The Fatal Touch (2 page)

“When was this?” he said eventually.

“When was what?” said her mother, swooping in from the kitchen bearing an aluminum coffeepot and two small white cups with fat lips. “What are you saying, Arnaldo?”

She circled around the table and placed a cup in front of both of them. “The sugar’s in the kitchen, but I left it there because I know neither of you takes it. Be careful, Arnaldo, or you’ll burn your hand again. I’d leave it for a moment till it stops hissing. Don’t pour it yet. None for me, of course. I don’t drink coffee since my op.”

Her husband waited for her to complete the circuit of the table, gathering speed as she came onto the straight stretch leading back toward the kitchen. When she had gone, he unclasped his fists and put his silverware down on the table. “When was this?”

“Three days ago,” said Caterina. “On Tuesday. Since then, nothing. But there haven’t been any cases.”

“No murders in Rome?”

“Some muggings, probably the work of one person. No murders in our district, though. The weekend begins now. That’s always a good time for killing,” she said.

“We can only hope,” said her father. He drank his coffee, then eyed the bottom of the cup to make sure it was all gone. “If you do get assigned to a murder investigation,” he said, “you won’t say anything to your mother, will you? She still thinks you process passports.”

“Right,” said Caterina. She kissed him on his forehead, the least wrinkled and tragic part of his face, and stood up. At the front door, she hitched her shoulder bag across her chest, lifted a heavy plastic bag full of fruit that her mother had left for her despite her pleas that she had more fruit than she knew what to do with, and left.

She rubbed her eyes and refocused on the present. She was to report directly to the scene. She tried to remember what address the dispatcher had given, but although it had been less than a minute ago, it had merged into the dream she had been having about colored fountains and fighting babies. Elia was beside her. He was nine, now. Too old to sleep with his mother.

She sat up quickly before sleep could catch her again.

She phoned her parents, to tell them to come to look after Elia. Her mother said she would be over immediately and expected Caterina to wait.

Caterina was already dressed in yesterday’s clothes. If this was going to become a habit, she’d shower in the evenings and set out fresh clothes every night.

“I can’t wait. I have to go now. It’s an emergency call.”

“What if he wakes up alone in an empty house?”

“I told him it might happen. I’ll phone him. He knows you’ll be here.”

“I’ll be there right now. I want you to wait. You have to. What sort of mother . . .”

“I need to hang up, mamma. I’ll probably see you at the gate on my way out.”

“I don’t see what could possibly be so urgent . . .”

Caterina hung up, finished dressing quickly, kissed Elia, snug in the bed and smelling like a warm loaf of bread. She slung a leather satchel across her body, pulled the front door of the apartment closed, but did not lock it from the outside. Her mother always complained about this, saying gypsies could easily kick down the door, get in, and steal her only grandchild away.

Caterina had tried to address this particular phobia, but it was just one of many. “Gypsies don’t steal children, mother. That’s an urban myth. They have more than enough of their own.”

“And you a policewoman.”

“Which is why I am not locking my child in for any reason.”

She made it all the way to her car without meeting her mother. She did her best to suppress a faint buzzing of anxiety like a trapped black insect bouncing lightly against the inside of her breast. She hated it, the feeling of her mother’s fretfulness and fear insinuating its way into her own personality.

She got in the car and phoned the dispatcher to get the address again. Piazza de’ Renzi in Trastevere. Near work and far from home.

Caterina drove through the center and crossed the Tiber at Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II, wondering if she had chosen the fastest route. She followed the curve of the river, building up speed on the empty road. Then she turned right, and parked her car in the middle of Piazza Trilussa, to the annoyance or amusement, it was hard to tell, of a group of down-and-outs surrounded by beer bottles, and walked through two dark lanes to Piazza de’ Renzi. Out of the shadows stepped an Agente so young he seemed like a child who had dressed up as a policeman. He examined her ID card and wrote down her name. A few more steps brought her into the little piazza where she found four uniformed policemen, the coroner’s wagon, a five-strong team of technicians in a pool of halogen at the far side of the piazza, and the medical examiner already at the scene. Even from this distance, she recognized Rospo’s oddly shaped head. The other one was what’s-his-name—Di Ricci.

She saw no sign of Blume or any other detectives, and was not sure what her next move should be. Between a little magnolia tree and a clutter of small cars, she could just make out something dark on the ground, its presence revealed mainly through the contrast it made with the legs of the technicians as they moved back and forth in their white jumpsuits, and she realized she had been called in late.

She took out her notebook from her shoulder bag and began taking basic notes. The piazza was a trapezoid, shorter at the far end where the body lay. She had come up Vicolo de’ Renzi, to her left and fronting the murder scene was a restaurant, Cassetta Trastevere. To her right, turning neatly out of the piazza almost before it had begun, was another lane, its name a mystery. The corner of the piazza opposite her was closed, a tall pink building meeting a lower orange one. Two policemen from another district stood in the shadows talking quietly. One was heavy-set, jowly, and bald, and seemed to be giving instructions to the other, who was average build but with an oversized chin and a protruding lower lip, a mouth made for catching raindrops.

Caterina needed to know something before she dealt with Rospo, so she asked, “Who found the body?”

The bald policeman paused slightly, looking her up and down before nodding in the direction of Rospo and Di Ricci.

“Those two geniuses over there,” he said. “Talk to the guy with the big shiny head.”

Caterina went over to Rospo, who let his eyes travel up and down her while he adjusted his scrotum in his gray pants. “Well, well. Look who’s here.”

“Did you find the body?” asked Caterina.

Rospo raised his hands. “Guilty.”

Caterina could not think of what to say next. She had a feeling Di Ricci was clowning behind her back. Probably masturbatory movements, thrusting his pelvis, cupping his hands to indicate breasts. Rospo was definitely amused by something.

She spun round in time to catch Di Ricci in mid mime. The man was almost forty. “You,” she said, “go over to those two in the shadows, then take up positions at the entrances to this piazza. You can stand guard behind us, where the two lanes almost converge.” She pointed to the left. “Don’t let anyone through, except for the detectives when they arrive.”

Di Ricci did not move. He said, “We’re dealing with a dead tramp. A tramp fell down, banged his head, and died.”

Rospo said, “Sovrintendente Grattapaglia gives the deployment orders.”

“Is he here?” asked Caterina.

“No, but he’s on his way. Then things will get organized.”

“Who called in the body?”

“I did,” said Rospo. “Pair of Huns saw him lying in the street, went straight back to the hotel to tell the manager. That’s how they must report crimes in Germany. See a dead body, find the nearest hotel manager. Fucking Germans . . .” he spat.

“Has the victim been identified?”

“Sure.”

“By who?”

“Me again,” said Rospo. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen this guy, English tramp. Been living here for years. He paints, gets drunk. Sometimes gets into fights, though he must be about seventy. You’d almost admire that. People round here have complained about him for years, pissing into doorways, singing songs in the street.”

“Tramp?”

“Artist, if you prefer. Anyhow, soon as I saw who it was, I told the German to fuck off back to his hotel, then Di Ricci and me tried to lift him up and get him to walk home. We dragged him for a few meters, but then I immediately realized he was inert and pretty cold, so we put him down again, called dispatch, and requested a crew.”

“You dragged a dead body several meters from its original position?” asked Caterina.

Rospo shrugged. “We’d picked him up off the ground twenty times before. Who was to know he was dead this time? Anyhow, we put him back. This sort of shit happens all the time.”

“So those two technicians there are looking at where the body was, originally?” She pointed at two men standing a few meters apart from the others, staring at a piece of empty ground.

“More or less there, maybe a bit to the left, a bit behind that spot,” said Rospo.

“You don’t feel like going over and telling them to take a step or two back to where you actually found the body?”

“I can’t be so precise. Besides, they’ve probably already looked there. Nothing to see.”

Caterina walked over and stood outside the circle of technicians, none of whom acknowledged her. The victim was lying flat on his back on the ground, like he wanted to look at the stars. He had a short white beard, neater than seemed right for a tramp. His hair was white and curly, all of it bunched in curls at the back of his head. The moonlight through the magnolia leaves cast a strange pattern on the upturned face. Caterina moved slightly, but the pattern remained the same, and she realized the man’s left cheek was wrinkled and scarred. It looked like an old burn. She bet he had grown the beard to hide it. She felt the muscles in her neck tense and a shudder pass through her and turned around to see Rospo.

“I found him more or less here.” He knelt down on the ground, as if looking for something, stood up, brushed dirt off his knee, and nodded. “Yes, no, wait. It was maybe a bit further over. Fuck it. Let’s just say it was here.”

“Then what did you do?”

“While the ambulance was on its way, I felt for a pulse and found none. The EMTs reached the scene twenty minutes later and pronounced suspicious death, and a forensic team was called in. The suspected cause of death is blunt head trauma.”

Caterina looked over to see if the uniformed policemen had sealed off the entrances to the piazza like she said. They had not. Then, to her immense relief, she saw Commissioner Blume and Inspector Panebianco walking over toward her. Blume was carrying a bag, which he dropped on the ground next to her. He unzipped it, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, and snapped them on. Panebianco did the same, and then they waited for her. Feeling self-conscious, Caterina plucked out two gloves from the box and pulled them on, taking twice as long as Blume.

Blume nodded at Rospo, then turned his head downwards at his bag, and pointed at a roll of crime scene tape with his toe. Rospo picked it up, and Blume shook his head in sharp dismissal, saying, “What the hell? You need to be told everything?”

Rospo was gone. Blume asked Caterina to start writing down anything and everything she saw. But first, he wanted her to get the names of the policemen called to the scene and everyone present.

Then he asked her if anything had been added to the scene since she arrived or if anyone had touched the body. But as she began her complicated response he stopped her.

“It’s OK. I know about Rospo’s body-lifting efforts already. I just wanted to see if you did.”

“You were testing me?” A thought occurred to her. “You’re not really just arriving now, are you?”

“No. I got here a while ago.”

“You didn’t seal the area off,” said Caterina, annoyed at being played like this.

“I did. You didn’t check. The exclusionary cordon you wanted was fine, but I chose to close off
Vicolo del Moro. No access there means no access to any entrance to the piazza. One roadblock instead of two. Less manpower. We’ll narrow the area later, when people start waking up and going to work.”

“I see,” said Caterina.

Blume pointed to a pile of cobblestones and sand piled up against the wall of a bar, and said, “Use the tape and ring it around those stones afterwards. They might want looking at.”

“OK,” said Caterina.

Blume clapped his hands together. “So, are you having fun, Inspector?”

“I am glad to be here, if that’s what you mean,” said Caterina.

“If I had meant that, I would have asked if you were glad to be here,” said Blume. “Don’t you think this is fun?”

Caterina thought of her son waking up to her absence, the dead tramp with the white beard a few meters away, the scorn she had seen in the policemen’s eyes when she tried to give them orders. “No. I wouldn’t say fun, exactly, more . . .” She stopped, realizing that Blume did not really want to stand there listening to her trying to give shape to her thoughts.

Blume confirmed her suspicion by getting down to business. “So Rospo and his partner moved the body. Well, that’s a good start. I suppose we’ll begin with the assumption this is yet another mugging. Certainly, it’s another foreigner . . .” He stooped and she realized it was up to her to continue.