That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (19 page)

One day, then, stripping her bed, the maid had found a candle: a Mira-Lanza candle, those stubby ones they made then: which she must have taken from the new package in the kitchen; they were kept on hand in the cupboard, for when the lights fail, sometimes. She—with her ready tongue —said she wanted to light it to the Madonna: because she had a special intention: but she didn't have matches: she had fallen asleep with the candle in her bed. Doctor Ghianda examined the girl, made her drink citron water, which has a calming effect for certain nervous fantasies, plus a few drops, three times a day, of the anti-hysteric water of Santa Maria Novella of Bologna, which the monks make there with a filter, a specialty of theirs. (This was, afterwards, confirmed: in the Merulanian tones of Sora Pettacchioni.) In any case, to avoid misunderstandings, the Professor was called back, was asked by Liliana for advice. He frowned for a moment, looking at her with a hint of a smile, his mannerism of a severe but kindly father, his usual way with kids. He was a very distinguished pediatrician. With three fingers he toyed with his gold fob, over his waistcoat. After a moment of suspense, he relaxed his forehead, drew a deep breath, and counseled "it seems the best thing, to me," that the child be sent back to her respective parents: who, however, didn't exist, neither the one nor the other. Whereupon, after a little while, when a reasonable pretext had been hit upon, she was restored to her "uncle and aunt," comforted, in the anticipation of receiving her back, with a nice bank order, of a sea-green color, the kind that have such a psycho-tonic effect on our beloved Comit.
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"The Banca Commerciale Italiana . . . will pay ... on the line, for this handsome little sea-green gent here, the sum of lire . . ." And the more they are, the better it is.

Don Corpi stretched his legs, holding his hat with his forearms, like a shield over his belly, clasping the big fingers of his two hands, which sank into his lap. The second ward, already twenty or twenty-one years old, was Ines, and she, after a little while, had gone off to be married: a wedding that was all in order. She had married a fine young man from Rieti, son of property owners, a law student in his eighth year of college: the full course lasted ten. One fine day, just when Liliana's tendernesses were condensing over her head, she had suddenly come out with the information that "she wanted to follow her vocation." And she followed it: with excellent results. From the daughterly, and urban, adventure, she had extracted a bit of a dowry, had collected a hope chest: two big suitcases full of lace-edged linen. Affected, as she was, by a classic form of wifely foresightedness, not, however, of the grasping form of her predecessor, she had been able to captivate wholly the stepmotherly heart, so maternal, or so gently sister-like (Liliana was eight or nine years older than she) and had acted with stubborn assiduousness in infallible determination, minute by minute, and in the systematized premeditation of her every gesture or smile or word or whim or glance or kiss: those which distinguish the tacit will of the woman, when she has "character": a past mistress, on occasion, in prompting the thought without even giving its outline verbally: with hints, lateral tries and counter-tries, mute waiting: setting off a process of induction, like the stator of a generator: with the same technique whereby she is wont to surround and protect (and direct towards the Right) the first stumbling steps of a little one: channeling it, however, where she wants, which is where he can wee-wee in the most seemly way, and with utter relaxation.

Ines! The urban adventure! From Galilei's
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matutinal clarities, when the Lateran office and mystery, the green gaiety of the churchyard receive within the city's walls the hick with his devout Sign of the Cross, the ass hitched up for a moment, gee!, from the golden pomp, at vespers, or ruby-colored, and from the full
cavate
of Maderno, from whose archway the indelible hymn in praise of Mary Mother has burst into the centuries never to return; from the PV and the BM and from the ten holes in the disk of the telephone, and from the big box of the radio which she put out of commission four times, the cothurnate fore-thinker had taken home a certain brisk, cavalier manner in darning socks, that is to say, taking the hole in wide circles, with needle and thread: and then, after that rapid circumnavigation, she pulled it all together and snapped off the thread at once, with her teeth. A first-class darn! Not even Princess Clotilde herself could have done better. A swelling, a musket ball under your heel which warmed your heart, for the whole festive day. Like so many orogenic seams towards the peak of a cone-shaped mountain: from those cones that pierce the clouds, which are the socks of the Lord.

She had brought to her student-husband, in addition to serene days and nights happy in the communion of souls and tongues, she had brought him . . . everything that a girl can bring in the practical and welcome line, for a student-husband: a great nonchalance in ironing pants, after having scorched six or seven pairs of Balducci's. That, we know, had been her discipline, her
gradus ad Parnassum.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We learn by mistake. Trial and error.

The third, Virginia! Don Lorenzo lowered his eyes, looking at the ground, though he was a grown man; then he raised his eyes to heaven for half a second, as if to say: be still, my lips! He joined his pious hams in a brief swinging beneath his nose, before his beard: a to-and-fro in the plane of the azimuth, an Italic, decent gesture. "The less said the better!" he seemed to be pleading with Doctor Fumi. It had to be said. The two officers were waiting: Ingravallo, indeed, was on his feet, grim, nervously tapping one leg. The giant's ten huge fingers slumped in his lap, still tightly intertwined: comb and counter-comb: like an apostle of marble, the kind that stand on the balustrade over the big cornice of San Giovanni Laterano. Twenty-five pounds of finger bones, good for cracking nuts, in that black furrow of the cassock: where, in rapid succession, the black caravan of the priest's buttons descended: which had neither beginning nor end, like the catalogue of the centuries. The two shoes, at rest, shiny gravedigger color, but no more so than all the rest, priapated from beneath the garment, like two forbidden objects, camping by themselves near those of Doctor Fumi, under the rack of dossiers, among the four legs of the desk; and inside them, no doubt, two hunks of double feet like a stone Saint Christopher.

"Well, what about Virginia?" Little by little, her character emerged: her headstrong vitality, the impudent type. It turned out that the charmer had charmed two souls: in two unconnected directions. The neighbor women, indeed, said that she had put a spell on both: and some of them played the numbers on the lottery. Her provocative beauty, her health, like a coral devil inside that ivory skin, her eyes! one could really believe that she had hypnotized husband and wife: "those brash ways," that somewhat rustic air, which revealed, however, "a big, sincere heart" (Petac-chioni), or as was said, with a smile and a frown at the same time, with the professional tic of Doctor Ghianda, "a case of violent puberty." To this same Professor Ghianda, without being called upon to do so, Virginia had displayed her tongue, with a very rapid expulsion and an equally rapid return to its place, as if automatic, and with the tip pointed in a special way that was her trademark: sustaining then with the cold authority of her full face, though with a spark of malice in her eyes, his irritated, sulphurous gaze, filled with wrath and pitchy emanations. Hearing him called— she thought—piedatrician, or piediatrist, with great respect, by all the ladies of Stairway A, but even by some of B, she had believed that the distinguished man of science, whom she had seen for years going up and down the steps of the building in that mortician's overcoat to worm the kids, was, at the same time, the Monsignor's callus doctor,
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Don Lorenzo's, that is: that this, in fact, was the basic profession of old frock-coat. An idea which, once it had entered her head, nobody had been able to drive out. The dimensions of Don Lorenzo's dogs made her certain she was in the right, believing that for such feet you'd need a piediatrist of that high rank. For the rest, my God! she had a pair of hips, two marble breasts: two teats so hard you'd need a scalpel: and with her way of shrugging all the time, so haughty, and that contempt on her lips, as if to say: shit to you! Yes, sir.

After hours of silence, her bizarre insolence, her cruel laugh: with those white, triangular teeth, like a shark's, as if she were going to tear somebody's heart to shreds. Those eyes! from below the black fringe of her lashes: they flamed up suddenly in a black lucidity, narrowed, apparently cruel: a thin flash, which escaped, pointed, oblique, like a lie revealing a truth, which still unspoken, preferred to fade already on the lips. "She was a spoiled girl, but all heart," the chicken-seller opined, after an hour, when he had been summoned in his turn. "A fine figure of a girl, believe me; she liked to act saucy," the grocer's wife from Via Villari confirmed: "Ah! Virginia, from the third floor? She was a bag of tricks!" "That girl? She had the devil on her side," her girl friends said. "She had a devil inside her." But one girl, who was from the Patrica hills, let out a different expression: "She had a poker up her ass": and blushed at once. Commendatore Angeloni, extracted from Regina Coeli for an hour, to let him get a breath of fresh air, too, poor man, when titillated at Santo Stefano del Cacco, promptly drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened snail: "Well," he merely grumbled, showing a pair of melancholy eyes, till he looked like an ox in a bad humor: yellow, they had become, after only a few days on the Lungara
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: "I remember bumping into her a couple of times on the stairs, but I don't know her at all; I can't tell you anything," he affirmed sententiously, "about a person I don't know. She was the Balduccis' niece, or so I was told."

Once, several times (Don Lorenzo went on to say), without being much aware at that point of the "figure" or "position" of mother that Liliana Balducci intended to assume, she—that is to say, this Virginia—in the house there in Via Merulana, when the husband had escaped to his trains, and when the maid was out, she had embraced and kissed the signora. "When she got certain whims in her . . . her head." Don Lorenzo managed to recover himself: with the steady voice of charity he reported: she, at those moments, well, it had to be one of two things: either she was out of her mind, or else she felt she had to play-act like that. What was certain was that she used to embrace and kiss the mistress of the house.

"Mistress?" interrupted Doctor Fumi, narrowing his brows.

"Mistress, stepmother—it's all the same." She kissed her, the way a panther might give a kiss: "Oh Signora Liliana, darling, you're like the Madonna for me!" then, in a low low voice, in an even more stifled tone of ardor: "I love you, love you, love you; one of these days I'm going to just eat you up": and she grasped her wrist, and twisted it, staring at her: she twisted it like a vise, mouth to mouth, till each could breathe the other's breath, tit to tit. Don Corpi rectified, naturally enough: "I mean, moving close to her with her face and bosom." But both Ingravallo and Doctor Fumi had understood the first time.

One day, in an access of filial love, she really did bite her ear: and that time Liliana took fright. Madonna! How it hurt! She ran all the way to the Quattro Santi, at full tilt. Pale, breathless, she had displayed the part known as the lobule, still dotted by the little circle ... of those teeth! My God! All in fun . . . but nasty fun, just the same. If fun is the word for it.

Then they had tried to drag her into the church, "to make her say some prayers, as many prayers as she could. Prayer, you might say, is the ticket to Paradise: or to Purgatory, at least. If you're carrying a heavy suitcase, you don't get past the Customs in Paradise . . . not the first time. But her pray? Not on your life! She hummed them under your nose, till you wanted to slap her, like a song, those Roman songs they sing with the guitar . . . sad ones, between nose and throat: or else shaking her head all the time, with her eyes on the tips of her shoes,
avemaria avemaria, la-la-la-la gratiaplena gratiaplena,
as if to mock the whole lot of us, the Madonna included. The Madonna! Now really! A singsong that would have put a baby to sleep. Shameless! Because if there's somebody who can help us out in this world, it's the Madonna, and her alone: because the good Lord . . . it looks to me like we do our best to give him a pain in the . . . the heart . . ." Don Corpi recovered himself: a second time.

Or maybe she wore her veil, but with her head in the air, at the high mass, in a kind of happy asthenia or bored echolalia: she became distracted, with the mother-of-pearl rosary that Liliana had given her: she held the book upside down, so she couldn't read it, even if she had been able to understand any of it. The feast of Corpus Domini.. . would you believe it? . . . she had the nerve to ape the canons of San Giovanni, as they chanted their office? with a man's voice? which only the devil could have lent her, at that moment. Even the saints from their thrones seemed to protest, all of them, painted though they were, because she had really made them lose all patience. He had looked her in the face, stopping his chant . . . sitting at the right of Monsignor Velani. Then, after Mass, he had told her a thing or two, on the spot, under the portico, when they came to say hello to him, her and Liliana! But her only act of contrition was to shrug her shoulders, that animal: "till you wanted to give her a slap." And he raised and opened his hand over the table; it was so big that both Fumi and Ingravallo were wide-eyed, at last.

      
VI

ON that same afternoon of Tuesday the 22nd, while in room number 4 the above-mentioned conference of the three men was still in progress, later filed among the official records as "fifth questioning of Balducci," there arrived at Santo Stefano (Collegio Romano) a telephonic communication from carabinieri headquarters in Marino regarding the investigations on the "Menegatti case." The message was received by Sergeant Di Pietrantonio. The communicating office confirmed, off the record and simply as a warning, that the owner of the green scarf (no longer so radically green by now) had been identified as a certain Retalli Enea alias Luiginio, aged nineteen, son of Anchise Retalli and Venere nee Procacci, born and residing in the locality known as "II Torraccio" not far from Le Frattocchie: Luiginio. That's right, yes, Lui-gin-io . . . present whereabouts unknown. Yes . . . no . . . fine . . . perfectly . . . No, no . . . they hadn't found him at II Torraccio. In short a fugitive from justice. From what Di Pietrantonio's auricular diligence managed at last to salvage from the shipwrecked text (the receiver's crackling and the line's inductance sonorized the message: various interferences, an urban crossed line, laced it with chatter, tormenting reception), it seemed more or less that the uncautious Enea Retalli or Ritalli,
site
Luiginio (but obviously Luigino) had taken the scarf to be dyed . . . thirty-six quintals of Parmesan! Heddo, who's sbeaking? shipped yesterday from Reggio Emilia . . . Lieutenant-commander Racace here. Heddo? Heddo? . . . Abmiradal Mondeguggoli's house! The Bavatelli Shipping Company from Parma, yes, by truck . . . carabinieri headquarters, Marino, we have precedence. Thirty-six quintals, yes, three trucks, left at ten o'clock yesterday. No, the condessa's in the hospiddle ... in the hord-piddle, visidding the admiradal . . . via Orazio! Yes, sir. No, sir. I'll ask. Police here, we have precedence, Rome Police Headquarters. Get off the line. Thirty-six quintals from Reggio Emilia, Parma-type cheese, absolutely first class! The admirabdal was obberadated on Monday: gallbladder:
bladder.
Yes, yes, sir . . . no, sir, no . . .

What could be extracted from such a muddle was, in short, that Retalli had taken the scarf to be dyed, to a woman at I Due Santi on the Via Appia, a certain Pacori, Pacori Zamira. Z like in Zara,
A
like in Ancona! Zamira! that's right. Za-Mir-a! known to many, if not all, in the area of Marino and Albano for many of her merits: if not for all of them. Then the connection broke off, in honor and for the benefit of higher authorities: or so it seemed. When night had almost descended, there arrived at Santo Stefano on his motorcycle Corporal Pestalozzi, or Pestalossi it may have been, bearer of a written report and more than one verbal message from the carabinieri station, that is to say from Sergeant Santarella, who in the absence of the commanding officer in those days, or in other situations of the titular lieutenant, was his representative. It was eight o'clock, hour of the stomach and the spoon, almost. Balducci had already been sent away, Commendatore Angeloni with the fondest good-byes sent off, liquidated. By this hour he must surely have been in bed, and with his nose more drippy than ever, his stocking cap pulled down over his eyes and down his nape: stuffed into his grandmother's bed, under a fat eiderdown and under stuffy, but deserted cover, the most suited and the most desired by a stuffed-shirt like him. Fumi's voice: "Have Pestalozzi come in." Nausea at the Cacco's piles of papers was about to overcome even the hardiest . . . But that northern and carabinieresque name electrified them. Pestalozzi, who had taken special pains to track down the scarf, was immediately received and heard in number 4 by Fumi: Ingravallo present with Di Pietrantonio, Paolillo, and Grabber. The last-named, protected by the shadows from a kind of huge, extinguished stove, put into his mouth and hastily chewed the last remains of roast-beef sandwich, which to a great extent he had already managed to lacerate outside, in the corridor. Er Maccheronaro, in Via del Gesù, just a stone's-throw away, never overlooked a chance to demonstrate his friendliness: and he had paved it inside, with three such slices of prime beef that, on first seeing them, he had taken them for three terra cotta roof tiles on a roof in Sampierdarena: nestling one against the other, all three supported by that big beam of double roll, the size of a carpet slipper, Madonna! the kind you can't even remember nowadays, now that the Empire has put its oar in. The panacea of panaceas for his empty stomach, lacking its soup, but already dewy in the gastric juices of an anticipated gratitude and no less predisposed peristalsis. The customers at the counter, seeing that miracle, had been bug-eyed: natural enough: who can say what they were thinking; "Hey, Pompeo, what are you doing over there in that stove? . . . Come here," Doctor Fumi ordered, "you've got to hear this, too." He began and continued in a loud voice, with musical vigor, reading the report of carabinieri headquarters, Marino. When he had terminated, he began to titillate Pestalozzi with questions and, alternately, Di Pietrantonio, with the aid of his great shining eyes, which in the not-bright light of the room, a little each time, he turned, on every face: he mitigated with parallel statements, more and more vivid, more and more narrated (like neighboring little streams) the carabinieresque, buttoned-up discipline of the former and the smart, police alertness of the latter. That discipline is well evidenced, generally, and is operative in a tacit, a hard and cautious resistance in the face of the rival organization of the police.
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The fact is that, at Doctor Fumi's gently inviting glances, so black, so limpid and melancholy in his pallid countenance—even at night, and in the weak candle-power of Madam Mazda—even at night, and barely descended from the motorcycle, at the marvelous timbre of that voice, the most buttoned-up of carabinieri couldn't resist. Pestalozzi, moreover, having still to catch Retalli, whose scarf alone had remained in his hand, was, in turn, interested in eliciting as much as possible from the five experts of the Collegio Romano: in pumping out the best from Santo Stefano del Cacco's urban cistern: data, various illations, motives for suspicion, well-founded hypotheses, doubts, counsel, the latest news: the final dotting of i's and crossing of z's the final disjunctions of the great deductive wisdom. And then the bloodhound's
amour-propre,
his pride in taking part in the investigation of the great crime which was on every tongue, from Frascati to Velletri, whose numbers all Italy was playing in the lottery, in all the best and luckiest cities: the Royal Lottery, as it was then, nowadays Lottery of the Republic. So that a kind of police-carabinieri osmosis began and continued to be celebrated in that room number 4, and at that late hour, through the ass's skin membrane of reciprocal distrust, professional jealousy and
esprit de corps:
a two-way flow of information, a game of
do ut des,
with amiable phrases, or even lapses into gossip.

Di Pietrantonio was personally acquainted with Sergeant Santarella: not to mention Ingravallo, who was even a distant cousin via various old women, aunts, a chain of godmothers: the chain of relations, repeated in time along the chain of mountains, the harsh Apennine, had traveled up the bitter spine of the boot, up, up, from Vinchiaturo to Ovindoli. And, besides Santarella was the shining eponym of discipline: and of Latial duty. Di Pietrantonio, for his part, knew la Pacori, and Grabber knew her, too: because they had stopped for a drink, in September, at her counter: Zamira! of whose name and whose actions, open or veiled, not to say secret or splendid, legend had become first discoverer or
trouvere,
then divulgator and trumpeter: from Marino to Albano, from Castel Gandolfo to Ariccia.

Meanwhile Retalli Enea, aged nineteen, son of Anchise and Venere nee Procacci, it turned out, had as his
nom de guerre
Iginio, not Luiginio: "which doesn't make sense anyway," they dismissed it, in one accord. "Bah! of course not!" they agreed. Tricks of inductance, overloaded wires. Inadequate service. Work on the line. The change of management!

La Pacori, oppressed then by an accumulation of rags, garments, heavy sweaters, and ragged jerseys to dye, which would need the caldron of Beelzebub, her patron, with some suspicion of animal life inside the stuff, at the height of anguish, had sub-contracted the dyeing work, including the green sash to the Ciurlani firm in Marino: which, two days earlier, in the fury of a stupid equinoxial wind with slanting rain, had sent a carriage to collect that rubbish: and the horse had arrived soaked, and so worn out, poor animal, that they had to unhitch him, then dry him off in a broken-down stall, where it rained in, patting his ass and giving him some hot wine to drink. It was there, in Marino, that is, that Pestalozzi had directed himself. There was some stuff already dyed, in a heap, on a table: and other stuff to disinfect or to dye again, in two sacks against the wall, on the ground: but when it came to them, Sora Mara warned the corporal to watch his step, you can't be too careful: "Those little beasts, once they get on to you . . ."

Pestalozzi, a man with guts, sharpened his eyes, but with his legs, he drew back at once: "two steps to the rear," snip, snap, with military vivacity: like at close-order drill. After some pecking around by the titular Ciurlani (that is to say Sora Mara herself) in that pile on the table, which was already cooked almost white, purified in the autoclave of any possible quadruped, from it, in fact, the scarf had emerged, tugged by one end, the sash: unfinished: like a serpent drawn from its hole by the tail, green, yes, once, black-green with dots: now green no longer, but not yet its new color which, ideally, was to be a pale brown, because to perfect the pale brown a second immersion was required. Thus spake la Ciurlani.

But how was it, asked the experts, that Zamira, the trouser-maker of I Due Santi, had dared offer the information?

Pestalozzi led them to believe that the idea of questioning her had occurred to him: and "only later on" to Sergeant Santarella. They were the station's two motorcyclists. And at his disposal, in the course of certain private exchanges of ideas with some stubborn types, he had arguments which were not wholly ineffectual, indeed rather convincing, against the great plague of reticence: (Di Pietrantonio, in his mind's eye, was already examining the leather belt): arguments which, in some cases, could succeed in counterbalancing and even overcoming, in doubting hearts, in hardheaded bumpkins, the opposing fear, the terror of vendetta. But with the good Zamira . . . there had been no need to go so far. Eh! A woman! And a woman of such stuff, of such form! Not even calling her to the barracks
ad audiendum verbum,
not even that had been considered necessary: a thing which, for that matter, "you might say," would have caused her more pleasure than fear. Oh! Sergeant Santarella, that is, in other words . . . the station, yes, the station had its trump cards, some here, some there: "all through the deck": and Di Pietrantonio, taking the words from his colleague-adversary's mouth, assumed the wisest face in the Cacco office. "In the midst of the theater of operations," Fumi added, serious, turning over a paper, with gentle gravity. A niece ... a girl who worked for la Pacori. A little bunch of primroses for the sergeant. Two knitted stockings for his little girl, the baby, Luciana, and a few words to go with them. Few, but well-chosen.

Fumi then recalled that a girl, that Ines, Ines . . .—and he started to search, with one hand, in the file of fine ladies, which he kept on his desk as a kind of mindful aroma, like lovely flowers in a vase—Ines . . . Ciampini, yes, from Torraccio, or Torracchio, on via Appia, the stop after Le Frattocchie, had been picked up a few evenings earlier by a patrol from the San Giovanni police station: the evening before the crime: picked up for loitering, no identification papers: and on well-grounded suspicion of prostitutional activity in a public place (Santo Stefano Rotondo!), activity for which she was not licensed (a mere amateur, in short). She had insulted the arresting officers, calling one of them "Sergeant Fathead." She had offended, "admittedly probably with only sporadic activity and, on that evening, in an entirely occasional form," she had been caught in flagrant contravention of the Federzoni orders for the reformation of the urban sidewalks under booted regime, "in accordance with that special regulation from the Minister of the Interior on February fourteenth, you know the one, Ingravallo, regulation number seven hundred eighteen—help me out on this—Ingravallo, with that memory of yours!—concerning the moralization of the Capital." Ingravallo didn't open his mouth. "And held for suspicion of complicity in a theft," Di Pietrantonio reminded his chief. "What theft?" "A chicken." "Where'd she steal it?" "Piazza Vittorio." The morning of Wednesday the sixteenth, after the round-up of the nymphs, Corporal Juppariello of the San Giovanni station had shown her to the two women who had suffered the robbery three days before: a chicken-seller and another woman who sold slippers. A theft of an old pair of shoes from this latter, and a chicken, too, nearby, from the next stand: plucked and neckless, as it turned out, but in compensation with three feathers in its ass. And the ones who snatched them, both shoes and chicken, were two characters, a boy and a blond girl, "who had wandered around for some time along the street, in that very crowded hour, then they had separated, and had mysteriously disappeared with the merchandise." The chicken-seller's wife, who was the one who yelled loudest of all, "at first" had thought she recognized in Ines, Cionini Ines of Torraccio, the very blonde who she believed had snitched the feathered creature, or rather, de-feathered. "On second thoughts," however, she seemed to hesitate. A sample chicken, to enlighten the police, had been taken to San Giovanni, in every way similar to its colleague which had vanished from sight three days before—it was now Sunday the 13th—and the same with the two shoes: accused and accuser were then coached together to Santo Stefano, the shoe lady with them. Questioned at headquarters, Ines had sustained and sworn, with many a "I hope to die if it's not true," that she knew nothing of the fowl, in the first place: that she was an apprentice seamstress, though without employment at present: and that she had worked, as a trouser-maker at I Due Santi, just beyond le Frattocchie. "And then what?" Then she had been reduced to coming to Rome, to look for work. "It's no shame to have to look for a job." The chicken let off a terrible stink: it, too, had been taken to the station, along with the two shoes, both lefts; once at Santo Stefano del Cacco, the bird had apparently taken fright and, though dead, it had shat, there on Paolillo's little table: not much, though, to tell the truth. "Let's hear this Ines!"