Fatal Touch cab-2

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “Your friends will be here soon. It will take twenty minutes at most.”

  “I know nothing.”

  “What was this I heard about you seeing something?” she asked, not holding out much hope for a meaningful response. It was probably a setup, Grattapaglia getting his revenge by showing her the sort of stuff he knew she couldn’t handle.

  His suspension from duty, still her fault evidently, was just hours away. But she did not need him to prove she could not do what he did. She already knew that. She did not have his bulk, swagger, girth, experience, age, his bullying instincts and capacity for sudden violence, his slyness and menace. Maybe Blume was punishing her, too.

  Stay there and question this one, Grattapaglia had ordered her; ordered her though she was his superior in rank; I’ll round up a few more. Then he abandoned her, against regulations, with a male youth and no supervisors anywhere.

  The youth was shaking his stupid shaved head and mumbling something incoherent. What did you have to do to a child to allow him to become like this? Ignore him. That was probably all it took. That and the bad luck of giving birth to him in the first place.

  She tried again, probing gently at first, then with more insistence. All she got were monosyllables. After twenty minutes, she had established that Sandro knew nothing about tourist muggings. All he knew is that when a patrol came to move him and his friends off the bridge, he had told the two cops they were cowards, hassling him and his friends but not bothering about rapists.

  “What rapist?” asked Caterina automatically, wishing she hadn’t bothered.

  “Maybe not a rapist. I don’t know.”

  Which was why she shouldn’t have bothered asking.

  “When was this?”

  “On Tuesday, April 4.”

  The precision seemed uncharacteristic, and caught her attention. “You remember the date?”

  “It was three days after my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “An adult now. What time did you see this incident?”

  “Around three, four in the morning.”

  “Where?”

  “That piazza with the bar on the corner, you know. Trees. Behind Vicolo del Moro.”

  “Are you talking about Piazza de’ Renzi?”

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  “Can you remember the name of a bar or anything?”

  Sandro cleaned his nose with the back of his hand. Caterina fished a packet of Kleenex from her bag. “Use a tissue, for Christ’s sake, child. Clean your hand.”

  He wiped his hand across his sleeve and said, “There’s a bar with two umbrellas. The bartender’s an asshole. I totally tagged the front of his bar.”

  “You spray-painted his walls? I’m not going to follow up on this, so just say yes or no.”

  “He caught me doing a throw-up on a wall once. It wasn’t even his wall, but he thought he’d intervene. He reported me to the cops, but not before he had tried to blind me spraying the aerosol into my eyes. So we’ve been targeting his bar.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  They were interrupted by shouting and curses and trampling feet that announced the arrival of Grattapaglia and three more youths. Two girls, no older than sixteen, and a kid who looked about fifteen.

  They all wore tattoos and metal studs and rings on their faces, and as soon as they entered the basement, they seemed to converge on Caterina. They were aggressive, but they crowded her also like kids around a teacher, or greedy toddlers around a mother with candy. Two of them were clutching bottles of beer by the neck.

  “You didn’t take the drink away?” Caterina asked Grattapaglia, who was standing with one foot against the wall.

  “You afraid they’ll use the bottles as weapons? These creatures?”

  A greatly pierced and abscessed girl walked with a sideways lurch, as if the bottle of Ceres she held in her hand weighed heavily.

  Caterina said, “OK. Both of you put your bottles on the floor. Both of you.”

  She stood patiently as a torrent of abuse flowed toward her, moving back and forth a few steps trying to show it did not bother her, but it did.

  When they had stopped cursing her, they looked at each other for new ideas. Then the young boy detached himself from the group, picked up a beer bottle, and dangled it at his side. He went up to Caterina, leaned closer, then belched loudly in her face, opening his mouth wide.

  It was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

  Grattapaglia took his foot off the wall, stepped forward two paces and, with a lazy, sweeping slow-motion movement of his arm, slapped the kid across the face. He opened his fingers at the last moment to lessen the blow, but the kid still fell sideways as if shot. The beer bottle dropped straight to the floor and cracked and rolled.

  The pierced girl came running over, screaming. She knelt down beside him and cradled his face. The other two shuffled around, bumping into each other like blinded animals in a pen, unable to decide whether to stay or go. The girl began to cry, rubbing the back of her hand across her perforated nose.

  Caterina was beside Grattapaglia now, her lips drawn back, the tendons on her neck throbbing. “What the fuck was that? The child is about fifteen, younger maybe.”

  “I hardly touched him. It was a slap, not a punch.”

  “That’s not what you do to a child.”

  “He’s bigger than you,” said Grattapaglia.

  She looked at the youth whose head the girl was trying to lift and cradle. The scarlet weal on the boy’s face showed the white outline of Grattapaglia’s fingers.

  “I’m going to sue you fuckers,” said the boy, pushing the girl away and struggling into a standing position.

  “That’s likely,” said Grattapaglia. “You really look like the sort of person who has a personal lawyer on a retainer.”

  “My parents will sue for me. When they hear this, they’ll sue. My father has contacts. When I tell them, they’ll… they’ll…” He pointed to Caterina. “What’s your name? You’re going to jail, puttana.”

  Caterina tried to touch the child’s face, but he pushed her hand roughly away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “The fuck you are. I’m suing.”

  “Stop it,” said Caterina. “Nobody’s getting sued.”

  She had had enough. “Sovrintendente, get these kids out of here. Put them back wherever you found them, send them to social services. Just so that you and they get the hell out of my sight. Now!”

  “I thought they might have seen something.”

  “Sandro stays with me,” said Caterina. She looked over at his white face. He had put his thumb in his mouth. When he saw her looking, he started biting at the nail, rubbing his teeth, rolling his eyes as if the police exasperated rather than terrified him.

  To her surprise, Sovrintendente Grattapaglia did what she asked.

  When the clumping up the stairs and babble of voices had died away, she repeated her question. “What did you see?”

  “I already said. I saw this old guy try to grab a girl. I saw him do it. Then she lashed out and punched him and ran away. And the old guy fell and didn’t get up.”

  “How do you know he didn’t get up?”

  “I went over to him. I was going to give him a kicking, and I don’t have a problem saying that. But when I got there I could see he was, you know, out of it.”

  “Do you mean unconscious?”

  “Almost. His eyeballs were sort of swimming around and then they floated right up into his head, out of sight. Like this.” Sandro rolled his eyes around.

  “I don’t need the visuals, thanks. Did the man say anything?”

  “Yeah. He said, ‘Call her back.’ Amazing he could say that.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s all I heard.”

  “Did he have an accent?”

  Sandro scrunched up his face. “Can’t say. His voice was all husky and sort o
f gurgly. Maybe he had an accent. What sort?”

  “Forget it.” She did not want to start suggesting details to him. “Did you call an ambulance?”

  “For a rapist?”

  “I see you’re quick to condemn, Sandro. Just like those people who look down on you and your friends.”

  “Someone tried to rape my girlfriend Elvira.”

  “That was the older girl in here just now? The one with the red hair extension?”

  “What’s a hair extension?”

  “Your girlfriend’s string of red hair. It’s not her own.”

  “I thought it was dyed. Yeah, Elvira got attacked once, but didn’t report it.”

  “You said tried. Did she get raped or not?”

  “She said no. She said one grabbed her from behind, the other started ripping at her clothes. She said she fought and spat. When she screamed she was HIV positive, they ran off.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few months ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Monte Mario.”

  “An old guy that time, too?”

  Sandro looked puzzled. “No, no. She said two young guys.”

  A different time, different place, different attacker. “So you were sort of revenging her, even though this was someone else?”

  Sandro shrugged. “Old guy molesting a young woman.”

  “Did you see him attack her?”

  “No. He was trying to hold her. An old guy like that.”

  “How do you know she was a young girl? It was dark, she ran before you arrived.”

  “She had long silver-blond hair. I heard her voice, which was young, and then when she ran. You can sort of tell someone’s age from how they move, you know?”

  “What age would you say she was?”

  “I don’t know. She could have been sixteen, she could have been maybe as old as thirty, but no older.”

  Caterina made Sandro go back over the events twice more, and then made him do it in reverse chronological order while she checked against her notes. His story did not change. He saw the girl push the old man, then run. The old man lay on the ground. Sandro went over to him but did not help. He did not see anything wrong with his own behavior. He told the story a fourth time, and again mentioned that his original reason for going over to the old man was to kick him, not help him. In not kicking him, Sandro felt he had shown restraint.

  “Also, I didn’t steal money or anything from him.”

  “That was good of you, Sandro.” Caterina reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a blow-up of Emma’s ID photo.

  “Sweet!” said Sandro. “Who’s that?”

  “You’ve never seen her?”

  “I’d have remembered a face like that. What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing,” said Caterina. “Just an idea.”

  Caterina accompanied Sandro back up to his friends, who were seated on the plastic bench at the entrance on the first floor, eating pizza and drinking cans of Coca-Cola.

  “I may be in touch.” She gave him a half-push, half-caress on the shoulder to propel him down the corridor.

  She watched as the sorry little crew gave their Sandro a welcome fit for a returning warrior king. They piled out of the station into the evening air, their energy returned, their spirits temporarily lifted as they were given back the excessive freedom that was killing them.

  She went back up to the operations room, where Grattapaglia was beginning to clear his desk.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Not that will help us with the muggings.”

  He shrugged and turned back to his work.

  Caterina said, “Where did they get the pizza and Coca-Cola?”

  “From the pizzeria a taglio down the road, I suppose,” said Grattapaglia.

  “You accompanied them, right?”

  “Of course. You told me to keep an eye on the scumbags.”

  “You took them out and brought them back. Did you buy the pizza for them, too?”

  “Dumb little fuckers spend all their money on drugs,” said Grattapaglia. “Who else was going to pay?”

  Chapter 27

  For the next half hour, Grattapaglia slammed things on his desk and kicked at chairs, while Caterina stood in front of a large-scale map of Trastevere, pulling out and putting in the pins showing where the muggings had taken place. The map had been on the wall for three months, and the number of pins had gradually expanded.

  She had to pass by Assistente Capo Rospo’s desk on her way to turn on the overhead lights, and he took the opportunity to say, “Those pins don’t mean shit.”

  “They all converge around two places,” said Caterina.

  “Yeah, two hotels. Big fucking surprise that, finding tourists in hotels.”

  “This hotel has more than…”

  She had to stop talking, because Grattapaglia’s metal desk drawer refused to slide, and Grattapaglia smashed the side of his heel into it several times, swept the stuff from his desk, and left it on the floor.

  “ Ma vaffanculo a tutto! ” Grattapaglia clenched and unclenched his fists, then rubbed his left bicep and whitened.

  Rospo was suddenly busy with his work.

  Caterina went over to the Sovrintendente. “Let me help you,” she said. “Don’t let the stress kill you.”

  “Fuck the stress,” said Grattapaglia. “It’s being indoors. Last thing I’m going to do here is find out who the damned mugger is. You coming?”

  Caterina hesitated. Her shift ended in half an hour.

  “Sure,” she said. “Just let me call my mom, tell her I’ll be late again.”

  Grattapaglia surprised her by suggesting they go on foot.

  “It’ll calm me. We catch the mugger, we can call a car.”

  As they were crossing Ponte Garibaldi, she pulled the blow-up of Emma’s ID photo from her shoulder bag and showed it to Grattapaglia.

  “The kid who knew nothing about the mugging?” she said. “I think he might have seen her, but he did not identify her.”

  Grattapaglia looked at the photo carefully. Emma waited for a crude comment, but none was forthcoming. “Who is she?”

  Caterina explained. Grattapaglia nodded, “This has nothing at all to do with the muggings.”

  “I know. I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing down there with that kid. Look, I know you’re the one who’s going to be doing all the work and all the talking for the next few hours, and I’m basically going to be in your way… but I was wondering, could you…” she delved back into her shoulder bag and pulled out a photo of Treacy.

  Grattapaglia looked at the photo of Treacy in one hand, Emma in the other. “You want me to ask about the girl and Treacy as well as the muggings?” said Grattapaglia.

  “As a favor.”

  They veered right toward the Jewish school, for no other reason than that Grattapaglia seemed to want to shoot the breeze with the four patrolmen guarding the entrance. Caterina waited in the shadows, listening to a stream of guffawing misogyny.

  Then they walked to a bar where the bartender greeted Grattapaglia like an old friend and nodded warily at her.

  “Wait here,” Grattapaglia told Caterina, and he and the bartender disappeared into a back room. Ten minutes later, he reemerged.

  They left the bar, Grattapaglia whistling, swaggering slightly as he occupied the absolute center of the street, forcing young people and tourists to move to either side of him.

  Caterina realized the price to be paid for asking a favor was she would have to chisel information out of him.

  “Did that bartender see Treacy or Emma?”

  “Emma. I didn’t even know the name,” said Grattapaglia. “He knew the Englishman. But he couldn’t remember if he had seen him on the night in question.”

  “Shit, I just remembered something,” said Caterina. “Her name would not have been Emma. Use the name Manuela instead.”

  “Whatever you say. I still don’t know who she is.”
>
  Caterina explained, and Grattapaglia listened attentively, bending down in a way that reminded her a bit of Blume. Tall men, the two of them. Broad, too, though Grattapaglia was out of shape.

  “Now I know who I’m talking about, I might be able to ask better questions. Maybe I should have been told before now. You seem to be in a privileged position with the Commissioner.”

  Caterina was glad of the dark that hid her face. She changed subject as casually as she could manage. “The bartender you were just talking to, was he working that night?”

  “ Porcaccia la misera! I forgot to ask.”

  He was jerking her about, but he was also doing what she had asked and so she kept quiet.

  He walked on a bit, then said, “Yes, he was working that night. No, he didn’t see them.”

  In the next bar, on Piazza Santa Maria, a bartender in a starched white outfit with gold buttons glanced at the photos and became immediately adamant that Treacy had not been there. About the girl he knew nothing.

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  The bartender sprayed blue detergent on the zinc counter and wiped it even cleaner.

  “I’m not saying I don’t know him. I do. That’s why he doesn’t come here anymore.”

  “You won’t serve him?”

  The bartender touched his toothbrush mustache with his finger, and spoke in soft and confessional tones, throwing an anxious glance at two well-dressed men with briefcases seated at the table outside. “He threw up vomit and blood all over a table of Germans. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but a guy that age and that sick should know better than to drink like that. Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not surprised,” said the bartender, and dried droplets from the sink.

  They left the piazza and reached the third bar. A fug of marijuana sat above the fifty or so people sitting outside.

  A thin skinhead Roma soccer “Ultra” with blue arms was trying to stare them down.

  Grattapaglia led the way toward the farther of the two ancient tin tables to his left, which was occupied by three men, two of whom had hardly taken their eyes off them since they arrived.