A Walk in the Dark

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “I have to ask him,” he said at last, nodding towards the deputy head of the Flying Squad, who was still wandering around with that useless megaphone in his hand. He went up to him and they talked for a few minutes. Then they both walked towards us and it was the deputy head who spoke first.

  “Are you the nun?” he said, turning to Claudia.

  No, I’m the nun. Don’t you see my veil, idiot?

  Claudia nodded.

  “Do you want to try and talk to him?”

  “Yes, I want to talk to him and ask him if he’ll let me in. It could work. He knows me. He might trust me and if I go in I think I can persuade him. He knows me well.”

  What was she talking about? They didn’t know each other at all. They’d never talked to each other. I turned to look at her, with a questioning look on my face. She returned my gaze for no more than a couple of seconds. Her eyes were saying, “Don’t open your mouth: don’t even think about it.” Meanwhile, the deputy head of the Flying Squad was saying it was worth a try. At least they had nothing to lose with a phone call.

  Tancredi took out his mobile, pressed the redial button and waited, with the phone flat against his ear. In the end Scianatico answered.

  “This is Inspector Tancredi again. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you. Can I pass her to you? No, it’s not a policewoman, it’s a nun. Yes, of course. We’re not even thinking of coming any closer. All right, I’ll pass her to you.”

  Yes, this was Sister Claudia, Martina’s friend. She’d been wanting to talk to him for a long time, she had a lot of important things to say to him. Before continuing, could she say hello to Martina? Oh, she wasn’t feeling well. On Claudia’s face a kind of fissure opened up, but her voice didn’t change, it remained steady and calm. Never mind, I’ll talk to her later, if that’s OK with you, of course. I think Martina wants to get back together with you. She’s often told me that, even though she didn’t know how to get out of the weird situation you were both in. I can’t hear you very well. I said I can’t hear you very well, it must be this mobile. What do you say I come up and we have a little talk? On my own, of course. I’m a woman, a nun, you have nothing to worry about. Besides, I don’t like the police either. So shall I come up? Of course, you just look through the spyhole, that way you can be sure I don’t have anyone with me. But in any case you have my word, you can trust me. Do you think a nun walks around with a gun? OK, I’m coming up now. On my own, of course, we agreed. Bye for now.

  Apart from the things she said, what almost hypnotized me was her tone of voice. Calm, reassuring – hypnotic, in fact.

  “Do you want to put on a bulletproof vest?” Tancredi asked. She looked at him without even replying.

  “OK. Before you go up, I’ll call you on the mobile, and you answer straight away and then leave the line open. That way at least we can hear what you’re saying and we’ll know what’s happening.”

  He turned to two guys in their thirties, who looked like housing-estate drug dealers. Two officers from his squad.

  “Cassano, Loiacono, you two come with me. We’ll go up together and stay on the stairs, just below the landing.”

  “I’m going with you,” I heard myself saying, as if my voice had a will of its own.

  “Don’t talk bullshit, Guido. You’re a lawyer, you do your job and let us get on with ours.”

  “Wait, wait. If Claudia can get the negotiation started, I could go in after her, I could help her. He knows me, I’m Martina’s lawyer. I can tell him some nonsense – we’ll call off the trial, withdraw the charges, that kind of thing. I can be of help, if the negotiation goes ahead. If on the other hand you have to go in, obviously I’ll get out of the way.”

  The deputy head of the Flying Squad said that in his opinion it might work. The important thing was to be careful. Great advice. He didn’t give any indication that he might come too. To avoid a bottleneck, I presume. His ideal policeman wasn’t Dirty Harry.

  In my memory, what happened next is like a blackand-white film shot through a dirty lens and edited by a madman. And yet vivid, so vivid I can’t tell it in the past tense.

  The three policemen are in front of me, on the last flight of stairs before the landing. As far as we can get without running the risk of being seen. We are very close, almost on top of each other. I can smell the pungent sweat of the taller one: Loiacono maybe, or maybe Cassano. The doorbell makes a strange, out-oftime noise. A kind of ding dang dong, with an oldfashioned echo that’s quite unsettling. There’s a voice from inside the apartment, and Claudia says something in reply. Then silence, a long silence. I assume he’s looking through the spyhole. Then a mechanical noise: locks, keys turning. Then silence again, apart from the sound of our held breaths.

  Tancredi has his mobile stuck to his left ear. With his other hand he’s holding his pistol, like the other two. Against his leg, the barrel pointed downwards. I remember the action all three of them performed before coming in. Slide pulled back, round in the chamber, hammer cocked gently to avoid accidental firing.

  I look at Tancredi’s face, trying to read in it what he can hear, what’s happening. At a certain moment, the face distorts and before I need to think what it means, he cries, “Shit, all hell’s breaking loose. Smash the door down, damn it, smash the door down right now.”

  The bigger of the two officers – Cassano, or maybe Loiacono – gets to the door first, lifts his knee almost to his chest, stretches his leg and kicks the door with the sole of his foot, at the height of the lock. There’s a noise of wood splitting, but the door doesn’t yield. The other policeman does exactly the same. More splitting wood, but still the door doesn’t yield.

  Another two, three, four very violent kicks, and it opens. We all go in together. Tancredi first, the rest of us behind. Nobody tells me to wait outside and do my job while they get on with theirs.

  We pass through a number of rooms, guided by Scianatico’s cries.

  When we get to the kitchen, the scene that meets our eyes looks like some terrible ritual.

  Claudia is sitting astride Scianatico’s face: she’s gripped him between her legs, keeping him immobilized, and with one hand she’s pinned his throat, her fingers digging into his neck like daggers. With the other hand clenched in a fist, she’s striking him repeatedly in the face. Savagely and methodically, and as I watch, I know she’s killing him. The frame widens to include Martina. She’s on the floor, near the sink. She isn’t moving. She looks like a broken doll.

  Cassano and Loiacono seize Claudia under her armpits and pull her off Scianatico. Once her feet are on the ground, she does what the two officers are least expecting: she attacks them so quickly they don’t know what hits them, they don’t even see the punches and the kicks. Tancredi takes a step back and aims the pistol at Claudia’s legs.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Claudia. Don’t let’s do anything stupid.”

  She’s deaf to his cries and takes a couple of steps towards him. I don’t think she’s even seen me, even though I’m very close to her, on her left.

  I don’t actually make a conscious decision to do what I do. It just happens. She doesn’t see me, doesn’t even see my right hand as it comes towards her and strikes her on the chin, from the side. The most classic of knockout blows. You can be the strongest man in the world, but if you’re hit by a good straight jab, delivered the correct way, right on the tip of your chin, there’s nothing you can do. Your lights go out and that’s it. It’s like an anaesthetic.

  Claudia falls to the floor. The two policemen are on top of her, twisting her arm behind her back and handcuffing her, with the automatic, efficient movements of people who’ve done it many times before. Then they do the same with Scianatico, but with him there’s no need to hurry. His face is unrecognizable from all the blows, he’s uttering monosyllables, and he can’t move.

  Tancredi goes to Martina and places his index finger and middle finger on her neck. To see if there’s still any blood circulating. But it’s a mechanical
gesture, a pointless one. Her eyes are staring, her face is waxen, her mouth is half open, showing her teeth, and there’s a trickle of blood, already dry, from her nose. The face of death, violent death. Tancredi has seen it many times. I’ve seen it too, but only in photos, in the files of homicide cases. Never, until now, so concrete, so vivid, so terrifyingly banal.

  Tancredi passes his hand over her eyes to close them. Then he looks around, finds a coloured dishcloth, takes it, and covers her face.

  Cassano – or Loiacono – makes as if to go out and call the others, but Tancredi stops him and tells him to wait. He goes up to Claudia, who’s sitting on the floor with her hands cuffed behind her back. He crouches and talks to her in a low voice for a few seconds. Finally, she nods her head.

  “Take the handcuffs off.”

  Cassano and Loiacono look at him. The look he gives back doesn’t need interpreting: it means he has no wish to repeat the order and that’s it. When Claudia is once again free, Tancredi tells us all to leave the kitchen and comes out with us.

  “Now listen to me carefully, because in a few seconds there’ll be chaos in here.”

  We look at him.

  “Let me tell you what happened. Claudia went in. He attacked her and a scuffle started. We heard it all over the phone, and that’s when we broke in. When we got to the kitchen they were fighting. Both of them. We intervened, he resisted, and obviously we had to hit him. We finally managed to immobilize him and handcuff him. That’s it. That’s all that happened.”

  He pauses, and looks at us one after the other.

  “Is that clear?”

  Nobody says anything. What can we say? He looks at us again for a few moments and then turns to Cassano, or maybe Loiacono.

  “Call the others, without making too much fuss. Don’t go out shouting, there’s really no need. And send in the ambulance people too. For that piece of shit.”

  The officer turns to go. Tancredi calls him back.

  “Hey.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to see any journalists in here. Is that clear?”

  By the time we left, the apartment was filling with policemen, carabinieri, doctors, nurses. The deputy head of the Flying Squad resumed command, so to speak, of the operation.

  Tancredi told me to take Claudia away, make sure she calmed down, and call him again in an hour. We had to go to police headquarters for Claudia’s statement, and he wanted to be the one to take it, obviously.

  He wasn’t looking at her as he spoke. She, on the other hand, was looking at him and it seemed as if she wanted to say something. She didn’t say anything, but there was probably no need.

  We walked back to her van, which was still there, squashed up against the dustbin.

  “Could you drive, please?”

  “Do you want to see a doctor?”

  “No,” she said, but her hand went unconsciously to her chin, and she took it between her thumb and the other fingers, to check it was still in one piece, after the punch. “No. It’s just that I don’t feel up to driving.”

  It was still light and the air was cool and mild, I thought, as I got into that old contraption, on the driver’s side.

  It was April, I thought.

  The cruellest month.

  32

  We drove along all the seafronts in the city, two or three times, in Claudia’s van, without saying a word. When I saw that an hour had gone by, I asked her if we could go to police headquarters. She said yes. In a toneless, colourless voice.

  We drove to police headquarters, and they took her statement. Tancredi was there, along with a very pleasant young policewoman. They wrote down the story Tancredi had already told us when we were still in Martina’s apartment.

  It didn’t take long, and Claudia signed the statement without reading it.

  When I asked if they needed my statement too, Tancredi looked me in the eyes for a few moments.

  “What statement? You didn’t go in until it was all over. So what kind of statement do you want to make?”

  Pause. I instinctively glanced at the policewoman, but she was making a photocopy and wasn’t paying any attention to us.

  “Just go, we’ve got work to do. It’ll take us all night to get the paperwork ready to send to the Prosecutor’s department tomorrow.”

  He was right. What kind of statement did I want to make?

  There was nothing to add, and so Claudia and I left.

  Margherita was out, at work. I was glad she wasn’t in because I had no desire to tell her what had happened. Not that evening, at least. So I didn’t switch the mobile on again: I’d turned it off when we went into police headquarters.

  We walked back to the van without saying a word. Claudia didn’t break the silence until we were sitting. She was looking straight ahead, her face expressionless.

  “I don’t want to go back. I want to go for a drive.”

  I didn’t want to go back either. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I started the engine without saying anything and set off. I took the autostrada after the Bari North tollgate, drove 500 yards, and stopped at the first motorway café. Absurdly, I felt like eating. In that casual, unstructured way you eat on long journeys, which I really like. Maybe that was why I’d taken the autostrada. We had two cappuccinos and two slices of cake. Because, absurdly, Claudia was also hungry.

  When I paid, I asked the cashier for a cigarette lighter and a packet of MS. The packet was soft, and I held it in my hand for a few seconds before putting it in my pocket.

  We set off again, into the still, welcoming darkness of that April night.

  “Do you remember there was a story I wanted to tell you?” “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s stop somewhere. Somewhere quiet.”

  About twelve miles further on, I pulled into a parking area, surrounded by deserted, dark, silent trees and dimly lit by a few street lamps. There was something strange and reassuring in the occasional muffled sound of a car speeding by. We got out of the van and went and sat on a bench.

  White Nights came into my mind. I mean the actual words written in my head in printed characters. Along with images from the film, and words from the book. A bench, two people who can’t sleep, spending the night talking. Hovering in a suspended universe.

  Calmly, I unwrapped the packet. First the silver thread, then the plastic at the top, then the tinfoil. I tapped the closed part with my index and middle fingers to get the cigarette out.

  I closed my eyes and felt the smoke hit my lungs and the cool air on my face.

  I didn’t care about anything, I thought, as I smoked that harsh, strong cigarette with my eyes closed. I lost contact with reality, I was floating somewhere, which was both there, in that car park, and at the same time somewhere else. Somewhere in the distant past, somewhere dark and welcoming and forgotten.

  “I’m not a nun.”

  I opened my eyes and turned to her. She had her elbow on her knee and her head on her elbow. She was looking – or seemed to be looking – towards the dark shadow of a eucalyptus.

  She told me her story.

  I opened the door and stopped just inside the room, my arms hanging at either side of my body. He raised his head and looked at me. There was a hint of surprise in those filmy eyes.

  “Where’s Anna?”

  As I answered, I realized I was shaking all over. And I mean all over. Legs, arms, shoulders, chin.

  “Leave her alone.”

  He craned his neck towards me and half closed his eyes, in an instinctive gesture. As if he didn’t believe what he’d just heard. As if he didn’t believe that I could challenge him like that.

  “Tell Anna to come up here right now.”

  “Leave the child alone.”

  He got up from the bed.

  “I’m going to show you, you little bitch.”

  I was shaking all over, but I stayed where I was, just inside the room. All I did was lift my right arm, when he was almost on top of me.

&n
bsp; That was when he saw the knife. It was a long, sharp knife with a point. The kind that’s used for cutting meat. He was so close, I could see the hairs in his nose and ears. I could smell his body and his breath.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing with that knife, you whore?”

  Those were his last words. I put my left hand over my right, and pushed with all the strength I had. From bottom to top, all the way. He jerked slightly and then, slowly, put his hands on mine, in a gesture of self-defence that was pointless now. We stayed like that, united for an endless moment, hands and eyes locked.

  His eyes were full of astonishment. Mine were empty.

  Then I freed my hands, took a few steps back, without turning. And closed the door.

  Anna hadn’t heard a thing – he hadn’t even groaned – and didn’t notice anything. I took her by the hand and told her we had to go down to the yard. She took her dolls and followed me. As we were going downstairs, she stopped and pointed.

  “You’ve hurt yourself, Angela. There’s blood coming out of your hand.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ll wash it at the tap in the yard.”

  “But you have to put disinfectant on it.”

  “There’s no need. Water will be fine.”

  After that, my memories are confused. A series of fragments, some clear, others so dark you can’t see anything.

  At a certain point, my mother came back, passed us and went upstairs. I don’t remember if she greeted us, or just saw us. A few minutes later we heard her terrible screams. Then people leaning over the balconies, or coming down to the yard, or climbing the stairs in our block. Then noises of sirens, and flashing blue lights. Dark uniforms, a crowd pressing around our door, the hours passing, night starting to fall, people talking under their breaths while two men in white shirts carried out a stretcher with a body on it, covered in a sheet.