The Crocodile (20 page)

Stella loves back.

She’s enchanted by the sound of her father talking, by the warm, deep vibration of his voice that echoes in her chest.

And she presses her face against her mother’s cheek when her mother pulls her up out of her bath and into the warm vapor that surrounds the two of them.

Stella sleeps happily, preparing to live her life.

When they were alone again, Piras turned to Lojacono.
“You saw it too, right? Lorusso’s met Rinaldi before. She saw him, there was a flash in her eyes, and she immediately regained her composure.”

She had begun addressing him more informally, using “
tu
” rather than “
lei
.” Lojacono noticed and followed suit.

“Yeah, I saw it. He recognized her too, and he looked at the floor. I told you, there’s a relationship of some sort. Now it’s up to us to figure out what kind of relationship.”

“And we have no time to waste either. What worries me most are the time lapses in this thing: one week between the first murder and the second one, then only three days between the second murder and the third. If the Crocodile has something else in store, he won’t wait long. It all seems so strange to me: murders that are apparently so difficult to carry out, kids murdered practically right in the safety of their homes, one after the other, and he gets away with it every time. He must be on a winning streak not to have had anyone see him.”

Lojacono stood up and started pacing the room. His eyes had narrowed to slits, further accentuating the Asian appearance of his features.

“Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of technique. It’s very simple: it’s preparation. He prepares every step, minute by minute. The Crocodile’s technique: he stakes it out, he stands watch, he waits patiently. And when the prey is within reach, he strikes. He can’t afford to make a mistake, so he only moves when he’s absolutely certain.”

Piras followed his reasoning, but something still didn’t add up.

“Then isn’t he moving a little too fast? Isn’t the interval between one murder and the next too short to allow him to prepare so thoroughly?”

Lojacono stopped and turned to look at her.

“Not if he started preparing a long time ago. Not if he planned all of the murders at the same time.”

Piras thought that over for a while. Then she said, “We need to figure out how and why Lorusso and Rinaldi know each other. Because if there’s one chance of tracing back to the Crocodile, it’s by finding that out. What do you suggest?”

Lojacono grabbed his coat. “I’ll go see Lorusso. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try with the doctor. If we try talking to him first, he could reach out to someone and then we’d be hamstrung.”

Piras nodded. “Then get moving. And let me know as soon as you learn anything. It’s about time we had a stroke of luck.”

Before returning home, Luisa Lorusso had gone to the cemetery. She went every couple of days; she felt she had to. That was only the time she felt even partially alive, that she had a purpose, when she could neaten up the flowers, make sure the little lamp was still glowing.

She’d felt she was alive for Mirko and for him alone, when she used to iron his shirts, used to tidy that bedroom of his when it looked like a bomb had gone off in there. She’d felt alive when she sat up waiting for him to come home, so that he’d at least have some idea of how dangerous the night really was—he considered himself a crown prince of the night. She’d felt she was alive when she dreamed of that happy, invincible boy’s future, day after day. The future he’d never really had—something the two of them couldn’t have predicted.

On her way home, Luisa wondered how she’d find the strength to go on living for even a single day. What reason would she have? Seeing the doctor had caught her by surprise, but beneath all her grief and pain, she’d felt nothing more than the distant echo of a remorse long since buried. A chance occurrence, a coincidence, nothing more than that. The lunatic, the murderer, had taken other people’s children too, what of that? What did it change for her? She had died along with Mirko, and that was all she knew. The whole world could die now and it wouldn’t change a thing as far as she was concerned.

At the top of the staircase, in the arch of the doorway, stood the policeman from that night, the one she’d seen at police headquarters.

“Now what do you want? What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?”

Lojacono looked at her, expressionless. “I need to speak to you, signora. May I?”

Luisa walked through the door without a word, but she left it open behind her. The inspector entered and gently shut the door behind him.

“Signora, I can’t believe that you don’t give a damn about your son’s murderer being at large, on the street, free to kill again. I have a daughter myself and if I thought that someone wanted to harm her, I’d want that person dead. How can it be any different for you?”

The woman stood motionless, her eyes resting on the policeman’s face, her hands hidden beneath her black shawl. She looked like a statue. Then she slowly pulled a chair out from the table and gestured for the man to take a seat.

“I’ve only had one man in my life. He was already married, and he had children of his own. A
malamente
, we say—a bad egg. Someone who did dangerous things. But we loved each other. And just when I got pregnant, he was killed. I couldn’t even go to his funeral. The family was there. They’d have beaten me to death; everyone knew about the two of us. I had a nursing certificate. I’d always liked studying, unlike my brothers and sisters who were out on the street from morning to night. So I found a job.”

Lojacono waited. He hoped that at the end of this story he’d find the nugget of information he needed. He knew that the story she was telling him was a slender thread, the only one that could keep his hope alive.

“A neighbor used to look after Mirko for me—the same woman you saw crying with me, downstairs, that night. You know the way it is here: it takes a whole building to raise a child. Gang war rages in the streets, but it came all the way into the building to get my son.”

The woman spoke under her breath, and Lojacono had to make a special effort to understand what she was saying. A radio in a nearby flat was playing folk songs at high volume.

“The lady, back in police headquarters, said that
maybe
the Camorra has nothing to do with it. But I’m sure the Camorra had nothing to do with this. That’s not the way they do these things. They make noise, they want everyone to know what’s happened and why no one should ever make the same mistake. Whoever this was, he was hiding in the shadows. Like a rat.”

Lojacono nodded in agreement. “Yes. I’m convinced that these murders, all three of them, are about something else. And if I am able—if we are able—to understand what and why, then we can catch him. We can stop him.”

Luisa suddenly burst into laughter. It was the laughter of a madwoman; she was laughing with her mouth, not with her eyes. With a shiver, Lojacono watched her and suddenly realized how young she really was, and how irredeemably old she had become.

“You want to stop him? Now that he’s already done everything he wanted to do?”

Lojacono waited for the hysterical laughter to subside, then he spoke.

“Signora, I think I told you that I have a daughter of my own. Last night I had a dream: someone was watching her from the shadows, threatening her. And there was nothing I could do about it. That’s the way it works in this city: there are many who watch from the shadows but no one seems to see them. Your son was the first, and no one could foresee what would happen next, no one could do anything to prevent it. Then the girl from Posillipo was murdered, and once again no one could imagine or understand. But now this killer has murdered Doctor Rinaldi’s son. I understand that you already knew Rinaldi. Don’t deny it, please. I remarked upon it, and Dottoressa Piras saw it too. That’s why we brought you together, to see if any of you knew each other. And you two do know each other.”

Luisa stared into the middle distance. Tears ran down her cheeks from her convulsive laughter, or perhaps she was crying again.

Lojacono went on. “Until today, Signora Lorusso, none of what’s happened has been your fault. You couldn’t know, you couldn’t help us to prevent it from happening again. But from now on, now that you know that these innocent victims might be a result of something you know and that you’re keeping to yourself, blame attaches to you. If another kid is killed, it will be as if your son, my daughter, and all the children were dead because of you. Do you think you can bear that burden?”

The silence that followed weighed heavy like the silence of death itself. Outside, the folk singer sang about a good friend’s infamous betrayal. And a strong odor of cooking onions blighted the air.

Luisa looked up into Lojacono’s face.

“Sure, I know him. I know him very well. Doctor Sebastiano Rinaldi. I knew him before he was a famous doctor, when he needed money, lots of money. When he performed clandestine abortions in a block of flats on the Via Foria. When I was his nurse.”

Luisa Lorusso’s words came out broken, fragmented, pierced by the present pain of time now past.
The words came out and mingled with the notes of the Neapolitan neo-melodic songs wailing out of the neighbors’ radios.

The words came out amid the stink of garlic and onions for the lunches that were being prepared, amid the sound of sirens cutting through the air, the car horns and roaring engines of the traffic that suffocated the city.

Out came the words, in the leaden light of another early afternoon of drizzle, beneath the tears of a sky that incessantly mourned its dead.

Out came the four years of working together—the nurse from the poverty-stricken quarter of the city, earning a living so she could carry on her affair with the Camorrista who was an outcast to both warring families; the nurse who needed money to buy the flat where she still lived, the flat where someday she’d give birth to her son. And the up-and-coming, ambitious gynecologist—a young man who wanted it all and wanted it now, who needed money to set up his most important and high-profile clinic in the aristocratic center of the city.

They had met by chance at the home of an elderly woman, an invalid; she was there to change the old lady’s IV. The doctor decided she would be perfect: they had no shared acquaintances, she was entirely outside his social circle, she was competent, efficient, and determined. Moreover, she was unhindered by any troublesome concept of legality. She was also capable of finding customers outside the regular circuits.

The logistics were simple: a rented flat in a transient neighborhood, anonymous, easy access. The lease was made out to a nonexistent company; there was to be no name on the buzzer downstairs. The phone number and the name circulated only discreetly. It had become a silent and efficient factory of tiny angels, with the mutual understanding that they’d both stop once they’d achieved their objectives: the flat on the top floor of the run-down old building in the working-class neighborhood for her, and the clinic in the Via dei Mille for him.

And that’s exactly how it went. From 1992 until 1996—the year Mirko was born. That’s when Luisa got out. Now that she had a child of her own, that kind of thing was hard for her to take. She’d started to spend her time running up and down the steps of the flats, visiting sick people, providing home-care nursing, administering injections and IV drips. She earned less that way, much less. But at night, she took Mirko in her arms and smiled down at him, and he smiled up at her. That was enough—more than enough.

“The reason I told you all this is that I didn’t want to kill any more children, once Mirko was born. And I don’t want to start again, now that he’s gone.”

Lojacono thought it over: four years.

“And do you remember anything, anyone, an operation that had serious complications or anything of the sort?”

Luisa shook her head. “There was no reason for complications. The operations lasted half an hour, we wrote the names of the antibiotics that the patients were supposed to take on a sheet of paper, and then it was
arrivederci
. They never came back, so we had no way of knowing what had become of them. They laid down the money, in cash, and left. Some of them were weeping, others were smiling in relief, happy to get it over with. When I found out that I was expecting Mirko, I never thought of it for a second, the idea of doing such a thing.”

Lojacono stood up. Suddenly he felt all the urgency in the world bearing down on him.

“Signora, you’ve done the right thing, believe me. And I promise you that you won’t get into any trouble over what you’ve told me.”

Luisa, who had been standing the whole time, suddenly collapsed into a chair as if all the energy had been sucked out of her.

She looked up into Lojacono’s face and smiled sweetly. It was the first time that he had seen that expression on her face.

“Trouble? Then you really don’t understand. No one can cause me any trouble, dotto’. I’m a dead woman walking, and nothing matters to me now. Nothing.”

Laura Piras remained impervious to Lojacono’s frenzied excitement.
“Of course I get it. Rinaldi and Lorusso were doing illegal, clandestine abortions together twenty years ago. That explains the relationship between the two of them, but we still can’t figure out how De Matteis fits in—that is, if she does. Plus, we need to get Rinaldi to admit it, which I doubt he’s going to be especially eager to do, considering what it will do to his reputation and standing. So we’re back to square one.”

Lojacono shook his head. “Laura, listen to me. I understand and I agree, we’ll never get Rinaldi to confirm any of this; but in my view we don’t need him to. All we need is to understand how De Matteis fits in—she’s the missing piece of the puzzle. We’re not trying to solve a cold case; all we care about is understanding what the Crocodile is up to. We’ll have plenty of time afterwards to take care of matters with Rinaldi, if we can. But right now, this is the only thing that matters. The more we find out, the more obvious it seems to me that the killer still has work to do.”