Adam's Rib (28 page)
Authors: Antonio Manzini
“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.”
“I don'tâ”
“You know what?” Rocco interrupted. “When I was talking with you I had the distinct sensation that I was under a microscope. You were very good. I really should have been studying you. But you were more skillful than I was. And you know why? Because you put your heart into this thing. I was just being a professional.”
“That's not true. Face it, you do have a heart.”
“Still, there is one thing that hurts my feelings. You assumed that I was an idiot. And that I'd go for it hook, line, and sinker.” Rocco started laughing softly. It was a hiccupy laugh, the kind that's contagious, and in fact Adalgisa indulged in a smile, along with him. “And my assistant, Officer Pierron, has a point. Deep down, I am an idiot, because I did fall for it. I fell for it because I was blind, my friend. Because I listened to my nerves, not my brain. Frustration instead of calm and cool deliberation. And you knew that. If you ask me, you knew that in the presence of Esther's corpse, something would snap inside me. Something that would blind me. You know me much better than what you read in the newspaper. It's crazy that you figured all this out just from a short conversation in a bar. If you write the way you study up on people, then you have a brilliant future ahead of you. How did you manage to identify my weak point?”
“Are you talking about your wife?”
Rocco nodded.
“I asked around. At police headquarters too. I have a friend who's a cop.”
“It wouldn't be Deruta, would it?”
“No. His name's Scipioni.”
“Take care of yourself, Adalgisa, and don't worry, you can stay in Aosta. No one's going to come bothering you.”
“
Grazie
.” The bookseller's eyes were wet.
Rocco turned and made for the door. But when he got there he seemed to change his mind. He turned back around and spoke to Adalgisa. “Two things. Throw away your keys to Esther's apartment. You don't need them anymore. And when you take police seals off the door, make sure you put them back afterward. Otherwise you're leaving indelible evidence. Remember that in your next detective novel.” And with that he left the apartment.
HE'D BEEN USED. MOVED HERE AND THERE LIKE A
puppet on a string, by a dead woman and her good friend. A woman who had found in that suicide one last extreme act to complete her life and to punish once and for all the man who had destroyed that life.
A parlor game that moved from the world of fantasy into real life, the deputy police chief thought to himself.
How many times had he played those parlor games with his friends? Like: You're all alone on an island populated by rats and seagulls. You have no weapons. How do you survive? What do you do?
He could just see them, Adalgisa and Esther at their book club, planning a fake suicide, with plenty of details. Who knows, maybe just to make the game more
interesting, more realistic, they had even set it on the stage of Esther's home.
And then they'd actually put it into practice.
Rocco had never glimpsed such extreme despair, such desperation. Total, with no way back. To reach this point involved a plan so absurd and complicated that only a woman could have come up with it. Only a woman could have implemented it.
And who was he to ruin that plan? No one, nothing, a pawn. A puppet, in fact.
He walked past Nora's shop. He stopped about thirty feet away and just looked. She'd changed the window display. Now there was a severe, very elegant wedding dress, a little bit in the style of Grace Kelly. He heard a peal of laughter echoing off the walls. He recognized it. That was Nora. She was on the other side of the street and was walking toward her shop with Anna and the interior decorator Bucci-something something. They were laughing loudly and eating gelato. A gelato in that cold, Rocco mused with a smile. He turned up his coat collar. They saw him. All three stopped short in the middle of the street. Nora's eyes were big and round. Anna had a half smile on her lips. The interior decorator was waggling his eyebrows, clearly ill at ease. Rocco leaned against the wall. A little boy riding a bicycle with training wheels went by, brow furrowed in concentration, followed by his father. Nora broke away from the trio and walked toward the deputy police chief. Rocco turned and vanished around the corner, mentally wishing her all the best. She deserved it.
IN SPITE OF THE COLD, HE WAS SITTING AT ONE OF THE
tables outside the chalet bar in the Piazza dell'Arco di Augusto. The bar was closed. He just sat there, in silence, listening to the sound of the wind and the few cars going by. He thought about Rome, his dusty apartment with its ghost furniture. He looked at the sidewalk wet with the rain that had just stopped falling. The mountains all around, still garbed in winter. The clouds rushing past, every once in a while having a little fun by offering a clear view of the snowcapped peaks. The occasionally hasty pedestrian turning the corner toward Sant'Anselmo.
“THERE'S NOTHING TO CELEBRATE, YOU KNOW,” MARINA
tells me.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“I'm enjoying the sunset.”
“What sunset? It's too cloudy to see anything.”
“Have a little faith. It's a cold city. But a pretty one.”
“True. It's pretty.”
“You're a cop, not a judge.”
She's never been so direct. “I know. I'm not a judge.”
“You can't always just do what you want.”
“I know that too.”
“So you're going to leave things the way they are?”
“I'm going to leave things the way they are.”
“Don't you think he's innocent?”
“No, Marina, he's not.”
“Look!” says Marina. “There it is. It's like the diluculum.
The first light. The gleam of hope. So you see, sooner or later it's bound to come?”
RIGHT THERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SKY, THE
clouds had parted. A ray of sunlight had shot down through that quilt of shadows and pierced the Arch of Augustus, illuminating the piazza and the street.
Rocco stood up. Slowly, he walked out into that narrow shaft of bright light. He was going to follow it, without thinking, at least this once, wherever it took him.
Maybe it would take him home.
F
irst of all, my sincere thanks go out to Piero and Luciano of the Aubert bookshop in Aosta. Your kindness and generosity have touched me deeply.
Then, thanks to Paola and her “tips.”
I cannot fail to thank Mattia for his attachment to Rocco Schiavone, as well as Maurizio, Floriana, Francesca, Marcella, and the Sellerio publishing house as a whole.
A huge thank-you to my family, which surprisingly continues to stay with me: Toni “if-there's-one-thing-that-gets-on-my-nerves,” Giovanna “check-and-make-sure-you-got-back-in,” Francesco “I-was-robbed,” Laura “hold-on-a-sec-lemme-put-in-my-earbuds,” Marco “what's-the-word-from-parliament,” Jacopo “A-plus-plus-plus,” Giulia “Idefix,” and last but only because he's the youngest, Giovanni “teach-this-year-I'm-definitely-passing-the-class!”
A wholehearted thank you to Fabrizio, who by now knows Rocco better than I do.
To Nanà , Smilla, Rebecca, and Jack Sparrow, who was a “guest” at my house, bringing a breeze of love.
Thanks from the heart.
As of November 21 in 2013, the year I wrote this book, there were 122 cases of femicide in Italy.
*
Until that number drops to zero, Italy won't be able to call itself a civilized country.
A. M.
B
orn in 1964 in Rome,
ANTONIO MANZINI
is an actor, screenwriter, director, and author. He studied under Andrea Camilleri at the National Academy of Dramatic Art and made his debut in fiction with a short story he cowrote with Niccolo Ammaniti. He is the author of three murder mysteries that feature Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone, a cop who thinks outside the box and disrespects both his superiors and police department regulations.
Adam's Rib
is the second of these novels to be translated into English.
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