The Crocodile (5 page)

He wondered whether he might not be the classic father who couldn’t stop thinking of his daughter as a little girl. A terrible trap to fall into. He remembered his last conversation with Sonia, the woman’s violent verbal barrage against him. He understood now that the relationship was over and done with, that there was no way to rebuild their old love, after so much hatred. He discovered, as he lay on the foldout bed they had for those on night shifts, analyzing himself, that he wasn’t especially torn up over the fact; emotions are born, live, grow old, and die, just like people. But the way he missed Marinella was an open bloody wound, and it showed no signs of healing.

He hadn’t had any difficulty procuring his daughter’s new cell phone number—he was a cop, after all. But he’d never had the nerve to call her. It struck him as an intrusion into the girl’s life, trespassing somehow. But he missed her; it killed him how much he missed her.

Sleep turned his worries into a dream. He saw his daughter in a nightclub, cheerful and pretty. He watched as she drank and took a pill her girlfriend gave her. He watched as she got into a car with a boy whose face, in the dream, was obscured. The car took off at speed, hurtling into the night. He tried to call out to her, to warn her of the danger, but his voice caught in his throat. He watched as the car took a curve at insane speed. He saw a truck coming around the bend from the opposite direction.

He found himself sitting bolt upright on the bed, eyes wide open, as the office phone rang and rang.

The place was pretty close by, the courtyard of an old building about half a mile from the police station. Lojacono had grabbed a uniform jacket from the locker room and climbed into the police car, recruiting a sleepy young policeman as his driver. The phone call had come in anonymously, a woman’s voice going on about a dead body.

There was a small crowd standing outside the half-open front door, a dozen or so silent onlookers. The inspector ran his gaze over the windows of the adjoining apartment buildings, a couple of them lit up, a few others wide open with curious faces watching the drama unfold. The silence was unreal: it seemed like a movie set, right before the cameras began to roll.

They stopped the car at the mouth of the street, top lights flashing, to keep people from coming in or out. They walked up the street and into the courtyard.

The scene that met their eyes was illuminated by a lamp, which hung from a pair of crossed cables running over the center of the courtyard and swung lazily in the breeze. To call it a courtyard was perhaps overstating the case: it was really nothing but an airshaft bringing light to the building’s suffocating windows. On one side was a heap of rubble, beams, bricks, and a couple of bags of cement; on the other, a few parked scooters. Near the last scooter in the line, almost up against the wall, sprawled the body of a boy, facedown. A short distance away, one woman held another in her arms; the two of them were sitting on a step. The older of the two, disheveled and wearing a dressing gown, was murmuring words, perhaps a prayer, with her arms wrapped around the second woman’s shoulders, who was younger and wore an incongruous pair of pink flannel pajamas.

The woman’s face was a terrible sight. She couldn’t be much over forty, and she was skinny, her chestnut hair gathered in an elastic band; her face was collapsing into a silent scream, her mouth wide open, a streamer of drool at either side, eyes staring wide in immense pain and sorrow, her neck straining in a spasm. She was emitting no sound at all, except for a faint hiss. Lojacono couldn’t take his eyes off that face, the very picture of madness, of a one-way journey into the abyss. With a stab of grief, he felt as if he’d plunged back into the dream he was having when the call came in, and he understood without a shadow of a doubt that this was the boy’s mother.

The drizzle had ceased, there was a little watery mud on the sidewalk that the rain had washed out of the construction site. Lojacono made his way over to the prone body, careful not to step on any potential evidence. He squatted down next to the corpse.

He saw the bullet hole in the back of the neck, at the base of the hairline, recently trimmed and shaved in keeping with the latest style. It was a small, sharply defined hole; some very small caliber, in his opinion. The boy’s hand still held the scooter keys: he hadn’t even had a chance to lock the chain. The padlock dangled from the rear wheel. The inspector looked up and noticed that there was a narrow gap next to the street door, a dark opening left over from some renovation work done decades ago. His gaze returned to the ground and he saw the bullet casing. Just one. He pulled out his handkerchief and picked it up.

The sound of sirens split the night, and a second police car arrived, closely followed by a third. Suddenly the courtyard was full of cops.

Lojacono had had only one conversation with Di Vincenzo, the captain of the San Gaetano police station, on the day he arrived. He remembered a man who was ill at ease, who kept tapping his fingers on a closed binder on the paper-piled desk in front of him. Marked on the cover was one word: “Lojacono.”

The man he saw now was a completely different person, collar unbuttoned, tie askew. His brow was furrowed, his voice was deep and confident, and he had the imperious air of someone who’s used to handling situations with unruffled competence.

He waved the three cops following him towards the two women, the corpse, and the entrance into the courtyard. Then he walked over to the inspector.

“Lojacono, what are you doing here? Explain yourself. I thought we had an understanding that you wouldn’t get involved in any investigations.”

“Captain, I was on duty. If you want to get mad at somebody, how about the guys who aren’t willing to work the night shift? It’s certainly not my idea of fun.”

Di Vincenzo blinked rapidly. He wasn’t used to that kind of answer, but he had to admit that the logic was flawless. Just as he was trying to come up with a retort, a young woman walked up to him and spoke to him abruptly.

“All right, Di Vincenzo, what do we know? Who’s the deceased? And who was the first person on the scene?”

She’d asked the last question with her eyes focused on Lojacono, who was a good eight inches taller than her; but the woman’s face, fine-drawn features, and especially her large dark eyes, emanated absolute authority.

Di Vincenzo hissed, “Assistant District Attorney Piras. Dottoressa, this is Inspector Lojacono. He took the call, but we got here immediately after him, so I was ordering him to head back to the police station.”

The woman never took her eyes off Lojacono’s face. “Not before he tells us exactly what he saw. I think we can all agree that the first responder has the most important information. Who’s the deceased?”

Lojacono registered the Sardinian accent and the impeccable business suit that sheathed the assistant DA’s svelte, petite body. Either she was still awake when the call came in or else she was the world’s fastest woman at getting dressed and made up.

“To tell the truth, we had in fact just arrived, dottoressa. We haven’t even had time to talk to the two women over there, who must have close ties to the victim.”

Piras nodded. “Sicilian, eh? A new arrival. Well then, if you don’t have any information for us, please follow the station captain’s orders and head back to the station.”

Di Vincenzo couldn’t wait to confirm the order. “That’s right, Lojacono. Back to the station.”

Without taking his eyes off Piras’s face, Lojacono held out the tissue to Di Vincenzo. “At your orders, Captain. In any case, this is the cartridge that was found close to the corpse, over by that nook next to the street door. A .22, if I’m not mistaken. There’s only one bullet hole, in the back of the boy’s head. I’d guess the shot was fired at point blank range, while the victim was padlocking the chain around the scooter, the one that’s lying still open on the vehicle’s rear wheel.”

Di Vincenzo had an unhealthy looking red splotch on his neck. “If we need any further information we’ll be glad to ask you to step in to do the job of the medical examiner and forensics, thank you, Lojacono. Now if you’d be so kind as to get out of my crime scene, you’d be doing me a favor.”

The inspector turned on his heel and moved off without saying goodbye. Then he murmured, audibly, “And don’t forget about the tissues.”

He started walking again, but he hadn’t gone a yard before Piras said, in a loud voice, “Just one minute! What do you mean by ‘the tissues?’”

Lojacono stopped and without turning around said, “In the nook by the door, you can see it from here, there’s a little pile of trash, drenched with rain. On top of the pile there are three used tissues, clearly deposited more recently than the junk underneath. It seems evident to me that the murderer dropped them there, because that’s where I found the shell and because that’s the only direction you could fire from if you wanted to kill someone who was parking their scooter right there. Now if you’ll forgive me, dottoressa, I’ve been ordered out of here.”

And, with his hands in his pockets, he walked away from the scene of the crime.

Behind him, in the silence, the hiss that came from Mirko’s mother’s voiceless scream.

Donato shuts his book; he can’t seem to concentrate. Might as well put on some music, stretch out on the bed, and let the mind go where it will.

This isn’t normal, for him. Generally speaking, he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t give up, especially when a final exam is impending. He’s methodical, precise, attends classes, attends extra seminars, reads the textbook cover to cover, goes over it again with highlighters, cultured pencils, and a cross-referenced extended study session with his class notes. Outcome: the highest possible score—30, or 30
cum laude
.

Method, Donato muses, can stand in for passion. Passion, as Papa has always told him, isn’t anywhere near as fundamental as people like to say when it comes to work. Work is work. Work is hard labor. It’s a string of daily tasks, repeating themselves endlessly, interlocking one with another like the links of a chain. What matters is precision, commitment, and, of course, success. Passion, Donato my boy, should be relegated to other compartments of your life.

That’s why he’s never had the slightest doubt about what courses to take, what department to choose, what major and specialty to focus on. Once passion has been excluded from the criteria to be considered, everything else can absolutely be planned out and optimized. With the father that he has—moreover, a father who can guide him, direct him, aid him, and even, in the end, place him—it would have been ridiculous to think of any other choice.

For instance, Donato liked to draw. And he even had a certain talent for it: he was good at capturing color and light and shapes and transferring them, in his own personal way, to the blank sheet of paper. But that’s no profession, and he was forced to come to terms with that fact very early on. Papa says that Mamma liked to draw too. But Donato never found anything, in the apartment or in the trunks where they still keep her clothing and possessions. Even his memory of this tall, smiling woman has faded over the years, leaving only the image of the hospital bed from which a sort of skeleton covered with flesh waggles its fingers, waving a sad goodbye to him.

But he still has Papa. There’s Papa who takes care of everything, and always has. There’s Papa, whom he must never disappoint.

But then there’s her too.

Donato met her at the university. Surrounded by a hundred other girls, she was different from all of them—beautiful and terrified, looking wildly around for someone to point her the way, with a sheet of paper clutched in one hand. On impulse he broke away from his little group and walked over to her, smiling, to ask if there was anything he could do to help. And that’s when their eyes met. For the first time.

He’d read books and he’d seen dozens of movies that focused on the importance of that first glance, and he’d never believed a word of it. It was all just literature. How on earth, he had always wondered, can someone understand what’s inside another person from a single glance? Another person’s past, tastes, memories? Their fantasies, their desires? After all, aren’t all those things the basic building blocks of the love between two human beings?

But that single glance had been enough. More than enough. Everything was there, Donato thinks to himself as he looks at the ceiling, fingers knitted behind his head. Everything he’d ever need. And in the months that followed, his conviction was only reinforced. Donato wasn’t distracted from his studies: not that. But now there’s another hunger, another drive pushing him to wake up in the morning every day. Donato is in love.

Sure, he’s had other girlfriends before; he’s got a certain appeal and he knows it. But he’s a serious young man, he doesn’t like to fool around or waste time. Finding a young woman with the same ambitions for the future is a much rarer thing than you might think; and so, when he speaks with her, when he dreams with her, he feels as if he’s found a mirror in which he can see a reflection of his better self.

It was natural to develop a certain closeness, it was natural to spend time alone together, it was natural to make love. Natural and wonderful, a symphony of the senses and the mind, the soul and the body. She burst inside him, with an even greater intensity than he had exploded inside of her.

He’s never mentioned it to Papa. This is the one outstanding concern for Donato. Papa is too important to him: he was father, mother, mentor, guide, staff, and support—but never friend. Papa is stern, straight as an arrow, formal, and always crystal clear about the world: white is white and black is black. Perhaps a less than ideal sounding board for one’s confidences and insecurities. Papa. What would Papa have to say about all this?

Donato hears his father’s voice as if he were actually standing there, in his bedroom, looming over his bedside: Now is not the time. If you want to fool around a little, go ahead, but there’ll be plenty of time later for serious relationships.