“I know. You’re half an hour late.”
“I wait for him to sleeping.”
“Why, wasn’t she there?”
“She came back late from working. She must go, if not, Signora looking for her.”
“I get it. Tell her to be careful. To make sure she isn’t seen by . . . by anyone.”
“Yes, told her. All good, anyway. No problem, like telling you.”
“Yes, I know. I heard.”
“I thinking, if place have video camera and get picture of face . . .”
“No, don’t worry. There won’t be any trouble. I checked. Tell me how it went.”
“I waiting outside in car. She going in, head covered like you saying. Seeing boy from front door, calling him. He coming, he happy. Everything like you say.”
“What about him . . . how is he doing, now?”
“He fine. In storeroom, I bringing water and food. You not worrying nothing. Instead, when you calling?”
“Like we agreed: The first phone call will be tomorrow afternoon. Keep it short, just the information. Then another call, twenty-four hours later. Always you calling, that’s important.”
“Yes, I knowing. And if . . . if some problem with boy?”
“What kind of problem? There can’t be any problems! Remember that the money . . .”
“Yes, I knowing: money in advance before, rest of money later. But if boy, for example, not being well, or making noise, or . . .”
“How many times do I need to tell you? Just make sure that the boy doesn’t make any noise. And make very sure he isn’t left in complete darkness. Most important: Either you or she have to be there at all times, never leave him alone. If someone went by and he called out, you’d be in big trouble. Got it?”
“Got it, got it. I knowing. But no one pass by here. No one, never. There is gate with chain, I broke and changed padlock with key, and only I and she having key. But money? You promising that we not doing anything difficult, only keep boy, and you giving money quickly.”
“You’ve already been paid the advance, haven’t you? When the time is right, you’ll get the rest. Stay calm. Now we need to avoid making mistakes: The phone calls are going to be crucial. If you get that wrong, if we get that wrong, there’ll be no money for anyone, just lots of trouble. You understand?”
“You not worrying, we no mistakes. You no mistakes, too, no? Remember: We making our part, you making yours. And if we making mistakes, everyone in trouble. If you making mistakes, just you in trouble. And boy too.”
“I know, I know! I have to go now. You turn off your cell phone, and turn it on every four hours. If you see that I tried to get in touch with you, call me back.”
“Okay. I knowing.”
“And . . . be careful with the boy. Don’t hurt him.”
“No. If you not making mistakes.”
X
Looking out from the balcony, Marinella Lojacono observed with fascination the slice of the city that teemed at her feet. This place was like Palermo, and yet different, even if she couldn’t explain how. Certainly they were both different from Agrigento, worlds apart.
She’d lived in Agrigento until she was thirteen: just long enough to finish eighth grade. There were the friends she’d grown up with; one girl in particular, Irene, with whom she shared her life. They were still in touch on Facebook, but they wrote each other less and less; Irene had a boyfriend . . . Angelo this and Angelo that, what a pain in the ass.
After Papà’s problems, she and Mamma had moved to Palermo. Now, as she looked down at the crowds, at people running and shoving each other, Marinella remembered her first days in that new city. Neither she nor her mother had been in the best state of mind, and that certainly hadn’t made things easier. Plus, Papà’s absence had been an intolerable burden. He’d always been the buffer between her and her mother, the only thing that stopped them from pecking each other to death. Marinella was silent, very reserved, and subject to long spells of brooding; her mother, Sonia, was exuberant and intrusive, always eager to stick her nose into Marinella’s business.
Not that she had much business, to tell the truth. She’d had a hard time fitting in; her schoolmates were too different from her, and her grades, which had always been outstanding, had dropped precipitously. When, after extreme effort, she’d finally made a friend, her mother had made sure to chase that friend away by bursting rudely into her room and delivering a long, cringe-inducing sermon on the fact that her girlfriend was smoking a cigarette.
That had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. With cold determination, Marinella had checked the ferry schedules; three days later she’d completed her last round of exams so that she wouldn’t have to repeat the year; she’d packed her few possessions into a backpack, and she’d left.
A scooter went roaring up the street against traffic, and a car stopped to let it go by. The boy on the moped waved his thanks, and the car tapped its horn in response. She felt like laughing: People sure were strange around there. Strange but nice. The Palermitans had struck her as more cautious, less willing to reach out; but maybe she’d just had a bad attitude. Here on the other hand, whenever she went out shopping or for a walk, she got unasked-for smiles, and now and then some kid her age would greet her as if she were a friend.
She liked taking care of the apartment. Lojacono had selected the place practically at random, believing he’d be living there briefly and alone; he was messy and lazy, and Marinella, who was very exacting, had found a place that more or less needed to be rescued. Her father had told her not to worry about it, to enjoy the time she had here as if it were a holiday. But it wasn’t a chore for her. For that matter, it might not even be a vacation.
She went back inside, reluctantly leaving the gentle spring air and the pleasant chaos that rose from the street below to the fifth-floor window.
A couple of nights ago, her father had told her that at first he’d hated the city, but that little by little he’d gotten used to it. Unlike him, she had immediately felt comfortable there. But Papà had been catapulted there from a place he’d never left. She hadn’t been. Perhaps that’s why they’d reacted to it so differently. Because usually Marinella and her father agreed. It had always been that way: They had a special rapport, they understood each other with a glance of those eyes, so strange and so similar, an unmistakable facial feature that united them the way their personalities did. Being torn away from her father had been traumatic, and the fact that her mother only spoke ill of him had just made her miss him more.
So, Marinella thought to herself, the solution was obvious: She’d stay here and live in the place she preferred, with the person she preferred. To take care of him.
As she was neatly folding and placing the linen in the drawers, her thoughts went to the woman that she’d seen coming home with her father the night she’d arrived. Then and there, the flood of her emotions had been so strong—the desire to throw her arms around him; the fear of his reaction to the fact that she’d run away—that she’d barely even noticed her. What’s more, the woman had left almost immediately, very discreetly. But it wasn’t so hard to figure out: A magistrate, someone her father worked with, going home with a man who lived alone, after midnight. It could only mean one thing.
Of course her father had assured her that they’d just needed to discuss a few loose ends on an investigation they’d just closed, and that he’d needed to give her a document; that it was all strictly professional. But Marinella and Laura, that was the bitch’s name, had exchanged a quick glance, and women only need one glance to know everything they need to know. She would have been happy, the bitch, if Marinella had simply gotten out of her way. Sorry to tell you, thought the girl, but I don’t intend to.
Still, that woman must never have actually been inside her father’s apartment, because she saw not a trace of her presence: not pair of underwear, not a toothbrush
, not a box of tampons. Marinella knew well that women marked their territory, that they planted little flags to testify to their presence; and she’d found nothing of the sort. Just in the nick of time, then, she thought wickedly.
Somewhere, someone switched on a radio and turned the volume up; a neomelodic song filled the air. She liked that too, about this city: There was always music. Someone was always playing an instrument, or singing, or listening to a CD, or the radio, or a TV; or else a cart was going by, the vendor calling his wares. There was always music.
Marinella went over to the mirror to get ready. Perhaps she wasn’t traditionally beautiful, but she was well on her way to becoming attractive in a special, distinctive way. Her narrow eyes, high cheekbones, and glossy raven hair all came from her father; her long legs, full lips, and lithe physique were from her mother, who could still make men stop and turn in the street.
She’d gotten into the habit of making her face up a little, just enough to “fare la femmina,” or “play the woman,” as her mamma liked to say, but without going overboard. She had another reason now, too, though she wouldn’t have admitted it even under torture.
She pressed her lips together to apply the lipstick, concealing a smile. On three separate occasions, on the stairs, she’d run into a guy.
Older than her, he must have been eighteen, maybe twenty; tall, athletic, carrying a bag full of books, and trotting down the stairs, whistling. The first time he’d stopped whistling, as if surprised at the sight of her; the second time he’d given her a long level look; the third time he’d actually breathed a quiet ciao. She hadn’t replied, she’d lowered her eyes and hurried past; but her heart had done a somersault in her chest.
The time of day was always the same, the bag of books and his apparent age spoke of university classes to be attended, the speed with which he descended the stairs suggested he lived above her, on the sixth floor, say, or at most the seventh; and leaving aside old Signorina Parisi, who lived alone with her cats and dogs, and the Gargiulos, who were an elderly, childless couple, she’d narrowed the list of possibilities down to the D’Amatos and the Rossinis. She was, after all, a policeman’s daughter.
And so, sharpening the weapons with which nature had endowed her, she was about to go visit the first of those two families and shamelessly ask if she could borrow two eggs: she’d waited until it was Thursday afternoon, the day that the local grocery stores all closed, for that very reason. She knew that at more or less this time of the day, the mysterious tune-whistler was about to go out; perhaps he would open the door himself.
The spring air carried the notes of the unknown neomelodic song, along with the disorderly racket of the bustling street below. A kid started crying and an exasperated woman began shouting at him. It was almost dinnertime, and the air was beginning to fill with the scent of minced garlic.
God, how she loved that city.
XI
Anyone who entered the large bullpen out of which Pizzofalcone’s investigative team worked would have found himself face-to-face with an odd spectacle. All of the officers, plus Commissario Palma, and even Guida, who manned the front desk and had magically chosen just the right moment to be temporarily relieved, were crowded around Ottavia Calabrese’s desk, watching the recordings from Villa Rosenberg’s security cameras, which she had digitized.
Romano and Aragona had the rumpled appearance of men who had worked hard and come up empty. They’d gone over the art gallery, the grounds, the surrounding area, and even the lobbies of the apartment buildings on the far side of the piazza with a fine-toothed comb, and they’d found nothing. They’d questioned the museum staff, the local shopkeepers, the traffic cops working the streets in the neighborhood, and even a few old men who’d hoped to enjoy a little spring air, but instead were sitting on benches getting lungfuls of smog. Nothing. No one had seen a little boy leave the museum, alone or accompanied, and head off somewhere else. It was as if Dodo—what a terrible nickname, Aragona had thought to himself—had vanished into thin air, had turned to dust and been blown away on the spring breeze all the way down to the sea.
To eliminate any lingering doubts, they’d forced the two nuns to answer about a hundred questions. Did they remember whether the child’s behavior had changed in the past few weeks? Had he said anything odd, unusual? Had there been any changes in his academic performance? What about his mood? Nothing, nothing at all. If Dodo had been unhappy, if he’d planned to run away from home, to do something foolish, he’d shown no warning signs. Everything had been perfectly normal, everything had gone just as usual, everything had been calm.
Except for the fact that Dodo had just vanished into thin air.
The original footage, in black and white, was pretty grainy; to be fair, the cameras were meant to catch someone removing paintings from the museum without permission, not people kidnapping children. Ottavia had done a little digital magic and managed to improve the resolution ever so slightly, and now they were all watching video coverage of a sleepy morning at the museum as if it were an adrenaline-charged thriller.
Before putting on his glasses to see from the sideline to which he’d been relegated, Pisanelli had closed the shutters, bringing darkness a little earlier than the impending nightfall would have.
“Guida, make yourself useful,” Lojacono had said brusquely, “turn the light off.”
It had become a kind of sadistic game to berate Guida, a sloppy, lazy beat cop who’d been kicked off his beat for manifest incompetence and put on front desk duty at the precinct house. On his first day at Pizzofalcone, Lojacono had dressed him down quite sharply for the state of his uniform and the informality of his salute, and since then, Guida had lived in holy terror of the lieutenant and been absolutely determined to reestablish his lost professional standing. With a single, sharp reproof, the Chinaman had achieved the objective that had eluded dozens of senior officers: He’d turned Guida into a perfect, spit-polished policeman, his salute timely and decisive. The metamorphosis had earned Guida the mockery of many of his coworkers and the approval of Palma, Pisanelli, and Ottavia, who’d all known him for years: Lojacono alone pretended not to notice the change, to Guida’s immense chagrin and the others’ endless amusement.
At the lieutenant’s command, therefore, Guida sprang into action, and then trotted back to his previous location from where, if he craned his neck, he could glimpse the computer screen.
Ottavia hit fast-forward, and for nearly a minute the picture remained unchanged, unruffled by any human presence, until a museum guard appeared and jetted back and forth across the room like a rocket. Calabrese slowed the film back down to normal speed and said: “There. The museum’s open now.”
The lightning-fast guard turned human again, sleepy and slow. He turned on the light, checked the paintings on the walls, stuck his hand down his pants, and yawned as he scratched himself. “And to think,” Aragona said bitterly, “I shook hands with him when we left, that piece of shit.”
Guida snickered, but was then instantly silenced by a glare from Pisanelli. The screen emptied out again, then, after another five minutes telescoped into a few seconds by the magic of technology, it was filled by Sister Beatrice and her group of schoolchildren.
The teacher stopped in front of each painting to listen to the docent’s explanations. The children trailed after her, looking bored; some of them lagged behind the larger group, trading soccer cards. Just as they were all about to move on into the next room, the silhouette of Christian Datola, Dodo’s friend, appeared.
“There, stop it here,” said Romano. “This is the little boy who hung back with the child we’re interested in. It’s been exactly . . .” and here he looked down at the video’s time stamp, “. . . seven minutes. The boy, his name is Christian, said that the last time he saw Dodo the child was still waving, from a distance, at this blonde woman we’ve all heard about. That means that, at this same point in time, the security camera at
the front entrance ought to have recorded something.”
Ottavia waited for the group of schoolchildren led by Sister Beatrice to leave the room to make sure that no one had entered the camera’s field of view in the few minutes that followed; then she started the other video.
The tension became palpable: The small ad hoc audience was about to make the visual acquaintance of the little boy who might have been kidnapped. Almost imperceptibly, everyone moved a few inches closer to the screen, and Ottavia felt her arm come into contact with Palma, who was standing next to her. She felt a shiver, or rather an electric shock. She focused on the video controls.
The security camera offered a partial view of the atrium, from the door that led out to the grounds to the door that gave onto the first hall of the art gallery. But anyone who came in or went out would certainly have been caught in the frame.
There were a number of tourists with cameras around their necks, a young woman eating something, a father bouncing a child on his shoulders. Like the other footage, this was also in black and white and pretty grainy. People came in, people left. Suddenly a figure appeared, dressed in a gray sweatshirt; the hood was pulled over the figure’s head.
Aragona snorted: “A hood, in this heat? Who is that?”
Alex, standing beside him, narrowed her eyes to focus better and said: “It’s a woman.”
“How can you be so sure?”
The female officer pointed at the screen: “You can just see her breasts, look there. And the shoes have a bit of heel too. That’s a woman.”
They followed her with their eyes as she walked through the atrium and stopped just short of the entrance proper and the clerk taking tickets. She kept her hands in her pockets and peeked into the first hall. She stood there like that, motionless, for almost two minutes; then she raised her right hand and started to wave. The clerk, who was no more than a yard away, was chatting amiably with the young woman who was eating; he was leaning forward from the waist, his body language making it obvious he was hitting on her.
Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 5
