Friday
Do you really think it’s right that if I want to talk to you I have to get out the phone book and find the number of your residential hotel, and since it’s an old phone book, it doesn’t have the number, after which I have to go on the Internet and only after six different sites that no one’s bothered to update, I finally get to hear your jerky voice in my earpiece?”
“What time is it?” asked Rocco.
“Seven thirty in the morning, may you die of cancer!” shouted Alberto Fumagalli. “Come to the hospital. I’m here working. And I’ve just witnessed something that, believe me, not even in a film by Spielberg . . . Hurry!”
“What do films by Spielberg have to do with anything?”
“It’s straight out of a horror flick!”
“Spielberg doesn’t make horror flicks, you ignorant lunkhead.”
“Whatever, just get your ass in gear!”
“But wasn’t Pietra on the case?”
“Pietra has gone back to Turin, he has a murder in Parella. I called the police chief, I called the judge. And they made an executive decision that your fucking vacation is over. Get moving!” And with that the pathologist ended the call.
Rocco rubbed his eyes. But he had no intention of hurrying over, the way Fumagalli had suggested. If life was sucking him back into the stream, he’d made up his mind he wasn’t going down without a fight. Did they want to stick him with a royal pain in the ass of the tenth degree? Then he would go back to his longtime rhythms of existence: shower, breakfast at Ettore’s café on Piazza Chanoux, police headquarters, morning joint. After that, and only after that, a visit to the morgue.
AND SURE ENOUGH, THAT’S WHAT HE DID. GOING BACK TO the office was like finding yourself face-to-face with someone who had been insisting for years that he was your friend, but who had never been your friend in the first place. The people from the cleaning crew had avoided dusting his furniture. He shut the door, flung open the window to the sweet smells of May that were being wafted into the room by a light breeze, sat down, opened the desk drawer, and lit the first joint after four days of abstinence. He leaned out the windowsill. The cars were going by on the street below; the peaks, still covered with snow, were gleaming in the timid springtime sunlight, while the shoulders of the mountains had turned emerald green. New grass, excellent fodder for the cows.
“You want to know something, Lupa? I could jump out my window. But I’d just land on the roof of the canopy over the entrance to police headquarters. It’s not even a one-yard drop. At the very worst, I’d sprain my ankle. Just look . . .” The sky had opened up. The clouds were fluffy and white. He could see flowers on the meadows.
He inhaled another mouthful of smoke. Nice. Sweet and aromatic. The little electric trains started chugging again in his veins. His brain began spinning at a higher RPM; the pistons were puffing the dust away, the oil lubricated all the ganglions of his nervous system, and at long last Deputy Chief Rocco Schiavone felt that all was right with the world. Now, yes, now indeed he could go out and hear whatever news Fumagalli had, and all about his alleged horror films. He tossed the spent roach out the window, put on his loden overcoat, and opened his office door.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Dottore!” said Casella. There they were, all lined up outside his door. Casella, D’Intino, Deruta, Italo, Caterina, and Antonio Scipioni.
“What is this?” asked Rocco. “Are you about to execute me by firing squad?”
“It’s nice to see you again, Dottore! We missed you, you know that?” said Deruta. All their faces were beaming; they looked like a classroom of students who had just smeared glue on the teacher’s chair and were eagerly waiting for him to sit down.
“Do you mind telling me what’s gotten into you all?”
Italo winked and glanced archly at the wall to the deputy chief’s right.
“What is it, Italo?”
“Just take a look . . .”
Rocco turned around. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d first come in fifteen minutes earlier. There was a sign tacked up on the wall, divided into numbered quadrants. Up high was the title: “Major Pains in the Ass.” Rocco stepped closer. His officers were snickering.
“Who did this?” he asked.
Italo raised his hand.
“Major pains in the ass . . .” the deputy chief started reading. Every once in a while his shoulders would shake. He was laughing. “Cafés that don’t stock Algida ice cream, true enough. That’s a huge pain in the ass . . . Oh, and Radio Virgin Mary, those pain-in-the-ass priests. All the zeroes on IBAN routing numbers . . . Wait, Italo, did you collect all these?”
“In the past few months,” Pierron replied. “Then, as time goes by and we come up with others, I’ll add them.”
“Then you can add these five: Sixth degree, losing your place in a book you’re reading. Seventh degree, put down waiting for your luggage at the airport. Or else seeing it arrive, but with a broken handle or zipper. Or not seeing it arrive at all. Eighth degree, put people who text you without saying who they are. Ninth degree, attending a performance of folk dances. Tenth degree, obviously, an unsolved case of murder. Speaking of which, Pierron, get ready, because we have to go. Fumagalli has something for us.”
“Do I have to come, too? I already saw the dead body yesterday, at the prison.”
“Your presence is essential!”
Italo nodded. Caterina walked over to the chart with a pen in hand. “Well, I’ll add the new pains in the ass, then.” And she started writing.
“Caterì, when you’ve finished this thankless task, do you think you could bring Lupa some water? She’s asleep on the armchair in my office.”
“Certainly. And where should I put waiting for your luggage at the airport, again? What level?”
“Seventh. Put that at the seventh.”
“So are we certain that I absolutely have to come?” Italo insisted, hoping he could avoid this visit to the morgue. “I just had breakfast.”
“Don’t worry. I’m told that it’s not disgusting, just horrifying.”
“So, it’s not going to make me throw up?”
“Exactly.”
FUMAGALLI WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN FRONT OF THE MORGUE. He was looking up at the sky full of clouds that sailed along serenely, like so many little cotton balls, gliding on the calm spring winds. The snow, the cold, the black winter sky were all things that seemed light-years away. “Strange, isn’t it?” said the medical examiner as soon as Rocco and Italo came within earshot.
“What?” asked the deputy chief.
“When you’re in the middle of the winter, the days drag out and you get the feeling they’re never going to end. And it seems as if the cold will never end, either. But then, look! Zap! You can’t even remember when it was winter anymore.”
“Speak for yourself. I can remember it perfectly. It was barely a week ago,” Rocco replied. “Anyway, what about this horror flick?”
Alberto Fumagalli pressed his lips tight and gazed at the two cops with a serious expression. “Before you go in, Rocco, a word.”
They stepped off to one side, leaving Italo standing alone in the middle of the plaza.
“Listen. It really is a rather distressing sight. I can just picture him”—and here he pointed at the Valdostan officer—“already stretched out on the floor. In other words, maybe we should leave him outside. Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you and me care to make a little bet.”
Rocco looked the doctor in the eye. “I like it . . .”
“Let’s say I give your officer six seconds.”
“The odds are in your favor, Alberto. You already know what we’ll be looking at, and I don’t. That means that if you say six seconds, you have much better odds than I do. Which means I need you to give me a handicap.”
“Like for instance?”
“I say it’s going to be seven seconds. If Italo can hold out for only six seconds or less, then you win. Fr
om six and one hundredth of a second to when he finally does faint, which might not happen until ten seconds out, I win.”
Alberto thought it over. “So I win if he passes out at the sixth second?”
“Or before.”
“You’ve got a bet!”
“Okay, but what are the stakes?” asked Rocco.
“Dinner. At the Enoteca Croix de Ville.”
“Appetizer, pasta, entrée, and dessert?”
“And an after-dinner amaro!”
Rocco shook the doctor’s hand. They walked over to Italo while the medical examiner pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He had no intention of calling anyone. He was looking for the stopwatch function, which he was going to start the instant that Pierron laid his eyes on what the doctor had described as something straight out of a splatter film.
“Let’s go!” said the deputy chief, and the three of them trooped into the room.
ITALO LOOKED DOWN AT THE LINOLEUM FLOOR. ATTENTIVELY, Rocco studied the officer’s face, which had already turned pale. In fact, as soon as he had entered the hallway infested by the metallic stench of disinfectant, he’d immediately started showing worrisome signs of heart palpitations. The deputy chief decided he’d been reckless in his betting tactics. Fumagalli opened the door to the morgue and, with a sadistic smile, said: “Be my guests . . .”
“Rocco, I . . .” Italo said under his breath.
“What is it?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“My ass, you’d prefer not to, Italo. You’re a cop, learn how to do your job!”
They went in. Like a hovering, apprehensive mother, Rocco kept his eyes fixed on his favorite officer. He paid no attention to Alberto, who had in the meantime gone over to pull the plastic sheet off the corpse. The usual stench of rot mixed with alcohol that felt as if it would stick to their clothing forever. They went over to the autopsy gurney. Italo’s eyes widened. The deputy chief attentively observed his partner, while the alert doctor had already started the stopwatch.
One second: Italo Pierron’s pupils enlarged like oil spreading across water. Two seconds: his lips parted ever so slightly. Three seconds: his eyelids started to flutter hysterically. Four seconds: his forehead pearled over with drops of sweat. Five seconds: his eyelids started to lower. Six seconds: his eyeballs rolled upward. Almost seven seconds: Italo dropped to the floor.
“Fuck!” said Alberto as he hit the stopwatch. “Six seconds and fifty-five hundredths, goddamn it to hell!”
Rocco smiled and bent over to help his partner back up. “Good job, Italo! I knew you wouldn’t fail me! Albè, you owe me dinner! Give me a hand here!”
“Promissio boni viri est obligatio,” said Albert, quoting an old Latin saw about honoring your obligations. “And to think I lost by just fifty-five hundredths of a second, damn it all!”
Together they picked up the policeman and hauled him out of the morgue. They laid him down on a bench in the hallway.
“Now what are we going to do? Wait for him to wake up?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’ll be up and on his feet in two minutes,” said Rocco. They left him stretched out on the bench with his feet elevated, and turned around and went back into the autopsy room.
This time, Rocco focused on the body.
Mimmo Cuntrera’s corpse was a perfectly normal corpse, something that, sad to say, Rocco had already seen dozens of times before. The off note was that the body was already in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.
“I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” said the deputy chief. “Well, I mean, he’s a little bit rotten. Where is this horror flick?”
Alberto Fumagalli smiled. He went over to the table beside the gurney and picked up a white T-shirt. He picked it up, as if to show off how perfectly white it had come out in the wash. “Well?” he asked.
“Well, what?” He was starting to get on Rocco’s nerves.
“They brought him to me from the prison with this T-shirt on him. A white T-shirt, made in China, if you ask me. Cotton. And it was still on him when I laid him on the gurney.”
“I continue to fail to see what’s so odd about it.”
“Look here.”
The stitches around the sleeves had been torn open at several points.
“So it’s ripped. So what?”
“It’s torn.”
“In Rome, we’d say it was ripped.”
“Well, you’re in Aosta, so you can say that it’s torn.”
“Okay, all right, Alberto, it’s torn. What about it?”
“Before I put him in the refrigerated drawer last night, it wasn’t torn. So what happened?” The medical examiner’s question hung suspended in the silence of the morgue.
“I don’t know. Was he not dead?”
“Domenico Cuntrera was deader than Julius Caesar.”
“Did someone sneak in here last night in a state of delirium and tear up his T-shirt?”
“No. There’s only one answer.”
“He’s a zombie?”
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Rocco. He’s not a zombie. This body swelled up on me.”
“Isn’t that what all corpses do?”
“Let me try to make myself clear. This corpse blew up on me to a ridiculous extent and then, in just a few more hours, it deflated.”
“And what does that make you think?”
“I’ve never had anything of the sort happen to me before. I’ve been banging my head against it since this morning. Corpses just don’t behave like this . . . and most of all, do you want to see the anus?”
“Can I skip that part?”
“As you like. It was just a matter of scientific precision. You see that he’s already started to decompose? After just twenty-four hours?”
“That’s the strange thing. And can you figure out why?”
“It’s no easy matter. Not easy at all . . . I smell poison, though. I’m not sure exactly which, but if you ask me, it’s poison!”
“Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“What do you want to look at?”
“The skin.”
“Rocco, my friend, that’s my profession. And anyway, I don’t use a magnifying glass to look at skin.” The medical examiner went over to a tripod. “Solenord fluorescent magnifying light.”
He dragged it over to the corpse and switched it on. “Biconvex lens with a light intensity at fifty centimeters of 550 lux.”
“Albè, it’s not like I’m thinking of buying it.” Rocco grabbed the swing arm and started examining the neck of the late Cuntrera.
“What are you looking for?”
But Rocco didn’t reply. In silence he observed the pigments of the flesh, the moles. Then all of a sudden, he froze. “I need an expert opinion.” And he handed the lens off to Alberto.
“Fucking . . .” said the medical examiner. “Fucking hell . . . it’s tiny, it’s really tiny, but I’ll bet my retirement that this is an injection, or a bee sting.”
“Do they have bees in prison?” asked the deputy chief with a smile.
“Okay, that changes everything. Injection mark on the jugular. Bingo!”
“So now what are you telling me?”
Alberto jerked upright. “That things are starting to become clear. Now I need to get busy, and fast. If you want to stay, be my guest. But I need to cut my patient open and, believe me, for someone like you, that’s not an entertaining spectacle.”
“I’ll get going.” Rocco headed for the door while Alberto reached across the table to gather the tools of his trade. “So what’s the plan?” asked the deputy chief, turning around once he’d reached the doorway.
“I need to take a few bits of good old Mimmo here as samples and send them out to be tested. I need a first-class toxicologist, someone skilled. This is something that I personally have never seen before. And I’ll tell you the truth, I find it extremely exciting!”
“Exciting?”
“That’s what I said.”
Rocco nod
ded. “Exciting. All right, well, you owe me a dinner.” He opened the door.
“Oh, Rocco?”
The deputy chief stopped and turned back. “Yes?”
“Any news about the son of a bitch who broke into your apartment?”
Rocco limited himself to shaking his head.
“When you catch him, give me a shout. Because, and let’s keep this between us, I’d love to have him as a patient for a couple of hours.”
When Rocco got out into the hallway, he went over to Italo, who was starting to regain his senses. “Come on, Italo, let’s get back to the office. I’ll drive.”
Italo nodded and handed the keys to the deputy chief. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I really—”
“Don’t sweat it, you earned me a dinner!”
THE SEA WAS CALM. A VAST SILVERY GRAY EXPANSE THAT, toward the horizon, almost verged on purple. The constant low waves broke gently against the rocks. The occasional seagull glided solitary through the air. In the distance a ship had turned athwart the horizon line. Corrado Pizzuti was standing outside his café, arms crossed on his chest, his gaze lost in the panorama before him. He’d considered reporting Enzo Baiocchi to the police. All things considered, Corrado was an innocent man. All he’d done was drive Enzo to Aosta, so was that a crime? He’d had no advance knowledge of the reason for that drive—that’s what he’d tell the police. Which, after all, was the truth. If he’d understood that bandit’s intentions along the way, he would have torn out of there, leaving Enzo in some service area along the highway. The real problem was: Would they believe him? Corrado had spent time in prison on two separate occasions, once for defrauding an insurance company and once for peddling narcotics. What would his word be worth to a policeman? Less than zero. Especially given the evidence of that damned receipt he’d had them issue at the hotel. How could he have made such a stupid mistake? The umpteenth mistake of his life.
Spring Cleaning Page 8
