Even though she was dead.
Her time bomb had been set to go off almost three years before the one ticking away inside of him, and it had worked perfectly. Not that Giorgio had given up the fight, even then, but through tears he’d promised his wife that he wouldn’t let her die engulfed by the agonizing torments the disease could bring, torments she was so afraid of. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would be Carmen herself who would crumble before the prospect of that pain.
Leonardo, the monk who had become Pisanelli’s best friend, said that it was something that happened; facing an abyss of suffering, human beings display either strength or weakness, and sometimes they choose to end things ahead of schedule. They choose to leapfrog past the evil that’s consuming them, and go into the light before their time. That’s what Leonardo would tell him, when they sat and reminisced about Carmen without sorrow: Giorgio because he still saw her every second of the day and in his dreams; the monk because he’d helped and comforted her, sustaining her faith to the very end. Giorgio and Leonardo had met at his wife’s deathbed, and forged a bond of friendship that bound them still: the last gift that his wife had bestowed upon him before downing an entire bottle of painkillers and going to sleep forever.
Leonardo was right: Grief can cause so much fear that it robs you of your desire to go on breathing, even if you’re surrounded by the love of a husband and a son. He himself would have put an end to Carmen’s life, if her pain had become too much to handle. He’d been ready. But she’d beat him to it.
He noticed some movement in the atrium of the building and perked up; but it was a false alarm—just the butcher’s boy talking to the doorman.
That was exactly why he was here right now, because he knew how tempting it could be to try to escape when confronted with pain. And he, Giorgio Pisanelli, deputy captain of the state police, fought every day against the temptation to wipe himself from the face of the earth instead of waiting around for the date prescribed by Nefarious Nature. But he couldn’t. Not yet. First there was a case to close. First he had a killer to track down.
In the aftermath of Carmen’s death, when he’d been left alone in a huge apartment still echoing with her voice, still filled with her scent, when he had turned down Lorenzo’s suggestion that he go into retirement and join him up north, he’d asked himself: How does a person decide to kill himself? Where does one find the strength?
He knew the precinct he worked in like the back of his own hands. He’d been born there and he’d lived there all his life, like his parents and his grandparents before him. He knew all the abnormal norms, the usual oddities that characterized it: nothing could surprise him, because he knew how the neighborhood breathed as if it were a beloved, familiar animal, an immense beast that occasionally woke up, but for the most part lay sleeping, now and then shaken by unconscious spasms. And that’s how he knew that those suicides were something different.
He’d discovered them one sleepy morning, before that drug-dealing ugliness his four idiot colleagues had gotten tangled up in, four colleagues he still couldn’t help but think of with a hint of fondness. With Carmen and her death, still fresh at the time, weighing on his heart and mind, he’d started rummaging through the files and had noticed that over the past ten years, there’d been too many of these cases in the neighborhood. They’d all been handled professionally, no question, each subjected to a careful investigation and properly archived. Suicide notes, different means of death, motives, always good ones, underlying the deed: all within the norm.
And yet he’d never had a moment’s doubt. Those weren’t suicides.
He’d tried to explain it to the commissario, an old functionary, pragmatic and hardened, tested by years of police-work and largely indifferent to wild theories, what with all the work that there was to do. Then, on top of everything else, there’d been the scandal of the Bastards, and so of course the last thing anyone wanted to pay attention to were the fantasies of an old man. Even his new boss, Palma, who really did strike him as a good guy, didn’t seem to give his ideas a lot of credence, though out of respect and courtesy, he left him free to investigate whatever he liked. But he was certain, absolutely certain, that those people had been murdered. And he was certain precisely because of Carmen.
Here’s how he saw it: in order to want to die you have to be afraid. Depression, the slow falling back into the arms of a life that is no longer life, loneliness, poverty, a tiny pension, none of these things can easily become motives for suicide. To be so afraid that you’re willing to die, you need courage. Immense courage.
When Giorgio had confided in Leonardo, he’d seen infinite pity in the monk’s clear, light-blue eyes. He’d told him that unfortunately that wasn’t how it was, that in fact loneliness was life’s chief enemy, that many poor souls choose to end their lives because they can no longer tolerate the silence that surrounds them. That the years go by fast, too fast, but that days spent alone never seem to pass, and can cause intolerable anguish. Leonardo would tell him that he hoped that God, in his infinite so on and so forth, would forgive those benighted souls and so on and so forth, and that He’d welcome them into paradise, etc. But Giorgio was quite certain that someone else’s hand had done more than a little to help usher them into the Almighty’s presence.
And so he’d started putting the pieces of the puzzle together, with the scrupulous attention to detail that he’d developed over the course of a long career as a cop, collecting statements, eyewitness accounts, stories of shops forced into bankruptcy by the recession, accidental glances, apparently insignificant details. He’d wallpapered his apartment with newspaper clippings, letters, photocopies of scrawled notes, photographs of corpses. And he’d done the same in the office, attracting pity and sarcasm. He’d dug deep, disassembled and reassembled, with stubborn precision. He knew that his colleagues assumed he was losing his marbles, but that was fine by him: At least they left him alone. Aside from Aragona, of course.
His young colleague was the very picture of a bad cop, oafish and egotistical, arrogant and politically incorrect: And yet Giorgio found that it was precisely Aragona, with his obsession with nicknames and TV series, of whom he was fondest. Under his fake tan and those intolerable aviators, he sensed a kind of crude talent, an ungoverned intelligence that could turn him into a first-rate investigator—provided he gave up on trying to look like Serpico.
There she was. She came out of the front door and stopped, squinting into the sun. God, she looked like an elderly woman, but records indicated she was less than sixty. Dirty hair, shapeless sweater, shabby purse. The doorman gave her a brisk glance and didn’t bother to say hello. She headed off toward the piazza, dragging her feet.
This was a new development in Pisanelli’s investigation. After years spent working on the dead, reconstructing their misguided lives, their chain of misfortunes and, in the end, their incongruous demises, he had decided to break with procedure and identify potential future victims. In the last few months, he’d devoted himself to mapping out the locations of the suicides, in search of some common thread that might link them; in other words, he’d tried to narrow the field. Then he’d gone over the local pharmacies with a fine-toothed comb to find out who was taking psychotropic drugs, and who had recently increased his or her dose. It was hardly an orthodox method, sure, but it was still a method.
And eventually his research had brought him to her, Maria Musella, fifty-eight years old, who lived, barely, off a pitiful surviving spouse’s pension, in a tiny apartment she’d inherited from her husband, who’d died ten years earlier. Maria Musella, who begged her doctor to prescribe her something that would help her sleep. Maria Musella, who didn’t have a friend, who never went to play bingo, who tried to save money by buying her groceries twice a week from the local market. Today was market day, and Pisanelli was waiting for her to go out so he could get a glimpse of her up close. Maria Musella, who was traveling into a solitary old age filled wit
h nothing and no one.
Maria Musella, the perfect victim.
Pisanelli waited a moment, then he folded his newspaper, put it under his arm, and set off in the same direction the woman was going, carefully moderating his pace to keep the proper distance, even if he suspected that Maria Musella wouldn’t have noticed him if he’d stepped on her foot.
The policeman was waiting for someone to approach her. If you want to kill someone, he thought, you need to approach him. And since Maria Musella never saw anyone, if someone did approach her, that person might turn out to be the killer. Of course there would still be plenty of investigating to do, in-depth research to complete, evidence to sift through, but it was a starting point, wasn’t it? A starting point. He could go from there.
He’d pee in a bar when the woman came home after doing her shopping. Right now, he needed to follow her. Nature and his ticking time bomb could wait.
He was already anticipating the pleasure of telling Leonardo about these latest developments. Maybe later he’d go see him at the parish church, unless there was news about the boy; he’d asked Ottavia to call him immediately on his cell phone if there was. And if so, he’d put that visit off. After all, there was no rush. Leonardo was always available for a quick chat. And anyway, in a couple days they’d have their weekly lunch at the trattoria Il Gobbo.
Maria Musella stopped in front of a fruit vendor’s brightly colored wares. The May sunshine, brazen and indiscreet, beat down on the display, transforming it into a dazzling kaleidoscope that could not but inspire joy. Four boys in tank tops chased after a soccer ball inside a makeshift playing field bounded by shops, crates of vegetables, dumpsters, parked mopeds, and moving scooters. A fat woman sat shelling fresh peas outside of a ground-floor apartment, from whose interior burst the notes of a neomelodic song on the radio. Life—violent, colorful, and smelly—pulsated in every corner of the piazza.
You don’t want to die, Maria Musella. If you go out shopping for groceries, if you cook, if you eat, if you wake up in the morning, you don’t want to die. Maybe you don’t want to keep living, sometimes, but you don’t want to die. And that’s the crucial difference.
For no particular reason, Pisanelli’s thoughts went to Dodo. I wonder where you are, he thought. Let’s hope nothing happens to you.
It’s May, and the world is too lovely a place just now.
XVIII
Don’t trust the month of May.
May will deceive you in the blink of an eye. All it takes is a moment’s distraction, a change in plans, an extra laugh, and May will trick you.
Because in this city, May knows how to sneak up behind you. It tiptoes along and in a flash it makes you think you’re somewhere else, or in some other time.
Its soft tentacles will embrace you and make you think that everything’s fine, that everything’s just as it was.
But it’s not.
Tiziana’s running late this morning. Yesterday night, like an idiot, she stayed up watching a pointless movie on TV, and she got to sleep an hour later than usual.
The people at the office where she works have been waiting for this moment, guns loaded, no doubt about it; she’s the last one to be hired, and they don’t let anything slide. That’s how it is for newcomers: the hardest, most boring jobs, and no respect.
But Tiziana needs her job. That bastard hasn’t paid his alimony for at least a year and he won’t even answer the phone, he’s even figured out how to tell when she calls from a blocked number, the sly son of a bitch. And Francesca always needs something; her feet grow a whole size every three months and every season she has to have a new wardrobe. She’s four years old, after all. At that age, it’s normal.
She hurries past Francesca’s bed, patting her on the head as she goes by. A rapid, motherly thought: For the past few days her daughter has seemed quiet and preoccupied. Maybe she’s just coming down with the flu.
She goes into the kitchen. She has just a few seconds for her coffee, if Papà made it. From the aroma, she guesses he has. Her father is there, attentive: Good morning, sweetheart, have a biscuit, get something in your stomach, otherwise you’ll get a headache. Tiziana nods. It’s a good thing you’re around, Papà, Francesca and I are lucky that we have you at least, that you took us in, that you’re helping me out.
Sweetheart, he says, this will be your home, a home for you and for my little darling. You know that ever since your mother . . . Tiziana goes over and kisses his whiskery cheek; every time that the memory of Mamma passes lightly between them, his eyes glisten.
Don’t think about it, Papà. Now we’re all together. You see, the weather’s starting to get nice: Pretty soon we’ll be able to go to the beach, all three of us. And we’ll have a few hours of fun, we deserve it, don’t we? Now I’m sorry, I’ve got to fly to the office. I ironed a playsuit for her, so if the weather doesn’t change, you can take her to the park if you feel like it.
She blows him another kiss and then Tiziana is out the door and into the street; her father watches her turn the corner, her coat flapping behind. He sighs, shakes his head. Poor daughter, he thinks. What a life, he says. It’s a good thing I’m here to take care of them.
Careful not to make noise, he goes to see if Francesca’s still sleeping. Sweetheart? Are you asleep? You’re just pretending, aren’t you? Because now you want to play.
And, walking over to the bed, he unzips his trousers.
You can’t trust May.
It’s a month that knows how to pretend, suspended between the tail end of winter and the tip of summer’s nose. It knows how to mask itself, perhaps behind a thought or a false desire, and it plunges the blade of a hopeless fantasy into your back.
It envelops you in a faint perfume, so light you don’t even notice you’re smiling until it’s too late.
May is a razor-sharp threat that penetrates so deeply, you can’t draw even a single breath.
Ciro is a good boy. But the neighborhood where he lives is a tough one.
Still, he’s steered clear of the bad crowd, doing his best to keep from being dragged into things. His father is a streetcar operator and to bring home a little extra money, he takes on ridiculous shifts. Ciro wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he paid him back by giving him something else to worry about. His father has always told him—in very few words, because he’s not the kind who does a lot of talking—that people like them have no one to defend them; if they get mixed up in something, they’ll wind up behind bars and they won’t make it out again. Better to stick to the straight and narrow, better to work hard, even if only for a pittance.
Ciro knows, he can see how easy it would be to steal what he’d need to be able to go around on a motorcycle, wearing expensive shoes and nice clothing. But he also knows that guys who choose that path don’t last. It’s safer to work in a café, like he does, waking up at dawn and running up and down the stairs in office buildings delivering trays full of coffee, hoping it’s the key to a longer life. That’s what Papà says, though not in so many words, and he has to agree.
Ciro is a good boy.
He met a girl, Ciro did. She works as a salesclerk at a women’s clothing store, downtown, along the main thoroughfare where he often goes to deliver trays of espressos and cappuccinos. At first, they smiled at each other every time he went past the plate-glass window. Then, one time, he was so busy smiling that he dropped his tray and everything—coffee, mineral water, and check—went up in the air: a tragedy. She hurried out to help him collect the cups and glasses from under the feet of passersby. It was May. A year ago. It’s a nice thing to meet in May. The world is beautiful in May.
They’ve been going out for one year exactly, and Ciro wants to do something to celebrate. His friends give their girls lots of things: jewelry, nice clothes. Easy to do, when you have easy money. But Ciro is a good boy; he’s never had much money and he never will.
Bu
t he doesn’t want to let May go by without giving her a gift that’ll take her breath away. May is their month, you know, and she’s the most beautiful thing on earth, the only good thing that’s ever happened to him, to Ciro, the only good luck that’s come his way.
It’s easy, they told him last night at the pub. The jewelry boutique is tucked away, right by the vicolo that leads to our neighborhood, get fifty feet away and no one would ever catch you, even if you’re on foot. In the last year, we knocked the place over five times, it’s like an ATM, little kids rob the place, twelve-year-olds. And after all, it’s not like you’re trying to ransack the place, just take a thing or two and then you’re out of there, those guys won’t even come after you, the guy who runs the place is a chump, he’s the owner’s son, our age: He always gets scared and hides behind the display counter.
Ciro is a good boy, and he wants a special smile from her this month, this May. May is their month, and he’ll never have the money to buy her a ring. Once, just this once. He’s not afraid, not running any risks; five minutes and he’ll make her happy. It’ll last for the rest of his life, her smile. Five minutes.
Marco is a good boy. He’s not especially brave, it’s true, but he’s a jeweler, not a cop or a lion tamer. It doesn’t take courage to be a jeweler. Or at least, it’s not supposed to. He doesn’t even especially like the job, it’s just that his father has cancer and he can’t come down to run the shop anymore. So it’s up to Marco.
Marco is a good boy, and maybe even the robbers understand that he’d just as soon be somewhere else. So he’s been robbed five times in less than a year. Once they came in with sledgehammers and smashed the display cases, once they were armed with a straight razor, and three times they had handguns, which might have been fake, but I’d like to see you face down a guy in a ski mask brandishing something black right under your nose. He throws himself to the floor just like they tell him, that way at least he saves his skin. Be careful, Marco, his father told him, those kids are all hopped up on drugs. One time he even thinks he heard them laugh, those sons of bitches.
Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Page 9
