Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  It was neither anger nor envy that had prompted him to leave after that. Quite simply, he knew it would be impossible to keep the precinct running efficiently. He needed to step aside: If he had stayed on, his men would have defied the authority of their new commanding officer and continued to turn to him for help, since he knew the district, the men, and the balance of power in the precinct.

  It was then that the affair of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone had gone down, delivering a true body blow to the public image of the local police. Like so many of his colleagues who battled from dawn till dusk, with hard work and great pain, against the decay of life on the streets and in the vicoli, largely at the hands of their own inhabitants, Palma had been disgusted, had felt immense rage. But when he learned that the chief of police intended to shut down the precinct entirely, admitting de facto defeat, he rebelled against the idea.

  And he asked to take over command of the precinct himself.

  An impulsive gesture, no doubt. And a risky one, for sure. But also a way out of the stagnant pond his career—and his life, in a way—had become. A new place, a new situation. And a new group. Something like a new family.

  The human resources that had been assigned to him, at least on paper, didn’t leave much hope for success. The four bastards, dismissed for conspiring to run a grim drug-dealing ring, had been replaced by new bastards, stray dogs whose original precincts had been all too eager to get rid of them: the hamfisted Aragona, protected by nepotism, tin-eared and offensive, intrusive and rude; the enigmatic Di Nardo, who’d fired her handgun inside her old station house; the silent Romano, subject to outbursts of rage during which he wrapped his powerful hands around the throats of suspects and colleagues alike. And Lojacono? The Sicilian known as “the Chinaman” for his strange almond-shaped eyes? No, he wasn’t a reject, Palma had actually requested him. Not that Di Vincenzo, Lojacono’s previous boss, hadn’t been delighted to be free of him: the mark of infamy that the Chinaman carried with him, that of a transfer away from his home territory because of allegations made, though never proved, by a Mafia turncoat about Lojacono’s collusion with organized crime, was exactly the kind that could never be forgiven in law enforcement circles. But Palma had watched Lojacono in action during the hunt for the Crocodile, a serial killer who had terrorized the city months before, and had clearly recognized Lojacono’s talent, his fury, his emotional involvement: Those were qualities he sought in his investigators, the things that were needed to succeed in that profession.

  Even the two staff members who had survived the purge carried out by the internal affairs commission had proven to be anything but burdens.

  The elderly deputy captain Pisanelli knew everything there was to know about the precinct where he was born and where he’d worked his whole life. He was an honest and empathetic man, a source of solid and extensive information that helped to make up for the fact that nearly all the others were pretty much new to the place. If not for his unfortunate obsession with a series of suspicious suicides, he would have been an ideal assistant.

  As for Ottavia, at first he’d wondered whether he ought to deploy her in the field, working investigations; then he’d come to understand just how invaluable she was as support staff. The intelligence she managed to cull from the web was at least as valuable as her colleagues’ legwork out in the vicoli and streets of the city, if not more so. She saved them hours and hours of work by instantly assembling mountains of information that would otherwise have cost a tremendous effort to obtain.

  Certainly, Palma had to admit to himself, as he listened to the woman laughing at Aragona’s nonsense, the knowledge that she was right there, in the next room, warmed his heart.

  He was far too experienced to fail to sense the danger: Nothing good could come when the simple pleasure of working together transformed itself into something different. He was there to supervise a team of police officers, to save the precinct and make it work efficiently; she was there to perform important tasks. It would be unforgivable for either to assign ulterior motives to the other’s appearance in the office each morning. Moreover, while he might be unattached, she was married and had a son, a son who was afflicted with autism.

  And after all, he might be fooling himself. Maybe those smiles, that solicitous care, the low tone of voice she used only when she spoke to him, were all just figments of his imagination: He was seeing and hearing what he wanted to see and hear. Maybe it was just his own desire playing tricks on him. Too many nights spent sleeping on his office couch, avoiding the messy studio apartment that he didn’t have the heart to call home; too many Sundays spent tossing back beers in front of the television, not even watching the screen; too many memories, by now so faded that he was actually afraid he might have made them up in order to fill a vast emptiness.

  It wasn’t sex that he was yearning for; he’d always thought sex without feeling was meaningless. When he met up with his few friends, old classmates who stubbornly insisted on getting together every couple of months, he stoically bore their mockery; in their opinion he’d slowly become just like their old Religious Studies professor, preaching the joys of the meditative life to a group of pimply and perennially horny teenagers. But Palma wasn’t looking for female company with no strings attached. He wanted to assuage his loneliness; another man’s wife or girlfriend, with her own family, her own life, her own problems, could hardly do that.

  Those excellent reasons, however, smashed themselves up against the reality of Ottavia’s face when she got to the office every morning, before all the others. And he lost the battle, miserably, fracturing himself into a thousand specks of subtle pleasure. What harm is there, his subconscious argued, if, after all, nothing is going to happen? If you don’t declare yourself, if you don’t go for her, if you don’t let her think that your interest is any more than merely professional? He knew that he was lying to himself, but he had no wish to erect excessive defenses around himself; come to think of it, he wouldn’t have even known how.

  He listened to her voice as she answered the phone, smiling at the warm sounds to which he was quickly becoming accustomed.

  Then he stopped smiling.

  IV

  In the morning, the police go on their rounds of burglaries, Lojacono was thinking to himself as he climbed the steep vicolo, surrounded by noisy shop assistants putting out merchandise for sale on the street, feral mopeds in search of unlikely routes, and sleepy kids with backpacks slung over their shoulders. Apartment burglaries float to the surface only when the sun rises, washed up by the night onto the shores of dawning consciousness, when the victim of the burglary discovers his or her new condition, and awakens to a nightmare.

  Burglary, Lojacono mused, is a very particular crime. It’s a rape of one’s sense of security, the brusque revelation that it’s not enough to lock the front door to keep out the violence of a world seething with pain and fear. It’s the police blotter dumped right at your doorstep, yes, yours, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, even if you might have believed yourself exempt from such grotesqueries, invulnerable to crime. It’s the end of tranquility, the event that gives one last violent shove to the orderly world you’ve labored to build, to the serenity of an oasis that you had considered inviolable.

  It’s no fun being a cop responding to a burglary call in somone’s home. You feel responsible, as if you’ve failed to provide the protection someone had every right to expect. In the victim’s gaze you can read a mute undertone of reproof. I pay my taxes, that gaze always seemed to say; I work hard and honestly, I lead a tough life, navigating a thousand personal hardships, and part of what I earn winds up in your paycheck. And here’s what I get for it: my home turned upside down, criminal hands rummaging through my possessions and robbing me not only of my valuables, but also of my domestic peace of mind. You have to admit that this is your fault, too, Mr. Policeman. Where were you while the thieves were pilfering my sense of safety and security? For all I know, you
were sound asleep, digesting the dinner I paid for with my taxes.

  Lojacono checked the address that he’d jotted down on a scrap of paper. When the phone call had come in, there’d been no one in the office but him, Ottavia Calabrese, and Di Nardo, who’d just arrived. Early risers, his colleagues at the Pizzofalcone precinct: A good sign, though he suspected that it was more a result of existential lacks than any genuine love for the job. A man had sobbed broken phrases in dialect in a way that had struck him as virtually incomprehensible, and in fact he’d finally been forced to hand the receiver over to Alex.

  He turned to look at Di Nardo, tilting his head toward the apartment building’s front entrance. She nodded, taking in the usual knot of rubberneckers that always gathered mere seconds after any noteworthy event; a few yards further on, the squad car stood parked with a uniformed cop, arms folded across his chest, leaning against the door. The man nodded in greeting.

  Strange girl, Di Nardo was. Not that the others weren’t equally strange, and probably the strangest of them all was Lojacono himself. But there was something enigmatic about Alex. Graceful, silent, with finely drawn features, she emanated a sense of restrained force, as if she were ready to transform herself into something else. Lojacono had overheard Aragona, shameless gossip that he was, talking about a gunshot fired inside a station house and the officer who’d narrowly missed being hit, but he’d preferred not to delve deeper: After all, didn’t they all have some dark chapter in their pasts, there at Pizzofalcone?

  His train of thought betrayed him by bringing him an image of home, of the Sicilian province so full of light and shadows: the sudden smell of salt water on a gust of wind, the branches of the almond trees heavy with blossoms. And the memory of the testimony given by Di Fede, the mafioso he’d gone to school with; the words that had changed his life.

  Not all had changed for the worse, he thought as he cut his way through the crowd to reach the courtyard and the broad flight of steps that led upstairs from there. For instance, his wife, Sonia’s, true colors had been unveiled; she had dumped him and now she never missed the chance, during their rare phone conversations, to unleash a stream of venom and rancor. He’d met people he never would have otherwise, his new colleagues for example. Even his relationship with his daughter, Marinella, was different. And that was a good thing.

  For months he hadn’t even been able to talk to her, because of the barrier that Sonia had erected between the two of them. He’d missed his daughter, who wasn’t quite fourteen, with a kind of physical pain, one of the sharpest in his life. Then, little by little, they’d begun to talk on the phone again, and just two months ago he’d found her on his doorstep in the rain, fleeing the umpteenth screaming match with her mother, in search of solid ground that she thought she’d lost forever.

  No easy matter, Lojacono thought to himself. He’d left behind a tender and emotional little girl who still played at being a grown-up lady with her friends, pretending to make coffee dates and go shopping, who put on her mother’s clothes and burst out laughing in front of the mirror; now that little girl had become a silent, pensive young woman who dressed all in black, and whose almond-shaped eyes, so similar to his own, were often lost in indecipherable thought. He didn’t know how long she planned to stay, and he was afraid to ask. He didn’t want Marinella to have even the hint of a thought that she might be less than welcome. He’d informed Marinella’s mother that the girl was with him and that she shouldn’t worry, and had been forced to endure an endless series of recriminations. In reality, Lojacono wasn’t certain which solution would be best for his daughter: whether she should stay with a father who, because of his job, could spend very little time with her, and deal with a new environment, or whether she should go home to a place where she clearly wasn’t happy.

  Di Nardo’s low voice brought him out of his thoughts: “That’s the way in.”

  On the second floor landing there was only one entrance, whose wooden, single-paneled door stood ajar. The apartment building, originally, like so many others in the neighborhood, an aristocratic palazzo owned and inhabited by a single family, had undergone a centuries-long process of deterioration, while decades of social darkness had settled over the quarter as a whole. In the past ten years, though, the drop in rents combined with the increasing demand for apartments in the city center had reversed the trend, so that buildings in this part of town were slowly regaining their prestige. The graffiti on the outside walls had been scraped off, the plaster had been repaired, the flowerbeds in the ancient courtyards had been restored by skilled gardners to their onetime glory and filled with rosebushes and hydrangeas, flowers that on that warm May day seemed to glow with their own light.

  The apartment where the burglary had taken place was on the building’s second and main floor, the piano nobile. Unlike the other floors, this one hadn’t been subdivided into units with less floor space so that they could be more easily rented or sold; that meant the place must be really big. A security camera had been installed over the door; Di Nardo was looking at the camera, too. The young woman called Lojacono’s eye to the front door lock, which showed no signs of forced entry. The landing was illuminated by a large window which seemed locked, with the vertical metal latch lodged securely in the marble windowsill. Lojacono, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, opened the window and saw that it gave onto the interior courtyard. The brass plaque on the door read “S. Parascandolo,” beneath ornamental curlicues.

  At the entrance stood a uniformed officer who saluted them, snapping the tips of his fingers to the visor of his cap.

  “Buongiorno, my name’s Rispo. We’ve been here for twenty minutes or so, we forwarded the call from the operations center.”

  A large foyer opened onto a hallway, and off to the right was the entrance to what might be a living room. Already in the hallway there were scattered garments, bags, and knickknacks littering the floor. Next to the door stood a suitcase and a leather trolley bag, both shut.

  “The luggage belongs to the homeowners,” Rispo said. “They came back from Ischia this morning and found the place turned upside down. They’re in there, in the living room.”

  Alex pointed out to Lojacono the discreet security cameras, just like the ones outside, each with sensors connected to the alarm system. You certainly couldn’t say that S. Parascandolo, whoever that was, thought safety was of little importance. Even though all that attention didn’t seem to have done a lot of good.

  From the living room came rhythmic sobbing. Someone was crying.

  Lojacono started off, followed by Alex.

  V

  Not all the calls that come into a precinct house are the same.

  The phone rings all the time, and there’s always someone who answers it, someone who tries to make themselves heard over the cacophony of so many people all talking at the same time. In a precinct house’s bullpen, powerful emotions, passions, and sentiments clash: and so voices are raised, there’s confusion, there’s agitation. In precinct houses people shout, like in some circle of hell.

  When Ottavia Calabrese picked up on the second ring, everyone was talking. Aragona was shouting into his own receiver, asking Guida, the officer on duty at the front door, for a coffee; Romano was asking Pisanelli whether he knew of any one-bedroom apartments for rent near the precinct, and Pisanelli was giving him the name of a real estate agency run by a friend of his; Palma had just stuck his head out of his office to say good morning to everyone.

  But as soon as Ottavia, who had put one hand up to her ear to shut out the noise, said: “What? Someone took a child?” the room fell into a frozen silence. Calabrese grabbed a pen and started taking notes, her face taut, her voice cold and efficient. Only her eyes betrayed emotion.

  Palma took a step forward and came up to her desk, worried. A child. A child had been taken.

  Ottavia hung up. Everyone was looking at her.

  “A little boy is missing from a
school field trip that was visiting Villa Rosenberg’s art gallery, not far from here. They’d just arrived and he vanished right away. One of the teachers made the call, a nun; it’s a private school on Via Petrarca.”

  She spoke in a low voice, distressed but still professional. She was staring straight at Palma, even though she was talking to the group at large. A child.

  Palma asked: “How do they know that he was taken? Couldn’t he have just wandered off, or be hiding somewhere, or something like that?”

  “One of his classmates was with him. The boy said that he walked off with a woman. A blonde woman.”

  Silence. Tension, anxiety. Palma heaved a sigh.

  “All right, let’s not waste time. Romano, Aragona, go straight there: Take the car. Pisanelli, get the name of the child, see what you can find out about the family, and if you can, let them know. Ottavia, call Villa Rosenberg back, tell them not to let anyone move: no one is to enter, no one is to leave. I’ll inform the operations center and have them send over a couple of squad cars from headquarters. Let’s get busy.”

  To his usual crazy driving, Aragona had now added an embarrassed silence. He didn’t much like Francesco Romano, aka Hulk. Something about his gaze, often lost in space, his expression of vague suffering, frightened him; and his buzz cut, his bull neck, his jutting jaw, gave an impression of power held back, ready to explode at any moment. For that matter, what little he knew about him wasn’t especially reassuring: A friend of his, a uniformed police officer, had told Aragona that this Hulk had grabbed a suspect who was mocking him by the neck and sent him to the hospital. “Marcu’,” he’d said to him, “I was there, and it took three men to pry that guy loose from his hands; another five seconds and he’d have killed him.”

  Hurtling straight toward a crowd of Japanese tourists without bothering to slow down, horn blaring, so that they fluttered off like so many pigeons, Aragona thought to himself that it wasn’t hard to believe: The man looked violent. And then he had that strange sense of humor so that every time Romano replied to one of his jokes, Aragona came off looking like a idiot. He glanced at him quickly: He was gripping the seat with his left hand and the door handle with his right; a muscle was twitching threateningly in his jaw.