These Dark Things (21 page)
Natalia and Pino climbed Via San Mattia, en route to lunch in the Spanish Quarter. It was the toughest section in the city, but still she couldn’t resist it. They diverted into a small inclined street. The alley twisted, a dark ribbon with a slice of sky above. Most alleys here were augmented intermittently with stone steps to aid in the steep ascent up toward the Vomero hill district on the ridge, some eight hundred feet above. A widow in black knelt, scrubbing the stone beneath a local shrine, clearing a small rectangle amid the grime. The stone was worn smooth with centuries of scrubbing. A blizzard of signs hung over the street, announcing the nature of the services offered within the shops that lined both sides.
Pino and Natalia discussed their second suspect as they climbed.
“Where would a blind monk hide?” Natalia asked.
Three boys kicked a ball across the expanse of the Piazza Dante. They were using garbage bags as goalposts.
“What is he doing for money?” she asked.
“His fellow monks would supply him with some.”
“No doubt. Or Father Pacelli. But where would he hide out? I can’t see him checking into a hotel.”
“Me either,” said Pino. “Maybe a hiding space under the church?”
“In the crypts? Too awful to contemplate.”
“But for him, hiding in the dark would be perfect. He’d actually have the advantage.”
“How would he eat? Maintain himself?” She shook her head. “No. He’s up here with us somewhere.”
“Where wouldn’t we think of looking for him?” Pino asked.
“In the monastery?”
“We’ve already tried that. No. Where would he not stand out? Go unnoticed?”
“Someplace with other blind people. A hospital?”
“Or in an assistance program for the blind. Maybe a special residence.”
Turning into a street running parallel to the hill, they came to a small plaza. Just a few tables were set up outdoors, as far from the mounds of garbage bags as possible. A cook spun a wheel of dough in the window of a pizzeria. The odor of garlic pervaded all, stronger even than the sickly sweet smell of refuse.
Two beautiful Nigerian men passed, their smiles startling. A woman rushed past, screaming. A French tourist, her expensive bag now on the arm of a youth who was racing away. Her husband made a show of concern for her well-being to avoid giving chase. She slapped at his hands, screaming and pointing in the direction the purse-snatcher had gone. Big Doro’s aunt stood on her balcony above them. He must have been nearby: he was the
camorrista
who ran the immigrants who thieved in the quarter. Rumor had it there was a monthly quota on pick-pocketed wallets and snatched handbags that the police would tolerate, the price of admission for slumming tourists.
No one had a bank account here, no credit cards, and only the children ate decently. The residents all looked sinewy and gaunt. Half the men under thirty were unemployed, and three quarters of the women.
Two Bangladeshi trailed them for a block. At first Natalia worried about their designs on Pino and her, then realized they were just more undocumented stateless souls trawling for casual labor: a floor needing sweeping, a display window requiring washing. Failing that, they might grab up an unattended handbag. Natalia clutched hers closer, momentarily concerned not to lose her weapon to a cutpurse too naïve to recognize the special bag carried by plainclothes policewomen and female Carabinieri.
“Where’s my money?” a woman yelled at her companion. A drug addict, judging from the sunken cheeks and the sores on her lips. The sequins on her T-shirt flashed. She had on fashionably torn black jeans and leopardskin boots. An alley filled with Chinese women, sweatshop workers taking a rare break. The dozen streets of the quarter were a grid laid out in military precision, perpendicularly crossed by another eighteen, most no more than a dozen feet wide. They were too narrow even for sidewalks and were paved with large, flat stones. Five hundred years earlier, Spanish invaders had built the district to quarter their troops. The six-story buildings dated back centuries and looked their age. Repairs layered repairs.
Natalia and Pino reached their favorite
trattoria
and greeted their regular waiter. He was happy to have customers for an early lunch. The place was empty. He gestured toward their usual table, a step into the open-sided restaurant near the cash register. Neapolitans passed by, shopping bags and briefcases in hand, heading toward the tram station and the funicular car that would winch them from the cramped and weathered alleys of the quarter up the steep incline to the wide boulevards and tree-lined residential streets atop the ridge.
There was shouting in the street outside.
“Now what?” Natalia exclaimed. “Go ahead and order. I’ll be right back.”
A crowd stood gathered at the top of the street, watching several dogs snarling at one another, fighting over rotted meat they’d extricated from a ripped garbage bag. The yelping dogs were sinewy but muscular, tough as the streets they inhabited. The latest scourge to befall the city—feral dogs. Packs of them came down from God knows where in large numbers to feast on the garbage.
The wild dogs were too mangy to appear pedigreed, but the aspects of German shepherd, bulldog, terrier, and Doberman were present. Running in a pack, they roamed where they pleased, baring their teeth at any creatures foolish enough to interfere with their scrounging. They turned their attention to a small woman clutching her shopping and her baby.
“I can’t get into my house,” she cried. “They’ll bite.”
She was a gypsy, scarf tied around her head. The lead dog growled, eyeing a packet of meat poking out of the top of her bag. Natalia approached the woman steadily. She reached into the bag and tossed the meat. As most of the pack ran off, Natalia escorted the woman into her house. Then she put in a call to the dog-catchers. They were horribly overtaxed, but she got through after a dozen rings. Her lucky day. An animal-control van was nearby on a call in the quarter and would come over.
“That didn’t help my appetite,” Natalia said, rejoining Pino, who was already enjoying their pizza.
“I took the liberty of ordering wine,” he said. “May I?”
“Please.”
He poured, and she immediately took a sip. “That’s definitely nicer than wild dogs.”
“Or garbage,” he said. “The paper this morning said thirty-nine landfills are completely overloaded and not accepting any more from Naples.”
“The public is coming unhinged. A mob of irate citizens attacked the police station in Pianura last night, set buses ablaze, broke windows.”
“When is Bianca going to defy Gambini and unleash her trash collectors?”
“God. Soon, I hope. Colonel Donati’s wife is agitating for them to move. She can’t stand it any more, he said.”
Pino sighed. “Why are we talking about this at lunch?”
“What should we be talking about?”
“Us. Last night. Its greater cosmic meaning.”
“Last night was wonderful,” she said.
“You think people can tell?”
Natalia took ravenous bites of pizza. “If you keep fondling my knee, I think they might come to suspect.”
“Sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Look. Last night was great. I told you already.”
“But?” he said.
“Do I have to fill in the blanks? We work together. Today is today.”
“What’s that—a Zen koan? I’m not familiar with it.”
“Pino, please. If we become a couple, we can’t remain partners.”
“We
are
a couple, Natalia. As of midnight last night.”
Natalia sighed. “I don’t know, Pino. We have to keep it a secret, but you know as well as I, there aren’t any secrets at the station. Somebody will find out and tell everyone else. I’m worried too that our feelings could jeopardize our lives out here on the street, never mind our careers.”
“What
about
our careers?” Now he looked a little grim too.
“The regulations. Sergeant fraternizing with a superior officer. Superior officer fraternizing with her subordinate. They would make us choose. One of us would go. I don’t want it to be you. And it won’t be me. I can’t abandon another career and start over. I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want you to. You’ve worked too hard, have too much invested.”
“And you?”
“Yeah, me too.” Reality began to sink in. “But you should know. I’m not giving you up.”
The guards and groundskeepers were finishing lunch when Natalia reached the Orto Botanico. They were discussing last night’s football game and ignored her as she walked through the iron gates and climbed the stairs. After the fumes of the city, the green crown of trees was a relief. The garden had been a favorite of hers when she was a child, her parents’ destination after church and on her father’s one day off. Every Sunday, if the weather allowed, they’d stop home after mass to change. Her mother packed up the salami sandwiches prepared the night before, along with a jug of lemonade, and they’d set off. Sometimes Mariel or Lola would come too.
Natalia’s father could name all the birds chattering round them as they picnicked—kestrels, wrens, robins. At home he had books with photographs and names of hundreds of species and records of their songs. One year, Natalia’s mother saved up and bought him a splendid pair of binoculars.
Natalia sat on the bench in front of the greenhouse where she and Lola had agreed to meet. Giant purple and red blossoms hung off of thick green stems. A bright yellow bird flew over her head. Below the chestnut trees, a gardener trimmed hedges. Otherwise, it was the birds, and distant traffic.
A butterfly landed at her feet. Black-and-orange wings paddled open and shut. A brief life, but nearly perfect. Odd that Lola wasn’t here yet. Appearances aside, she had always been the more punctual. As Natalia took out her phone to call, she heard the explosion. Hundreds of birds rippled out of the trees.
So much for peace and quiet. She’d catch up with Lola later. She dropped her cell phone into her purse and sprinted toward where the sound had come from.
Sirens grew louder.
Three blocks away, the car was black and twisted. Local police were already there. Natalia flashed her badge and pushed through the crowd. A woman sat at the curb, screaming, her face bloody, blouse and stockings spattered with blood. Lola.
Natalia crouched, took a handkerchief from her bag, and wiped Lola’s forehead.
“Frankie,” Lola said, sobbing hysterically. “Nico, my poor baby. Nico.”
“Sssh. There’s no pain, Lol. They’re gone, Lola. They’re gone.”
“It’s my fault. He shouldn’t have gone with Frankie. It’s my fault.”
“No, Lola. No.”
Natalia pulled Lola closer and rocked her like a child, blocking her sight of the car and the thick black gasoline smoke curling skyward.
The police guard at the door waved Natalia into Lola’s room. Her beautiful hair was jagged, partly cut away to get at the cuts in her scalp. She was sitting up, her eyes closed. Natalia walked to the bed and touched her arm. Lola opened her eyes. Dead eyes, Natalia thought.
“They got Frankie and Nico.”
“I know,” Natalia said, touching her cheek.
“I have to tell you—”
“You don’t have to do that now.”
“No. I do.”
“He can kill you and your two younger ones. We won’t be able to guard you three all the time. Lola, your kids are down to one parent.”
“I know, I know. The damn girl.”
“Teresa Steiner?”
“Yes. We worked together, she and I, for the last six months. Frankie was as much of a prima donna as she and quickly got sick of her. But Gambini seemed so taken with this girl Teresa, and was determined to bring her in. Frankie flapped around and said he wanted to quit the organization. He couldn’t, of course. It would be betrayal. So I took over working with her.”
“On the shrines?”
Lola nodded. “I knew all about the shrines—my uncle ran the collections years ago. Gambini thought we’d make a good team. He had big plans for her. The shrines were nothing. He wanted her moving heroin for him. No easing into it, maybe starting her in hashish or kobret. No, he just drops her on us—boom. She had plans as well and wanted to know everything about us. How everything worked, what everyone did. Made us all leery of her.”
“Gambini had her running part of the drug operation?”
“I know—odd. I’d keep track of the shipments coming in and Teresa would move them out—to our local people operating open-air markets and to distributors in Germany. She was perfect, Gambini said. Spoke Italian and German fluently, of course, and easily traveled back and forth. Who would suspect a beautiful young girl—an honors student on her way to becoming a professor?”
“Did she want to be a professor?”
“She wanted everything, sure. Except for this problem with her adviser.”
“Lattanza?”
“Yeah. Said he was a devious shit. Just scum. He was, but she had led him on too. He threatened to ruin her academic career if she didn’t take him back. She still wouldn’t come around and he threatened her, the fool. He had no idea who she was associating with. Teresa laughed about him. Said the University was worse than the mob.”
“Was she afraid of Lattanza?”