The Deliverance of Evil

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The Deliverance of Evil Page 33

by Roberto Costantini


  He stripped Linda, this prick of a racist, this animal in policeman’s uniform.

  Anger prevailed completely over prudence. The words slipped from him without control, as they had so many years ago.

  “Vasile’s left wrist was sprained several days before Nadia was killed. That was why he screamed so much when you grabbed him. We have the medical report. There’s not the slightest possibility that he strangled Nadia.”

  Madness, Balistreri, sheer madness. They should expel you from the force.

  He saw Colajacono turned pale and suddenly get. He jumped to his feet and got in Balistreri’s face. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he hissed, closing in.

  Balistreri moved to the door. He could take Colajacono, but he hadn’t regressed that far. A fight would have marked the end of the investigation, or at least his role in it. He chose to land a verbal uppercut instead.

  “You fucking moron. They had you stay here with Tatò so you wouldn’t have an alibi for the time they murdered Nadia.”

  The effect was a lot worse than a physical uppercut. As he made his way toward the main entrance, he gave Colajacono a last look. He was as white as a sheet, leaning against the wall, staring into space. He had understood he was sitting at a card table where the stakes were too high for him.

  . . . .

  When Balistreri returned to the office late in the afternoon, Margherita told him that Corvu needed to speak to him urgently.

  “Have him come into my office.” He pointed at the flower in the glass on her desk and winked at her. She blushed.

  Corvu had the agitated manner of a high-school student the day before final exams.

  “Captain, I’m being followed.”

  Balistreri cursed under his breath and felt anxiety as well as anger growing inside him for the members of his team who were too enterprising.

  “Followed where? Weren’t you supposed to be in the office today?”

  Corvu looked at the floor. Balistreri had come to expect this kind of loose-cannon behavior from Piccolo, but not from Corvu.

  The deputy hastened to explain. “First, I analyzed all the data we have on Nadia. I spoke to Forensics and asked for any information. There were traces of bodily fluids that point to DNA from a single party. It’s definitely Vasile’s DNA.”

  He took Balistreri’s silence as encouragement to continue.

  “Then I compared the alibis of all the possible suspects between six and nine on December 24.” He held out a chart.

  Balistreri saw “solid alibi” written beside the names of Greg, Mircea, Adrian, and Giorgi and “incomplete or unsupported alibi” written next to those of Hagi, Colajacono, Tatò, and Ajello. The last name caught him by surprise.

  “How do you know what Ajello did on the evening of December 24?” he asked. He didn’t like seeing that name there.

  “I called ENT and Ajello’s secretary said that he was coming back from Monte Carlo this evening. So I said that we urgently needed to check the books of Bella Blu in order to get confirmation of the date that Camarà was hired. She got in touch with Ajello, who said it was okay.”

  “And you went over to ENT?”

  Corvu was looking at his shoes. “With Mastroianni,” he whispered.

  Balistreri gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles were white, and he clamped his lips so tight he crushed the unlit cigarette he had stuck in his mouth

  Damn Corvu! And damn Mastroianni with his big-time Italian hotshot looks!

  When he felt he had regained control over himself and was ready for the worst, he said, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  Corvu continued to address his shoes.

  “We went there by bus. When we got to ENT I introduced Mastroianni to Ajello’s secretary as an accounting expert. She had put Bella Blu’s books in a meeting room. She offered us some tea, and Mastroianni left the room with her a couple of times on the pretext of making some photocopies. Then he asked her what some abbreviations meant. He kept talking to her. She was distracted and flattered, of course. I excused myself to go to the bathroom.”

  “And you checked his calendar.” It wasn’t a question.

  Corvu nodded. “Ajello’s last appointment in his office on December 24 at six thirty. Then the diary was empty until seven, when it said ‘Grand Hotel: Cocktails.’”

  Balistreri groaned softly. Then he waited in silence, resigned.

  “I called the Grand Hotel and asked for the manager with the excuse that I was from the finance police and I was auditing a catering company. I asked if there had been a reception there in on the evening of December 24. They told me that every Christmas Eve there was a cocktail party at at seven for the members of a charity group that raised funds for a humanitarian organization. It’ll be easy to check whether Ajello was there and whether he wrote a check.”

  Balistreri stood, and Corvu took a step backward. “Corvu, you will not do one more thing that involves ENT, Bella Blu, or Ajello. If you step out of line I’ll send you back to the Sardinian mountains to count goats. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Corvu mumbled.

  “Now tell me why you think you’re being followed,” Balistreri ordered.

  “I noticed him when I was on the bus, coming back. He was the only one to get on with us. I didn’t see him on the way there, but it was the same guy who was following us the other day.”

  Evening

  There wasn’t a minute to lose. The actions of Piccolo and Corvu and his own words to Colajacono had flipped the switch on a ticking time bomb. He summoned Coppola and Mastroianni.

  “I want you to follow Colajacono and not let him out of your sight. Take turns and don’t let yourselves be seen. Now get a move on.”

  “I wanted to tell you that I haven’t tracked down Fred Cabot yet, but I spoke to Carmen again and she mentioned something strange,” Coppola said.

  “I don’t give a shit, Coppola. One of you has to be outside the police station before Colajacono’s shift ends, and it’s almost eight.”

  Mastroianni raised his hand like an elementary school student with good comportment. “Coppola will have to go first. I need to be at the airport at midnight to bring in Ramona Iordanescu to spend the night for security purposes.”

  “But I’ve got my son’s basketball game. Tonight’s the championship,” Coppola protested.

  Balistreri tilted his head at him. “Coppola, there will be other games. Stick close to Colajacono and don’t let him out of your sight. This is important.”

  Coppola reacted just as Balistreri expected. “Captain, you’re right. Ciro will play in lots of championship games. I’ll follow Colajacono to the gates of hell.”

  Left to himself, Balistreri went over again what they knew. Bella Blu had been chosen as a meeting place to introduce Nadia to someone. Then a real disaster happened. By pure coincidence, Camarà had a urinary tract infection and urgently needed to pee. He went down to the toilet. As he passed the private lounge, he saw Nadia with someone. The person who’d organized Nadia’s death for the following day sensed he was in danger. And so he did away with Camarà, faking an argument with a motorcyclist.

  But that wasn’t enough. On the morning of December 24, the cleaning woman noted that a lighter in the private lounge needed replacing. They called whoever had been with Nadia in the lounge, but he didn’t know anything about it. A link between Bella Blu, ENT, and a future crime was absolutely unacceptable. They figured they’d find the lighter on Nadia when they killed her, but they didn’t. They panicked and called Mircea and Greg, figuring that Ramona must have it, but in order to protect Bella Blu they didn’t say what they were looking for. Rudi would have given them the lighter if he’d known they wanted it.

  What troubled Balistreri most was the inevitability. Up until December 23, nothing had happened that would compromise Bella Blu, ENT, or its shareholders. They could have waited. They didn’t have to kill Camarà right away, or Nadia. They could have changed their plans. But it was as if the
re had been no other choice. Despite all the risks, the plan had to move forward. So Camarà died, Nadia died, and they beat up Ramona and Rudi in order to find the lighter. They continued to search for it in Nadia and Ramona’s room and happened to be surprised by Piccolo and Rudi.

  He was exhausted from thinking about it. He couldn’t shake the powerful image of Colajacono trembling and pale as a ghost. He had to do something to stop what he himself had set in motion. He picked up the phone and called Linda Nardi.

  . . . .

  Both the police and the carabinieri armed themselves with the Beretta 92 nine-millimeter Parabellum. The gun was military issue and not available to civilians. The 92FS was the latest version; that was what most police officers with fewer than fifteen years of service carried. Balistreri had the 92SB, a model that was a little older but still in use.

  Reluctantly, he took the weapon from his office safe. He cleaned it, loaded it, put the safety catch on, and slipped it into his holster, which he fastened under his left armpit. He’d learned to shoot when he was a kid, but guns weren’t associated with happy memories for him. He hadn’t touched a weapon with the intention of shooting it for many years. But now old ghosts, the dangerous crowd he’d run with before, were looming on the horizon.

  He made his way through the city center on foot, while a few customers were leaving the shops that were about to close and people shivering with cold were beginning to slip into restaurants. There was a pleasant drizzle again, and when he got to the Pantheon his hair was wet and plastered to his forehead.

  She was already there. She was wearing a dowdy raincoat and below it a sweater and baggy pants. The contrast between her childlike face and her old-lady clothes was greater than usual. Yet Linda Nardi was thirty-six, neither a child nor an old lady.

  He got straight to the point.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed, Ms. Nardi?”

  She considered that for a moment, as if it were a serious question. “Pretty soon no one will give any thought to Nadia, or Samantha, or the other young victims, or the family members who mourn them.”

  He stared at her. A beautiful woman, polite and kind, but incorruptible in her principles and therefore dangerous. In her eyes was the steady calmness of those who are right.

  The eyes of someone I loved, the values that I lost.

  The thought took him back forty years. Something collapsed inside him. It felt like the distant shock of an explosion at the bottom of the ocean when it finally reaches the shore.

  “You’re crazy.”

  They both knew what that “crazy” meant. The word that had slipped out was an impossible bridge over the raging torrent between them.

  What do you think you’re doing, Balistreri? You’re an old man. Don’t make yourself any more ridiculous to others than you already are to yourself.

  She smiled at him, the first real smile she’d given him since they’d met.

  “Finding out the truth is part of my life, part of what I am. I never knew my father, and I still don’t know why. I was an aggressive child. I used to hit my classmates, boys and girls.”

  Balistreri said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can show you pictures. I was an early bloomer, physically and psychologically. I was fully developed at age eleven. I went to a private middle school, the Charlemagne School. The upper school was there as well, the older boys. I didn’t have a father, so I went looking for an older boy to take his place. At least that’s what the psychologist said when all the trouble began.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She shook her head, lost in an unwelcome memory. Balistreri knew how hard those could be to dispel.

  “There was a problem and I had to leave the school. Fortunately, love heals all wounds. My mother’s love, that is. She helped me get better. She took care of me until I was able to go back to school. And I got good grades once I went back. It turns out I really am intelligent.”

  “And it’s precisely because you’re intelligent that you should understand that tracking down a murderer isn’t a journalist’s job. Leave it to the police.”

  She nodded. “Colajacono is going to give me the name before midnight. I promise I’ll give it to you immediately.”

  He paused. He really didn’t want to ask for anything more, but he had to. “I need another favor.”

  This time again she listened to him without any interruption. She placed no conditions on doing what he asked. They left each other soon after in the Pantheon’s deserted piazza. He had wanted to hug her in the rain but instead let her go with a brief good-bye.

  . . . .

  While he was walking home in the rain he was struck by a feeling of disquiet. Halfway there, he decided to stop in a bar that was still open near the Termini main railway station. It was full of foreigners. The Asians were crowded round the slot machines, the East Europeans were drinking shots of spirits, and the Africans were trying to sell counterfeit designer bags to the few passersby shivering with cold. All of them were smoking, not caring in the slightest that it wasn’t allowed in the bar.

  Balistreri lit his last cigarette of the day. The surrounding square was intermittently illuminated by the headlights of the few cars in circulation. It was a little after midnight.

  He called Coppola. “Colajacono’s still in the station. He went out to the little restaurant opposite with Tatò and then they came back. I promise I won’t lose him.”

  “Thanks, Coppola. That’s great.”

  Coppola added, “By the way, my son scored thirty-two points and his team won.”

  “Are you sure he’s really yours, Coppola?” They laughed and hung up.

  Then he called Mastroianni.

  “I’m with Ramona. We’re coming in from the airport now.”

  “Mastroianni, I want to talk to her immediately. Meet me at the bar on the Via Marsala side of Termini station.”

  . . . .

  He had of course imagined a different and more private setting for questioning Ramona Iordanescu, but there was no time to lose. An official interrogation in the barracks or in the office was impossible without the public prosecutor present, so they found themselves sitting at a little table in the bar filled with people, smoke, and muffled voices.

  The photo with Nadia taken in front of St. Peter’s hadn’t done justice to the girl’s statuesque figure. The harsh features of her face were immediately belied by her adolescent’s manners. She was making eyes at Mastroianni, which was no surprise. She asked for two cream-filled pastries.

  “I just love these,” she said, wiping a bit of the filling from the corner of her mouth.

  “You can have as many as you like,” Mastroianni said.

  “All right,” Balistreri cut in, “but meanwhile let’s have a little chat.”

  Ramona nodded, her mouth full of cream and flaky pastry.

  “You don’t need to worry about this. Tomorrow we’ll have a meeting with you and Deputy Captain Colajacono. Immediately after that, Mastroianni will take you to the airport and you can go back home,” Balistreri said.

  He read the fear in the young woman’s eyes. “He’ll go straight to prison on the charge of being an accessory to Nadia’s murder and won’t come out for many years,” he said, trying to comfort her.

  Mastroianni and Ramona both looked startled. “Accessory to murder, really?” Mastroianni asked.

  Balistreri ignored him and spoke directly to Ramona.

  “Tell me about the apartment near Cristal. Did it have a false ceiling or a real one?”

  “I don’t understand,” Ramona said. Mastroianni explained the question to her.

  “I don’t know. How can you tell?”

  “By the lights. Where the ceiling wasn’t covered by the mirror was there a regular light fixture or spotlights?”

  “Spotlights?”

  Another explanation from Mastroianni.

  “Yes, pink spotlights.”

  For filming from above. Real pros.

  “
All right, then what happened?”

  “I did as Colajacono said. Well-dressed man at Cristal offered me a drink. We went to apartment. He wanted to be slave. I did my job. He was very happy and gave me hundred-euro tip, then went away.”

  “Would you recognize this man if you saw him again?”

  “Every bit of him,” she said. She giggled.

  Balistreri took out his BlackBerry and looked for the e-mail Mastroianni had sent from Iasi. He frowned as he read.

  “Ramona, you said that Colajacono wanted to convince you that Nadia was safe with the man she got into the car with. Is that exactly what he said?”

  He felt Mastroianni was about to interrupt and signaled him to keep quiet.

  “Yes, I’m sure. He said exactly that.”

  “And you told him that she had gotten into a car?”

  Mastroianni was rhythmically tapping his cup against the saucer. Balistreri shot him a warning glance.

  Ramona appeared to be making an effort to remember. “Well, I said that Nadia and I worked as pair, that we didn’t get into car ever if other not there. Then I told him I was away with limp-dick client and on return I found Nadia gone. And that I waited and also asked other girls about her.”

  “Did you tell him what the other girls said to you?”

  “No, he said not to piss him off.”

  Mastroianni was shifting in his chair. Balistreri, irritated, leaned over and whispered to him, “If you have to go to the bathroom, go ahead.” Mastroianni stood and left the table.

  “What’s happening?” Ramona asked, disconcerted.

  “Nothing. He has to go to the bathroom. So, you hadn’t told him about the car.”

  This is what happens when you delegate questioning to the inexperienced and you sit in your comfortable office and read about it via e-mail. You’re a fool, Balistreri. And stupid Mastroianni thinks he can get the right answers from a woman without asking the right questions.

  Then he remembered the mess Corvu had made, and Piccolo. In the end, the only one who hadn’t messed up was Coppola. He really should have thanked Coppola rather than teasing him. He picked up his cell phone to call Coppola, but at that moment a loud cry of joy rose up from the Romanians. They began cheering and toasting each other.

 

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