Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone (3 page)

He turned to look at Di Nardo, tilting his head toward the apartment building's front entrance. She nodded, taking in the usual knot of rubberneckers that always gathered mere seconds after any noteworthy event; a few yards further on, the squad car stood parked with a uniformed cop, arms folded across his chest, leaning against the door. The man nodded in greeting.

Strange girl, Di Nardo was. Not that the others weren't equally strange, and probably the strangest of them all was Lojacono himself. But there was something enigmatic about Alex. Graceful, silent, with finely drawn features, she emanated a sense of restrained force, as if she were ready to transform herself into something else. Lojacono had overheard Aragona, shameless gossip that he was, talking about a gunshot fired inside a station house and the officer who'd narrowly missed being hit, but he'd preferred not to delve deeper: After all, didn't they all have some dark chapter in their pasts, there at Pizzofalcone?

His train of thought betrayed him by bringing him an image of home, of the Sicilian province so full of light and shadows: the sudden smell of salt water on a gust of wind, the branches of the almond trees heavy with blossoms. And the memory of the testimony given by Di Fede, the mafioso he'd gone to school with; the words that had changed his life.

Not all had changed for the worse, he thought as he cut his way through the crowd to reach the courtyard and the broad flight of steps that led upstairs from there. For instance, his wife, Sonia's, true colors had been unveiled; she had dumped him and now she never missed the chance, during their rare phone conversations, to unleash a stream of venom and rancor. He'd met people he never would have otherwise, his new colleagues for example. Even his relationship with his daughter, Marinella, was different. And that was a good thing.

For months he hadn't even been able to talk to her, because of the barrier that Sonia had erected between the two of them. He'd missed his daughter, who wasn't quite fourteen, with a kind of physical pain, one of the sharpest in his life. Then, little by little, they'd begun to talk on the phone again, and just two months ago he'd found her on his doorstep in the rain, fleeing the umpteenth screaming match with her mother, in search of solid ground that she thought she'd lost forever.

No easy matter, Lojacono thought to himself. He'd left behind a tender and emotional little girl who still played at being a grown-up lady with her friends, pretending to make coffee dates and go shopping, who put on her mother's clothes and burst out laughing in front of the mirror; now that little girl had become a silent, pensive young woman who dressed all in black, and whose almond-shaped eyes, so similar to his own, were often lost in indecipherable thought. He didn't know how long she planned to stay, and he was afraid to ask. He didn't want Marinella to have even the hint of a thought that she might be less than welcome. He'd informed Marinella's mother that the girl was with him and that she shouldn't worry, and had been forced to endure an endless series of recriminations. In reality, Lojacono wasn't certain which solution would be best for his daughter: whether she should stay with a father who, because of his job, could spend very little time with her, and deal with a new environment, or whether she should go home to a place where she clearly wasn't happy.

Di Nardo's low voice brought him out of his thoughts: “That's the way in.”

On the second floor landing there was only one entrance, whose wooden, single-paneled door stood ajar. The apartment building, originally, like so many others in the neighborhood, an aristocratic palazzo owned and inhabited by a single family, had undergone a centuries-long process of deterioration, while decades of social darkness had settled over the quarter as a whole. In the past ten years, though, the drop in rents combined with the increasing demand for apartments in the city center had reversed the trend, so that buildings in this part of town were slowly regaining their prestige. The graffiti on the outside walls had been scraped off, the plaster had been repaired, the flowerbeds in the ancient courtyards had been restored by skilled gardners to their onetime glory and filled with rosebushes and hydrangeas, flowers that on that warm May day seemed to glow with their own light.

The apartment where the burglary had taken place was on the building's second and main floor, the piano nobile. Unlike the other floors, this one hadn't been subdivided into units with less floor space so that they could be more easily rented or sold; that meant the place must be really big. A security camera had been installed over the door; Di Nardo was looking at the camera, too. The young woman called Lojacono's eye to the front door lock, which showed no signs of forced entry. The landing was illuminated by a large window which seemed locked, with the vertical metal latch lodged securely in the marble windowsill. Lojacono, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, opened the window and saw that it gave onto the interior courtyard. The brass plaque on the door read “S. Parascandolo,” beneath ornamental curlicues.

At the entrance stood a uniformed officer who saluted them, snapping the tips of his fingers to the visor of his cap.

“
Buongiorno
, my name's Rispo. We've been here for twenty minutes or so, we forwarded the call from the operations center.”

A large foyer opened onto a hallway, and off to the right was the entrance to what might be a living room. Already in the hallway there were scattered garments, bags, and knickknacks littering the floor. Next to the door stood a suitcase and a leather trolley bag, both shut.

“The luggage belongs to the homeowners,” Rispo said. “They came back from Ischia this morning and found the place turned upside down. They're in there, in the living room.”

Alex pointed out to Lojacono the discreet security cameras, just like the ones outside, each with sensors connected to the alarm system. You certainly couldn't say that S. Parascandolo, whoever that was, thought safety was of little importance. Even though all that attention didn't seem to have done a lot of good.

From the living room came rhythmic sobbing. Someone was crying.

Lojacono started off, followed by Alex.

N
ot all the calls that come into a precinct house are the same.

The phone rings all the time, and there's always someone who answers it, someone who tries to make themselves heard over the cacophony of so many people all talking at the same time. In a precinct house's bullpen, powerful emotions, passions, and sentiments clash: and so voices are raised, there's confusion, there's agitation. In precinct houses people shout, like in some circle of hell.

When Ottavia Calabrese picked up on the second ring, everyone was talking. Aragona was shouting into his own receiver, asking Guida, the officer on duty at the front door, for a coffee; Romano was asking Pisanelli whether he knew of any one-bedroom apartments for rent near the precinct, and Pisanelli was giving him the name of a real estate agency run by a friend of his; Palma had just stuck his head out of his office to say good morning to everyone.

But as soon as Ottavia, who had put one hand up to her ear to shut out the noise, said: “What? Someone took a child?” the room fell into a frozen silence. Calabrese grabbed a pen and started taking notes, her face taut, her voice cold and efficient. Only her eyes betrayed emotion.

Palma took a step forward and came up to her desk, worried. A child. A child had been taken.

Ottavia hung up. Everyone was looking at her.

“A little boy is missing from a school field trip that was visiting Villa Rosenberg's art gallery, not far from here. They'd just arrived and he vanished right away. One of the teachers made the call, a nun; it's a private school on Via Petrarca.”

She spoke in a low voice, distressed but still professional. She was staring straight at Palma, even though she was talking to the group at large. A child.

Palma asked: “How do they know that he was taken? Couldn't he have just wandered off, or be hiding somewhere, or something like that?”

“One of his classmates was with him. The boy said that he walked off with a woman. A blonde woman.”

Silence. Tension, anxiety. Palma heaved a sigh.

“All right, let's not waste time. Romano, Aragona, go straight there: Take the car. Pisanelli, get the name of the child, see what you can find out about the family, and if you can, let them know. Ottavia, call Villa Rosenberg back, tell them not to let anyone move: no one is to enter, no one is to leave. I'll inform the operations center and have them send over a couple of squad cars from headquarters. Let's get busy.”

 

To his usual crazy driving, Aragona had now added an embarrassed silence. He didn't much like Francesco Romano, aka Hulk. Something about his gaze, often lost in space, his expression of vague suffering, frightened him; and his buzz cut, his bull neck, his jutting jaw, gave an impression of power held back, ready to explode at any moment. For that matter, what little he knew about him wasn't especially reassuring: A friend of his, a uniformed police officer, had told Aragona that this Hulk had grabbed a suspect who was mocking him by the neck and sent him to the hospital. “Marcu',” he'd said to him, “I was there, and it took three men to pry that guy loose from his hands; another five seconds and he'd have killed him.”

Hurtling straight toward a crowd of Japanese tourists without bothering to slow down, horn blaring, so that they fluttered off like so many pigeons, Aragona thought to himself that it wasn't hard to believe: The man looked violent. And then he had that strange sense of humor so that every time Romano replied to one of his jokes, Aragona came off looking like a idiot. He glanced at him quickly: He was gripping the seat with his left hand and the door handle with his right; a muscle was twitching threateningly in his jaw.

When, brakes screeching, they came to a halt in front of the museum, Romano snarled as if Aragona wasn't there: “Even from the way he drives you can tell he's a dumbass.”

They got out of the car just as two squad cars rolled up from different directions. At the entrance to the old eighteenth-century villa that now housed an art gallery, confusion reigned: A small knot of tourists trying to enter the museum was crowding the ticket office's cash register, protesting in a rudimentary, German-accented Italian; a private security guard with both arms raised was shouting over them, doing his best to impose calm; one nun was sobbing while another, older nun upbraided her roughly; a group of kids all about ten years old were standing fearfully in a corner of the large room.

As soon as they saw them come in, the two nuns came over.

“You're from the police, is that right?”

“The name's Romano. This is my partner Aragona. Tell me what happened, Sister.”

The woman, about sixty, had a round face and blue eyes that sparkled under the black veil.

“I'm Sister Angela, of the order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She,” and here she pointed to the younger nun, who was still blowing her nose, “is Sister Beatrice. We already told the person on the phone what happened: A little boy was taken. From here, from this museum, less than an hour ago.”

Aragona coughed faintly, removing his sunglasses: “What's the child's name? And exactly how did it happen?”

Sister Angela spoke to him disdainfully: “Aren't you a little young, officer, to be in charge of investigating such a grave offense?”

Before Aragona had time to retort, Romano broke in, his tone firm: “My partner's age is not under discussion; especially because I can assure you that we're both quite qualified. What does seem to me to be under discussion here is the fact that a child, who if I understand correctly was entrusted to your care and to the care of your sister, here, has vanished. Now, would you be so kind as to answer the question, please?”

The woman blinked rapidly; she wasn't used to being contradicted.

“I'm the mother superior of the convent where the school is based, and I wasn't present. The children were with Sister Beatrice, who alerted me the instant that Dodo . . . when the little boy, Edoardo Cerchia, disappeared. I rushed over here and then we called you.”

Aragona, rendered cocky by Romano's unexpected rush to his defense, said: “So, you weren't present. And what's more, you failed to call the police immediately; instead you wasted precious time talking amongst yourselves. Congratulations!”

Romano turned to him; the expression on his face promised nothing good. Sister Angela blushed.

“I . . . I . . . Sister Beatrice is very young, and she certainly never imagined she would find herself in such a situation. In all these years, it's never happened that . . .”

Romano addressed the youngest nun.

“Sister, please, tell us how it all happened. It's very important that you do your best to remember precisely. Aragona, perhaps you could take a few notes.”

Sister Angela tried to regain lost ground: “Now then, this morning at school . . .”

Romano sliced the air with one hand, brusquely: “Mother Superior, I think you'd better go and see how the children are doing. Leave us alone with Sister Beatrice, thank you.”

Once again blinking rapidly, the older nun took a step back, almost as if Romano had literally pushed her. Then she turned away and, putting on a show of offended dignity, headed off toward the group of children.

Sister Beatrice had folded in on herself; now that she was alone, she lost what little nerve had been left to her, and through her tears she stammered: “I . . . I don't know . . . he was with me, in the hall of watercolors, then . . . with all the, all the other children, I . . . just didn't notice . . .”

Aragona, pen and notepad in hand, stopped her: “Calm down, Sister, calm down. Take a deep breath, and speak calmly, otherwise I won't know what you're saying and how can I write it down?”