The Bastards of Pizzofalcone (20 page)

Piras thought it over for a moment, then said: “All right. Wait a couple of minutes, then go back in. You'll see, you'll be given a different welcome.”

They went to a café and had the cup of coffee, as announced, along with a couple of slices of pizza, which they ate standing at the counter. Aragona commented on how depressing their lunch was. When they walked back into the barracks, fifteen minutes had passed, and they found a mortified Bistrocchi awaiting them, alongside a woman in a lab coat. She was young, very attractive, and clearly in command; she immediately introduced herself: “Lieutenant Lojacono, is that right? Hi, I'm the chief administrator, Rosaria Martone. I supervise this investigative squad. I apologize for the earlier misunderstanding: Bistrocchi here hadn't been informed of the importance and urgency of your investigation. We've brought all the documentation with us,” she said, pointing to the file that Bistrocchi held in one hand. “Would you care to come to my office?”

She led the way down a corridor, followed by Bistrocchi; as they walked, Aragona shot sweet darts of mental vengeance at the man. The office was a large, clean, tidy room, lit by a window overlooking the interior courtyard. Martone pointed them to two armchairs and a small couch in a corner of the room opposite a large desk cluttered with documents and file folders.

“Let's sit down here, we'll be more comfortable. All right, Bistrocchi, bring us up to speed.”

The superintendent, who had remained standing, gazed in embarrassment at his fingertips.

“My apologies, I hadn't realized that this case was a priority. We've completed our examination of the apartment, but the report still hasn't been drafted . . .”

Martone waved one hand impatiently. Lojacono though to himself that behind the woman's delicate features and petite stature must lurk a formidable personality: “Bistrocchi, let's not waste any more time—ours or our colleagues'—with bureaucratic excuses. Summarize the crucial points for us; the precinct will receive the report in due time.”

The man took a deep breath, switched to a pair of reading glasses, and opened the file.

“Now then, first of all the points of access to the apartment: there are no signs of forced entry, either on the building's main door, which is wood on the exterior and metal on the interior, nor on the front door—which is made of wood and is single-paneled—that gives onto the landing, or the second, internal door, which is glass. The apartment appeared to be in excellent condition, both structurally and in terms of plumbing, with . . .”

“Bistrocchi,” the woman roared. “Get to the point!”

The man blinked rapidly.

“Certainly, boss. The only room here described, because it was in a state of disorder, is the living room, which is where the corpse was found. All of the surfaces were carefully analyzed, dusted with hygroscopic and magnetic powders, but no latent fingerprints were found. Likewise, two buccal swabs were performed on the cadaver, and fingernail clippings from both hands were taken as well; here, too, negative results from the analyses performed by the laboratory we operate that specializes in the examination of organic and biological material.”

Now it was Aragona's turn to blink rapidly. “Which means?”

“Nothing,” the director explained. “No prints other than those belonging to people whose prints ought to have been there, I'd imagine.”

Bistrocchi nodded, turning to the next page. “Exactly. Only the prints of the dead woman, the housekeeper, and two prints belonging to the notary on both the handles of the door leading to the rear of the apartment.”

“And nothing on the corpse,” Lojacono added, speaking more to himself than anyone else. “No flesh under the nails, no bite marks. She didn't put up a struggle.”

Martone nodded. “So it would appear.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Lojacono asked: “What about the alleged murder weapon? The glass ball, in other words.”

Bistrocchi flipped through his papers.

“Here we are then: glass sphere with wooden base, found beneath the armchair, etc, on carpet, etc . . . intact, free of abrasions or cracks, etc . . . at the top of sphere we found traces of organic, hematic material, as mentioned in analysis attached . . . and hair . . . here's the analysis. Blood and hair matching those of Cecilia De Santis. The marks are compatible with the wound on the back of the neck of the cadaver. In all likelihood, then, this was the murder weapon.”

Martone puffed out her cheeks and ran a hand over her face. “Bistrocchi, please. I think what Lieutenant Lojacono wants to know is whether there were any foreign prints on the object. Can you tell us, or are you going to keep us in suspense for a few more hours?”

The man's ears reddened, and he said hastily: “A partial print was detected. Made by a glove. That's all.”

Nothing. No fingerprints. Never once did things turn out to be simple, thought Lojacono. Never once did they luck out.

He addressed the director: “At the station house they told us that you were given several articles that might turn out to be the items stolen from the apartment, pieces of fine silver, I believe. Could you tell us something about them?”

Martone was happy to oblige: “Yes, we received those this morning. They were in a plastic bag, which had been abandoned in a dumpster. There was nothing on the bag or on the objects themselves: two small vases, two picture frames, a centerpiece, and a statuette of a lady dressed in nineteenth-century attire. Not even the housekeeper's fingerprints; evidently they had recently been cleaned. The thief or thieves wore gloves and didn't remove them. There are no marks of any kind.”

Aragona scratched his forehead: “I don't get it. Why steal a couple of pieces of silver in an apartment overflowing with extremely valuable objects, and then toss them into the first dumpster you see?”

“Sometimes these things happen,” Lojacono answered. “It might suddenly have dawned on them what they'd done, and they panicked and dumped the loot. Or else they realized that we might be able to trace them through their fence, or whoever eventually bought the pieces. Or else, again, the burglary might have been nothing more than a crude attempt to cover up the real motive. Dottoressa, may I ask a favor? Could I see the murder weapon?”

W
hat were you thinking? What was in your mind when you did it?

Lojacono was sitting in the little anteroom of the forensic squad's laboratory, his head resting on his hands, which were on the table, fingers intertwined. His almond-shaped eyes had narrowed to slits, and there was no discernible expression on his Asian features. As if he were sleeping. But he wasn't: he was looking.

He was looking at the glass sphere, its top smeared with a dark stain. The only object on the spotless laminate countertop, white against the white floor, between white walls, illuminated by the white light from the ceiling fixture. The white ceiling.

A faint reflection gleamed off the curved surface of the glass.

Aragona, the only dark patch in the room, except for Lojacono himself, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortably. He would have liked to know what was going through his colleague's mind.

What was going through Lojacono's mind? Death.

He was trying to receive a message from that innocent object, a piece of kitsch that had ended the life of a woman he'd never met. He was trying to intuit why that glass sphere, created to—best case scenario—make children smile, had ultimately become the instrument of an act as irrevocable as murder.

Don't you know that murder is a serious matter, Glass Ball? Lojacono mused. Murder is a very serious matter, that touches lots of people. You see this place, Glass Ball? People rushing to and fro, in white lab coats, serious and efficient; instruments, test tubes, microscopes. And parked outside are armored cars, and there are phones ringing, uniforms, handguns, tears, and laughter. All propelled by the murder.

Murder ought to have the right, since it's such a serious matter, to be executed via gunshot or, at the very least, via sharp blade. Murder deserves to be repaid with a complicated piece of machinery, such as an electric chair, or a sophisticated device such as the ones used to administer lethal injections. Murder calls out for historical tools of execution: the garrote, or the guillotine, or the gallows. Murder is a serious matter, not a joke.

From inside the globe, a woman's smiling face stared back at him. Inside the sphere was a sort of dancer, from the Caribbean or Hawaii, with a flower wreath, her probably bare chest covered by a tiny guitar and, underneath, a skirt made of long green leaves.

A ukulele. It came to him in a flash, the name for that little guitar. Ukulele. Marilyn Monroe played one in
Some Like It Hot
, that movie with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; he'd probably seen it ten times. She was so beautiful, Marilyn Monroe was.

De Santis, on the other hand, wasn't beautiful. That is, even aside from the fact that she was now dead.

Aragona coughed softly. Lojacono didn't blink.

She wasn't beatiful, okay. So what? Did she deserve to die in such an absurd way for the crime of not being beautiful? Clubbed in the back of head with a glass ball?

Glass ball, glass ball. Not one of those crystal balls that fortune-tellers use to see into the future. There's no future inside this glass ball. Maybe just a little of the recent past.

Lojacono thought to himself that the globe must have traveled several yards before doing its dirty work to the back of De Santis's head. Because the corpse was sprawled out at the end of the wall that led to the door that gave onto the interior of the apartment, and that part of the room was closest to the globes depicting Europe, globes containing the Eiffel Tower and the Cologne cathedral, London's Tower Bridge, and the Little Mermaid of Copenhagen; this little hula dancer with a ukulele smiling at him from under the glass, therefore, should have been located in another part of the room, next to the golden sands and palm trees of the tropics, the cliffs of Acapulco and the stone heads of Easter Island. What were you doing there, little dancer? Why were you under the armchair, maybe five yards away from your proper place on the shelf?

Because the gloved hand took you and brought you down onto the back of your doting mistress's head?

Lojacono lifted his head to free his own hand and picked up the object. The director of the forensic squad had told him that they'd need to hold onto it, but that since they were done with their examinations, he was free to touch it.

The lieutenant shook the base, hefting its weight. It was a ball of medium size, heavy because of the liquid inside and thanks to the block of wood that formed its base. He turned it upside down and then turned it back right side up.

Inside the globe, there was now a tiny blizzard. Snowflakes—entirely out of keeping with the climate of the place depicted and with the little dancer's garb—whirled, covering everything in a glittering flicker. Aragona coughed again.

Slowly the flakes settled to the bottom and, indifferent to the cold, the dancer once again stared at Lojacono, blithely unaware of the dark stain of organic origin smearing the top of her spherical abode.

What were you thinking? Lojacono wondered again. You, with your gloved hand, with the silver from the front hall and living room in that plastic bag, what did you have in mind? Why take such an innocent object and hurl it or smash it against that woman's head? Why kill her in
this
way? If she'd screamed, if she'd called for help, maybe you'd have suffocated or strangled her. If she'd been closer to you, instead of four or five yards away, you'd have killed her with your hands, instead of using the first object you came across.

If that's the way it went, of course. Because maybe things went very differently. Maybe you'd had an argument, and maybe Signora Cecilia De Santis, Festa by marriage, hadn't been as malleable as you expected.

And so, in a burst of fury, you killed her, perhaps while she was heading back to her bedroom, thinking the discussion was at an end. Calmly turning her back on you, never dreaming you might react like that, never dreaming she was in danger.

Never dreaming that you'd kill her—much less with one of her beloved glass balls.

The dancer smiled at him. He stared at her for another minute, in silence.

Then he stood up and left the room, followed by a perplexed Aragona.

T
he warrant had been faxed in midmorning, and Di Nardo and Romano had left immediately.

This time, threatening black clouds had forced them to take the car. Alex was at the wheel and she hadn't removed her sunglasses, even though there was no sun.

As they tried to make their way through the tangled traffic, Romano had tried repeatedly to get through to Giorgia; when for the umpteenth time he reached a recorded voice informing him that the phone was turned off or out of range, the man swore under his breath and hurled the phone into the back-seat.

“If you break your own phone,” Alex commented, without taking her eyes off the road, “I can guarantee no one will ever answer you.”

“And that might be better,” Francesco replied, gravely. “That way we can just stop worrying about it once and for all.”

Di Nardo drove in silence for a while, then said: “You know I'm really curious to look this mysterious tenant in the face. And to know why she's locked herself up in that apartment.”

“If you ask me, we're chasing our tails. If a woman chooses not to go out and wants to spend her time sitting indoors, she has every right, doesn't she? We shouldn't be at the beck and call of some delirious old gossip who, by the way, never leaves her apartment either. Tomorrow morning our mystery woman could call us up and report that the old paraplegic is a recluse: and there we'd be, running back and forth across the
vicolo
, from one place to the other, asking them both why they never go out.”