Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone (30 page)

That's what Dodo thinks, as he lies stretched out on the floor wrapped in the filthy blanket, in the stench of his excrement and of the stale food. That's what he thinks.

And he falls asleep.

 

 

M
anuel was looking at Eva, who was nodding off in an armchair. She seemed like another person, someone different from the woman he was accustomed to living with, whose bursts of anger and sudden mood swings he'd grown so used to.

She was much more like her father than she was willing to admit in the long tirades during which she cursed his personality, his harsh nature, his lack of generosity, before suddenly attacking Manuel for his inability to earn. In general, while he tolerated the cascade of insults as if they were a summer thunderstorm, knowing that it was sure to pass eventually, however intense, he also thought that his girlfriend wasn't being fair to her old and sickly parent.

Yes, he was a bastard and a son of a bitch who refused to loosen the purse strings of his immense fortune, as if he could take the money with him all the way to hell, which was where he would certainly wind up sooner or later, in fact, sooner rather than later, given his health. And he never missed an opportunity to point out what a useless fellow Manuel was, a gigolo that his daughter had taken in like a stray dog, to her own detriment as usual. Through that old witch Peluso he'd also turned off the taps, as if he had no idea that the scum who held his gambling debts weren't kidding around, and would before long leave him lying in some alley or other spitting blood. He, of all people, a man with a sensitive soul and an aversion to violence.

All this was true.

But it was also true that, for now, thanks to the old man's money, he'd been able to avoid entirely the trouble of working for a living, a vulgar, tawdry consideration that his elevated soul couldn't bear contemplating. Equally true was that thanks to all that wealth, built up over a lifetime of being miserly and dishonest, he, Manuel Scarano, an artist, had been able to cultivate his own interests without having to worry about how to make ends meet, something that he'd watched his own parents do over the course of their unhappy lives until they'd finally had the good taste to die, thus unburdening him of their awkward, sometimes embarrassing existence.

He only wished that Eva, his partner, the woman who was meant to share in his aspirations and support him, could understand that creative blocks happen, and that a temporary sluggishness in the market for his paintings was more than understandable, especially given the unscrupulous dealers and whorish critics. But things would get back on track soon enough, and then he'd be revered and acclaimed all over the world. After all, he'd had a solo show in Venice, like all the greats.

But Eva, who was now sleeping openmouthed, her face still red from crying—
mamma mia
, though, so much crying, it's been three days and she hasn't done anything else—failed to understand the needs and the infinite nuances of the soul of an artist. She didn't even understand that it had been for her, in an attempt to liberate her from her father's control, that he'd first started playing cards. So he could get rich quick and slap that old bastard in the face with the full measure of his disgust. Okay, so things hadn't gone quite as hoped, and now he also had the not insignificant problem of having to steer clear of dark and deserted streets: But no one had had the last word yet. Great souls, thought Manuel, are unfailingly optimistic.

Suffering ages you, thought Manuel, as he watched Eva toss and moan in her sleep. She looked like a
dolente
, one of those women who, until the sixties, worked as paid mourners at funerals. But to Manuel, such sorrow was incomprehensible. He'd never much cared for the snot-nosed brat, who had anyway spent most of his time locked in his room with those damn action figures of his. Manuel had often wondered whether the boy might not be retarded, the way he dulled his senses playing war and combat games.

Perhaps it was a simply that he resembled his father, that obtuse and violent gorilla who had been on the verge of attacking him just the other night. It was obvious why Eva had dumped him the minute she'd met a sensitive soul like him.

Eva, Eva. I'm sorry to see you suffer, Manuel said to himself, but every cloud has a silver lining. Who knows, perhaps this will mark the beginning of a brand-new life in which we can think about ourselves and no one else. Grief ends eventually, Eva, and it leaves scars that you can learn to live with. And on the way, perhaps, it will give the old man his coup de grâce, finally leaving the two of us free to cultivate our love and my art.

Perhaps, my love, this grief will actually be a blessing. We can shed some dead weight: your father, that primate ex-husband of yours, the old witch, those goddamn criminals trying to track me down so they can get their money. And to help us forget, we'll go away, all alone, to some faraway island, like Paul Gauguin. I'll strike creative gold again and a few centuries from now, in the books they'll write about me, they'll tell the story of our lives, and they'll point out how this tragedy was the necessary preamble to my masterpieces.

A ray of sunshine came in through the window and struck Eva's closed eyes. The woman jerked upright.

“Dodo? Dodo? My God . . . how long did I sleep?”

Manuel did his best to calm her down: “Just a few minutes, sweetheart. Just a few minutes. I was here beside you the whole time. I'd have woken you if anything had happened.”

Eva blinked and looked down at her hands. She seemed to be having some difficulty returning to the real world. Then she murmured: “I had a dream. But it was so realistic that I can't help believing it was something more. I was lying next to him, stroking his hair, the way I do when he has a fever or one of those sore throats he gets at the beginning of every season. I was singing him our song, the one that helps him get to sleep; I was just humming it, softly. And he had the smell he had when he was first born, a scent that only I can smell. Oh God, it was all so precise . . .”

She started crying, louder and louder, until her shoulders were shaking with sobs.

Here we go again with the same old lament, thought Manuel.

And with the appropriate pained smile, he walked over to take her in his arms.

T
hey decided to wait for her at the entrance to the gym.

Alex and Lojacono had talked it over, trying to determine whether it would be better to go formal and show up at home, at the scene of the crime, to talk to her in her husband's presence and see if she'd give herself away.

Then they'd agreed that it would be better to meet her alone and confront her with what they'd found out, so that she could choose whether to accept her guilt or else struggle to salvage the life she'd made for herself.

The first person to get to work at the gym was Marvin. He seemed tense. Something wasn't going according to plan, and the young man was aware by this point that he'd become a repeat offender, and that, since he'd conspired with one of the robbery victims, his sentence would be even heavier.

Assunta Parascandolo aka Susy came in half an hour later. Her anxiety was immediately apparent thanks to a pair of oversized sunglasses behind which she seemed to be trying to hide, and the aggressive way in which she berated the driver of a scooter that had come close to tearing off her car door—which she had thrown open without bothering to check her rearview mirror. Lojacono gestured to Di Nardo and they both got out of the unmarked car in which they'd been waiting for the woman.

They came up on either side of her before she could enter the building. She didn't seem surprised; her shoulders sagged as if someone had just hit her.

“
Buongiorno
, Signora. What do you say to a little chat with us? It might be better for us not to go into the office. It's in your own best interest; we're not trying to cause you any trouble.”

The woman nodded and headed for a nearby café. Alex and the Chinaman followed her in and sat down at a table in a room off to the side.

Lojacono was the first to speak: “So: At your home the forensic squad has found numerous fingerprints belonging to Mario Vincenzo Esposito, the Pilates instructor we met yesterday at the gym. As you can imagine, that's some pretty significant evidence. But perhaps you have something to tell us, as far as that goes.”

Alex was impressed by her partner's skillful handling of the information. He hadn't lied, he'd limited himself to the facts they had in hand, but he'd done so in a manner that sounded like: We know everything, that idiot boyfriend of yours left fingerprints everywhere when, with your knowledge, he broke into the safe; now, how do you want to play your cards—toss him under the bus or tell us the way things really went? Aragona was right: You could learn a great deal from partnering with the Chinaman.

Susy's expression remained indecipherable—assisted by the dark glasses and the stiffness of her features, which was thanks to extensive cosmetic surgery. Then it fell apart. Her lower lip started to tremble, and the tremor spread to the rest of her face in concentric circles; it looked like a pond into which someone had thrown a stone. She took off the sunglasses and slammed them down on the little table, shattering them.

“Asshole. What an asshole. You really have to be unlucky to go from a maniac to an asshole. It's no good, I just don't know how to pick men.”

What she was feeling was rage, not sorrow. Pure rage. Di Nardo turned toward Lojacono and found him in the meditative stance he always assumed when he was intent on listening and reflecting: hands lying on his thighs, motionless, his face betraying no emotion, eyes narrowed into twin fissures. She imagined how that expression might induce in someone an urge to speak, if for no other reason than to shatter that stillness, to provoke a disturbance of some kind. She wondered if he did it intentionally or if it just came naturally.

Susy turned to Lojacono: “You can't have any idea, Lieutenant, what it means to be that man's wife. He chose me at twenty; my father, God rest his soul, owed him. He wasn't much more than a kid but he was already doing what he does now. He came to see us with a couple guys who worked as his debt collectors, men who were capable of killing without leaving a mark on you. My father had done what he could to keep the clothing store running, but things were going badly; he'd had to fire two shopgirls and I was going in to help out. I can still remember that morning. They showed up and he said to me, with that fucked-up little voice of his: Girlie, pull down the security blinds, I need to have a chat with your father. I looked him in the face, that dog face of his—you know that they call him Tore the Bulldog, right?—and I told him: Pull them down yourself, you asshole. One of his henchmen grabbed me by the arm but he stopped him. He looked me in the eye for a minute and then ordered his men, in dialect:
Iammuncenne, guagliu'
. And sure enough, they left. The next day, he came back alone, with a bouquet of flowers and all my father's IOUs.”

The waiter came to the door of the little room, but Parascandolo waved him away with a brusque flip of her hand, hissing to him that no one else had better come in. She snickered bitterly: “There, you see, that's one of the advantages of being the wife of Tore the Bulldog. Almost everyone owes him something, and everyone's afraid of him. Because ever since the day he started, he's grown a little richer, a little more powerful and little bit more of a piece of shit—every day.”

Alex shifted in her chair, uneasily; Lojacono didn't move a muscle.

The woman went on: “So I married him; what else could I do? Sure, I could have left town and moved to another city, in another country, but he would have found me; no one says no to Tore the Bulldog. He'd have taken it out on my old man, and on his shop. I married him. But I always hated him, from the very first day; and he hates me, too. Because he knows that I'm the only one, the only one, who's never knuckled under entirely. It's a war that's been going on for thirty years.” She blew her nose and then went on: “I've grown old beside him. At least I managed to keep from having children. And to make up for it, I've sucked the blood out of the damn miser: clothing, jewelry . . . I've even allowed myself a few nips and tucks; I know it doesn't show but I'm telling you the truth, believe me.”

Alex thought she detected a quiver at the left corner of Lojacono's mouth.

“Then I got him to buy me the gym. I've always loved exercise, aerobics, fitness, Pilates, spinning, the whole thing. He needed a business to use as a cover and he picked up this old movie theater without laying out a cent: The owner owed him I don't even remember how much. Taking advantage of certain friends he has up north, people in his same line of business, we fixed the place up.”

Lojacono asked: “His same line of business, you say? What line of business is that?”

The woman stared at him, surprised: “Jesus, Lieutenant, do you really not know? I can't believe it, sorry, I guess I assumed you're sharper than you are.”

Alex spelled it out: “We have to hear it from you, Signora. That's necessary.”

Susy seemed to think it over: “Oh, yes, I imagine that at this point that's the way it has to be. My husband is a loan shark: He's a Shylock, and he's got half the city by the balls.”

Lojacono spoke up: “But no one's ever managed to prove that.”

Parascandolo gulped a mouthful of air: “Listen to me, Lieutenant, we need to make a deal. You're investigating a simple burglary, kid stuff. Can we agree to that?”

Lojacono didn't move a muscle.

Susy went on: “It's just that if the details emerged, Marvin would be in real trouble. And this time, he wouldn't forgive even me. That means that the only way I can save myself is this deal with you. Are you in or not?”