“Don’t worry about it. In fact, the less we’re seen together in public, the better. I’ll tell you, this is the last thing I needed.” The plumes of smoke from his pipe filled the room, along with the smell of wood and moss. When the cloud of smoke disintegrated, the notary’s face re-emerged.
“Dottor Schiavone. Make sure you get Chiara back home. Safe and, if possible, sound.”
Rocco nodded. He shook the notary’s hand and left the office.
The Via Tiburtina was an ancient Roman consular road that led to the spa town of Tivoli, where the patrician nobility of long ago had their villas. From Tivoli it led on to Ostia Aterni—the city we now call Pescara. It’s no longer called a consular road, merely an Italian state highway—the route hasn’t changed much, and it’s not clear how much of the pavement dates all the way back to the origins. The Via Tiburtina runs through Rome from the Termini train station and then on through the outlying suburbs. It’s a pipe clogged with traffic at every hour of the day and night, at least until you get well outside Rome’s beltway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Unlike most Romans, who preferred to take the A24 superhighway to reach the region of Abruzzo, Enzo Baiocchi was driving along the Via Tiburtina in an old Ford he’d stolen an hour ago. Less traffic, less risk of running into the police, and so he felt more at ease. Still, the car was a complete jalopy. It was low on gas, and the engine struggled and shrilled every time the tachometer on the dashboard reached 3,000 RPM. Windows wide open, he’d already left far behind him both the city and the outlying neighborhoods. The chaos and the countless tall apartment buildings of Italy’s capital were nothing but a memory now. He was starting to glimpse the countryside. And cars were few and far between.
The reserve fuel light had been on for ten minutes now. He needed a gas station, he couldn’t put it off any longer. On the right, a sign informed him that there would be one in 300 yards. The escapee smiled, put on a filthy baseball hat that he’d found in the back seat, and lit a cigarette. He turned on his blinker and pulled into the gas station. It was perfect. No houses nearby, just farmland and the occasional desolate ruin on the horizon. Cars were few and far between and, most important of all, none were lined up for fuel. He parked the car at the pump. A man in his early seventies, with a slow, weary step, walked toward him. “How much you need?”
“Fill it up.”
The man took the hose from the pump and started filling the tank. Enzo got out of the car. He looked around. He peered into the glass-and-aluminum-frame booth full of automotive products. Deserted. So the gas station attendant was all alone.
“Hot out, isn’t it?” he said. The attendant said nothing. He put the pump back and walked over to Enzo.
“That’ll be fifty euros.”
Enzo put his hand in his pocket. He pulled out the pistol and slammed the handle sharply against the old man’s temple. The attendant collapsed to the ground without a sound. Enzo leaned over the body and unzipped the fanny pack. He looked inside. It was stuffed with banknotes. Cheerfully, he climbed back into his car, and took the Via Tiburtina toward the mountains.
A little mutt without a collar emerged from the glass-and-aluminum booth and lay down whimpering next to its master. It licked the man’s face, but he gave no sign of life.
“I want to know if they’ve gotten in touch. If you’ve talked with your daughter,” Rocco said, clutching the receiver tight, as if he were afraid it might fall out of his hand.
On the other end of the line, Pietro Berguet was breathing deeply. “Only for a few seconds. They talked to my brother. All she said was: I’m fine. Then someone else took the phone back. And hung up.”
“Well, at least we know that. That she’s alive.”
“Commissario, I’m going to say it again. . . .”
“And I’m going to say it again to you, I’m not a Commissario, I’m a deputy chief.”
“Deputy Chief, I’m going to say it again. It no longer matters. Let’s do this thing, I’ll get my daughter back home, and then we can act, if the law can still help me.”
“So that’s what you want?”
“That’s what my wife and I both want. I’m begging you, for now just stay out of it. I’m down on my knees, begging you.”
“All right, Dottor Berguet. All right. In that case . . . I’ll just wait for a word from you, and I’ll unleash police headquarters on the case.” He hung up the phone. He looked at Italo. “They talked to her. Apparently, she’s okay. How is that piece of shit Diemoz?”
“He just keeps hollering that he’s an innocent man. It doesn’t matter, though. We’re transferring him to the maximum-security prison today.”
“Excellent.”
“So what are we doing, Rocco?”
“We’re going to just keep going. What is Caterina up to? Is she coming in?”
“Yes, she’s on her way to the office,” Italo replied. “Her temperature has dropped.”
“Well, set her loose on this Calcestruzzi Varese and this alleged Ugo Montefoschi.” As he talked, Italo was taking notes. “Right now, the kidnappers think that tomorrow, at the very latest, they’re going to the notary’s office for the transfer of ownership. We have three days to figure out something more. Antonio?”
“He brought in that poor girl, Melina, the shop clerk. All she does is cry and says she doesn’t know a thing.”
“Let her go, she knows less about it than D’Intino.”
He hadn’t finished mentioning the officer’s name when none other than D’Intino himself stuck his face in the office door. “Dotto’, may I?”
“What is it, D’Intino? This isn’t the time! Do you want to go home? Then go home!”
“It’s a bad thing. A very bad thing.”
Rocco rolled his eyes. “Will you tell me what very bad thing?”
“They found a dead corpse.”
Rocco stared at Italo. “Did I understand him correctly? Did he just say a dead corpse?”
“I think he did, Dottore. His exact words were: ‘a dead corpse’. But by that, I think he just meant a dead man,” Italo clarified.
“Who?”
It was Rosa the concierge who had called the police. When she entered the apartment to do her routine housekeeping, she’d found Cristiano Cerruti’s dead body sprawled face-down on the floor in the dining room. There was an enormous red stain on the carpet and the glass side table was shattered into a thousand pieces. Cerruti’s neatly trimmed, sparse little beard was smeared with blood and spattered with bits of brain. Rosa was sitting on the apartment house staircase, pale as a Christ on the cross, dabbing at her eyes, which were red with weeping. After dismissing Casella—who had an unfortunate reputation for contaminating crime scenes with his own DNA in various formats, ranging from urine to saliva, with a sideline in fingerprints—Rocco wandered the room while waiting for his frenemy Alberto Fumagalli. There were also blood sprays on the living room wall and even on an oil painting by Schifano. It struck him as novel and intriguing that the red bloom of blood actually seemed to improve the painting. The apartment was small and furnished in Japanese style. Only a few very fine pieces of furniture, a lovely clean and tidy kitchen, no bric-a-brac in sight, not even a book. It felt more like a residential hotel than someone’s home. The bedroom was enormous. Clearly, Cristiano hadn’t slept alone in the king-size bed. Both pillows were crumpled, the blankets tossed aside, and the sheets bore the impressions of bodies on both sides. On a nightstand lay a pair of glasses and a book by Jon Krakauer; on the other side, on the bedside rug, a tray with two cups and some cookies with bites taken out of them. In the bathroom, too, which seemed like something out of a resort hotel, there reigned a maniacal neatness—if you overlooked the toothbrush on the edge of the sink and a razor still encrusted with shaving foam.
The only certainty was that that murder—whatever the burden of violence and stupidity which it had brought with it, rocketing heedlessly into Rocco’s life—at least formed part of the same story, the same thread, and was not simply some u
nlooked-for addition to the mess he was already dealing with. He heard a commotion in the living room. Fumagalli had arrived. As usual, the two men exchanged no greetings. The medical examiner, squatting down next to the corpse, was putting on a pair of latex gloves.
“Nice hard smack,” he said, sticking his fingers into the wound that had opened up right at the back of the skull, producing a sound of floppy flesh. Rocco’s stomach gripped tight. “Really a good hard smack.”
“Can’t you just try to avoid sticking your fingers in the wound, making these disgusting noises, and for once behave like a normal human being?”
“Listen to who’s asking what. All right, so, do you know who this poor soul is, or was?”
“Cristiano Cerruti, right-hand man to Pietro Berguet, president of Edil.ber.”
“And do you know why someone did this to him?”
“Just a notion.”
“Okay, now I’m going to stick a thermometer in him and we’ll try and figure out what time he was killed.”
Rocco made a point of paying no attention to the operation and went on looking around the room. There was the video intercom, a device he was determined to have installed in his own apartment one of these days, and a door so heavily armored and reinforced that it looked like it belonged in a bank. Everything was in perfect order. He opened a few cabinet doors in the living room and found stacks of dishes, glasses, napkins, and utensils, all neatly arranged by shape and color. When he turned to look at Fumagalli, he noticed he was busying himself curiously around a fire engine-red Chinese cupboard. He was fiddling around with a long metallic object.
“What is it?”
“Here, Rocco, let me give you a hand. You can use it.” Alberto was carefully observing the golf bag leaning against the wall. “I’ve figured out the murder weapon.”
“What makes you think that?”
“This set of golf clubs is missing the driver. That’s the club you use to take your first shot. No golf player can do without a driver.”
“What’s one look like?”
Alberto pulled out a club. “Here, at the end, it has an enormous head, big but not really all that heavy.” Then as if he’d lost his mind, he took a swing in the air. “A blow with this thing to the back of the skull will send you straight to your maker, even if you’re wearing a helmet.”
“How would you know?”
“Listen, sweetheart, you’re talking to a second-category handicap who’s won at Villa Olona and La Pinetina, you know that?”
“Wouldn’t it have been quicker to just say: I play golf? What the hell do you think I care about your trophy cabinet?”
“I know, but I like to make you eat your heart out.”
“I’m not eating my heart out, I don’t give a damn about golf. It’s not a sport.”
“What do you mean it’s not a sport?” the doctor asked indignantly.
“A short walk over the fields dressed like a clown and swinging a club at a little white ball? You call that a sport?”
“So what would you call it, instead?”
“A short walk over the fields dressed like a clown and swinging a club at a little white ball.”
“In 2016, they’re bringing it back as an Olympic sport.”
“Along with bocce ball?”
“You’re not right in the head, Rocco.”
“Ah, speaking of which, what’s the name of the missing golf club again?”
“The driver.”
“The driver. Which is now lying at the bottom of the River Dora.”
“Or else in a dump somewhere, or buried, how am I supposed to know?” Fumagalli said and then went back to the corpse. “Yes, the wound could match. Well, I’ll take this young man to the hospital. If he tells me anything more, I’ll get in touch.”
“If he tells you anything? Oh, right, of course, sorry.” Rocco had forgotten that Alberto Fumagalli, in the long hours he spent alone with his corpses, tended to talk to them and to consider them living, animate beings.
As always, Italo had steered clear of the actual scene of the crime, but now he timidly stuck his head in the front door: “Deputy Chief? Rosa here has something she wants to tell you. . . .”
“Who?”
“The concierge.”
The woman, still sitting on the stairs, wiped her nose with the handkerchief that she clutched in her hand, by now a shapeless mass, streaked and damp.
“Come on, Rosa, tell the deputy chief what you told me,” Italo encouraged her.
At last, the woman seemed to have run out of mucus, and she looked up at Rocco. “I saw someone leaving Dottor Cerruti’s apartment.”
“Excellent. And . . . what else?”
“He went right past my apartment. I live on the ground floor, and the place is tiny, because I’m the concierge, plus I clean house for a few of the tenants. For instance, I cleaned Dottor Cerruti’s apartment. That’s why I went in this morning, and in fact, I was the one who found the body. I was in my apartment when someone went by, I wasn’t alone because my nephew is staying with me, actually, he’s here from Civita because he’s taking a civil service exam for the regional government, and let’s just hope that the Madonna grants us the grace to get him a good job. I put him in my room to sleep, even though he told me over and over he’d be glad to sleep on the couch, poor thing, but I said no, I’m fine on the couch . . . and so. . . .”
“Signora, you’re putting me to sleep here!” the deputy chief blurted. “Why don’t you tell me about this guy that you saw.”
Rosa blew her nose, then went on: “You know, Dotto’? I knew that Cerruti had a lover. And I know that she never came in through the front entrance. He always had her come in through the garage, downstairs. Then she’d ride up in the elevator, and afterward she’d ride back down and leave through the garage. But I never once saw her.”
Rocco nodded. “He was a very private individual, wasn’t he?”
“It strikes me. But maybe it was important to know this thing, right?”
“Yes, it was important . . . so what can you tell me about this guy you saw?”
“I only saw his back. He was big, fat, I mean to say. But you know what? He definitely wasn’t a tenant—that much is certain.”
“Long hair? Or short? Blonde, brunette?”
“I don’t know. He was wearing a woolen watch cap and a black jacket. I don’t remember anything else. Could he have been the murderer?” asked Rosa in a faint voice.
“Yes, or he could have been a plumber. I don’t know, Signora, maybe you should explain what you meant about the garage.”
“You can enter the building from the garage, but you either need to have a special key or else someone has to open the gate for you from inside the apartment.”
“And do all the tenants use it?”
“Not at all. There are only three parking spots. One belongs to the general who’s been too old to drive for years, the other belongs to the architectural design firm on the second floor, but they use it to park a cargo van, and then there’s the spot that belonged to the late lamented Cerruti. He used it, like I told you. To let his lover come upstairs.”
Rocco gestured to Italo. “Come on, Italo, let’s go down to the garage. We take the elevator to get down there, right, Signora?”
“Yes. Push the letter B.”
The two policemen boarded the elevator. “Do you suspect this woman? Do you think she killed him?”
“I think he killed him, Italo. The lover was a he.”
“A . . . a man?”
“Do you know many women who shave first thing in the morning?”
She hadn’t moved in hours. Every so often she opened her eyes, then she’d close them again.
I’m falling slowly, gently, from some very high story. Extremely high. My heart is in my ears. And it’s beating slowly, just a beat every now and then. How cold it is. It’s cold in here. But it’s strange. Now I’m going to pull the comforter over me . . . it’s at the foot of the bed. Didn’t I put it
on the bed? Didn’t I put the down comforter on the bed? Dolores, where is the down comforter? Do you think I went and fell asleep with all the windows open? What a dope. I’ll get up and open them. I can’t hear a thing. Is it still snowing, or did it stop? Snow eliminates all noises. Even the air becomes silent when it snows. You can’t hear footsteps. Only the tree branches, when the wind blows . . . and the gusts toss the pine needles. I can hear the wind, and the footsteps on the snow. That’s why it’s so cold. I’ve fallen. I’ve fallen into the snow. Where was I? Stefano . . . was I skiing? I think I must have fallen while skiing. My leg hurts so much. I must have broken it. Stefano, I broke my leg, didn’t I? Why aren’t you coming to get me, Stefano? Help me! Where are you? Aren’t you going to talk to me anymore? Have you left? Have you all vanished, all of you, just like that? Into thin air? I’m so tired. Now I’m going to get some sleep. Five minutes. Just five minutes, then I’ll wake up and get back on my feet. I’ll get up and go home. Go home. Go home . . .
Rocco and Italo were looking around. The garage was small, and it was mostly used by the tenants for storage. As the concierge had told them, there was a cargo van parked there. On the side was written, “Architecture and Interior Decorating,” and then there were two other empty parking spots.
“What are we looking for?” asked Italo, his eyes focused on the pavement.
“Nothing. I just want a stroke of luck. Every so often one might come in handy. You see? The murderer came through here. That means he parked, took the elevator upstairs, did what he came here to do, and then came back down to get his car. . . .”
“Or his motorcycle. . . .”
“Or his fucking bicycle, how would I know?”
Rocco went over to the metal gate that led directly onto the street.
“But, just one thing . . .” and he shook the gate. “Listen. If the way he got in is that Cristiano opened the gate from upstairs, how did he get out?”
“He must have taken Cerruti’s keys?”
“It doesn’t take a key. You see?” and he pointed to a strange little pentagonal socket. “You have to insert a plug of some kind that closes the circuit and opens the gate.”
Out of Season Page 18
