The Bastards of Pizzofalcone (18 page)

Mascolo thought it over, then said: “No. No one came, no one phoned. I was there for ten minutes or so, and it was around eleven o'clock. I went up because it's always slow then, so I can step away.”

Lojacono broke in: “I noticed the door to the notary's apartment is the only one on that landing. Who lives one floor up? And one floor down?”

“It's an old building, and there's just one apartment per floor; well, actually, some of them have been subdivided, but that's all interior—you still enter through that one door and then there's a sort of partition. Downstairs and upstairs, on the fourth and sixth floors, there are offices: an investment bank and a tax lawyer's office. Obviously they're closed Saturday and Sunday, and there's no one there.”

Without much conviction, Aragona asked: “And this weekend, no one came into either of those offices, right?”

“No, no one came in.”

Lojacono stood up: “One last thing: did you see the notary after what happened? When he came home, was he alone?”

A solemn expression appeared on Mascolo's face: “Certainly, he came home late yesterday morning. Your men were still upstairs, the ones in white jumpsuits. He was alone. He waited until they had finished their work, then I saw him leave, carrying a suitcase. I went up to him to express my condolences, and there was a look on his face that frightened me: he looked like he'd aged a hundred years. He told me that he was checking in at the Grand Hotel Vesuvio, right around the corner and also on the waterfront, and that if I needed him I'd be able to get in touch with him there. Poor man, he must have so many regrets now: he always left her by herself, the signora.”

A
s they were about to leave, Lojacono felt the impulse to go back upstairs to the apartment.

Over the years, he had learned that to follow one's instinct was nothing more than to listen to a part of the mind that continued to work away, beneath the threshold of consciousness. And frequently, for that very reason, it was the best part of the mind, the part that could focus without all the distractions of the outside world.

Aragona followed him without objections; he knew that he had a lot to learn, and despite his shortcomings, he did recognize—to his credit—that his partner had a great deal more experience. And so he went along without asking for too many explanations.

At the apartment door they found a man standing guard, sent there by Palma. Lojacono appreciated the commissario's style; he didn't meddle with his investigators in the field, but at the same time he provided plenty of support. The officer opened the door and let them in.

The atmosphere in the deserted apartment was grim; Lojacono sensed with a shiver that this was now a place without a soul, that it would take an enormous amount of time for it to become a home again—and perhaps only if occupied by another family. More than twenty years of practicing his profession had taught him that when there is a violent death, the air becomes the vector for immense sorrow; it can't be purified again, except by the presence of someone who knows nothing of that pain. Gray light from the rain-heavy sky filtered in through the living room window, the only one left open. Clearly, when the notary came back to get the few things he needed to bring to a hotel, he'd preferred his presence be limited to the strictly necessary; he hadn't even turned on the lights. Understandable, Lojacono decided.

They wandered silently through the rooms. The apartment was immense, but cold. It was clear that most of the rooms—the office, the drawing room, the guest rooms—though they were clean and extremely neat, hadn't been used in years. They lingered in one of the guest bathrooms where, presumably, Mascolo had repaired the blinds; Aragona checked to see that they closed properly, making sure that the strap and lifting mechanism were clean and well oiled. He nodded in Lojacono's direction, confirming that the concierge's story had in fact checked out.

As if by tacit understanding, they saved the room where the murder had taken place for last. Ironic twist of fate, thought the lieutenant: the room bathed in sunlight was the one in which a murder had taken place.

The gray bay could be seen through the glass of the balcony windows, the waters still very choppy and clouds scudding across the sky. An oil tanker offshore, black and red and immense, looked like a passing whale. The peninsula, on the far side of the water, was a dark silhouette pointing a finger into the gray murk, as if trying to call attention to the profile of the island nearby. Lojacono thought about just how beautiful the city could be. If admired from afar.

He walked over to the spot on the carpet marred by the dark stain. He wondered what the signora might have been thinking right before she died. That would have been useful to know: the last, fleeting thought before the darkness of night. Who could say whether she'd thought of love, if she'd remembered something, someone. If she'd been surprised.

He looked up toward the wall filled with shelves crowded with glass spheres of every shape and size. Each containing an object, a landscape, a monument, a celebrity. He noticed that their sizes varied considerably, and he wondered what order they'd been arranged in.

Backlit, the shelves were spotless, the dark wood had not yet been invaded by the uniform veil of dust that would, with the passing of the hours, settle over the room. He went closer to get a better look.

Nearest the dark bloodstain, the snow globes enclosed European monuments and panoramas. Lojacono walked the length of the shelves and soon realized that the snow globes were arranged by nation and continent. From left to right, the globes depicted first the nearest vistas, gradually moving to more distant ones, all carefully and methodically sorted. This was the case on the two lowermost shelves. Higher up were the holidays—Christmas and Easter globes with religious vignettes of various kinds: from Buddha to Christ crucified; from Mohammed to the Hanukah menorah. Lojacono wondered how it had ever occurred to her to collect objects of this kind.

Aragona said: “It makes me wonder why anyone would collect these things. They gross me out, if you want to know the truth.”

“A person has to do something. From what I understand, the signora lived a pretty solitary life.”

The officer snorted: “I've never been able to understand people with money who are depressed. I mean, in Africa, where they have nothing to eat, are they all depressed? And anorexic? Or bulimic? This kind of loneliness is a disease that comes with money, take it from me.”

Lojacono, displaying a certain indifference to the profound social issues Aragona was exploring, was visually sketching a hypothetical trajectory of events. Finally, he said: “Here's what I want to know: if you hear a noise, walk into the room, and find a burglar, what do you do?”

“Sorry, I'm not following you.”

“So the signora walks in here, sees someone with her silver in his hands, someone who, by the way, got in without forcing the doors or windows—but for now let's leave that detail aside. If you were in her shoes, what would you do?”

Aragona was bewildered. He tried to picture the scene.

“I don't know: maybe I scream? I try to stop him?”

“Right. Or else you try to run, to get away. And in that case, which way do you go?”

Aragona pointed hesitantly toward the door that opened onto the front entranceway.

“I'd go that way, and try to reach the stairs.”

Lojacono nodded, lost in thought. When he was concentrating this hard, his Asian features made him look like a Buddhist monk meditating.

“But instead she went toward the other door, as if trying to escape toward the interior of the apartment. Where there was no way out. And there's no doubt about this, because she was clubbed in the back of the head, so she had her back to the murderer.”

“Maybe she hadn't seen him, and was simply passing through this room on her way to bed, after wishing those horrible snow globes a good night's sleep. Or maybe she was going to lock herself in her room and call someone.”

Lojacono agreed, reluctantly. “Certainly, that's a possibility. Maybe the murderer, who really could have been anywhere, was standing between her and the door, though that doesn't add up either, because in that case he'd have hit her in the temple, not the back of the head. Plus, the victim would have been between the murderer and the shelves with the snow globes: where would he have grabbed the murder weapon?”

The officer listened to the analysis, interested: “Maybe it was actually something valuable. After all, what do we know? Maybe he'd come to steal that specific object. Maybe someone hired him to take it. Maybe we should start looking into collectors of shitty objects.”

Lojacono didn't agree: “No, that strikes me as implausible. Though maybe we should take a closer look at the murder weapon. One thing is certain: the murderer didn't come here intending to kill. He would have done it with a weapon he'd brought for that purpose, or even barehanded—but certainly not by striking the signora with an object that he just happened to find.”

“Well, what do you think happened? Where was the signora headed? And most important of all, how did the murderer get in?”

The lieutenant thought it over for a while. Then he said: “We don't have enough information. We need to gather more evidence. In my opinion, either she didn't see who was in the room or else she knew him and felt secure enough to turn her back on him. There were no signs of a struggle, the signora was neat and fully dressed; the medical examiner saw no traces of violence on her body.”

“There's still the fact that the door was opened without being forced. It's true, it could have been someone who stole the housekeeper's key, or else the signora's, or even the notary's: but in that case, he would have had to have known the victim's routines, and if he had he wouldn't have entered the apartment then, knowing that she was there.”

“Or else it was someone she knew,” Lojacono added, “and she opened the door to him. Then they had an argument and, once she thought the conversation was over, she turned her back on him to leave. Only the murderer didn't think their conversation was over—and he ended it in his own way.”

“What about the silver?”

“That could be a deliberate red herring. Or a way of paying back an insult, a souvenir he took away. I've seen it happen before. In any case, the key to it all is figuring out who the victim really was: it's the only way we'll be able to explain her behavior.”

Aragona scratched his head, baffled. “We don't know much about her, that's true. Maybe we'll get a little more information, like you say, from the Baroness Whatshername, the one that feeble old geezer Pisanelli arranged for us to interview at the yacht club.”

Lojacono replied brusquely: “I'd call you feeble sooner than I would Pisanelli. While we're here, let's put in a call to the station house and see if there's any news.”

Ottavia answered the phone, her voice much more somber than usual.

“Everything okay?” Lojacono asked. “You don't sound like yourself.”

“Just a headache, nothing important. Listen, I have some news for you: they've found the stolen silver. In a dumpster, a few hundred yards from the scene. The forensic squad has it, and if you want to take a look, you can swing by. Maybe you could do it before your appointment with the Baroness Ruffolo at the yacht club.”

P
izzeria Il Gobbo was a happy exception to the rule.

In the midst of the neighborhood's most well-to-do quarter, surrounded by designer boutiques and elegant florists' shops, there was a steep uphill
vicolo
so narrow that cars couldn't enter it; a few yards up the
vicolo
was the entrance to the pizzeria, marked with a tiny sign, and inside a narrow staircase leading up to the dining room, with fewer than ten tables and a small balcony.

Il Gobbo—the Hunchback—himself had been dead for many years, but he appeared in a yellowed photo, dressed in a pizza chef's white smock and cap, short and twisted as a question mark, between two mustachioed gentlemen identified as Di Giacomo and Scarfoglio by the scribbled names below. The pizzeria was run these days by his grandson, a big gruff man who, despite his perfectly erect spinal column, had still inherited the nickname; this new Gobbo also possessed a substantial gut that confined him to the front of the restaurant, between the cash register and the oven: the stair leading up to the dining room was too narrow for him. A slender and agile young Polish woman named Yula took care of the waitressing; her appearance was yet another of the place's attractions.

Twice a week, Giorgio Pisanelli went to have lunch at Il Gobbo with the only friend left to him; the only one he kept no secrets from, and the only one from whom he was willing to accept good-natured ribbing for his elaborate theories.

Yula greeted him as usual, as if she had been waiting for him all her life: “
Ciao
, Dottore! Monacello wait you at table.”

Pisanelli climbed up the stairs. Brother Leonardo Calisi, known as 'o Munaciello—the little monk—was a Franciscan from the monastery of Maria Annunziata. And what else were people going to call him: he stood four feet eleven inches, he dressed in a cassock and sandals even in the winter, was white-haired and blue-eyed, and his mischievous expression was ever present. If that poltergeist of pranks and jibes and minor acts of charity, that regular protagonist of Neopolitan legends known as 'o Munaciello, were ever to take living form, it could only be as Brother Leonardo Calisi.

Pisanelli found him at the table by the balcony, patiently waiting.

“How long, exactly, were you planning to make me wait? You do realize that I have a parish to run? Ten minutes to walk over here, ten minutes to walk back, and then a full hour before you decide to show up!”

Pisanelli, raised both hands, defending himself against the monk's tirade. “Come on, we agreed on one o'clock and it's only 1:10! And everyone in the neighborhood knows that no one's set foot in that parish church for years now. You could just lock up and go home and no one would even notice.”