The Four Corners of Palermo (27 page)

Rosalia was making comparisons, while I tagged along behind her.

The oval medallion dangling from the stolen necklace had a border of interwoven laurel branches. At its center was a leg that could have belonged to a Hollywood diva. The engraver who’d done it clearly had an artistic touch: a fifties realist, from the school of Renato Guttuso. A shapely thigh, a slender calf, a graceful foot. All that was missing was the signature of the Maestro of Bagheria: Guttuso.

Rosalia pointed to an ex-voto down low, almost touching the floor.

“Look at this one, there’s a close resemblance.”

I knelt down beside her. Our shoulders touched. I held her hand, which held the pendant, and I laid it over the ex-voto hanging from the rock. One was an enlargement of the other.

We’d found it. I read out loud: “The Pecoraino family placed this ex-voto in gratitude for the grace received by Filomena—May 8, 1981.” I scribbled on my notepad: “Pecoraino,” “Filomena,” and the date. Three illegible scrawls. Rosalia looked down at the sheet of paper and asked: “What on earth did you just write?”

“Nothing, just notes for myself.”

She grabbed my arm with a dazzling gleam in her dark eyes. Being close to the other Rosalia, her namesake, had given her a concentration of distilled energy that, as we zoomed along the hairpin curves leading back to the Via della Favorita, was unleashed upon my chest, both hands holding tight as if they
were a gentle vise. Every time the Vespa braked, I could feel her bosom press against my back. I silently thanked the Santuzza.

At noon I was sitting across from Antonio Gualtieri, after dropping Rosalia off at the bus stop for Piazza Principe di Camporeale.

On his desk was a copy of
Tuttosport
, with a headline about Michel Platini on the front page.

“Antonio, he can do it, he can do it.”

“Keep it up and I’ll have you arrested.”

Platini was Juventus’s star player, and he was in line for the player of the year award.

“I know that you’re not allowed to joke about the Pallone d’Oro, but I’m saying it in all sincerity.”

“It might be safer for you if we stick to murders: What do you want to know?”

“Who are the Pecorainos?”

“Pecoraino who?”

“I can’t tell you that. A daughter or a wife ought to be named Filomena. This may have something to do with the severed head. I saw a necklace with a pendant. Do you think you could do me a favor—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Zoller!” he shouted, as if the office were going up in flames.

The inspector came rushing in.

“At your orders!”

“This young friend of mind wants to be an investigator. You wouldn’t happen to have a spot for him on your squad, would you?”

“
Dottore
, if you say so …” Zoller replied with a tone of resignation.

“You see, not even Zoller wants you. Do you really have to keep digging into the story of that head?”

I said nothing about Rosalia and the promise I’d made her.

“I’m obsessed with it. My boss says that it’s such a weird murder it boosts circulation.”

The pity ploy seemed to work.

“All right. Zoller, let’s see if we can help this young man who wants to be famous. Check into this Federica …”

“Filomena Pecoraino.”

“Filomena. But what does this woman have to do with the murder?”

“I really have no idea. Maybe nothing. But if I want to figure it out, it’s important to find out who she is.”

Gualtieri looked me up and down. “Here’s the young gumshoe again,” he said.

Zoller left the office with a brisk “I’m on it, sir!” in the direction of his commanding officer.

The policeman standing watch outside came in with two espressos. We talked about the Palermo team and how it was making me suffer, and about Juventus and how it was kindling dreams of championships. In those ten minutes, the phone must have rung a dozen times. I heard him say: “No,
you
go to hell, asshole!” then, “No, it’s not his shift,” then, “All right, he’s authorized to use his Ciao moped to follow the guy,” then, “The Greco clan? Well, what do you want me to do about it?” and finally, “No, I don’t think I’ll be home tonight earlier than ten. Calamari will be fine.” Fragments of conversations with subordinate officers, judges, the chief of
police, noncommissioned officers, and his wife. Gualtieri’s telephone was a nightmare with a ring tone.

Zoller came back.

“
Dottore
, I think I’ve found it. Pecoraino, Filomena, born in Palermo on August 10, 1970, died in Palermo on February 16, 1982. The daughter of Pecoraino, Ruggero, born in 1947, the brother-in-law of Incorvaia, Salvatore, born in 1944, fugitive from the law, the capo of the
mandamento
of Partanna Mondello according to the testimony of the informant Gaspare Fascetta.”

Giovanni Neglia had stolen the wrong thing from the wrong apartment. I told Gualtieri about the stolen pendant with the copy of the ex-voto; I told him what I’d seen in the grotto atop Monte Pellegrino, without mentioning the fact that I’d been there with Rosalia.

He thanked me. By that time, he’d come up with an idea of what had happened.

I went back to the newspaper in a hurry, just in time to write a front-page piece. The headline read: “Mystery of the Severed Head: There’s a Lead.”

I made no mention in the article of either family, Pecoraino or Incorvaia. I simply mentioned a copy of an ex-voto that had provided the investigation with a lead. I quoted Rosalia Neglia, the bereaved daughter, as saying that she needed to find out the truth. “You can’t live with the burden of doubt,” she said, in conclusion. As if she were a Kantian philosopher. Words she’d never said, but that I had thought. As in so many cases of shoddy journalism, I’d attributed my own thoughts to the person I was interviewing, in place of her own.
Nice work
, I said to myself as I reread what I’d written.

I spent the afternoon at the paper, looking over my notes from the piazza in front of the train station, Porticello, the mobile squad, and Monte Pellegrino. I couldn’t figure out the reason for the ex-voto: the little girl had died in the end. No grace had been received. As is so often the case, neither the doctors nor the Santuzza had done a bit of good. Then why had the Pecoraino family paid to engrave not one but two gold ex-votos?

I asked Annamaria, my friend the archivist, to find me the death notices for February 17, 1982. The day after little Filomena died. An hour later, there was a Xerox on my desk.

Papà Ruggero and Mamma Maria, in an agony of grief, mourn the loss of
FILOMENA PECORAINO
age 12, taken from this life, an innocent child, after terrible suffering
.
May God embrace her in glory
.
Our gratitude goes out to the physicians of the Children’s Hospital, especially Dr. Rosa Buttitta
.

There was a lead. Just like it said on our front page.

The Children’s Hospital looked like a Chilean penitentiary. Gray, cube-shaped, all it lacked were machine-gun nests at the corners and barbed wire all around it.

You could feel the despair of the place on your skin, as if it were a uniform. A mother hit me with the wheelchair she was pushing: the little girl sitting in it looked at me glassy-eyed, her face deformed by a spasm. At the front desk, I asked for Dr. Rosa Buttitta.

“Do you have an appointment with the head physician?” a fat man with white hair and a copy of
La Settimana Enigmistica
draped over the telephone asked me.

“No, I wanted to see Dr. Buttitta.”

“Which means you want to see the head physician.”

“Oh, I see. Sorry.”

I’d gotten off on the wrong foot. I introduced myself and the receptionist shoved
La Settimana Enigmistica
aside, making a call to the ward upstairs and reporting that a journalist was asking to come up.

“It’s a sad case, about a little girl who died,” I suggested.

The receptionist covered the receiver with one hand and froze me to the spot by whispering: “Believe me, all our cases are sad.”

On the other end of the line, someone said something.

“All right, I’ll send him up.”

He hung up the phone. He would have been much happier calling security and having me tossed out on the street.

The ward was on the third floor. The sign at the entrance, plastic, said:
GENERAL MEDICINE 1—CHIEF PHYSICIAN DR. ROSA BUTTITTA
. With an X-Acto knife, someone had carved into the plastic: “Ring Bell.”

I obeyed instructions and rang, even if there was no need: the door was open.

There was a hustle and bustle of nurses. At the end of the corridor I noticed a tall woman in a lab coat, with fluffy blonde hair, flanked by two young men, likewise dressed in white. I stopped a male nurse pushing a gurney.

“Is that the head physician?” I asked, pointing at the woman.

He nodded his head and moved away.

I walked toward her. She had just dismissed her two assistants and was walking back into her office.

I introduced myself.

“Ah, the journalist. Come with me.”

We walked into her office. A simple room with a white metal desk, a sofa in burgundy Naugahyde, and a glass-front cabinet for the medicines that pharmaceutical reps gave her. The wall behind the desk was adorned with a large baroque oil painting, a landscape with red highlights. A second canvas was hanging next to a Swedish bookcase: it depicted a man from behind, looking out over the sea from the rocks. An image that could contain, depending on the eyes of the beholder, either hope or despair.

“Do you like art?”

“It helps me to survive,” she replied, with a faint but courteous smile.

“I could never do the work you do.”

“I chose it at age twenty. Now I’m fifty-six. With these hands, I’ve touched pain and suffering of every kind.”

She held her hands out to me: her fingernails were painted with Mavala, a product to stop nail biting.

“Doctor, forgive me. I need to ask what you remember about a little girl who, sadly, is no longer with us.”

I blushed at the hypocrisy of the euphemism. This wasn’t a woman who needed false sanctimony.

“Tell me the name and the date of death.”

“Filomena Pecoraino, February 16, 1982.”

She called an assistant and told him to bring her the clinical file.

“She was my patient. I remember. She had a bone tumor that began in her right leg. She passed away in the orthopedic
ward. But I followed her case throughout her illness. They diagnosed the tumor when she was ten. A year of chemo, and she seemed much improved. Her parents thought she was cured.”

And they offered their thanks to St. Rosalia, I added in my mind.

It was all becoming clearer.

“Do you remember ever seeing Filomena wearing a gold necklace?”

“She never wanted to take it off. Every time I came to see her, I’d joke about her jewelry. Her parents had given it to her. They’d told her it ensured that Saint Rosalia, the Santuzza, would protect her. I’ve never encouraged that sort of thing among my patients. Still, of course, fairy tales for children …”

She broke off. Her eyes focused on a point midway between the glass-front pharmaceuticals cabinet and the bookshelf. The dirty white of the wall.

“Did they call you when she died?”

“Yes, they wanted me to be with them. The little girl was half-unconscious, because of all the drugs she was on; she died in the evening, holding her
mamma
’s hand. I remember that at first the
signora
couldn’t seem to cry. She silently took the necklace off Filomena’s neck. She put it in her purse, walked away from the bed like a robot. Then she fainted.”