WHAT A STRANGE, ODD THING TIME IS. YOU CAN Measure it with a clock, a calendar, or a chronometer. But it’s relative. While you look out the window and watch a snowflake fall, not even a minute has gone by. Nothing. A minute of nothing. That same minute for a newborn baby is the beginning of a lifetime. For someone swimming, that minute amounts to years of training. For me, it was just a snowflake falling. And I wonder what my minute is. My hour. Or even my day. There are people whose day consists of sitting in front of the television and watching the Home Shopping Network. For a dog, it’s his two daily meals. For a prison inmate, it’s just one day checked off his sentence. But for me, it’ll be the day that changed my life. And when will it come? And what will it be like? Sunny? Will the sun be out, or will it rain? It’s a safe bet that it will rain. I’ve never been very lucky.
BOOK CLUB. WE TALKED ABOUT “MURDERS IN THE RUE Morgue.” Only an orangutan could have committed the murder. Fantastic. Adalgisa and her literary byplay. I don’t like detective stories. She explained them to me, showed me how to appreciate them. She works so hard. Is it worth it? To someone who can’t even bring herself to get out of bed this morning? Maybe not. Still, I like her project. Sure, it’s pure fantasy, but Adalgisa has a brain that travels at the speed of light. If you really could turn an orangutan into a murderer . . . impossible though. Impossible? Why? It just depends on the orangutan.
FIRST DRAFT OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL. I’D like to call it Penelope.
She was falling slowly, gliding toward the bottom as the air exited her lungs with a hiss. Behind her eyelids, nothing but red, and the noise of her heart pounding more and more slowly in her ears. She fell as slowly as a red oak leaf in autumn, fluttering lightly before touching earth. She could no longer open the fingers of her hand, and everything was calm. Quiet and lovely. It was like falling asleep. Or the way it was after making love with Enrico, when they were still in love, when they were young and it felt as if they had all the time in the world at their disposal. But now time was running out. And that wasn’t really such a bad thing, after all. The street noises were muffled. Her muscles relaxed and nestled against the ceramic sides of the tub. A sudden chill. Then one last tiny gasp, the last heartbeat, fainter than a canary’s. And everything ended . . .
. . . IT’S NOT ME THAT I THINK ABOUT AT NIGHT. AND IT’S not him either. He’s not much more than a digestive tract. But I mustn’t defile these pages by writing about him. It’s a waste of paper . . . I think about Adalgisa’s games. Hmmm. Could that be the solution? I can’t see any others.
A BOY IN THE STREET LOOKED AT ME TODAY. HE MIGHT have been twenty years old. And I looked away. He went away. I saw my reflection in the glass of the front entrance. There I was. Two groceries bags in each hand. My hair tangled like a bunch of spinach. What did he see? What was he thinking when he looked at me? Probably pity. A bottomless sense of pity. What do I think when I look at myself in the glass of my front entrance? Is this my life? Is this what I wanted for myself? Is it worth living for thousands of days like this one?
ON SUNDAY I WENT TO CHURCH. I DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR Mass. I just wanted to look at the church. But I got there at the wrong time. I walked in right in the middle of Mass. The priest read Genesis, 2:21–23. I reread it at home. It says: “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’”
It got me to thinking. According to the Bible story, woman was born of man; in fact, woman is a part of man. And the man goes crazy for the woman and loves her. But in reality all he loves is himself. He loves a piece of himself, not someone different from him. He lives with himself and has children with himself and makes loves to himself. A love focused on his own person, a love that has nothing to do with real love. I believe it’s the most perverse thing I’ve ever read in my life. The man is in love with himself and nothing else. And that’s according to Sacred Scripture. The inferiority of women is just a side issue. It’s just a fig leaf to conceal all the rest.
Ownership. One person belongs to another, is owned by them. By divine decree. Which means my life has value because it belongs to a man. Beasts of burden, houses, farmland, women. All chattel. All possessions. They belong.
. . . I’LL NEVER HAVE A BABY.
Because she’d be born a girl.
And she doesn’t deserve that. Her mother would already have suffered through that.
Wherever you are, daughter of mine, please forgive me. Forgive your mother. She never felt up to it. And she never will. Never . . .
. . . I’M NO LONGER MYSELF. I’M NO LONGER MYSELF. I’M no longer myself.
. . . IT’S A MECHANISM THAT REQUIRES OILING, IT NEEDS to be fine-tuned. But if the trick works . . . there are no alternatives. I have no alternatives.
AT THE CENTER OF THE LAST PAGE, THERE WAS A phrase from the Brothers Grimm: “Hansel and Gretel didn’t give it overmuch thought, because they were sure they could find their way home by the breadcrumbs they’d dropped.”
ROCCO SHUT THE NOTEBOOK. AND ONLY THEN DID IT dawn on him what was wrong. What he’d overlooked. What the detail was that kept nagging at him, that lurked in the folds of his mind. When everything became clear, it was like being punched in the solar plexus. Powerful, sudden, the kind of thing that takes your breath away and makes your legs turn to rubber. He had to rush right over to headquarters. “It was too easy,” he said, pushing open the café door as he left. “It was all too easy. Idiot, idiot, idiot!”
HE THREW OPEN THE DOOR AND LUNGED INTO THE office. On his desk was a note from Italo listing all the calls he’d received: three from the police chief and, most important of all, the three calls from Luca Farinelli. Next to the note stood a cardboard box. The deputy chief of the forensic squad had left it for him. Inside were plastic bags containing various scraps of paper. On the box was a note:
All of these are things that were on the floor in the room with the corpse. See if any of it can prove useful. After you’ve looked it over, please give me a call and I’ll file it away in the archive.
HE STARTED SORTING THROUGH, PLASTIC BAG BY PLASTIC bag. A couple of restaurant bills, shopping lists, a gas bill to pay, a parking lot receipt. Nothing much. But his eye had recorded something that his mind took a few extra seconds to register. He picked up the parking lot receipt again.
Parini Hospital. Departure time, 8:10 A.M. On Friday, March 16.
Who left the parking lot of the Parini Hospital at 8:10 on the morning that Esther died? And why was that receipt in the room where the corpse was found?
“A necktie . . .”
The clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight shone through. “The light!” shouted the deputy police chief.
Italo Pierron came running: “What light? What’s happening?”
“I’m an idiot, Italo, a blundering idiot! Shut the door.”
The officer immediately did as he was told. Then he sat down across from the deputy police chief: “What’s going on? Can you explain?”
“Esther Baudo. She sent me exactly where she wanted me to go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hadn’t figured out a fucking thing! Now, Italo, listen carefully. We think it was the husband, right?”
“Yes, and he strangled her with his tie and then staged the hanging with the clothesline off the lamp hook.”
“And already there’s one thing that doesn’t add up. The light. Remember? When we walked in I flicked on the light switch and there was a short circuit. What does that make you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’d already figured it out, idiots that we are! It’s obvious that the killer closed the shutters afterward. And he left the room. She hanged herself with the tie, the cable came later. Do
you remember what Alberto said?”
“No, I wasn’t there in the autopsy room. I was outside throwing up.”
“He said that there was one bruise about two finger breadths in width that was from the object that actually strangled the victim, which is to say the tie, and then a smaller one around her neck that was the mark of the cable. Now, we’ve said that her husband, after strangling his wife, hauled her up as if with a pulley by using the lamp hook. Then he supposedly tied the cable around the leg of the armoire, closed the shutters, and left. You with me?”
“And that’s exactly what happened, right?”
“No! Because we caused the short circuit, when we turned on the light. So what does that mean? That the wires were exposed and were touching, and the minute we flipped on the switch, the power went out. The cable was attached to the ceiling hook of the lamp fixture; it didn’t even come close to touching the wires. So how did these blessed electric wires come into contact? During the first hanging.”
“The first hanging?” asked Italo, openmouthed.
“That’s right, the first hanging. Exactly. When Esther took her husband’s tie, twisted it into a noose around her neck, and let herself drop into thin air.”
“I’m not following you. What about the cable?”
“Someone stepped in after her death. And you know how? By wrapping the clothesline around her neck, looping it over the lamp hook, cutting away the tie, and leaving Esther Baudo to dangle there.”
“Someone did that? But who?”
“An ally. A girlfriend? A person who left the parking lot of the Parini Hospital at eight ten?”
“So someone helped Esther after she was already dead, do I have that right?”
“Exactly right. It’s a mechanism that Esther and her girlfriend had fine-tuned over time. The perfect murder. Perhaps at first it was nothing but a mental parlor game. How to commit suicide and pass it off as murder. What would they plant? They’d plant the shopping bag from the store, with the sales receipt, and the gift card for her husband, pointing to the idea that that necktie, the name day gift, was the murder weapon. And in fact, we never do find that tie. All we find is the logo of the ‘Tomei’ clothing store on the cloth label, right under the seat of Patrizio Baudo’s bicycle. And that was already an odd coincidence. She never gave her husband that gift. He never laid eyes on that necktie. All that mattered was that we see it, you get that?”
“Wait, Rocco, wait a sec, I’m not sure I follow you. Let’s start over again. Esther and Patrizio have a fight.”
“Let’s just say that Patrizio that morning threw a fit and really gave her a beating. Anyway, it all happens in the kitchen. That’s why the place was such a mess. Esther decides she can’t take it anymore and this is the right day. They’ve long ago organized everything down to the last detail, she and her girlfriend. All they need now is the right occasion. So she calls her ally—and unfortunately we never found Esther’s SIM card. Only her cell phone smashed to smithereens. It must have been a surreal phone call. Just try to imagine it! She tells her ally: The time has come. I’m doing it today. You know what to do next! And at that point, what had been nothing more than a literary plaything suddenly turns into something terribly real!”
“And she commits suicide. That is, to be more accurate, she hangs herself with the tie . . .”
“Exactly. Now the ally arrives, loops and secures the clothesline, cuts and removes the necktie, and then Esther’s dead body drops in the noose of that metal cable securely anchored to the armoire. The ally lowers the blinds, shuts the door, and leaves.”
“The ally lowers the blinds but doesn’t turn on the light?”
“No. The light stays off. I told you that. The short circuit took place either because in the first hanging the wires pulled by the necktie were exposed and came into contact, or else the electrical problem was caused by the ally, the accomplice, precisely in order to signal to us: It’s a murder! No one hangs themselves in the dark. Get it?”
“The ally is clever.”
“No, the ally is a cretin. Because she thinks we’re going to fall for this crudely staged murder. The ally and Esther were crude in their belief that we’d swallow it, hook, line, and sinker.”
“Not really, Rocco. You threw the husband straight into jail.”
Rocco pretended he hadn’t heard, but Italo had just spoken a blessed truth. “A murder disguised as a suicide by hanging. You see that, Italo? She passed it off as a murder disguised as a suicide by hanging. But there was a mistake. Her ally was clearly upset, she did it all in a state of grief and horror, and overlooked one precious detail.” Rocco held out the envelope containing the ticket from the parking lot. “Something crucial, you see? Proof that she was there, in the apartment. Then she left without being seen. And you and I turned the light on a few hours later.”
“So anyway, Esther and her ally left you a series of clues . . .”
“To ensure her husband would be arrested. To punish him. Do you know the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel?”
“The story about the breadcrumbs?”
“Exactly. That’s what they did to us.”
“So who’s the ally?” asked Italo Pierron.
“Someone who goes to visit her mother with a broken hip at the Parini Hospital every morning. Someone who wants to become a writer.”
“And who’s that?”
“Adalgisa Verratti. Esther’s only friend. Who’s so confident that their plan will work that she never says a single word about Esther’s appalling relationship with her husband. She leaves that to us. She knows that sooner or later we’ll nail him for it.”
“So you’re saying Patrizio Baudo is innocent?”
Rocco looked at Officer Pierron. “Technically, perhaps. He didn’t murder his wife. Or at least he didn’t on March sixteenth.”
“But he’d been murdering her for the past seven years, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“What are we going to do?”
The deputy police chief got up from his chair. He went over to the window and looked out. Then he rested his forehead against the glass.
“Seven years is a long time.”
“Seven years is a fucking long time, Italo.”
“Well . . . is it? That depends. But yes, it’s a long time.”
The deputy police chief hurried back to his desk. He pulled the receipt from the hospital out of the plastic bag. He looked at it.
“What are you going to do, Rocco?”
He took out his lighter and burned the receipt in the ashtray. The thermal paper turned black with a sudden flare, and nothing was left of the evidence but a flake of carbon in the midst of a desert of stubbed-out Camel and Chesterfield butts.
“Te l’appoggio . . .” said Italo, using a distinctly Roman expression. “I’m with you on this.” He’d started picking them up by now. “Te l’appoggio totalmente.”
But Rocco said nothing. He closed the cardboard box. “We can give this back to Farinelli. So he can file it away.”
Italo took the box and headed for the door.
“Italo?”
“What is it?”
“Only you and me.”
“Like always, Rocco. Like always.” And he left the office.
Rocco sat down as his desk. He pulled open a drawer. He looked at the joints, lying ready. Then he closed the drawer again.
HE WENT WALKING THROUGH THE CENTER OF AOSTA without any particular destination. He found himself almost entirely by chance in front of Adalgisa’s bookstore. He’d seen her not even an hour before, but maybe it was time to settle the matter and prevent any further complications. He went in.
He searched through the shelves. And he found the book he was looking for, in the children’s section. He went over to the cash register. There was a man with a beard.
“Is Adalgisa here?”
“She didn’t come in today. That’ll be ten euros fifty.”
Rocco paid and left the bookshop.
He walked the three hundred yards that separated the bookshop from Adalgisa’s apartment building. There were various surnames on the intercom. But not Verratti. He pushed a button at random.
“Yes?” asked an elderly voice.
“Mailman.”
The buzzer buzzed and the door swung open. He examined the mail slots. There he did find the surname Verratti. Apartment 6. He looked up at the landing. There were three apartments. He did some quick mental arithmetic and climbed up to the third floor. The door to Apartment 6R was open. Rocco pushed it gently. Coming down the hall toward him was Adalgisa, a roller suitcase in her right hand and her purse slung over her left shoulder. As soon as she saw the policeman she turned pale.
“Going somewhere?”
The woman swallowed uneasily. Rocco closed the front door behind him. He looked at the hallway. White. With a bookshelf loaded down with books. “There’s no need,” he said to her. He put his hand in his pocket and handed her Esther’s notebook.
“Did . . . did you read it?”
“Enough to understand.”
The woman tucked Esther’s diary into her purse.
“I passed by the bookstore. Look what I bought.” He showed her the book of fables. “I decided to start reading again. I’m starting from square one, a nice fairy tale. That’s a good method, don’t you agree?”
Adalgisa shifted her weight onto her right foot. Her hand let go of the suitcase handle.
“What’s your favorite fairy tale, Adalgisa?”
“I couldn’t . . . really say.”
“Mine is Hansel and Gretel. The one with the breadcrumbs. To find their way home. Sometimes it’s breadcrumbs, sometimes it’s pebbles. And sometimes it’s neckties.”
Adalgisa gulped.
“Don’t worry. I just wanted to tell you that we’ve found the way home. Thanks in part to you.”
“And what are you planning to do?”
“I don’t know. Take a walk. And try to figure out if the work I do still has any meaning.”
Adam's Rib Page 23
