Out of Season

by Antonio Manzini

  Marina isn’t here. I can’t find her anywhere. Not even in bed. I sit down at the dining room table. I unwrap the package from the pizzeria. The slices strike me as so many scabs covered with pus, the wounds of a burn victim, the lacerations of a herpes outbreak. I can’t bring myself to eat these shoe soles. The supplì—rice-and-cheese fritters—are black, they must have fried them in engine coolant. And the Coke is lukewarm. Even when it’s cold out, a Coke should be ice cold. Warm Coca-Cola sticks to your palate and extinguishes the will to go on living. That is, if you have it in the first place.

  So sleepy. I’m dropping on my feet. It’s strange. I’ve been thinking about that girl, Chiara, all day long, and I don’t even know what she looks like. Whether she’s tall, whether she’s skinny. Does she resemble her mother? Her father? Tomorrow, I’m going to come get you, Chiara. Tomorrow, I’m going to come get you, for sure.

  God, this sofa. You sink into the cushions. You just sink too deep.

  “All right then, tell me. For 100,000 euros. She starred opposite Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

  He doesn’t know. He’s twenty years old, this young contestant. What does he know?

  Jane Russell, you asshole!

  “Lauren Bacall?”

  You just pissed away 100,000 euros. You go on a quiz show and you lack the basic knowledge? So why are you even bothering, I say. Change channels!

  “Time. Time. What is time? The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. The Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook!”

  No, not Beat the Devil. Now I’m going to have to watch the whole thing.

  “I like an associate of mine to have a sense of humor. A good laugh does more for the stomach muscles than five minutes’ setting -up exercises.”

  “And now that we've had our moment of fun and all the better for it, let’s get back to the question.”

  Wednesday

  “You fell asleep.”

  “What . . . what time is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s late,” Marina replies, brushing back her hair. How does she do it? She brushes it back, she seems to knot it, and it doesn’t loosen. What does she have, glue on her hands?

  It’s late. It’s dark out. There’s a cartoon playing on the TV.

  “I was watching a movie.”

  “I know. But it’s been over for a while now.” Marina smiles at me.

  “Where were you, Marì?”

  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “Because I can’t. I just can’t. It hurts all over.”

  My back, my neck, my shoulder blades, my pelvis, and even my legs. “Do you remember when you’d come home in the early years and you’d give me massages?”

  “Of course I do. Every day that God sent us here on earth.”

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I don’t know . . . it seemed to make you happy.”

  “Well, now I can reveal the truth: I hated getting massages.”

  We both break out laughing. “There are so many things I never told you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t like you with short hair.”

  “What else?”

  “I didn’t like it when you wore ballet flats.”

  “Never had a pair.”

  “One summer you did. In Santo Stefano.”

  “But you gave me that pair.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “What else didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “For a while I thought you had another man.”

  “Me? Who?”

  “Prosperi.”

  “Giorgio? Serena’s husband? The surgeon?”

  “The very same.”

  “Sweetheart, he took out my appendix.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean so? He was the husband of my closest friend!”

  “Exactly, that’s a classic. You always invited him to dinner.”

  “We always invited them to dinner.”

  “He even rooted for S. S. Lazio. You acted the fool with him.”

  “Sweetheart, Giorgio and I went back thirty years. Come on, let’s not talk about that nonsense anymore. What else didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “That I miss you, Marina, I miss you so much I can’t stand it.”

  “That’s not true. You know why you say it? Because you’re scared.”

  And what am I supposed to be scared of? “Of what?”

  “It’s not me you miss. It’s you.”

  “You’re wrong. Do you remember that phrase? The desire you feel for a person is immortal.”

  “But if you satisfy it, it vanishes. And with it, your need for that person vanishes as well.”

  “How am I supposed to satisfy it?”

  “Maybe you already have.” She strokes my hair. I look her in the eyes. “You know something, Marina? I think my eyesight is getting worse.”

  “Your eyesight has nothing to do with it.” And she dries one of my tears. “It’s two in the morning, Rocco. Go to bed.”

  “I can’t. I tell you, I can’t.”

  Enzo Baiocchi breathed slowly under the sheets as he looked up at the ceiling. Which was blue. The security lighting tinged everything blue. The ceiling, his hands, his fingernails, the metal nightstand, the empty neighboring bed, the door and the bars on the window. This was the right time. Twenty past two in the morning. The guards had made their last round ten minutes ago and the trash truck would be pulling in an hour from now. He needed to get moving. First of all, he put on his socks and his running shoes, fastening the Velcro straps. He took off the pajama top, remaining in his black T-shirt. He kissed the gold crucifix that he wore around his neck. Then he went over to the window. The courtyard was deserted. Only the trees and bushes swayed in the night breeze. A cat trotted briskly across the gravel driveway, only to vanish amidst the leaves of a small dragon tree.

  In three days, they’d be taking him back to the cell, and so long to the fresh sheets and infirmary food, so long to the music that every morning the male nurses would blast at top volume, so long to the newspaper, and most important of all, so long to all the painstaking work he’d done on the third bar to the left in his window. It had taken him two weeks of effort to unseat that bar from its housing. And now it pulled out as easily as the molar of an old man with periodontitis. He’d been on a strict diet, he’d lost seven pounds, and sure enough, he fit right through the remaining bars. He didn’t even have to squeeze that hard. He was already on the ground floor, and it took only a drop of a couple of feet and he was standing in the flowerbed. He looked around. The infirmary lights were all out. Only that spectral, blue security spotlight told the world that the patients were all fast asleep. In the control room, however, the light was still on. At that time of night, the male nurse, the physician on duty, and the two guards were playing Risk, the board game of war and world conquest with little brightly colored plastic tanks, a pair of dice, and a world map. A craze imported by Frangipane, the younger nurse, and it served to combat the boredom of the graveyard shifts. In order to duck the closed-circuit security cameras, Enzo had to reach the exterior wall and creep along with his back pressed against it. He moved forward slowly, trying to stay as silent as possible while crossing the gravel. Once he reached the wall, beyond the light cast by the yellow area lights, inch by inch, creeping carefully as any sloth, Enzo made his way closer to the iron gate, which stood hermetically sealed just outside the control room.

  “I attack the Middle East from Egypt with seven tanks.” It was Frangipane’s voice.

  “I’ll crush you!” That was Vito, the guard.

  As Enzo approached the gate, there was only one point where he would be fully exposed to view. It was brightly lit and there was no way to hide: he’d just have to cross it quickly and pray no one was looking at the center of the courty
ard at that moment. There were only two guards. Luckily, the funding cuts imposed by the last few administrations had decimated the number of correctional officers assigned to security. Which meant it would be a simpler matter. If they’d been fully staffed, Enzo could never have dreamed of trying to escape. There would have been at least four men on the guard towers and three more in the courtyard. But now, with just two guards, their attention focused on protecting the territorial integrity of China or Yakutia, the idea seemed eminently feasible. He could go.

  “One, one, two, damn it, what shitty luck!” Frangipane shouted.

  “Ha, ha, ha. You’re not touching the Middle East, you bastard. Instead, I’m attacking you from North Africa,” Vito shouted.

  “What’s the matter with you, Vito?” came a third voice. That had to be the doctor on duty. “If you do that, Paolo can attack you from Brazil, right?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business, Doc!” That had to be Paolo, the other guard, who clearly had high hopes of colonial expansion into Africa once Frangipane had been weakened in that theater of operations.

  Enzo shut his eyes, took a breath, and in spite of the fact that he was all of sixty years old, he lunged like a lightning bolt straight toward the metal door. A pair of sky-blue pajama bottoms with a black T-shirt over them crossed the spotlight-illuminated yard. Quick as a dream upon waking. No one saw him. No one sounded the alarm. No one was monitoring the security cameras.

  Enzo slumped at the foot of the gate. He was panting and he mopped the sweat from his forehead. Now he just had to wait. Soon the metal gate would swing open and the garbage truck would enter the courtyard to load up the infirmary’s garbage. Three gray plastic sacks that were already waiting on the ground outside the control room. That would be the second-most difficult moment. He’d have to leap onto the back of the truck, get over the side of the garbage bed, and hunker down there, waiting for the garbage sacks to come sailing over the side, full of food scraps and who knows what other waste produced by seven patients, five male nurses, two physicians, and four guards standing different shifts. The important thing was not to give into the temptation of sleep. But Enzo Baiocchi wasn’t worried about that. He had so much adrenaline pumping through his body that he was unlikely to sleep for days, weeks, possibly months. One thing was certain: he wouldn’t rest before going to pay a call on that bastard. Something he’d been waiting to do now for five long years.

  At three in the morning the lights at police headquarters were all turned off. Only on the ground floor and in the operations room was there any sign of life. At the front entrance, Officer Miniero, newly transferred north from Vomero, was trying to solve a rebus in the weekly puzzle magazine.

  “Buongiorno!”

  The deputy chief’s voice brought him back to reality. He snapped to attention. “Deputy Chief. In so early?”

  “Yes.” Bundled in his loden overcoat he climbed up to the offices without turning on the lights. After all, he knew the way like the back of his hand. He entered his office, picked up the receiver, and dialed the phone number.

  “He . . . hello?”

  “Italo! It’s me, Rocco.”

  “But. . . .”

  He could just picture him, Officer Pierron, looking around wildly, trying to figure out whether that phone call belonged to reality or to the dream that he’d just left on his pillow.

  “What . . . what time is it?”

  “Three in the morning!”

  “And what . . . what’s happening?”

  “What’s happening is that you’re going to get dressed and hurry down to police headquarters. We have a visit to pay.”

  “At this hour of the morning?”

  “There’s a girl being held prisoner somewhere not far from here, and she may already be dead. Do I have to remind you of that?”

  Pierron said nothing. “Italo! Have you fallen back to sleep?”

  “No, no. Give me ten minutes.”

  “And don’t come in uniform!”

  Rocco hung up and at the same time, opened the drawer of his “secular daily prayers,” as he’d renamed his need for a daily dose of marijuana.

  At night the temperature drops. It’s a well known fact. But that May night was really overdoing it. He took the last toke. A faint smile was already starting to appear on his face. He flicked the roach out into the street and shut the window. Italo was about to come in, and Rocco decided to go meet him.

  He switched off the light and left his office. In the dark hallway the faint light of a vending machine illuminated a pair of shadows. Two figures were standing there, motionless in the middle of the hall, hands dangling at their sides, looking like something that had just stepped out of a nightmare.

  “What the fuck?” exclaimed the deputy chief.

  It was Deruta and D’Intino. Their wrecked appearance made them resemble a pair of homeless vagrants fished out of the waters of some foul-smelling swamp. They were no longer two police officers, but a distant memory of those public officials. Their uniforms were verging decidedly on the brown. Their pale, lunar faces were streaked with black drops of mud dripping down their cheeks, designing a spiderweb of horror. D’Intino was drenched and still wore his now-shapeless cap. Deruta was in shirt sleeves, and the front of that shirt was torn wide open, while the cuffs of his trousers were dragging under the heels of his shoes. Two survivors of some colossal defeat, like a veteran of Caporetto or a deserter from the Russian front in 1943.

  “What the fuck have you two been up to?”

  It was Deruta who spoke: “We’ve been looking for Viorelo Midea’s house.”

  Rocco had to force his memory to try to remember who Viorelo Midea was. That uncertainty was detected by Deruta: “The Romanian, the one who was killed in the car crash.”

  Rocco concealed his momentary confusion. “I know that, of course. So?”

  “We found it!” D’Intino said happily. Then he turned and vomited on the floor next to the coffee machine.

  Fifteen minutes later in police headquarters’ passport office, Italo and Officer Miniero had given the two wretched men a little tea from the vending machine, while Rocco observed the scene with an air of detachment.

  “It was hard, sir,” said Deruta. “Very hard.”

  “And how did you do it?” Italo asked.

  “We thought about it.”

  “Stop the presses, that’s the biggest piece of news all day,” said Rocco.

  “Here’s how it happened. We started at the apartment of the Abyssinians.”

  “Eritreans,” Schiavone corrected him.

  “That’s right, anyway, those guys. And we searched the whole building.”

  “We stuck the key in every door,” D’Intino continued. “And it was no good. No match.”

  “Just think, one old woman even hit D’Intino over the head with her purse because she hadn’t seen his uniform. So we searched the whole building next door and then the building on the other side.”

  “Nothing, it never matched. It would drive you crazy, Dottore!”

  “And that’s when I had a thought!” said Deruta.

  “Actually, I thought of it!” D’Intino retorted.

  “What are you talking about? I told you to go to the quarter. . . .”

  “No, I did, and then you up and said: no! But I managed to convince you that. . . .”

  “Whatever, you came up with the idea between the two of you. Tell me the rest of the story,” Rocco broke in.

  “Then we thought that if this guy doesn’t have money, then maybe, just maybe, he lives in a poor part of town.”

  “Well how about that . . .” said Italo, stifling his laughter. “Not bad.”

  “True, Italo, not bad at all. That is a fantastic deduction. And who would ever have thought of it?”

  D’Intino smiled at the deputy chief: “Right? And so we went and walked around in the poor part of town. Though in Aosta they don’t really have any!”

  “No.”

  “
Then this cretin,” said Deruta, pointing at his colleague, “what do think he went and did?”

  “I don’t know. What did D’Intino go and do?” asked Rocco.

  “He put the car in reverse as he was leaving the parking space and BAM!” He clapped his hands to emphasize the event. “He went and crashed into a cargo van.”

  “And the car?”

  “It crumpled the fender and a little bit damaged the headlight,” D’Intino replied, eyes downcast. “Now it doesn’t run so good and smoke pours out of the motor.”

  Rocco rolled his eyes.

  “All the same, even in our misfortune, we were fortunate indeed,” Deruta went on.

  “Shall we cut to the chase?” By now, Rocco couldn’t take much more. Either they got to the point or he was going to have to throw every file box in the passport office at their heads.

  “We crashed into a cargo van full of Romanians. Who were loading it full of stuff to take to Rumenìa.” He mangled, as was his way, the name of the country.

  “Romania, Deruta, Romania!”

  “Romania, right. But listen, Dotto’, don’t interrupt, otherwise we’ll lose the thread.”

  “That’s right,” D’Intino reiterated, backing up his colleague.

  “I promise not to interrupt again.”

  Deruta took a deep breath. “So we fought with these Rumanians. That is, D’Intino fought with the Rumanians, it was his fault. But we asked them, as long as they were Rumanians, if they knew this Viorelo Midea. And one of them smiled and said yes!”

  “And he even told us where he lived. And we went straight over!”

  “Now this is the good part. We got to the place. We went up to the apartment. We put the key in the lock to see if it matched and BAM!” Deruta clapped his hands again.