The Deliverance of Evil (15 page)

Piccolo handed over the photo. It showed two young women with their arms around each other in St. Peter’s Square. Someone had drawn a heart around them with a red pen. They didn’t look any older than twenty. One was tall and dark, the other small, slim, and blond. Someone had written an R under the brunette and an N under the blonde.

“And so yesterday she decided to report her missing?” Corvu asked.

Piccolo read directly from the statement, “Iordanescu came in today, December 28, 2005, at 5:00 a.m. to make a formal statement because one hour later she was departing for Iasi by bus.”

She looked up at Balistreri indignantly. “It seems no one ever dreamed of stopping her.”

Balistreri showed no sign of annoyance.

Who do you think is going to give a damn about a Romanian prostitute, without a residence permit, who disappears?

Now the car horns were honking outside the window, you could hear them even through the double windows. It was raining hard, and Balistreri was glad.

Rain cushions life, like an antidepressant
.

He looked at the time.

“It’s ten past eight,” he said to Piccolo.

“I asked about the change of shift. It’s at nine o’clock.” Piccolo was on her feet.

“Take the dwarf with you, and use the siren. Rome’s a disaster area in the rain.”

. . . .

Inspector Antonio Coppola was a fifty-year-old from Naples known for three things: his short stature, which had earned him the affectionate nickname “the dwarf,” his way with women, and, lastly, his poorly concealed racism, typical of a Southerner who has been discriminated against himself. As a young man, he’d been married and divorced twice. Both women were better looking than he was, and both had kicked him out because he cheated. He said he was compelled to cheat as a way to compensate for the inferiority complex his height gave him. Then, twice-divorced, he married Lucia, who’d been his first love back in high school in Naples. Tall and beautiful, Lucia bore Coppola a son, Ciro, who was now a very tall sixteen-year-old and captain of a basketball team. Nowadays Coppola confined himself to flirting with beautiful women, without going on to taste the fruit.

Nevertheless, Balistreri was resigned to the need to keep him far away from any investigations involving attractive women. He didn’t want to be either the cause or a witness to any romantic crises.

Coppola drove, siren blaring, while Piccolo filled him in on the case. He sped through the chaotic traffic as if he were driving alone on the Monza racetrack.

Eventually they left the city center, and beautiful ancient buildings gave way to the shabby towers of Rome’s eastern outskirts, built during the speculative housing boom of the 1960s.

They arrived at the Torre Spaccata police station at a quarter to nine and approached the officer on duty. Giuseppe Marchese, a twenty-year-old with very short dark hair and watchful eyes, was dressed in civilian clothes. He addressed Coppola, ignoring Piccolo completely.

“What can I do for you?” he asked with a marked Sicilian accent.

“Inspector Coppola.” Coppola flashed his badge. A long pause. The officer became flustered, as many did when they dealt with the special team. Then Coppola pointed to the woman beside him. “I’m here with Deputy Captain Piccolo.”

“I’ll call my superior immediately,” Marchese said, reaching for the phone.

“No,” said Coppola, brusquely stopping him. “It’s you we want to talk to. Is there an office where we can do this discreetly?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Marchese in a feeble attempt to escape, looking at the clock on the wall, “my shift’s over in five minutes.”

“Perfect, so no one will disturb us. Where should we do this?” Coppola persisted. He was a little conflicted. On the one hand, Marchese was a kid who’d left some village in Sicily and been assigned to a police station in one of the worst areas in the city. And on the other hand, he’d let Ramona leave. Anger won out.

Marchese led them to a little room off to one side. The officers for the next shift were already arriving. Some looked at them inquisitively, but Coppola shut the door in their faces. There was a table and two chairs in the room. Coppola offered the larger chair to Piccolo, who took it into a corner and sat down. Coppola leaned heavily on the desk.

“Sit down,” he said to Marchese. The poor kid sat on the edge of the seat.

“Ramona Iordanescu. You took her statement, right?” Coppola said.

Marchese shot to his feet. “Inspector . . .” he tried to say.

Coppola placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed the kid back into his seat. He was visibly uncomfortable. Piccolo had learned to recognize fear instantly. Even for an emotional young man, his reaction seemed too extreme. Of course, he was dealing with the special team and the dwarf’s tough-guy attitude, but no one was accusing him of anything. She got up and stood in front of Marchese with perfect timing, while Coppola moved out of the young policeman’s field of vision.

Piccolo squatted down in front of Marchese so that their eyes were at the same level.

“Giuseppe,” she said calmly, “you’ve done nothing wrong. You’re hardly responsible for the whole station at your rank.” He looked at her as if she were Our Lady of Help of Sciacca and had come to save him. Piccolo gave him time to calm down, then in a low voice addressed him, Sicilian to Sicilian. “I just want to know one thing: Who told you to let her leave for Romania?”

The kid’s eyes shot toward the door; voices could be heard outside. Piccolo glanced at Coppola, who went and stood in front of the door. Someone knocked. Coppola opened the door, left, and shut the door behind himself. The voices on the other side of the door were growing louder. She had a minute, maybe less.

“We’re not back in our small towns in Sicily anymore,” Piccolo said sympathetically. “They’re not kidding around up here in Rome, so just tell me who it was or you’ll be screwed.”

“I’m screwed anyway. The little people always get the shaft,” he grumbled. Then he whispered a name.

. . . .

In the corridor, all hell was breaking loose. Piccolo opened the door. A fifty-year-old deputy captain a good foot taller than Coppola was screaming in his face, “I’m reporting you to the disciplinary board! We’re not in Chicago here. Just who the hell do you think you are?”

Piccolo stepped out and flashed her badge. The man said, “You can’t just come in here and subject one of my men to an interrogation.”

Then he whipped out his own badge in return: Deputy Captain Remo Colajacono. He was tall and fit, his long, thick gray hair combed straight back and held in place with plenty of gel; he had a boxer’s nose and close-set, dangerous-looking black eyes.

“We can talk about it in your office, if you wouldn’t mind, not out here in the middle of the corridor,” Piccolo said politely.

The man turned rudely on his heel and showed her the way to an office in a corner. He took a seat below a crucifix and a photo of the president of Italy. Without inviting her to sit, he pointed to Coppola and said,“The officer has to wait outside.” Coppola stepped out and closed the office door.

“All right, let’s talk about Ramona Iordanescu,” Piccolo began.

“She filed a report yesterday morning,” he said quickly.

Piccolo restrained a smile. Violent men were often quick to react.

“No, the last time. Did you speak to her?”

Colajacono was uncomfortable because Piccolo wasn’t easy to pigeonhole. For him, women fit into one of a small number of categories: mothers, sisters, whores, or murder victims. He was tall, but she was taller. He had quite a high rank, but so did she and on a high-profile special team. To buy time, he lit a cigar.

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“No,” said Piccolo. She got up as if she were at home and went to open the window.

Colajacono decided to take the approach that would give him the most control. “I spoke to her a few minutes that time. She came in midmorning on December 25. Officer Marchese told me there was a young Romanian girl who wanted to speak to the captain, but I took care of her instead. She told me her friend Nadia was missing. I asked her if her friend had a cell phone, and she said no, they couldn’t afford phones. I asked her if her friend was happy working the streets and she said no, that she wasn’t happy either. She said there’s no such thing as a happy prostitute.”

Piccolo said nothing, but her look became darker.

“I told her to let us know if her friend didn’t show up,” Colajacono finished. He visibly relaxed.

Piccolo raised an eyebrow. “Really? You were that vague?”

Colajacono gave her a piercing look with his cold black eyes. “I don’t remember exactly what was said. We assumed that whore found some Italian sucker to be her sugar daddy and she stopped working the street.”

“Do you think the prostitutes on Via di Torricola are allowed to just stop working?”

“You tell me. You seem to know everything,” Colajacono answered sarcastically. He blew smoke in her face.

You can’t lay a finger on him, Giulia. Not here, not now
.

Piccolo got up.

“We’ll start looking for Ramona,” she said. Then, looking him straight in the eye with an angelic expression she murmured, “Let’s hope nothing happens to her in the meantime.”

She found Marchese in the corridor. He’d finished his shift. The two of them and Coppola walked out together. Despite it being almost half past nine, the traffic was still very heavy. They crossed the street at the crosswalk on the corner. Cars and mopeds brushed dangerously close to them. The bar across the street was crowded, mostly with office workers stopping for breakfast before starting their days at their desks. There were also some immigrants dressed for manual labor.

“Fucking Romanians, already drunk on beer at this time of day,” Coppola said, not bothering to hide his contempt.

Marchese was more relaxed now that they had left the police station. He and Coppola stayed in the bar, but Piccolo went to the car and sat with the heat on. It was still raining hard and the street was blocked with cars moving at a crawl to get over some rut filled with ten inches of water. Get rid of the potholes and the Roma gypsy camps. That’s what the opposition was urging the mayor to do. Potholes and Roma gypsies.

You could fill the potholes with Roma bodies. Many would agree with that.
She called Balistreri and told him everything.

“All right, Piccolo. Bring Marchese here and I’ll deal with Colajacono.”

Piccolo smiled. Balistreri wanted to keep her out of trouble.

. . . .

“Corvu, I’m meeting Linda Nardi after lunch. Top secret.”

Corvu was shocked. Linda Nardi was a journalist, and Balistreri usually avoided journalists like the plague. Moreover, she wrote for a paper that often criticized the police. Balistreri didn’t even read it anymore. Five months earlier, during the heat of the Samantha Rossi case, Linda Nardi had been particularly persistent in pointing out the many missteps made by the special team. She’d never joined in calling for Balistreri’s head, though.

Balistreri lit his third cigarette of the day and thought about Linda Nardi. How old could she be? She had to be about thirty-five, even though there were days and moments when she looked ten years younger, and others when she looked ten years older. A good-looking woman, no matter her age. The face of a serious child, eyes that went from intensity to detachment in a moment. A woman as polite and open as she was firm in her opinions and uncompromising in making them known. Balistreri knew that they considered her indispensable at the newspaper for the interest her articles aroused in their readers, but also dangerous in the past for the trouble the same articles had caused within political circles, the extremist fringe of the Church, and with officials from several foreign countries.

Rumor had it that many men—including police and journalists—had tried without success to get her into bed. She was courteous, even kind, but she didn’t respond to that kind of attention, sometimes with a bluntness that humiliated her would-be suitors.

One of them had been Balistreri’s predecessor in homicide, Colicchia, a real Don Giovanni. Having a beautiful woman aound who wouldn’t have sex with him disturbed his sense of equilibrium, partly because of his innate presumption and partly because he thought all women were easy. So Colicchia had sent Linda Nardi a bouquet of red roses and a card inviting her to dinner wherever she chose. She had politely declined, but when Colicchia had continued to persist, adding a veiled threat about cutting her off from privileged channels of communication, she finally accepted and had chosen Il Convento for their dinner. Colicchia, who was notoriously cheap, nearly had a heart attack: this was a restaurant with only eight tables where the food was heavenly but outrageously expensive, especially for an honest policeman.

But by then his reputation was at stake. He took her there and rattled off the usual selection of crimes he more or less romanticized and with which he usually impressed his prey, only to discover that Linda Nardi was as insatiable at the table as she was chased away from it. She ordered multiple dishes and the most expensive wines, which she barely touched. Then she began to ask Colicchia to tell her his bloodiest tales. In the end, when they were the only customers left, she began to tell him in all seriousness about her research into certain crimes committed in America by women against men. Tales of horrifying mutilation. In the end Colicchia who, like almost all of the rapid response team, suffered from gastritis and had been forced to drink all the wine she’d ordered and barely touched, had to run to the men’s room and throw up, returning to the table as white as a sheet. So ended their night out.

. . . .

As usual, Balistreri decided not to use an official car. It was still raining, Rome was awash.

It was a little after nine thirty, and the city was waking up. Shop owners unlocked their doors. Office workers who were running late—and those who had punched in and then left for breakfast—finished their coffee. Government bureaucrats and messengers were everywhere. A sea of buses, taxis, official cars, and private vehicles with permits surrounded the ministry of the interior as half of Rome’s residents tried to gain access to the historic center to get to work. They were all sounding their horns like crazy, as if the cacophony would help move the traffic jam along.