts there emerged a smile.

  When she smiled, it was as if she shed ten years of age all at once, and perhaps she really did.

  “Ciao, Giorgio. I was expecting you. Do you see that sparrow over there? It’s new. It wasn’t here yesterday.”

  Pisanelli wouldn’t have known a sparrow from a sparrowhawk, but he nodded.

  “That’s true. Good eye, Agnese. You’re right, it’s new. Are you happy?”

  She lowered her voice.

  “You know, I thought that maybe Raimondo might want to see me. After all, in my dreams, I can see him, but I’m not certain that he can see me. And so, maybe, he asked if he could come see me in the form of a sparrow. Because it’s very strange that in all this cold, a new sparrow should show up, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly, Agnese. Maybe so. Who can say. Now tell me, did you see anyone today? Did anyone, I don’t know, a man or a woman, approach you? Remember, you promised that you would tell me about it, if it happened.”

  She went back to that blank expression and shook her head gently.

  The policeman reached a hand out to the twist of paper, grabbed a pinch of crumbs, and tossed them toward the sparrow, which pecked at them.

  Agnese smiled. So did Pisanelli.

  XXIII

  Lojacono and Alex had been at the police station for half an hour now and, since Guida still hadn’t managed to get the boiler calibrated to an acceptable temperature, they were close to missing the arctic weather outside the building.

  “What with all these shifts in temperature, we’re sure to get sick,” said the lieutenant. “I already feel like I have a fever. Where are the others, though?”

  Ottavia, who had brought a light blouse from home in her bag, replied: “Aragona and Romano are out looking into that matter with the young girl. Pisanelli said that he had an informal appointment; he’s been going out to lunch for the past few days now. The commissario is at police headquarters again, poor thing: they summoned him to agree on a communications plan. Do you two have any news?”

  Alex reported on the conversation with Foti, the young woman’s boyfriend. When she was done, she commented: “I certainly had the impression that he wasn’t telling the whole truth. For instance, he was very vague about his fight with the Varricchio girl. In any case, I definitely thought I detected a moment’s hesitation. What about you, Lojacono?”

  “Yes, maybe so. He certainly seemed upset to me. Maybe we should get back in touch with him once he’s had a chance to calm down a little.”

  A sly expression appeared on Ottavia’s face.

  “If you like, I can think of a possible reason for the argument. And I don’t have to get up from this desk to do it.”

  The two cops exchanged a glance of astonishment.

  “You care to be a little more explicit?” asked Alex.

  Ottavia Calabrese pointed at her computer.

  “You have no idea the things you can find with this thing. I took advantage of a few moments of quiet this morning to surf their profiles and skim the network of young people in general. Did you know that for the past few months, Grazia Varricchio has been working for a modeling agency, doing runway presentations and photo shoots?”

  Lojacono shook his head.

  “No. What kind of agency are we talking about?”

  “It’s called Charles Elegance. It’s located in the Centro Direzionale Office Park, Block T, Building 3. The owner is one Carlo Cava. From what I’ve been able to figure out by studying the website, it’s pretty closely tied up with the fashion industry: wedding gowns, the collections of local designers, as well as swimsuits and intimatewear.”

  Alex was stunned.

  “Just how did you come up with this piece of information?”

  “Easy: the agency posted a photo album on the website with a sort of backstage coverage of a photo shoot, and the models were identified, though only by their initials. All I had to do was put the two letters in the search engine and waste a little time searching here and there. Look.”

  She turned her screen around so it faced them, displaying a series of shots in which several attractive young women were shown posing in swimsuits. Alex and Lojacono recognized Grazia instantly; she was by far the prettiest one, and she shone with a luminous glow.

  “I think it’s worth doing a little more digging,” Ottavia went on. “What kind of runway presentations she did, how many, what sort of relationship she had with the agency, and so on. Here are the phone number and address, written on this piece of paper.”

  Lojacono put it in his pocket.

  “The boss is right, you’re a war machine. We still don’t know anything about the father, right?”

  Ottavia raised a finger.

  “One thing at a time. Weren’t you interested in finding out what the argument between Grazia and her boyfriend was all about? The young man, if you ask me, knew something about the photographs and the runway presentations, and he wasn’t crazy about it. I found a status on this topic. You both know what a status is, don’t you?”

  Alex nodded and Lojacono shook his head. Calabrese decided to offer a brief explanation.

  “A status can be, for instance, a thought, a consideration, or a state of mind that someone shares on their social media profile. Which is to say: here’s what I’m thinking, and I want to tell you all about it.”

  Lojacono was baffled.

  “Oh, yeah? And who gives a damn?”

  Alex and Ottavia laughed.

  “Well, it turns out that lots of people do, and in fact they’re very interested, far more than you might imagine. Our friend Nick Trash, for instance, has quite a considerable following; I even noticed that certain songs of his, available as online videos, have been viewed many thousands of times, and the comments, especially those with female names, are pretty enthusiastic. It’s not to my taste, but some like it, clearly.”

  Alex zoomed in on the topic.

  “What about the status you mentioned?”

  Ottavia typed for a few seconds.

  “Here, read for yourself. He wrote it last Friday, two days before the murder.”

  A photograph appeared on the screen of Foti’s face—and especially hair—and underneath it, the words: “Certain women think that all they need to do is show off their ass in a photograph to increase their self-worth. But an ass is just an ass, and it’s never worth as much as a clean face.”

  Lojacono grimaced.

  “Deep thoughts. Is that Confucius or Karl Marx?”

  Ottavia laughed.

  “Okay, I’ll admit I wouldn’t have it engraved on my front door, but still, if you ask me, the chance that this is a reference to Grazia strikes me as pretty solid.”

  Alex thought it over: “I don’t think a guy would post something like that on the internet before murdering his girlfriend.”

  “Not if we’re talking about premeditated homicide,” Lojacono broke in. “But if it were in the heat of the moment . . . ”

  Ottavia shrugged.

&nb
sp; “It’s up to you two to check it out. As for the father, no news. I talked to my friend the lance corporal. It seems that no one in Roccapriora is talking about anything else. The town is crawling with journalists and every fool in town is spouting opinions into their microphones, dredging up memories, impressions, and half-baked conjectures. Once again, he talked to the friend, the field hand. He’s certain that the man tried to get in touch with Cosimo Varricchio, but he’s every bit as certain that he was unsuccessful. We circulated the name and photographs to the railroad police and highway patrol. We’ll see what comes of it.”

  Palma came in; he was frantically peeling off his overcoat and jacket.

  “Mamma mia, Guida is trying to kill us all with the heat in here. If you ask me, the police chief ordered him to do it, that way he won’t have to worry about what to do with the precinct. Any news?”

  Once he’d heard the report he remained silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

  “Okay, then, we’re starting to have at least a scrap of a lead. Run on over to this modeling agency. It’s a good thing that Ottavia figured it out before the press could. You have no idea: they’re crucifying us, police headquarters is subjected to a constant barrage. Before long, the spokeswoman was telling me, we’re not going to have any alternative, we’ll have to issue a statement. We need to toss them a bone.”

  Lojacono nodded.

  “In the meantime, we told Foti not to leave his home. Five minutes to grab a bite to eat, if nothing else to bolster our defenses against the cold, and we’ll get back out on the street, boss. But what matters most is to find the father of the two victims, if you’re looking for some real substance to placate the press. We have too little information about the young man.”

  XXIV

  The trattoria “Da Letizia—Local Home Cooking” was pretty close to the Pizzofalcone police station. You could get there in ten minutes at a comfortable slow walk up through the vicoli. In the summer, it was a pleasant stroll, with the cool breezes caressing you gently as they dropped down the slope from the hillside to the waterfront.