The Deliverance of Evil (22 page)

“How long have you been in Italy, Natalya?”

“Only two months.”

“Where did you learn to speak Italian so well?”

She smiled. A beautifully genuine smile. “I’ve had an Italian boyfriend for three years. I came to Italy to be with him.”

“And this boyfriend forces you to work as a prostitute?”

She burst out laughing, displaying two neat rows of white teeth. “I’m not a prostitute,” she protested, still laughing.

Corvu didn’t like surprises. “Then what were you doing at night on the street?”

“Graziano, I was just there that day, and it wasn’t at night. I was there for about two hours. Then I went to work.”

”What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a waitress in a snack bar. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“So what were you doing on Via di Torricola on December 24?”

“It was Christmas Eve. I went to keep my cousin company for two hours. She was on her own until eight. Unfortunately, she does work as a prostitute.”

“Weren’t you afraid when she got into a car with a man and left you there alone?”

“It only happened once for ten minutes. Luckily no one stopped. Anyway, we’d agreed that I’d play for time and would wait until she came back.”

“And during those ten minutes when you were alone, a car that was missing a headlight drove by.” Fate had spared Natalya and chosen Nadia.

“Yes. I was frightened then. I thought it was going to stop for me, but instead it slowed down, passed close by, then sped up again.”

“Did you see what kind of car it was?”

Natalya shook her head. “No, it was dark. But I think I might be able to recognize the model. My brother sells used cars in Ukraine. It was familiar, I think.”

Now was his chance to show her what he could do. “Natalya, I have a computer program with the various parts of all kinds of cars: hoods, doors, roofs, everything. If we go over these together, do you think you can identify the ones that are most similar to the car you saw?”

She was sharp and thoughtful, an excellent witness. They were both involved in examining the particulars of the cars closely. When the Janiculum cannon went off as it did every day at noon, they looked at each other almost guiltily, like two high school students caught smoking in the bathroom. Two hours had passed.

“Oh my God, it’s so late. I have to go to work,” she said.

“We’re not even halfway through,” Corvu said.

“I work until five today, Graziano. Then I have a haircut appointment, and then I’m free. I can come back then and we can finish. All right?”

“All right,” Corvu agreed quickly. Then, as she was leaving the room, he blurted out, “I hope your boyfriend doesn’t mind you spending so much time with me, Natalya.”

Have you gone crazy, Graziano? What the hell are you saying? Who do you think you are, Brad Pitt?

He blushed at his own audacity and then, closing the door sharply behind Natalya, barricaded himself in Balistreri’s office.

While he caught his breath he heard her cheerful voice from the corridor.

“I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. See you later, Graziano.”

Corvu was overcome with embarrassment.

. . . .

After the meeting with his team and the interview with Colajacono, Balistreri was even more out of sorts. He wanted a smoke, but he was already one cigarette over his daily ration. He wanted a coffee, but his stomach was too upset to drink it.

In the meantime, Margherita announced that Pasquali expected him at one thirty sharp. The man certainly wasn’t going to feed him lunch. Pasquali was a workaholic who barely ate. He needed a break.

In the outer office, Margherita was tapping on her keyboard.

“Can you help out with an investigation?”

She stared at him, clearly surprised.

“Of course. I’m all yours.” She said it without looking away from the screen.

In an earlier era, that “I’m all yours” would have carried other meanings and led to certain consequences. These days, though, young people called him “sir” and “Captain.” He was always a little surprised to hear those terms of address, but they didn’t bother him the way they once had—without physical attractiveness, the only power he possessed these days was conveyed through his position.

Having pondered these thoughts, he wondered if by chance he’d forgotten to take his antidepressant. This could have been a direct consequence of the depression. The sufferer can become self-destructive. The psychiatrist had mentioned this after Balistreri’s last visit, while he was writing a hefty check.

They went into his office and Balistreri closed the door. The wood was thin, so he could hear Coppola’s comment clearly.

“What the hell is going on around here? You’re shacking up with an Albanian faggot. Graziano’s mooning over a Ukrainian hooker, and the boss is screwing around with Margherita.”

Balistreri opened the door to his office. Piccolo looked ready to murder Coppola, but Balistreri shot her a look and she backed off.

“Don’t you have anything better to do, Coppola?” Coppola didn’t meet his gaze. At least he had the good grace to be embarrassed.

“I’m meeting the girlfriend of that Senegalese guy at the Bella Blu in the gym where Camarà worked during the day.”

“Get going then. But before you do, what were you talking about just now?”

Coppola turned pale. “I apologize, sir. I was out of line.”

“Not about me, about Corvu.”

“I told you Corvu had to pay for sex, didn’t I?” he said triumphantly.

Balistreri had already heard Corvu’s report and knew Natalya was no hooker. “Don’t go shooting your mouth off, Coppola,” he warned.

When they left, he shut the door again and turned to Margherita.

“Margherita, I’ve got a problem that a beautiful young woman such as yourself can solve for me.”

She turned bright red.

Old games I no longer have any use for
.

“It’s to do with work, Margherita,” he explained, trying to reassure her. “You have to imagine that you’re a prostitute who works as a pair with a friend and is waiting for customers on a dark street.”

“With a friend? You mean they do it together?” she asked.

This conversation’s becoming embarrassing; the girl’s too awkward.

“Not exactly. When one of you gets into a car with a john, the other one writes down the license plate number,” he explained.

Margherita settled down. “Okay, I get it.”

“So, you and your friend are on a dark street and there are no houses around. Just other prostitutes, the closest about fifty yards away from you. One gets into a car with a customer and the other takes down the number.”

“Okay.”

“A car stops, your friend gets in. You get the number. They drive off. You’re alone. You can see the other prostitutes, but they’re too far away for you to talk to each other. Two minutes go by. A car with only one headlight on—the other one must be broken—drives up and stops. What do you do?”

She looked at him a little uncertainly. “I take my time. I start chatting while waiting for my friend to come back.”

“He’s in a hurry. He tells you to get in,” Balistreri insisted.

“I continue to stall for time,” she repeated, not knowing what to say.

Balistreri got up and pulled down the blinds. The room was dark.

“Close your eyes. Place yourself in the scene.”

She looked at him uncertainly, but then her respect for authority and the desire to help kicked in. She closed her eyes and sank back into her chair.

“Now think about it, Margherita. He’s pushy. What’s going to happen?”

“He gets out, drags me into the car.”

“No, if he got out of the car you’d scream and the others would hear you and get suspicious. You get in.”

She was breathing heavily now. Concentrating.

“He knows my name,” she whispered.

Balistreri nodded. “Yes. He addresses you by name and asks you to get in. You go up close to get a better look. The car’s interior light comes on. Can you see him now, Margherita?”

Her voice was monotone, as if she were hypnotized. “Yes, I recognize him.”

“He smiles at you, beckons to you to get in. And you do. Why?”

“He’s someone I trust,” she whispered. “I was waiting for him.”

Balistreri’s voice seemed to come to her from far away. “He’s promised you the world, hasn’t he? And you know what he’ll give you instead, don’t you?”

Suddenly Margherita saw the face of her Latin teacher at school who’d invited her to take a ride. She let out a scream.

Five seconds later the door flew open. Giulia Piccolo was there—five foot eleven inches of muscle ready for action. Corvu was behind her.

“Come in and close the door,” Balistreri commanded, calmly switching on the light. Margherita blinked slowly. Balistreri put his hands on her shoulders. “Excellent job, Margherita.”

Piccolo and Corvu looked suspicious. They’d heard Margherita scream and seen the blinds lowered.

Balistreri could read their suspicions. Was it possible he’d fallen so low in their esteem?

He brought them back to reality. “Nadia recognized him and was waiting for him. It was all prearranged.”

Afternoon

The gym was on the ground floor of an office building near Via Veneto. When Coppola arrived at the entrance to the gym at one o’clock, several people could be seen through the windows working out on the equipment, lifting weights, and cycling on stationary bikes. Others were dancing to deafening thumping music around a large swimming pool. Professionals, well-heeled women, and some high-class villains, for sure.

Carmen was waiting for him. Like Camarà, she was of African descent. Her face wasn’t particularly pretty, but she had a trainer’s well-developed body.

“I’m from Miami,” she said in perfect Italian.

Coppola felt a sense of relief. His English couldn’t have withstood another test. She led him into a tiny cubicle that must have been her office. On the wall was a photo of her and a large-muscled black man standing in front of the gym.

“Were you good friends?” Coppola asked.

“We’d been together for three months,” she said. “Papa was a real sweetheart.”

“Was there anyone who held a grudge against him? Had he argued with anyone?”

Carmen shook her head. “No. It was that awful man on the motorcycle. I’m positive.”

“We know that they’d had words just before. We have a witness, an American from Texas,” Coppola added to give it more credibility.

“You don’t say,” she added scornfully. “A lying Texan, just like our president.”

“The witness states that they yelled at each other,” Coppola went on.

“The motorcyclist started it. Papa just told him to fuck off.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he called me right after and told me about it. We talked a bunch of times that night. He wasn’t feeling well. We were passing a urinary tract infection back and forth.”

Coppola had checked the phone records. Camarà had made a call to Carmen’s cell phone at two fourteen, right after the altercation with the motorcyclist and right before he was found dead. That call lasted two and a half minutes.

“What did he say?”

“He called to tell me he was okay. He was peeing a lot, but no temperature or anything. Then he told me about this guy on a motorcycle who’d screamed at him for no reason.”

“Had he ever seen the guy before?”

“No, that’s why it was so strange.”

Coppola lef the gym with the renewed conviction that urinary infections were common among people of African descent. He was too distracted to notice the man watching him from the opposite pavement.

. . . .

A little before one thirty Balistreri went on foot to see Pasquali. He realized he was short of breath and decided he ought to cut out even his last few pathetic cigarettes.

“He’s waiting for you in his office,” Antonella said. “Can I bring you a decaf?”

He nodded and thanked her. She really did watch out for him.

Pasquali was sitting at his imposing eighteenth-century desk. The little glasses on the end of his nose gave him the look of an intellectual. He could have been a harmless retired schoolteacher. Instead he was the ministry of the interior’s most influential official.

“Take a seat,” he ordered. “I have to be with the undersecretary in ten minutes, so I’ll be brief. We don’t like this business at all.”

He put an emphasis on the “we” without making it clear who else he meant. The chief of police, prefect, minister of the interior, his father. . . . But the mention of the undersecretary was not by chance. Balistreri said nothing.

Pasquali continued calmly. “It’s out of the question for you to bring charges against Deputy Captain Colajacono. You have nothing on him. He sent away a Romanian prostitute who didn’t know where another Romanian prostitute was. Is that really a crime? It barely qualifies as an oversight. Colajacono is respected by his colleagues and the locals.”

“And he’s respected by the residents of Casilino 900. Or maybe feared.”

“You and Colajacono are of like mind about Casilino 900.”

Balistreri shook his head. “No, we’re not. Colajacono wants to dismantle it, arrest everyone, and then deport them. I’m concerned about the safety of our citizens. Those camps are a time bomb waiting to go off. They should be moved outside of the city.”

“We need political consensus for that. We’re getting there.”

“All anybody cares about is getting reelected. On the left, they’re clueless. And on the other side they know only too well: procrastinate and let trouble brew, so in the meantime we have an increase in kidnapping, rape, and car theft by drunks who run people over. And perhaps with this tactic next year we can say good-bye to this mayor and one from the other side can take over.”

“It’s a complex problem, Michele. We need time and broad consensus. Any new camps need to comply with European regulations. And the Roma also have to be willing. The Vatican and the center–left coalition that’s in power aren’t going to agree to a forced move.”

Of course, let’s be patient until someone gets killed.

“Look,” Pasquali continued, “sometimes Colajacono’s methods are heavy-handed. As a policeman and as a Catholic, I don’t agree with them. But you can’t hang any charges on him.”