The Crocodile (12 page)

Lojacono shook his head. “No, not a chance. They already think I’m a bribe-taker, an incompetent who boosted his salary by taking money from a two-bit Mafioso in exchange for worthless information. They have all the reports, the information, the findings. And what do I have? A nightmare.”

“Then don’t worry about it. Let them take care of it if they’re so damn good. Maybe it’s all about jealousy, some girl who was in love. Maybe they liked each other, who knows? Maybe you’re right and the Camorra has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s all about love.”

Lojacono was silent, pensive, for a long while. Then he said, “Maybe so. In cases of this kind, things bob to the surface sooner or later. In the middle of some other crime, or else by chance, the killer slips up. But that’s not what I think will happen here. Someone who’s capable of preparing two murders so meticulously, one right after another, isn’t someone who’s acting on impulse. It’s someone who’s given it thorough consideration. Someone who’s gone to the location over and over again, staked it out, covered the ground, checked it out in every detail.”

Letizia’s laughter had an edge to it. “Really? Walking up and down past a place like the courtyard where Luisa’s son was murdered? Or letting himself be seen outside the girl’s house, when I read that she was murdered near the front entrance of an apartment complex a fair distance from the road? And you think that nobody noticed a murderer walking around with a handgun in out-of-the-way places like that?”

Lojacono ran a hand through his hair. “You live in this city. You have friends here, you work here, you were born here, and you know everyone in your neighborhood. I just got here. I’ve been here less than a year. But I can tell you that it’s very easy to be invisible here. All of you are afraid of getting caught up in some mess that has nothing to do with you, so you mind your own business. You’re probably right too. Still, the city’s full of phantoms, people who come and go unnoticed in your midst.”

“Now you’re trying to scare me. Just you wait—they’ll find your phantom, and you can go back to getting a good night’s sleep.”

“Let’s hope so. But something inside me tells me that the Crocodile isn’t finished hunting.”

Donato worked up the nerve and called her. He spoke, he listened. He mirrored her dreams, her desires, and her fantasies in his own, and he found them intact in the aftermath of the storm.

Of course, it would have been better if none of it had happened. But there’s a solution to everything, if you stay together, if you love one another. At the journey’s end, no matter how grueling it’s been, there’s a smile on your face—the right kind of smile.

First he talked to his father, and that was the hardest thing. He told him about the final exam, not about the two of them. Not because he was a coward, but because he believed that it was right for her to be present when he was talking about her, that any conversations about the future should take place in her presence. Because he is confident that his father, always so tightly controlled and cutting, will melt when he finds himself in the presence of those eyes, that smile. Donato decides that nothing in creation is so diamond-hard that it could withstand that smile.

Now he’s smiling too, about her concern. She’s tense, nervous, agitated. She’s afraid of this meeting, but Donato knows that her fears are groundless. He himself had worried far too much about his unsuccessful exam. His father, with extreme clarity, made him understand that it was at his request that the professor, an old friend, had been willing to accept only an absolutely outstanding result. That the decision to advise him to retake the exam had been a way of allowing him to complete his preparation.

He had expected a scolding, an outburst of icy anger followed by a lengthy silence, the way it had been when he’d done something wrong as a child; instead he was greeted with tranquility and understanding. His father truly was an exceptional man. At that point, he worked up the nerve and, taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere, told his father about her. Not everything, because he didn’t want to compromise his father’s freedom to decide; a decision that could hardly be anything but positive. But the basics, yes, he had conveyed the essentials. And he had managed to secure a dinner date.

Now Donato knows that everything’s fine, and that everything’s going to turn out fine. He knows that he was unlucky to lose his mother as a small boy, but also that he was very lucky to have the father he has; and that luck has continued to favor him, allowing him to meet the most wonderful girl in the world.

Exams come and go, Donato tells himself, as he whistles a cheerful tune and heads downstairs to the garage, to get the car out and drive over to her place. You can always retake an exam. Life always gives you a second chance. Starting tomorrow, he’ll redouble his effort and resume his studies, and this time he’ll give it his all.

Because I have my whole life ahead of me, Donato thinks, and one thing I know for certain is that it won’t be a couple hundred boring pages of text that will keep me from living it.

My whole life, Donato thinks. And he sticks his hand in his pocket, feeling around for the garage door opener.

It was clear that she couldn’t stay awake any longer; her eyelids were growing heavy. So Laura Piras decided to turn off the light and see if she could get some sleep. Outside, the night was finally quiet. That meant it must be past 2
A.M.

It had been so long since she’d been able to get to sleep before the early hours that she couldn’t even remember when that had been anymore. Another lifetime.

Looking back on her own past, it was easy to split it into before and after.

She’d been a bright, happy girl. She loved to laugh, read, and study, play sports, dance. She loved everything. She loved life. She was curious and attracted by everything with the excitement and glee of a young girl. And that excitement had a name: Carlo.

She’d met him in middle school, back home in Cagliari. He was an extremely skinny, gangly boy, with perennially tousled hair that she tried unsuccessfully to brush into some semblance of order with her hands. Carlo, in his turtleneck sweater all winter long. Carlo, and his passion for political activism. Carlo, and his determination to play soccer, no matter how bad a player he might be. Carlo, who could make her laugh even at a funeral. Carlo, who had loved her from the moment he first saw her until the day he closed his eyes for the last time.

In the dark, as she sought sleep without finding it, Laura retraced her steps with Carlo. They spent every waking minute together, they studied together, they engaged in political activism together, they went to the movies, and they made love. Everyone in town was used to seeing them together: the shapely, smiling girl and the gangly, bespectacled boy. Laura smiled at the memory of how they wanted to change the world by leaving their island. And at the way that coming from an island makes you different and determined for the rest of your life.

The thought of her island brought an oblique gaze and a half smile to mind, though they dissolved before bobbing to the surface of consciousness. And once again Carlo emerged, top grades like her after secondary school, and both of them opting for law—more concrete than philosophy and less abstruse than architecture.

And then, after the
summa cum laude
degree, the civil service exam. She was running a little behind schedule, what with her father’s illness and subsequent death, in the atrocious grip of a cancerous tumor. So he was ridiculously embarrassed to tell her that he had become a public prosecutor at age twenty-four. She’d laughed, as usual, and told him, “You know I’ll not only catch up with you but I’ll leave you in my dust.”

“I know,” he had replied, serious as ever. “You always beat me, even at billiards.”

Together they had picked through a list of likely destinations for his posting, and together they had dismissed Lombardy, which, of course, was where he was assigned. In the early days it had seemed so strange telling him, in the foggy north, about the sunshine of home, studying by herself, turning around to make a wry comment and finding that he was no longer at her side. But there were always the weekends. She felt her mood lift at the airport when she saw him emerge from the crowd, a good head taller than her, with that bunch of bananas that constituted his hair.

“How on earth do they take you seriously up there, the northern polenta-grubbers, with that head of hair?” she’d say.

And he’d reply, “Why, what’s wrong with my hair?”

And they’d both burst into helpless peals of laughter.

There had been guys coming on to her even then. Laura was pretty, and she’d always exuded a feminine allure. But with someone like Carlo, she felt no need for anyone else. That’s just how it was.

It happened, in fact, when he was on his way to the airport, to catch the flight down from Malpensa. Who knows why. Maybe he fell asleep at the wheel. Maybe he wasn’t used to the fog yet. Maybe he was distracted, stupid, dopey bastard that he was. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that Friday morning, there he was, the usual hasty phone call confirming he’d be arriving, and that same Friday evening, a policeman on duty at Cagliari airport awkwardly broke the news to her that he wouldn’t be getting off the plane. Ever again.

In the silence of the night, broken only by the wail of a distant siren, she tried to remember that grief. Losing him was like an amputation—they say that you go on feeling the limb after you’ve lost it, that the body never cancels the memory of its missing part.

She changed. She studied even harder than before, came in at the top of the civil service exam rankings, and left the island of Sardinia. So eager to put a stretch of salt water between her and that odd couple that resembled the Italian
il
, she so short, he so tall; to put distance between her and a spirit whose hair was always rumpled and flyaway; between her and the person she had been, the one who always laughed too loud and too long. She no longer wanted to talk to anyone, neither family nor friends. She made a hasty, reluctant weekly phone call to her mother to see how she was, as if performing an objectionable task, and she’d hang up with a sense of relief, free until the following week.

She’d taken a posting to a dangerous, challenging place that none of her colleagues would have accepted. She could have turned it down; she could easily have opted for somewhere quieter, more attractive, that would have turbocharged her already glittering career trajectory. But that was not what she wanted. She wanted to work hard, plunge body and soul into the dream that those two kids had once shared, and change the world from the ground up.

She knew that her attitude, the sharp edges that she did nothing to conceal, the cutting harshness in her responses, were all viewed by others as signs of arrogant pride—the typical female prosecutor, young and attractive, who puts on an unyielding persona to establish her authority. But that wasn’t the truth of it. Her brittle edge was nothing more than a manifestation of the permanent night that had fallen over her heart when the policeman at the airport, nervously turning his cap in his hands, had told her that she’d be alone from now on.

She had chosen not to let anyone get close to her. Not because she thought she should be faithful to a memory, but because she thought there was no point teaching the essence of herself to love someone who would never ever know her the way Carlo had. The call of the flesh was surprisingly infrequent, and anyway, it exhausted itself in brief, solitary moments that only left her feeling sadder than before. There were times when she thought she must be getting old without realizing it. She saw herself as rigid, and unlovely, and couldn’t understand the allure that she continued to exert over the men that she met. In any case, she unfailingly rejected their advances, decisively and unilaterally.

The night dragged on and sleep gradually enveloped her in a murky fog. Those kids, those murders. The press and its damned Crocodile. She didn’t mind the reporting of it per se; she just hated the way that the media attention created pressure and haste. Haste, as she knew all too well, made people do stupid things.

Maybe Lojacono, the Sicilian, had a point: the Camorra was a false trail.

Lojacono. Quite a guy. She’d felt his eyes running the length of her body but she’d picked up no attraction, not even when she’d impulsively invited him for a coffee. He’d struck her as different from the others. He was intelligent, that was obvious: he’d proved it at the crime scene, noticing the tissues before anybody else. And the observations he’d shared at the café hung together nicely too. She thought back to the file about him that she’d decided to read through once she got back to her office. A grim story: a police witness who’d decided to run his mouth. Maybe the informant had simply been inclined to get rid of a talented cop.

Suddenly she shivered and pulled the blankets a little tighter. Somewhere out there was the Crocodile, probably alone, and possibly hungry. And there was a Sicilian policeman with almond-shaped eyes, whom she imagined was every bit as alone.

So many people are alone in this crazy, chaotic city, thought Laura Piras.

And she finally dropped off to sleep.

Sweetheart, my darling,

I’m heading out soon.

As usual I’ve prepared it all in detail and I’m ready for any eventuality, including the possibility that I’ll come back here without having achieved what I set out to do because something went wrong at the last second.

Because that’s the key, my darling. To be in no hurry. To be sure you don’t compromise your ultimate aim just because you must complete the job at all costs. You have to wait for conditions to suit the plan. However long it takes.

If you think about it, the ten years that have already passed are part of that philosophy. One day after another, building: in my head, on paper, on the computer, at the shooting range, in the garage. Readying everything, second by second. I never prepared a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C; I only ever had a single plan. And I have to wait for the parts—all the parts—to fit together before I make my move.