Читать книгу A Cold Death - Antonio Manzini - Страница 7

They were March days, days that bring splashes of sunshine and hints of the springtime to come. Shafts of sunlight, warm, not yet hot, and fleeting, but still: light that colored the world and kindled hopes.

But not in Aosta.

It had rained all night long and pellets of watery snow had pelted down on the city until two in the morning. Then the temperature had plunged by many degrees, handing defeat to the rain and victory to the snow, snow that continued to flake down until six, covering streets and sidewalks. At dawn, the sun came up diaphanous and feverish, illuminating a city washed white while the last straggling snowflakes fluttered lazily down, spiraling onto the sidewalks. The mountains were swathed in clouds and the temperature sat several degrees below freezing. Then a malevolent wind sprang up unexpectedly, charging into the city’s streets like a raiding party of drunken Cossacks, rudely slapping people and objects.

On Via Brocherel, the wind had only objects to slap, given the fact that the street was deserted. The NO PARKING sign tossed and wobbled while the branches of the small trees planted along the road creaked like the bones of an arthritic old man. The snow, which hadn’t yet been packed down, whirled through the air in little wind funnels, and here and there a loose shutter banged repeatedly. Gusts of icy powder swept off apartment building roofs.

As Irina rounded the corner of Via Monte Emilus onto Via Brocherel she was caught by a punch of cold air straight to her face.

Her hair, gathered in a ponytail, swung out behind her; her blue eyes squinted slightly. If you’d taken a close-up of her and knew nothing about the context, you might think she was a madwoman without a helmet riding a motorcycle at 75 miles per hour.

But that sudden icy slap in the face actually felt to her like a gentle caress. She didn’t even bother to tug closed the lapels of her gray woolen overcoat. For someone who’d been born and raised in Lida, just a few miles from the Lithuanian border, that blast of wind was nothing more than a mild spring breeze. While it might still be winter in Aosta in March, back home in Belarus they were dealing with ice and temperatures around 15 degrees, well below freezing.

Irina was walking briskly, her feet clad in a pair of knockoff Hogan sneakers that sparkled with every step; as she walked she sucked on a piece of honey-flavored hard candy she’d bought at the café after enjoying her breakfast. If there was one thing she loved about Italy, it was breakfast at the café. Cappuccino and brioche. The noise of the espresso machine steaming the milk, churning up the frothy white foam that the barista then blended with strong black coffee and finally sprinkled with cocoa powder. And the brioche, hot, crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth sweet. Just the memory of the breakfasts she used to eat in Lida … those inedible mushy gruels made of barley and oats, the coffee that tasted like mud. And then, the cucumbers—that bitter taste first thing in the morning. Her grandfather used to chase them down with a glass of schnapps, while her father used to scoop the butter directly off the butter dish into his mouth as if it were some caramel dessert. When she told Ahmed about that, he’d laughed so hard he’d come dangerously close to vomiting. “Butter? By the spoonful?” he’d asked in disbelief. As he laughed, he displayed the gleaming white teeth Irina so envied. Her teeth were a dull gray. “It’s the climate,” Ahmed had told her. “In Egypt the weather is hot and so people’s teeth are whiter. The colder it is, the darker the teeth. It’s the exact opposite of skin color. It’s all because of the sunshine you don’t have. Plus, on top of that, if you start eating butter by the spoonful!” and he laughed some more. Irina loved him. She loved the way he smelled when he came home from the market. The scents of apples and new-mown grass floated off him. She loved it when he prayed to Mecca, when he baked apple cakes for her, when they made love. Ahmed was sweet and considerate and he never got drunk and his breath always smelled of mint. The only drinking he did was a beer every now and then, and even then he would say, “The Prophet wouldn’t approve.” But he did like beer. Irina would look at him and think about the men back home, the way they guzzled hard liquor, their foul breath, the stink on their skin. A mix of stale sweat, vodka, and cigarettes. But Ahmed had an explanation for this stark difference too. “In Egypt, we wash more often, because you have to be clean when you pray to Allah. And as hot as it is, we dry off very fast. Where you’re from, it’s cold, and you never really get dry. This too is because of the sunshine,” he told her. “In any case, we’d never eat butter by the spoonful,” and he was bent over laughing again.

But now her relationship with Ahmed had come to the crossroads. He’d made his declaration.

He’d asked her to marry him.

There were a few issues, strictly technical ones. If they were going to get married, either Irina would need to embrace the Muslim religion, or he’d have to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. And that was easier said than done. She could never become a Muslim. Not for any real religious reasons: Irina no more believed in God than she believed in the likelihood of hitting the Powerball jackpot. No, it was the thought of her parents that kept her from converting. Up north in Belarus, her family was Orthodox and faithful—to them God was “Bog.” Her papa, Alexei, and her mama, Ruslava, her five brothers, her aunts, and most of all, her cousin Fyodor, who had married the daughter of a metropolitan. How could she tell them: “Hi all! Starting tomorrow I’m going to be referring to Bog as Allah”? For that matter, it wasn’t as if Ahmed could call his father down south in Faiyum and say: “You know what, dad? Starting tomorrow, I’m Eastern Orthodox!” Aside from the fact that Ahmed seriously doubted his father even knew what being Orthodox meant: he’d probably think it was some kind of infectious disease. So Irina and Ahmed were considering a civil union. They would grit their teeth and stick to the plan. At least as long as Aosta remained home to them. Then Bog, Allah, or the Lord Almighty would look out for them.

She’d reached the apartment building at no. 22 of Via Brocherel. She pulled out her keys and opened the street door. What a fine big building that was! With its marble steps and wooden handrails. Not like her building, with its chipped terra-cotta floor tiles and damp patches on the ceiling. And no elevator, not like here. In her building you had to trudge up the stairs to the fourth floor. And every third step was broken, the next one was loose, and then one would be missing entirely. To say nothing of the heating, with the kerosene stove that hissed and whistled and would operate properly only after you gave a good hard bang on the door. She dreamed of living in an apartment building like this one on Via Brocherel. With Ahmed and his son, Hilmi. Hilmi was already eighteen and he didn’t know a word of Arabic. Irina had done her best to show him love, but Hilmi didn’t give a damn about her. “You’re not my mother! Mind your own fucking business!” he’d shout at her. And Irina would take it in silence. She’d think of that boy’s mother. The woman had gone back to Egypt, to Alexandria, where she was working in a shop run by relatives; she had never wanted to hear from her son or her husband again, as long as she lived. The name Hilmi meant calm and tranquility. Irina smiled at the thought: never had anyone been given a less appropriate name. Hilmi seemed like a flashlight that never turned off. He went out all the time, he didn’t even come home to sleep, he was a disaster at school, and at home he bit the hand that fed him.

“You miserable loser!” he would say to his father. “You’ll never get me to go sell fruit from a stall like you! I’d rather have sex with old men!”

“Oh really? So what are you going to do instead?” Ahmed would shout back. “Get the Nobel Prize?” It was a sarcastic reminder to his son of how catastrophically bad his grades were. “You’ll just be unemployed and homeless, that’s what you’ll be. And that’s not much of a future, you know that?”

“Better than selling apples out on the street or cleaning other people’s apartments like this scrubwoman you’ve taken in,” and he’d point at Irina in distaste. “I’ll make plenty of money and I’ll come visit you the day they put you in a hospital bed! But don’t you worry. I’ll pay for a nice big coffin to bury you in.”

Usually those arguments between Ahmed and Hilmi ended with the father taking a swing at his son and his son slamming the door as he stormed out of the apartment, extending further the crack in the plaster wall. By now it reached practically up to the ceiling. Irina felt certain that the next time they had a fight, both wall and ceiling would collapse, worse than what happened during the Vilnius earthquake of 2004.

The elevator doors swung open and Irina turned left immediately, toward Apartment 11R.

The lock opened after just one turn of the key. Strange, very strange, thought Irina. All the other times, she had to turn the key three full turns. She went to the Baudos’ three times a week and never once in the past year had she ever found either of them at home. At ten in the morning, the husband had long ago left for work, though on Fridays he actually left home at dawn to go ride his bike. The signora, on the other hand, only came in after doing her grocery shopping at eleven: Irina could have set her watch by it. Perhaps Signora Esther had caught the intestinal flu that was felling victims in Aosta worse than a plague epidemic in the Dark Ages. Irina walked into the apartment, bringing a gust of snowy cold air with her. “Signora Esther, it’s me, Irina! It’s nice and cold out … are you home, Signora?” she called as she put her keys away in her purse. “Didn’t you go grocery shopping?” Her hoarse voice, a result of the twenty-two cigarettes she smoked every day, echoed off the smoked glass of the front door.

“Signora?”

She slid the pocket door to one side and walked into the living room.

The place was a mess. On the low table in front of the TV sat a tray with the remains of dinner still on it. Chicken bones, a squeezed lemon, and greenish scraps. Spinach, maybe. Crumpled up on the sofa was an emerald-green blanket and in the ashtray were a dozen cigarette butts. Irina decided that the signora was most likely in her bedroom with a fever, and that last night her husband, Patrizio, had eaten dinner alone and watched the soccer game. Otherwise there would have been two trays, his and Signora Esther’s. The pages of the Corriere dello Sport were scattered all over the carpet, and a drinking glass had left two distinct rings on the antique blond wood table. Shaking her head, Irina walked over to clear up: one foot kicked an empty wine bottle and it went rolling across the floor. Irina picked up the bottle and set it on the low table. Then she took the ashtray and dumped the butts into the plate with the stale food. “Signora? Are you in there? Are you in bed?”

No answer.

With both hands occupied by the tray and precariously balancing the bottle of merlot, she bumped the kitchen door open with one hip. But she didn’t walk through the door. She froze and stood staring. “What on earth …?” she half-muttered to herself.

The pantry doors swung open. The floor was covered with dishes, utensils, and glasses alongside boxes of pasta and cans of tomato paste. Tablecloths, dish towels, silverware, and paper napkins were strewn everywhere. Oranges had rolled to the base of the half-open refrigerator. Chairs were knocked over, the table was shoved almost against the wall, and the handheld electric mixer that lay shattered on the floor tiles spewed wires and electric gadgets out of its belly.

“What happen here!” Irina shouted. She set down the tray and turned toward the hallway.

“Signora Esther!” she called again. No answer. “Signora Esther, what happen here?”

She hurried into the bedroom, hoping to find the signora there. The bed was unmade. Sheets and duvet heaped in a corner. The armoire thrown wide open. She backed away, cautiously, toward the kitchen. “But what …?” Then her foot hit something on the floor. She looked down. A cell phone, shattered.

“Burglars!” she shouted and, as if someone had placed a cold, menacing blade against her back, she stiffened, turned, and ran. The antique afghan carpet that lay rumpled on the floor tripped her up. Irina sprawled headlong and banged her knee on the floor.

Chunk!

The muffled sound of a kneecap cracking, followed by a stabbing pain penetrating directly into her brain. “Aahh!” she screamed through clenched teeth, and holding her knee with both hands she got to her feet. She aimed straight toward the sliding pocket entrance door, certain that behind her lurked a couple of scary-looking men, their faces concealed by balaclavas, black, and with the sharp teeth of ferocious beasts. She banged her shoulder against the panel of the sliding door, and it quavered, shivering the smoked glass. Now another stab of pain sank its fangs deep into her clavicle. But this one she felt less. Irina mustered all the adrenaline she had in her body and limped out of the Baudos’ apartment. She hastily slid the door shut behind her. She was panting. Now that she was on the landing she felt a little safer. She looked down at her knee. Her stocking was torn and drops of blood stained her pale white flesh. She licked two fingers and ran them over the wound. The pain had shifted from keen to dull and throbbing, but it was now a little easier to take. Then it dawned on her that she was not even remotely safe on the landing. If the burglars were inside the apartment, how hard would it be for them to open the door and slaughter her, to stab her with a knife or beat her to death with a crowbar? She started limping gingerly down the stairs and shouting: “Help! Burglars! Burglars!”

She pounded on the doors facing the third-floor landing, but no one came to answer. “Help! Burglars! Open up! Open up!”

She continued downstairs. If she could, she would have been taking the steps two at a time, but her knee wouldn’t let her. She held tight to the handsome wooden handrail and thanked God that she’d put on the counterfeit Hogan sneakers that morning, sneakers that she’d purchased at the flea market near her house: at least they had rubber soles. If she’d been wearing leather soles on those marble steps, she could easily have slid down two or three flights flat on her ass. She tried knocking on the second-floor doors. She pounded with her fists, pushed the doorbells, and even kicked, but there was no one home. No one came to the door. Only from one apartment did she hear the hysterical yapping of some tiny dog answering her knock.

A building full of dead people, she thought to herself.

Finally she reached the ground floor. She tugged open the front door and lurched out into the street. It was deserted. Nothing in sight, not even a shop or a bar where she could ask for help. She looked at the buildings lining Via Brocherel. No one at the windows, no one entering or leaving. The sky was leaden and gray. There were no cars. At ten in the morning it seemed as if the world had ground to a halt, at least in that street: as if it were paralyzed, as if she were the only living creature in the whole neighborhood. “Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Then, as if by some miracle, an old man appeared at the corner wrapped in a heavy scarf with a little mutt dog on a leash. Irina ran straight toward him.

Retired army warrant officer Paolo Rastelli, born in 1939, lurched to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman with no overcoat, her hair standing straight up, and limping with a badly bloodied knee was galloping straight at him, her mouth gaping like a new-caught fish. She was shouting something. But the warrant officer couldn’t hear what it was. All he saw was her mouth wide open, as if she were chewing the chilly air. He decided to turn on the Maico hearing aid he wore in his right ear, which he always kept off when he took Flipper out for his walks. Flipper was a mix of Yorkshire terrier and thirty-two other breeds. The dog was more volatile than a flask of nitroglycerine. A dry leaf in the wind, water gurgling down a runoff pipe, or just Flipper’s diseased imagination was enough to set that fourteen-year-old mutt off, yapping in an irritating high-pitched bark that sent shivers up and down Rastelli’s spine, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. As soon as he switched it on, the hearing aid shot a burst of electric static into his brain. Then, as he expected, the white noise sharpened into Flipper’s shrill yapping, until he could finally hear words with some meaning pouring out of the woman’s open mouth: “Help, help, somebody help me! Burglars!”

Flipper had lost most of the vision in his right eye, and his left eye had been useless for years. The dog wasn’t barking at the woman, he was barking at a traffic sign tossing and clattering in the wind on the other side of the street. Paolo Rastelli had only seconds to make up his mind. He looked behind him: there was no one in sight. There wasn’t time to pull out his cell phone and call the police; by now the woman was just yards away, galloping toward him as if demonically possessed, shouting all the while: “Help! Help me, Signore!” He could turn and run from that latter-day fury with her straw-blond hair, but first he’d have to reckon with the pin in his hip and his wheezing lungs, already on the verge of emphysema. And so, just as when he was a raw recruit, a private standing guard at the munitions dump, he remained rooted to the spot, standing to attention, waiting for trouble to wash over him with all the ineluctability of malicious fate, cursing Flipper and the dog’s midmorning walks, cursing at the constant need to take a tiny yapping dog out to piss and break off work on his crossword puzzles.

It was 10:10 on the morning of Friday, March 16.

When the alarm went off, it was twenty to eight. Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone had been stationed in Aosta for months now, and as he did every morning he walked over to the bedroom window. Slowly and intently—like a champion poker player fanning open the hand of cards that’s going to determine whether he wins or folds—he pulled open the heavy curtains and peered out at the sky, in the vain hope of a glimpse of sunlight.

“Shit,” he’d muttered. That Friday morning, as usual, a sky as oppressive as the lid of a pressure cooker, a sidewalk white with snow, and natives walking hurriedly, bundled up in scarves and hats. Now even they feel the cold, Rocco had thought to himself. Well, well, well.

The usual daily routine: shower, coffee pod in the espresso machine, shave. Standing in front of his clothes closet, he had no doubts about how to dress. Same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the same as tomorrow and so on for who knows how many days yet to come. Dark brown corduroy trousers, cotton T-shirt underneath, wool T-shirt over that, wool blend socks, checked flannel shirt, V-necked light cashmere sweater, green corduroy jacket, and his trusty Clarks. He’d done some rapid mental calculations: six months in Aosta had cost him nine pairs of shoes. Maybe he really did need to find a good alternative to desert boots, but he couldn’t seem to. Two months ago he’d bought himself a pair of Teva snow boots, for when he’d had to spend time on the ski slopes above Champoluc, but wearing those cement mixers around town was out of the question. He’d put on his loden overcoat, left the apartment, and headed for the office. Like every morning, he left his cell phone powered down. Because his daily ritual still wasn’t complete when he got dressed and left for the office. There were still two fundamental steps before really starting the day: get breakfast at the café in the town’s main piazza and then sit down at his desk and roll his morning joint.

The trip into police headquarters was the most delicate phase. Still wrapped in the dreams and thoughts of the night before, his mood as bleak and gray as the sky overhead, Rocco always made a muted entrance, as darting and slithery as a viper moving through the grass. If there was one thing he wanted to avoid, it was running into Officer D’Intino. Not at eight thirty, not first thing in the morning. D’Intino: the police officer, originally from the province of Chieti, a place the deputy police chief despised, possibly even more than he hated the inclement weather of Val d’Aosta. A man of D’Intino’s ineptitude was likely to cause potentially fatal accidents to his colleagues, though never to himself. D’Intino had sent Officer Casella to the hospital just last week by backing his car into him in the police parking lot, when he could perfectly well have just put the car into first gear and driven straight out. He’d crushed one of Rocco’s toenails by dropping a heavy metal filing drawer on his foot. And he’d come terrifyingly close to poisoning Officer Deruta with his mania for cleanliness and order, by leaving a bottle of Uliveto mineral water around—only filled with bleach. Rocco had sworn he’d fix D’Intino’s wagon, and he’d started pressuring the police chief to transfer the officer to some police station in the Abruzzi where he would certainly be much more useful. Fortunately, that morning no one had come cheerfully out to greet him. The only person who’d said good morning was Scipioni, who was on duty at the front entrance. And Scipioni had limited his greeting to a bitter smile, and then lowered his eyes back to the papers he was going over. Rocco made it safely to his desk, where he smoked a nice fat joint. His healthy morning dose of grass. When he finally crushed the roach out in his ashtray, it was just past nine. Time to turn on his cell phone and begin the day. The phone immediately emitted an alert that meant he had a text message.

Are you ever going to spend the night at my place?

It was Nora. The woman he’d been exchanging bodily fluids with ever since he’d moved from Rome to Aosta. A shallow relationship, a sort of mutual aid society, but one that she was steering straight toward the breaking point—a demand for stability of some sort. Something that Rocco was unable and unwilling to face up to. He was perfectly fine with things the way they were. He didn’t need a girlfriend. His girlfriend was and always would be his wife, Marina. There was no room for another woman. Nora was beautiful and she helped to alleviate his loneliness. But he didn’t know how to resolve his psychological difficulties. People who go to an analyst do it because they want to get better. And there was no way that Rocco would ever set foot in an analyst’s office. No one walks a woman to the altar just for the exercise. If they go to the altar, it’s because they want to spend the rest of their lives with another person. Rocco had already taken that walk once years ago, and his intentions really had been sincere, the very best intentions. He was going to spend the rest of his life with Marina, and that was that. But sometimes things just don’t go the way you expect them to, they break, they unravel, and you can’t stitch them back together again. But that was a secondary problem. Rocco belonged to Marina, and Marina belonged to Rocco. Everything else was an afterthought, branches that could be pruned, autumn leaves.

While Rocco was thinking about Nora’s face, her curves and her ankles, a sudden crushing realization hit him square in the forehead. He’d just remembered the words she had whispered to him the night before, as they lay curled up in bed. “Tomorrow I turn forty-three, and on my birthday I’m the queen. So you have to behave like a good boy,” and she had flashed him a smile, with her perfect white teeth.

Rocco had continued kissing her and squeezing her large luscious breasts without a word. But even while he was enjoying Nora’s nude body, he understood that tomorrow he’d have to buy her a gift, and maybe even take her out to dinner, and certainly miss the Friday peek-ahead to Sunday’s Roma-Inter match.

“No perfume,” she’d warned him, “and I hate all kinds of scarves and plants. I’ll buy my own earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, and the same goes for books. To say nothing of CDs. There, at least now you know what kind of presents not to get me, unless you’re actually trying to ruin my birthday.”

What was left to bring as a gift? Nora had thrown him into a state of crisis. Or really she was forcing him to think, to reflect on what he should do. Giving presents, whether for birthdays or at Christmas, was one of the things that Rocco detested most intensely. He’d have to waste time on it, think of something, wander around from store to store like an asshole, and he didn’t feel like it in the slightest. But if he wanted to slip between the sheets and go on banqueting off that splendid female body, he’d need to dream up something. And he’d need to come up with it today, because today was Nora’s birthday.

“What a pain in the ass,” he’d said under his breath, just as someone knocked at his office door. Rocco had lunged to yank open the window to air out the room, then like a bloodhound he’d sniffed at the ceiling and four walls to make sure you could no longer catch a whiff of cannabis, then he’d shouted “Avanti!” and Inspector Caterina Rispoli had walked in. The first thing she did was wrinkle her nose and make a face. “What’s that smell?”

“I’m applying rosemary plasters for this cold I have!” Rocco had replied.

“But you don’t seem to have a cold, sir.”

“That’s because I use rosemary plasters. Which is why I don’t have a cold.”

“Rosemary plasters? Never heard of them.”

“Homeopathy, Caterina, it’s serious stuff.”

“My grandmother taught me how to make plasters with eucalyptus nuts.”

“What?”

“Eucalyptus PLASTERS.”

“My grandmother taught me how to make plasters too.”

“With rosemary?”

“No. With my own fucking business. Now, are you going to tell me what you’re doing in my office?”

Caterina fluttered her long eyelashes for a moment and then, after regaining control of her nerves, she said: “There’s one crime report that might bear closer examination …” holding out a sheet of paper for Rocco to see. “In the park by the train station, somebody called to say that every night there’s a tremendous ruckus until three.”

“Hookers?” Rocco had asked.

“No.”

“Drugs?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Rocco gave the report a quick scan. “We ought to follow up on this …” Then a magnificent idea occurred to him that all by itself gave a brand-new meaning to the day. “Get me the cretins, right away.”

“Get you the what?” Caterina asked.

“D’Intino and Michele Deruta.”

The inspector had nodded quickly and hurried out of the room. Rocco took that opportunity to close the window. It was freezing. But his excitement about the idea he’d just had made him forget about the chill that filled the room. Not five minutes later, D’Intino and Deruta, escorted by Caterina Rispoli, walked into his office.

“D’Intino and Deruta,” Rocco said in a serious tone, “I have an important job for the two of you. It will require your utmost attention and sense of responsibility. Are you up to it?”

Deruta had smiled and rocked back on his heels, balancing his 245 pounds of weight on his size 8 shoes. “Certainly, Dottore!”

“Most assuredly, no doubt about it!” D’Intino backed him up.

“Now listen carefully. I’m going to ask you to do a stakeout. At night.” The two officers were all ears. “In the park by the station. We suspect there’s drug dealing going on. We don’t know whether it’s smack or coke.”

Deruta glanced at D’Intino in excitement. At last, an assignment worthy of their skills.

“Find yourselves a place where you won’t be noticed. Requisition a camera, so you can take pictures and record everything you see. I want to know what they’re doing, how much narcotics they’re dealing, who’s doing the dealing, and in particular I want names. Are you up for it?”

“Certainly,” D’Intino replied.

“Well, though, I have to work at my wife’s bakery,” Deruta had objected. “You know that I often help her out, and we work until sunrise. Just last night I—”

Snorting in disgust, Rocco stood up and cut off what the officer was saying. “Michele! It is a wonderful and admirable thing that you help your wife out at the bakery, and that you break your back with a second job. But first and foremost, you’re a sworn officer of the law, for fuck’s sake! Not a baker!”

Deruta nodded.

“You’ll both be reporting to Inspector Rispoli.”

Deruta and D’Intino had swallowed the news unwillingly; it was clearly a bitter mouthful. “But why her? We always have to report to her!” D’Intino had the nerve to say.

“First of all, Rispoli is an inspector and you aren’t. Second, she’s a woman and I’m not going to send her out into the field to do a challenging stakeout like the one to which I’ve assigned the two of you. Third, and this is a fundamental thing, you will do exactly what I tell you to do, D’Intino, or else I will kick your ass from here to Chieti. Is that quite clear?”

D’Intino and Deruta nodded their heads in unison. “When do we start?”

“Tonight. Now get out of here. I need to have a talk with Rispoli.” The inspector had said nothing, standing off to one side. As the two male officers filed out of the room, they’d glared angrily at her.

“Dottore, now you’re putting me in an awkward position with those two.”

“Don’t worry, Rispoli, this way we’ve got them out from underfoot. What I need now is some advice. Sit down.”

Caterina did as she was told.

“I have to get a gift.”

“Birthday?”

“Exactly. I’ll give you the information. It’s a woman, age forty-three, in good shape, sells wedding dresses for a living; she’s from Aosta, she has good taste, and she’s quite well-off.”

The inspector took a moment to think it over. “Personal friend?”

“That’s my fucking business.”

“Understood.”

“Rule out flowers, scarves, plants, jewelry, books, perfume, and CDs.”

“I need to know more about her. Is this Nora Tardioli? The one with the shop in the center of town?”

Rocco nodded, without a word.

“Congratulations, Dottore, nice get.”

“Thanks, but as per aforementioned comment, my own fucking business.”

“How far out on a limb are you interested in going?”

“Not far. Just consider it a tactical move, keeping the status quo. Why?”

“Because, otherwise, you could give her a diamond ring.”

“That’s not going far. That’s handing yourself over to the enemy bound hand and foot.”

Caterina smiled. “Let me think it over. Does she have any hobbies?”

“As far as I know? She likes to go to the movies, but I’d avoid DVDs. She goes swimming twice a week, and works out three times a week. She’s a cross-country skier. And I think she bikes too.”

“Who are we talking about here? Lindsey Vonn?”

“Right now it’s …” Rocco glanced at his watch. “Ten fifteen. Do you think you can come up with an idea by noon?”

“I’ll do my best!”

Just then, Officer Italo Pierron threw open the door and strode into the room. Along with Rispoli, Pierron was the only other officer Rocco considered worthy of being on the force. He was allowed to walk into the deputy police chief’s office without knocking and address him by his first name outside the four walls of police headquarters. He glanced briefly at Caterina and nodded hello.

“Dottore?”

The young officer’s face was pale and alarmed. Rocco asked: “Italo, what’s wrong?”

“Something urgent.”

“Go on.”

“A call came in. Apparently a gang of burglars have barricaded themselves in the apartment of Patrizio and Esther Baudo on Via Brocherel.”

“Barricaded themselves?”

“That’s the term used by Paolo Rastelli, a retired warrant officer who’s also half-deaf. That’s what I managed to piece out, but in the background I could hear a woman screaming: ‘They’re inside! They’re inside! They’ve turned the place upside down!’”

Rocco nodded. “Let’s go …”

“Can I come too?” asked Caterina.

“Better not. I need you here. Stay close to the telephone.”

“Roger.”

As they zipped through city intersections with their siren off, Rocco pulled a cigarette out of Italo’s pack and looked out at the perfectly plowed streets. “The city government does its job up here, eh? In Rome you get a couple of flakes of snow and there are more deaths than from the start of the August vacations.” Then he lit the cigarette. “Why don’t you buy Camels? I think Chesterfields are disgusting.”

Italo nodded silently. “I know that, Rocco, but I like Chesterfields.”

“Make sure you don’t drive into a wall or run over any old ladies.”

Italo turned into Corso Battaglione Aosta, downshifted, passed a truck, and accelerated sharply.

“If you weren’t a cop, you’d be a perfect getaway driver for an armored car robbery.”

“Why do you say that, Rocco? Are you planning something along those lines?”

They both laughed.

“You know something, Italo? If you ask me, you ought to grow a goatee or a beard.”

“You think? You know, I’d thought about that myself. I don’t have any lips.”

“Exactly. You’d look less like a weasel.”

“I look like a weasel?”

“I never told you that? I’ve met lots of people who look like weasels. But never on the police force.”

After a six-month acquaintance, the two men understood each other clearly. Rocco liked Italo. He trusted him after what the two of them had done some time ago, intercepting that load of marijuana on a Dutch semi and splitting a nice big haul of several thousand euros. Italo was young, and in him Rocco glimpsed the same motivation that had led the deputy police chief to undertake his police career: pure chance. At the fateful moment when the deputy police chief’s classmates were starting life on the streets, working with blades and bullets, he just happened to put on the lawman’s uniform. Nothing more than that. For people who were born in Trastevere at the start of the sixties into blue-collar families, with neighbors who were on a first-name basis with prison, there were only two paths available. Like the game they used to play at the parish after-school when they were kids, a little game of tag known as police and thieves. Except now it was real. Rocco had become a cop, and Furio, Brizio, Sebastiano, Stampella, and all the others had become thieves. But they’d remained the best of friends.

“How on earth is a gang of burglars going to barricade themselves in an apartment, Italo? It’s not as if it’s a bank, with hostages and everything.”

“I don’t get it either.”

“I mean, if the people reporting them are a half-deaf old man and a woman, then what’s to stop them from coming out of the apartment, clubbing them senseless, and taking off in less than a minute?”

“Maybe the old man’s armed. He is a retired army warrant officer, after all.”

“Absolutely crazy,” said Rocco, looking out the window at the cars screeching to a halt and honking furiously as the BMW with Italo at the wheel zoomed past.

“Listen, Rocco, don’t you think we should use the siren? At least that way people would know it was the police and we’d be less likely to crash into someone!”

“I hate sirens.”

So, racing at 75 miles per hour through the city streets, they pulled up in front of no. 22, Via Brocherel.

Rocco buttoned up his loden overcoat and, followed by Italo, walked over to the two people waving their arms outside the front door.

An elderly man and a woman in her early forties, with straw-blond hair, a large run in her stocking, and blood on her kneecap.

“Police, police!” the woman was screaming, and her Slavic accent was echoing down the deserted street. The street might have been deserted, but a few inquisitive faces appeared behind the glass of windows here and there. The old man immediately stopped the woman with a wave of his hand, freezing her in place, as if to say, “Better let me handle this, man to man.” At the old man’s feet, a tiny pug of a dog, its eyes bulging out of its head, was barking furiously at a NO PARKING sign.

“Police?” asked the man, eyeing Rocco and Italo.

“What do you think?”

“Normally the police have a flashing light and a siren on top of their squad cars.”

“Normally people are a little bit better at minding their own fucking business,” Rocco replied, seriously. “Are you the one who called?”

“Yes. I’m Warrant Officer Paolo Rastelli. The signora here is certain that a gang of burglars have barricaded themselves in the apartment.”

“Do you live here?” asked the deputy police chief.

“No,” replied the warrant officer.

“Then this is your house?” Rocco asked, turning to Irina.

“No, I just come here to clean, every Monday and Wednesday and Fridays too,” the woman replied.

“Shut up!” the old man shouted at the dog, jerking at its leash until the little critter’s already blind eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. “Forgive me, Commissario, but this dog just won’t stop barking and it really gets on my nerves.”

“It’s typical of dogs, you know?” the deputy police chief said calmly.

“What is?”

“Barking. It’s in their nature.” He squatted down and with a single pat on the head silenced Flipper; now the dog was wagging its tail and licking his hand. “And anyway I’m not a commissario. The rank of commissario no longer exists. Deputy Police Chief Schiavone.” Then he looked over at the woman, who still had a frightened look on her face and her hair standing straight up, held in place by some electrostatic force, probably emanating from her light blue nylon sweater.

“Give me the keys!” Rocco said to the woman.

“To the apartment?” the Russian woman asked naively.

“No, to the city. Certainly, to the apartment, for the love of Jesus!” the retired warrant officer barked. “Otherwise how are they supposed to get in?”

Irina dropped her gaze. “I forget inside the keys when I run away.”

“Oh hell,” muttered Rocco under his breath. “Okay, let’s do this: what floor is it?”

“There … fourth!” and Irina pointed at the apartment building. “You see? Window up there with curtains is living room, then there is other room next to it, with shutters pulled down: that is den. Then there is last on left, the half bath, then—”

“Signora, it’s not as if I want to buy the apartment. All I need to know is where it is,” the deputy police chief brusquely interrupted her. Then he jutted his chin and directed Pierron toward the fourth-floor apartment. “Italo, what do you say?”

“How am I supposed to climb up there, Dottore? What we need is a locksmith.”

Rocco sighed, then glanced at the woman, who seemed to have regained her composure. “What kind of lock is it?”

“There are two keyholes,” Irina replied.

Rocco rolled his eyes. “Sure, but what kind? Pick-proof, lever tumbler, drum lock?”

“No … I don’t know. Apartment door.”

Rocco pulled open the street door. “Do you know the apartment number, or not that either?”

“Eleven,” Irina replied with a broad smile, proud that she could finally provide the police with some actionable intelligence. “Eleven R.”

Italo followed the deputy police chief.

“What should I do?” asked the retired warrant officer.

“You stay here and wait for reinforcements!” Rocco shouted. And he almost had the impression that the old man promptly clicked his heels in response.

As soon as the metal elevator doors swung open, Rocco went to the right, Italo to the left.

“Apartment 11R is right here,” said Italo. The deputy police chief caught up with him. “It’s an old Cisa lock. Excellent.”

Rocco put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the keys to his own apartment.

“What are you doing?” asked Italo.

“Hold on.” On his key ring, Rocco had a little Swiss Army knife, the kind that has about twelve thousand blades and clippers. He carefully pried open the little screwdriver. He bent over and started working on the lock. He removed the two screws that held the plate, then extracted the fingernail file. “You see? If you can just open a space between the wood and the lock mechanism …” He slid the file into the opening. He applied pressure, once, then a second time. “It’s a hollow-core door. In Rome, you don’t find front doors like this anymore. Nobody has them.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re so damned easy to get open.” And with that the deputy police chief popped the lock open. Italo smiled. “You really picked the wrong line of work!”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.” And Rocco swung open the door. Italo stopped him with one arm. “Shall I go first?” he asked, as he unholstered his pistol. “I mean, what if there really is someone barricaded in there?”

“Who do you think is barricaded, Italo? Come on, let’s not talk bullshit.” And he strode in.

They walked through the sliding door and found themselves in the living room. Italo headed for the kitchen. The deputy police chief continued down the hallway and took a look in the bedroom. The bed was unmade. He kept walking. At the end of the hall was another room. The door was shut. Italo caught up with Rocco just as his hand closed around the door handle. “No one in the kitchen. The place is a mess, but no one’s there. It looks like a tornado hit it.”

Rocco nodded, then threw open the door.

Darkness.

The wooden blinds were lowered, and it was impossible to make out anything in the shadows. But the deputy police chief caught a whiff of something ugly. Sickly sweet, with hints of puke and piss. He found the light switch and flipped it on. A bright glare lit up the room for a second. Then a short circuit knocked out the power as a handful of sparks showered down through the dark like so many party streamers. The room was plunged back into shadow. But that flare of electric light, like a photographer’s camera flash, had seared a hair-raising image into the deputy police chief’s retina. “Shit! Italo, call the main switchboard. And tell them to get Fumagalli right over here.”

“Dr. Fumagalli? The medical examiner? Why? What is it? Rocco, what did you see?”

“Just do what I told you!”

Italo backed a few steps out into the hallway, pulled out his cell phone, and did his best to punch in the main number for the hospital, but with the Beretta in his hand, it was no simple matter.

Rocco groped his way forward and ventured in warily, one hand on the wall.

His fingers brushed the edge of a bookshelf, then the wall again, then the corner of the room. He ran his hand over the wallpaper, pushed the curtain aside, and finally grasped the strap to raise the wooden roller blind. He gripped hard and gave it a first hard tug. Slowly the gray light of day filtered into the room. From below. As he hoisted the blind, the light first covered the floor, revealing an overturned step stool. With the second tug, daylight illuminated a pair of dangling bare feet; with the third, two legs, a pair of arms dangling alongside the body; and finally, once the roller blind was fully raised, the scene appeared before his eyes in all its macabre squalor. The woman was hanging from the lamp hook on the ceiling by a slender cable. Her head slumped forward, her chin rested against her chest, while her curly chestnut hair covered her face. There was a stain on the hardwood floor.

“Oh Madonna.” The words came out of Italo’s mouth like a hiss, as he stood there with his phone pressed to his ear.

“Call Fumagalli, I told you,” said Rocco. He moved away from the window and walked over to the woman’s body. Her bony, skinny feet reminded him of the feet of a Christ on the cross. Pale, faintly greenish. All that was missing were the nail holes; otherwise those feet could have come straight out of a painting by Grünewald. The knees were scraped, like the knees of a little girl coming home from her first bicycle ride. She wore a nightgown. Sea green. One of the shoulder straps had torn free. The stitching had come unraveled under the armpit and a small gap revealed a patch of flesh and the rib cage beneath. Rocco avoided looking her in the face. He turned on his heel and left the room. As he went past Officer Pierron, he grabbed the packet of Chesterfields out of his pocket and yanked out a smoke, just as Italo finally managed to get the hospital on the phone. “This is Officer Pierron … put me through to Fumagalli. It’s urgent.”

“Come smoke a cigarette, Italo; otherwise the sight will get etched into your retinas and you won’t be able to see anything else for the next two weeks.”

Italo followed Rocco like a robot, the cell phone in his left hand, his pistol in his right. “And holster your piece,” Rocco added. “Who the fuck are you planning to shoot, anyway?”

Esther Baudo and her husband were the subject of every framed photograph arranged on the top of an upright piano. There was a wedding picture, pictures on a beach, pictures under a palm tree, and even a picture in front of the Colosseum. In a single glance Rocco saw it had been taken from the corner of Via Capo d’Africa, where there was a seafood restaurant that he and Marina inevitably chose when they had something to celebrate. The last time—and it had been more than five years ago—was when they’d completed the purchase of the penthouse in Monteverde Vecchio. Esther Baudo was smiling in every picture. But only with her mouth. Never with her eyes. Her eyes were always lackluster, dead, dark, and deep, never sparkling with laughter. Not even on the day of her wedding.

Her husband was just the opposite. He always smiled into the lens. Happily. The hair had vanished from the top of his cranium and now adorned only the sides of his head. White, straight teeth gleamed in his small, rosebud mouth. He had small jug ears.

Rocco left the living room and went to look at the kitchen. Right at the threshold of the kitchen door was a shattered cell phone. He picked it up. The screen was chipped, the battery was missing, and who could even say where the SIM chip had wound up. Then he looked around the rest of the room. Italo was right. The place really was a mess. It looked like a herd of buffalo had trampled through. The ground was a crazy hodgepodge of boxes, tin cans, packages of pasta, silverware, and a bread knife. He placed the shattered cell phone on the marble countertop, next to a plastic scale.

He turned to look toward the room at the end of the hall: the den. And slowly, inexorably pulled toward it, as if by a magnet, he walked back to it. The woman still hung there. Rocco was tempted to lower her to the ground. To see her dangling there like a butchered animal was more than he could take. He bit his lip and stepped closer. The first thing that caught his eye was the swollen face. It was puffy, with a split lip from which the blood had flowed. One eye was open, staring; the other was shut and swollen to the size of a plum. The cable around her neck was a metal clothesline. The woman had run it over the hook that held up the ceiling lamp and then anchored it to the floor, tying it to the foot of an armoire. Like a ten-foot guywire, to make sure it would support the weight. Actually, though, it hadn’t—her weight had torn loose the electric wiring and caused a short circuit. There was a stool lying on the floor. A three-legged stool, like a piano stool. When it overturned, the cushion had torn loose. Maybe Esther kicked it in the last instant of her life, when she made up her mind that her time on this planet Earth had come to its logical conclusion. The skin on her neck was pale, but not around her throat. There a purple band ran, a little less than an inch across. Purple like the stain on the hardwood floor.

“It’s the third damned suicide this month,” said the medical examiner from behind him, snorting in annoyance. Rocco didn’t even bother turning around, and both men, faithful to the routine they’d developed over the months, exchanged no greeting.

“Who found her? You?”

Schiavone nodded. Alberto stepped closer and stood, surveying the body. They looked like a pair of tourists visiting MoMA, admiring an art installation.

“A woman, about thirty-five, probable cause of death strangulation,” said the doctor. Rocco nodded: “And they gave you a medical degree for that?”

“I’m just kidding.”

“How can you kid about this?”

“With the work I do, if you can’t kid around, you’re done for,” and Alberto tilted his head toward the corpse.

Rocco asked, “Are you going to take the corpse down?”

“I’d say so … I’ll wait for a couple of your people and then we’ll take her down.”

“Who was coming upstairs?”

“The young woman and a fat guy.”

Which meant Officer Deruta and Inspector Caterina Rispoli.

Rocco left the room and went to meet the two of them.

Deruta was already in the front hall, sweaty and panting. Caterina Rispoli, on the other hand, was still out on the landing. She was talking to Italo Pierron and twisting her police-issued gloves.

“Did you come up the stairs, Deruta?”

“No, I took the elevator.”

“Then why are you out of breath?”

Deruta ignored the question. “Dottore, I was just thinking—”

“And that right there is a wonderful piece of news, Deruta.”

“I was thinking … don’t you feel the sight of all this is a little too harsh?”

“For who?”

“For Inspector Rispoli?”

“The sight of what, Deruta? The sight of you at work?”

Deruta grimaced in annoyance. “Of course not! The sight of the dead body in there!”

Rocco looked at him. “Deruta, Inspector Rispoli is a police officer.”

“But Rispoli’s a woman!”

“Well, she can’t help that,” said the deputy police chief as he walked out onto the landing.

The minute he walked out the door, Caterina took a look at him. “Deputy Police Chief …”

“Go on in, Rispoli. Don’t leave me alone with Deruta; next thing you know, he’ll hang himself too.” Caterina smiled and walked into the apartment. “Ah, Dottore?”

“What is it, Rispoli?”

“I did come up with an idea for that gift.”

“Perfect. Let’s talk in ten minutes.” As Caterina disappeared into the living room, Rocco turned to look at Italo. “Let’s go get ourselves a cup of coffee.”

“If you don’t mind, Dottore,” said Italo, moving from a first-name basis to a more official term of respect, “I’d just as soon stay right here. My stomach’s kind of doing belly flops.”

Shaking his head, Rocco Schiavone went down the stairs.

Via Brocherel was crowded with people. People looking out their windows, people rubbernecking outside the front door. There was a muttering of conversation that sounded like a kettle on the boil. “A corpse? … There weren’t any burglars? Who is it? The Baudos …”

There was a brief moment of silence when the front door swung open and Rocco Schiavone, wrapped in his green overcoat, emerged. Officer Casella alone was keeping the rubberneckers at bay. “Commissario,” he said, saluting.

“It’s deputy police chief, Casella, deputy police chief, Jesus fucking Christ! You at least, seeing that you’re on the police force, ought to try to remember these things, no?”

He looked around but there was no sign of a café or a shop anywhere in sight. He went over to the retired warrant officer. “Excuse me! Could you tell me if there’s a café anywhere around here?”

“Say what?” asked the old man, adjusting his hearing aid.

“Café. Near here. Where.”

“Around the corner. Take Via Monte Emilus and go about a hundred yards, and you’ll see the Bar Alpi. Do you have any news, Dottore? Is it true that they found the lady hanging by a rope?”

Irina too stood gazing at him apprehensively.

“Can you keep a secret?” Rocco asked in an undertone.

“Certainly!” Paolo Rastelli replied, puffing his chest out proudly.

“I can too!” Irina chimed in.

“So what do you think, I can’t?” Rocco retorted and walked away, leaving them both openmouthed.

As was to be expected, the retired warrant officer’s dog, Flipper, promptly began barking again, this time at the NO PARKING sign. The former noncommissioned officer glared down at the yappy little mutt and brusquely switched off his hearing aid. At last, the world turned silent, muffled and cottony once again. A giant aquarium he could gaze at with detachment. With a smile and a slight forward tilt of the head, he bade farewell to Irina and resumed his daily stroll, heading for home and the crossword puzzle.

As the wind blew, pushing chilly gusts of air under his loden overcoat, Rocco decided that all things considered, it could have gone worse. A suicide just meant a series of bureaucratic procedures to get out of the way, the kind of thing you could take care of in an afternoon’s work. His plan was simple: leave the bureaucratic details to Casella, talk to Rispoli and find out what idea she’d come up with for Nora’s present, go home, get a half-hour nap, take a shower, go back out and buy the present, go out to dinner with Nora at eight, after an hour and a half pretend he had a crushing migraine, take Nora home, and then hurry back to his place to watch the second half of the Roma-Inter game. Acceptable.

Just as the wind died down and a fine chilly drizzle began to pepper the asphalt, cold as the fingers of a dead man’s hand, Rocco stepped into the Bar Alpi. A strong smell of alcohol and confectioner’s sugar washed over him, like a warm, welcome hug from a friend.

“Buongiorno.”

The man behind the counter gave him a smile. “Hello. What’ll it be?”

“A nice hot espresso with a foamy cloud of milk … and I’d like a pastry. Do you have any left?”

“Sure … go ahead and take what you like, right there …” He pointed to a Plexiglas case with an electric heater where breakfast pastries were on display. Rocco grabbed a strudel while the barista ratcheted the porta-filter into place and punched the button that applied pressure to the boiling water. He heard the clack of billiard balls from the other room in the bar. Only now did he notice that the walls were covered with pictures of Juventus players and black-and-white team scarves. Rocco went over to the counter and poured half a pack of sugar into his coffee. It took awhile for the sugar to sink into the hot dense liquid. A clear sign that this was a good espresso. He took a sip. It really was good. “You make a first-rate espresso,” he told the barman, who was busy drying glasses.

“My wife taught me how.”

“Neapolitan?”

“No. Milanese. I’m the Neapolitan in the family.”

“So, you’re saying that you’re a Neapolitan who roots for Juventus and that a woman from Milan taught you how to make espresso?”

“Plus I’m tone deaf,” the man added. They both laughed.

Another sharp clack from the next room. Rocco turned around.

“You want to play some pool?”

“Why not?”

“Look out, those two are a pair of professional sharks.”

Rocco slurped down the last of his espresso and strode into the next room, finishing off his strudel in a shower of crumbs down the front of his overcoat.

There were two men. One wore the jumpsuit of a manual laborer, the other a suit and tie. They’d just set the cue ball down on the table and were about to begin a game of straight pool. When they saw Rocco they both smiled. “Care to play?” asked the man in the jumpsuit.

“No, you guys go ahead. Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all,” said the one who looked every bit the estate agent. “Just watch me dismantle Nino, here. Nino, today I’m not taking prisoners!”

“Ten euros on the best out of three games?” asked the manual laborer.

“No, ten euros a game!”

Nino smiled. “Then I’ve already made my end-of-year bonus,” he said, and shot the deputy police chief a wink.

The estate agent took off his jacket while the laborer chalked his pool stick with a vicious grin.

Clack! And the three ceiling lamps that illuminated the green felt of the billiards table went dark simultaneously.

“Well of all the damned … Gennaro!” shouted the estate agent. From the bar the proprietor called back: “The power always goes out when it’s windy like this!”

“Try paying your electric bill, and maybe that’ll stop it from happening!” called the man in the jumpsuit, and he and his friend shared a hearty laugh.

But Rocco remained straight-faced, leaning against the wall, lost in thought. “Holy shit!” he said, between clenched teeth. “I’m an idiot! Why didn’t I think of it? What a shitty profession this is!” Cursing, he left the game room before the astonished eyes of the two pool players.

“Albe’, tell me that what I’m thinking doesn’t hold up!”

“Run it by me again, Rocco,” said the medical examiner, as he leaned over Signora Baudo’s corpse.

“When I walked in, I switched on the light. And it short-circuited. So that means it was turned off before, right?”

“Okay, Rocco, I’m with you.”

“Obviously, when she fell the poor woman yanked loose a couple of wires. When I flipped the switch I caused a short circuit. What does that mean? That she hanged herself in the dark. How did she do it? She lowered the blinds, fastened the noose, and let herself drop?”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Fumagalli, “and so?”

“So it must mean there was someone there with her. Whoever it was must have lowered the blinds after she hanged herself. Jesus fucking Christ!” Rocco cursed through clenched teeth.

“And listen,” Fumagalli said, “as long as you’re here, I have something else to point out. Look at this.” He pointed to the victim’s fair skin.

They walked over to the corpse, which Deruta and Rispoli had lowered to the parquet floor. “The cable is too thin to leave a bruise like that. You see it?” Alberto Fumagalli pointed to the purple stripe on Esther’s neck. It was a couple of finger widths wide. “When the cable dug into the flesh, it just left a narrow stripe; you see it? In other words, it wasn’t this cable that strangled her. That much is clear. And did you get a good look at her face?”

Rocco sank into the leather armchair in the den. “Of course. She was beaten up. Do you know what that means?”

Fumagalli said nothing.

The deputy police chief continued with a low rattle, from the chest, a distant sinister gurgle like a rumble of thunder, warning of an oncoming storm. “That means this isn’t a suicide. It means I’m going to have to deal with this thing, and it also means a series of pains in the ass unlike anything you can even imagine!”

Fumagalli nodded. “So now I’m going to take this poor creature to my autopsy room. And you’d probably better call the judge and the forensic squad.”

Rocco suddenly jumped out of his chair. His mood had shifted as quickly as a wind at high elevation suddenly bringing black rain-heavy storm clouds where minutes before the sun had been shining.

As he left the room Rocco glanced at Deruta and Caterina. “Rispoli, call the forensic squad in Turin. Deruta, go do what I told you and D’Intino to do this morning.”

“But we’re supposed to do the stakeouts at night,” the cop shot back.

“Then go get some rest, go make bread with your wife, just get the hell out of my hair!”

Like a kicked dog, Deruta shot out of the apartment. Caterina asked no questions. Unlike Officer Deruta, she had learned that when the deputy police chief’s mood turned sharply black, the best thing was to shut up and obey.

“Pierron!” Rocco shouted, and Italo’s face appeared immediately at the door to the living room.

“Yes, Dottore.”

“Scatter the people who are rubbernecking out in the street. I want the names of the Russian woman who was the first to enter the apartment and that half-dead warrant officer. Tell Casella to get busy and make sure nothing comes out in the newspapers. Question all the neighbors, and have someone call the district attorney’s office. This is another pain in the ass of the tenth degree, Rispoli, you understand?” And though he had used her name, he was no longer speaking to the unfortunate inspector who was busy talking on the phone to someone in Turin. Right now Rocco was talking to everyone and to no one, waving his hands as if he were perched on the edge of a cliff and trying desperately to regain his balance. “This is definitely a pain in the ass of the tenth degree, no doubt about it!”

Italo nodded, sharing his boss’s opinion wholeheartedly. In fact, he knew that the deputy police chief had cataloged the sources of annoyance or pains in the ass in life by degrees, or levels. From level six on up.

In Rocco’s own personal hierarchy of values, the sixth level of pains in the ass included children yelling in restaurants, children yelling at swimming pools, children yelling in stores, and just in general, children yelling. Then there were salespeople calling with special offers of convenient bundled contracts for water, gas, and cell phone, blankets that come untucked from under the mattress leaving your feet to freeze on winter nights, and the apericena—Italy’s latest trend in dining, a blend of aperitif and dinner. The seventh level of pain in the ass included restaurants with slow service, wine connoisseurs, and colleagues at the office with garlic on their breath from dinner the night before. The eighth level included shows that went longer than an hour and fifteen minutes, giving or receiving gifts, video poker machines, and the Roman Catholic radio station, Radio Maria. At the ninth level were wedding invitations, baptism invitations, First Communion invitations, or even just party invitations. Husbands complaining about wives, wives complaining about husbands. But the tenth level, the highest ranking of all possible pains in the ass, the very maximum degree of annoyance that life—that old bastard—could possibly stick him with to ruin his day and his week, towered high above the rest, unequaled: an unsolved case of murder. And Esther Baudo’s death had just turned into one, right before his eyes. Hence the sudden mood shift. For anyone who knew him, this was a mood swing to be expected; for anyone who didn’t, it was an overblown reaction. It was a case of homicide, and it sat there, useless and relentless, wordlessly demanding a solution that only he could provide, asking a mute question that he and no one else would have to answer. To get that answer he’d have to delve into a filthy well of horrors, plunge down into the abyss of human idiocy, scrabble around in the squalor of some diseased mind. At times like this, when a case had just blossomed like a flower of sickness among the underbrush of his life, in those very first few minutes, if Rocco had chanced to lay hands on the guilty party, he would have gladly and ruthlessly wiped him from the face of the earth.

He found himself sitting at the center of the living room. In the adjoining room, Alberto Fumagalli was working silently on the victim. The other officers had melted away like snow under bright sunlight, each to carry out specific instructions. He rubbed his face and got to his feet.

“All right, Rocco,” he said in an undertone, “let’s see what we have here.”

He pulled on the leather gloves he had in his pocket and ran his eye around the apartment. A chilly, impersonal eye.

The mess in the living room was, all things considered, the ordinary mess of everyday life. Magazines lay scattered, sofa cushions shoved aside, a low table across from the television set covered with clutter of all sorts—cigarette lighters, bills to pay, even two African carved wooden giraffes. What didn’t add up, on the other hand, was the unholy disarray in the kitchen. If there actually had been burglars in the apartment, what would they have been looking for in the kitchen? What valuables do people keep in the kitchen? The cabinet doors had all been thrown open. All except the doors under the sink. The deputy police chief pulled those doors open. There were three receptacles for sorted waste: garbage, metal, and paper. He peeked inside. The garbage was full; so was the bin for metal cans. But the container for paper and cardboard was almost empty. There was only an empty egg carton, a flyer for a trip to Medjugorje with a special offer on pots and pans, and a fancy black shopping bag with rope handles. At the center of the bag was a sort of heraldic crest. Laurel leaves surrounding a surname, “Tomei.” Rocco thought he remembered a shop by that name in the center of town. Inside the bag was a gift card. “Best wishes, Esther.”

On the well next to the fridge was a flyer from the city government. It was a map listing trash days. Rocco took a look at it. They picked up paper recycling on that street on Thursdays. The day before. That’s why the bin was half-empty.

The deputy police chief shifted his attention to the cell phone that he himself had placed on the marble countertop. That was another question mark. Who did it belong to? Was it the victim’s? And why had it been shattered? Where was the SIM card?

The bedroom looked like it had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb. The burglars had concentrated here, working carefully. While the kitchen looked like the aftermath of an earthquake, in the bedroom you could see the careful hand of someone conducting a surgical investigation. Only the sheets had been tossed roughly aside and, to the attentive eye, it was clear that the mattress had been shoved a couple of inches over from the box spring beneath. The front doors of the armoire swung open, but the dresser and side tables were undisturbed. Under the window, half-hidden behind the floor-length curtains, was a dark blue velvet box. Rocco picked it up. It was empty. He left it on the dresser, next to another framed photograph of the couple. In this one, they were sitting at a table and embracing. Rocco stared at the woman’s face. And he silently promised her that he’d catch the son of a bitch. She thanked him, responding with a halfhearted smile.

The deputy police chief had decided to head home on foot, in defiance of the wind that had started to buffet the powdery snow off the roofs and tree branches, kicking it up in small whirlwinds off the blacktop of the streets. He strode briskly, his hands buried in the pockets of his light overcoat, which did little to keep him warm in that chilly weather. He looked up, but heavy dark clouds had covered both mountains and sky. Looking past the apartment buildings, all he could see were fields covered with snow or dark with mud. The last thing he wanted was to head straight back to police headquarters: he didn’t want to talk to the chief of police, much less explain to the judge exactly what they’d found, partly because he didn’t actually know. People on the sidewalk went past him without a glance, absorbed in their own affairs. He was the only one out without a hat. The wind’s icy fingers massaged his scalp. He was bound to pay for this walk with a sinus infection and a backache. The air was a blend of wood smoke from the chimneys and carbon monoxide from the tailpipes. He walked briskly into the street at crosswalks, defying death. In Rome, someone would have certainly run him over, crushing him to jelly on the asphalt. But this was Aosta, and the cars screeched to an unprotesting halt. He thought about what awaited him, what lay ahead of him. Aside from the Fiat 500 that stood patiently waiting for him to cross, nothing but work. And life in a city that was alien and distant. There was nothing here for him, and there never would be, even if he stayed for the next ten years. He’d never be able to bring himself to chat with old men in the bars about the high points of the local wines or the upcoming football transfers. And for that matter his hesitant, wavering efforts to construct an affair with Nora looked thinner than a piece of onionskin typing paper. He missed his friends. He knew that at a time like this they’d rally to his support, and help him get over that intolerable pain in the ass. He thought of Seba, who had at least come up to see him. Furio, Brizio. Where were they now? Were they still out on the street, or had his colleagues in the Rome police sent them for an extended stay at the Hotel Roma, as the Regina Coeli prison was called? He’d have given a frostbitten finger of his hand for an ordinary Trastevere pizza, a good old cigarette at night, high atop the Janiculum Hill, or a game of poker at Stampella. Suddenly he found himself at the Porta Pretoria. At least the wind couldn’t gust so freely through those ancient Roman gates. How had he wound up there? It was on the far side of town from police headquarters. Now he’d have to retrace his steps to Piazza Chanoux and continue straight from there. He decided that he’d stop in the bar on the piazza. He slowed his pace, now that he had a destination. Then he heard Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” issuing from his overcoat pocket. It was the ringtone he’d put on his cell phone for personal calls.

“Who is it?”

“Darling, it’s me, Nora. Bad time?”

“Yes.”

“So am I bothering you?”

“Why do you insist on asking questions that practically demand a rude answer?” he asked.

“What’s going on? Something wrong?”

“You want to know? Then I’ll tell you. I’ve got a murder on my fucking hands. Satisfied?”

Nora paused for a moment. “Why on earth would you take it out on me?”

“I take it out on everyone. First and foremost myself. I’m heading back to the office. Hold on half an hour, and I’ll call you back from there.”

“No, you’ll forget to call anyway. Listen, I just want to tell you that I’ve arranged a party at my place. A few friends are coming over.”

“Why?” Rocco asked. The recent events in Via Brocherel had run over the blackboard of his memory like an eraser.

“What do you mean, why?” asked Nora, her voice getting louder.

The deputy police chief simply couldn’t remember.

“It’s my birthday today, Rocco!”

Oh, shit, the gift, was the thought that flashed through his brain. “What time?” he asked.

“Seven thirty. Can you make it?”

“I will if I can. That’s a promise.”

“Do what you like. See you later. If you can make it.” Nora hung up. The woman’s closing words had been colder than the sidewalk around Piazza Chanoux.

It’s a chore to maintain human relations. It takes commitment, determination, and willingness: you have to face life with a smile. None of these things were in Rocco Schiavone’s toolkit. Life dragged him rudely from one day to the next, yanking him by the hair, and whatever it was that drove him to live from one day to the next, it was probably the same force that was making him put his left foot, shod in Clarks desert boots, in front of his right foot, similarly shod. One step, another step, as the Italian Alpini used to say to themselves as they marched through the Ukraine in temperatures of 40 degrees below zero in the long-ago winter of 1943. One step, another step, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone kept saying to himself—he’d been saying those words ever since that day, that distant July day in 2007 when his life had been snapped in half once and for all, when the boat had overturned, and he had been forced to change course.

It had been a hot, sticky Roman day. The seventh of July. A day that took Marina away from him forever. And with her, everything that was good in Rocco Schiavone. He’d spend the rest of his life with nothing to guide him but his instinct for survival.

The man walked up to the front door of the apartment building on Via Brocherel. Streamlined helmet and high-impact sunglasses, pink and blue skintight bike shorts and jersey in power Lycra, covered with advertising slogans, white calf-length socks, and shoes with the toe higher than the heel, making him walk like a circus clown.

Click clack click clack, went the iron plates on the toes of his shoes, as Patrizio Baudo walked his bike, stepping awkwardly to accommodate the padding in the seat of his bike pants. He observed the apocalyptic scene on the street outside his building. The police, rubberneckers, and even some guy with a TV camera.

What’s happened? he thought as he kept walking.

He walked up to a petite blond policewoman with a sweet face and big beautiful eyes, and expressed his thoughts aloud: “What’s happened?”

The policewoman sighed: “There’s been a murder.”

“A … what?”

“Just who are you?” asked the policewoman.

“Patrizio Baudo. I live here,” he said, and raised one hand with a fingerless glove to point at the windows of his apartment.

Inspector Rispoli focused on the man’s face, so that she could actually see her reflection in his sunglasses. “Patrizio Baudo? I think that … come with me.”

He hadn’t had time to change yet. Sitting in his cycling jersey and shorts across from the deputy police chief, Patrizio Baudo had however taken off his sunglasses and helmet. He’d handed his bike over to a police officer; you don’t leave a piece of fine equipment like that, easily worth six thousand euros, out on the street, even if you do live in Aosta. His face was pale, and there were two red stripes beneath his eyes. He looked like someone had been slapping him around for the past ninety minutes. He sat there in a daze, slack-jawed, staring blankly across the desk at Rocco. He was trembling, hard to say whether in fear or from the cold, and held his hands between his legs, still clad in leather cycling gloves. Every so often he’d raise his right hand and touch the gold crucifix that hung around his neck. “Let me get you something warm to put on,” said the deputy police chief as he picked up the receiver of his desk phone.

Phascolarctos cinereus. Commonly called the koala bear. Patrizio Baudo resembled nothing so much as the little Australian marsupial, and that was the first thing that had come into Rocco’s mind when the man walked into the room and shook his hand. The second thought was to wonder why he hadn’t already detected that resemblance from the photographs scattered throughout the apartment. The proportions, he replied inwardly. You can see them much better in person. The eyes are so much better than a camera lens at judging space and units of measurement. All it took was a quick glance at the jug ears, the small, wide-set eyes, and the oversize nose square in the middle of the face, practically covering the small, lipless mouth. To say nothing of the weak, receding chin. Every detail of that face shouted koala. There were, of course, differences. Aside from the differences in diet and habitat, what distinguished the animal from Patrizio Baudo was the hair. The little marsupial had lovely, cottonball hair, while Patrizio was bald as a billiard ball. This was a habit of Rocco’s, to compare human faces to the features of a given animal. Something that dated back to his childhood. It all started with a gift his father had given him when he turned eight: an encyclopedia of animals that had a section full of wonderful illustrations done at the end of the nineteenth century, depicting lots and lots of birds, fish, and mammals. Rocco would sit on the carpet in the family’s little Trastevere living room and spend hours poring over those drawings, memorizing names, amusing himself by finding resemblances with his teachers at school, his classmates, and people in his neighborhood.

Casella walked in with a black jacket and gave it to Patrizio Baudo, who immediately wrapped it around his shoulders. “How … how did it happen?” he asked in a faint voice.

“We still don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Patrizio’s dead, dark little eyes suddenly flamed up, as if someone had lit a torch in the pupils.

“It means we found her hanged in your den.”

Patrizio put his gloved hands over his face. Rocco went on. “But the situation isn’t entirely clear.”

The man took a deep breath and looked at the policeman, his eyes filled with tears. “What do you mean by that? What isn’t clear?”

“It’s not clear whether your wife killed herself or was murdered.”

He shook his head and ran his hand over his weak chin. “I don’t … I don’t understand. She hanged herself … how could someone else have possibly killed her? Are you saying someone hanged her? Please, I don’t understand …”

Caterina Rispoli came in with a cup of tea. She gave it to Patrizio Baudo, who thanked her with a half smile but didn’t drink any. “Please explain, Dottore. I don’t understand …”

“There are details concerning the death of your wife that just don’t make sense. Details that make us think it might have been something other than a suicide.”

“What details?”

“We’re strongly inclined to think that it’s been staged somehow.”

Only then did Patrizio Baudo gulp down a mouthful of tea, which was immediately followed by a shiver. He once again touched the crucifix with his gloved right hand. Rocco shot Officer Casella a look. “I’ll have you taken home now. Please, take anything you’ll need. But I’m afraid you won’t be able to stay in your apartment. The forensic squad is conducting an examination. Do you have somewhere you can stay?”

Patrizio Baudo shrugged. “Me? No … maybe at my mother’s?”

“All right. Officer Casella will accompany you to your mother’s house. Here in Aosta?”

“Not far. In Charvensod.”

Rocco stood up. “We’ll keep you informed, don’t worry.”

“But who was it?” Baudo suddenly blurted. “Who could have done such a thing? To Esther … to my Esther …”

“I promise I’ll do everything I can to find out, Signor Baudo. I assure you.”

“I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Just like that? From one moment to the next? What is this? What’s happening?” He looked around in bewilderment. Caterina had dropped her gaze, Casella was fixated on some indeterminate point on the office ceiling, while Rocco stood there, chilly and detached. Deep inside him a rage was burning that wasn’t all that different from what the other man felt. Patrizio finally burst into tears. “I can’t take this …” he murmured under his breath, crumpled up on his seat like an abandoned rag.

Rocco put a hand on his shoulder. “Tomorrow I’m going to need you, Dottor Baudo, once you feel a little stronger. We believe that there was a theft from your home.”

Patrizio went on sobbing. Then the emotional tempest subsided as quickly as it had come. He sniffed and nodded to the deputy police chief. “Not tomorrow. Now.”

“Right now you’re too—”

“Right now!” said Patrizio, leaping to his feet. “I want to see my home. I want to go home.”

“If nothing else, you can get changed, no?” said Casella, inappropriately. Rocco incinerated him with a single glance. “He can’t go around dressed like a clown, you know,” Casella added under his breath, justifying his comment to Rispoli.

“All right, Dottor Baudo, let’s go,” said Rocco, taking the cup still full of tea and setting it down on the desk.

“Don’t call me dottore. I never went to college.” He strode briskly out of the room, followed by Rocco and Inspector Rispoli.

Italo drove the police BMW without revving the motor, carefully avoiding the worst potholes. It was easy to avoid the worst potholes in Aosta. Because there weren’t any. At least not compared with the streets of the Italian capital, where the native Romans had given a name to every lurch and jolt and where trying to accelerate on the sanpietrini—the Romans had named their cobblestones after St. Peter—was an excellent way of procuring a spontaneous abortion. Patrizio Baudo looked out the passenger window. “I’m starting to hate this city,” he said.

“I can understand that,” replied the deputy police chief from the backseat.

“I’m from Ivrea. But you know how things are, right? I found a job here and then … Esther’s from here, from Aosta. We were great friends, you know? I mean, before we got married. I don’t even know how it happened. First we were friends, then we fell in love. Then all the rest.”

Patrizio’s pale legs were trembling slightly. He clutched at his thighs with both hands. He’d loosened the Velcro wrist fastenings of his bike gloves, but he still wore them.

“Signor Baudo, how was your wife this morning?”

“I didn’t see her. On Fridays I only work afternoons, so I get up at six and go out for a nice long ride. Do you ever ride a bike, Dottore?”

“No. Not me. I played soccer.”

“When I was twenty I was on a team. I wanted to become a professional cyclist. But that world is just too hard, too dirty. You might just wind up being second banana, in the middle of the pack during the final sprints, nothing more than that. Maybe I wasn’t really all that good. Every now and then I go out for amateur races.”

Italo stopped at the light. Patrizio sniffed, but with his face turned to look out at the street, so Rocco couldn’t tell if he was crying or just coming down with a cold.

“You’re the last person to have seen Esther. So last night …”

“Right, last night. The usual. She went to bed around ten, maybe ten thirty. I stayed up to watch a little television. There was a movie about some guy who brought salmon to Yemen. So that people could fish for them. Have you seen it?” Rocco said nothing. He knew that Patrizio was just giving voice to a jumble of disconnected thoughts. He was concealing behind words the pain and grief that hadn’t yet clearly surfaced in his heart, and in his head. “It wasn’t bad. The movie, I mean. What I can’t understand is why a person would sit in front of the television set channel surfing without actually watching anything. Do you do that?”

Patrizio sniffed again. But this time his shoulders were trembling. And this time Rocco understood that he was crying.

When they got to Via Brocherel, the van of the forensic squad was already parked outside. Two officers were unloading equipment. A third officer, fair-haired and short, was putting on his white jumpsuit. Italo had double-parked the car and the deputy police chief was walking toward the street entrance, followed by Patrizio Baudo. The press wasn’t there yet, which struck Rocco as odd. But evidently the meeting of the regional assembly to decide on an amateur bicycle race was considered hot news. Just one less pain in the ass, thought Rocco.

The young fair-haired officer went over to Rocco. “Dottore! Special Agent Carini, forensic squad …”

“Welcome to the crime scene. Is your boss with you?”

“No, Dottor Farinelli will join us later. He’s working on a murder down in Turin.”

This was the first time that Rocco had ever heard the expression “down in Turin.” As far as he was concerned Turin had always been “up.” I’m going up to Turin. But “down to Turin”—that’s the way they said it in Aosta. Sort of like when you’re south of the equator, where the water goes down the drain spinning counterclockwise.

“We need to enter the apartment, Carini. This is the victim’s husband.”

The special agent looked at Patrizio Baudo, still dressed in his biking gear. “I should actually talk to my boss … let me call him right now and—”

“You don’t need to talk to anyone. Give us some shoe protectors and latex gloves and stop busting my chops.”

The special agent nodded. “Certainly. Wait here, I’ll bring you everything you need.” He walked over to the van, where his colleague was all ready with briefcase and biohazard suit.

Patrizio looked at the building as if this were the first time in his life he’d seen it. “Is … is my wife still upstairs?”

“I don’t think so, Signor Baudo.” Rocco turned to a young officer standing guard outside the ground floor entrance. “Has the morgue truck been by already?”

The young man nodded.

“Who’s up in the apartment?”

“Scipioni, I think.”

Rocco looked at Patrizio. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Certainly. It’s my home.”

Patrizio couldn’t seem to make up his mind to enter the apartment. He just stood there, with the paper cap on his head, wearing latex gloves and plastic overshoes, looking at the front door from the landing while the policemen readied their gear. Officer Scipioni, who was standing sentinel outside the apartment, was engaged in a conversation with a very elderly woman, pale as a sheet with blue hair that matched her dressing gown. There were punks on the King’s Road in the late seventies who wouldn’t have dared to try out her look, Rocco mused as he considered her hair. The woman was nodding her head, holding both hands to her face.

“Shall we go in?” asked Rocco.

Patrizio opened the door and the hinges creaked.

“There’s been a break-in!” exclaimed Officer Carini as he studied the lock.

“No. That was me, the first time I went in,” Rocco replied. Next came the master of the house.

Baudo walked slowly, unspeaking, his eyes focused and sad. He shot a glance at the French door that led onto a small balcony. Someone had put his bicycle out there. The first thing he did was bring the bike in and lean it against the credenza in the living room. Rocco’s alert eyes caught every detail: the man seemed to be caressing a daughter, not a piece of athletic equipment. “It’s a Colnago … more than six thousand euros,” he said, as if that was justification enough. “Where … where did you find her?” Rocco pointed to the den. Patrizio silently moved toward the room, softly as a ghost. He opened the door. The cable dangled from the lamp hook. He stood in the doorway, gazing silently. It seemed as if he was sniffing the air. Then he heaved a deep sigh and went back to the bedroom. “We only have one thing of real value in the apartment,” he said as he walked by the deputy police chief.

As soon as he saw the room, he jerked in alarm. “They’ve been in here too …” He went to pull open the drawer of a small side table under the window. Then his eye lit on the blue velvet box that Rocco had set on the tabletop. He looked inside, with a bitter smile. “So they found it.”

“What was in it?”

“It’s where we kept our gold.”

“Your gold?”

“Yes. Nothing much. A watch, a few bracelets, my cuff links, and a brooch that my mother had given Esther. A pretty pin, with a peacock. With green and blue stones. It belonged to my grandmother, just think.” He sat down on the bed. Tears poured from his eyes like an open faucet. “Is that all my wife’s life was worth?”

“You did all right, my wife’s wasn’t even worth a euro. Just the price of a nine-millimeter round,” Rocco felt like saying to him, but he said nothing.

“Esther always was unlucky,” Patrizio said, looking at the floor and stroking the bed as if his wife were lying on it, fast asleep. “She always had bellyaches. You know what I used to call her? Estherichia coli,” and he started chuckling under his breath. “Estherichia coli instead of Escherichia coli … but all she needed was a massage and she’d get over it. It was a nervous disorder, if you ask me.” He dried his tears. Then he looked up at Rocco. “I’m a believer, Commissario, but I swear to you that right now I just couldn’t say. Where was God when someone was killing my wife? Can you tell me where God was?”

There was probably no question that Rocco Schiavone was less suited to answer.

“Please, take me to my mother’s place. I just can’t take this anymore … I can’t take it anymore.”

The deputy police chief had been sitting in the district attorney’s waiting room for more than half an hour, looking at the wood grain on Judge Baldi’s door. Funny how he managed to see different shapes in it every time.

On that chilly March day, what popped out of the grain was a dolphin and a rose, though the rose actually looked more like an artichoke than a rose. But if he looked at it the other way around, it became an elephant with just one ear. The door swung open and the imaginary wood-grain fresco disappeared, replaced by Judge Baldi’s face. “Well hello there, Schiavone! Have you been waiting long?”

Rocco stood up and shook hands.

“Come in, have a seat.”

Standing next to the bookshelf, a young man in jacket and tie was gathering a series of enormous file folders full of documents. “Let me introduce you to Judge Messina. Aldo, this is Deputy Police Chief Schiavone, who’s been working with us for just a few months but has already solved one case brilliantly. Am I right?”

Judge Messina was obliged to set down his armful of folders so he could shake hands with Rocco. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said, with unmistakable emphasis.

“And you still shake my hand?”

Messina smiled. “I wouldn’t refuse to shake anyone’s hand. If you’ll excuse me.” He gathered up his folders again and left the room. The first thing that Rocco Schiavone noticed was that the photograph of the judge’s wife was now gone from the desktop. The last time he’d seen it, the picture had been lying facedown. Now he felt certain it was tucked away in one of the desk drawers. That’s always a bad sign. The magistrate’s marriage was on its way out. The eve of the final breakup. Baldi swept his blond bangs out of his eyes with a quick flick of the hand and sat down at his desk. “Now then, what news do you have for me about what happened on Via Brocherel?”

“It was a murder. I’m sure of it. Esther Baudo—that’s the victim’s name—was beaten and then strangled. The hanging seems to me to have been staged. Plus, the room where we found the corpse was dark, with the shutters down. But when I walked in and I turned on the light, there was a short circuit. Which means that the woman hanged herself in the dark …”

“Or else, after she hanged herself, someone lowered the blinds. Right?”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one, Dottore. I’m still just sniffing around.”

Baldi stretched both arms in the air. “And do you like what you smell?”

“Smells like shit, as usual.”

“The husband?”

“He’s a sales representative, works in athletic equipment. Clean record, no run-ins with the law, a traffic ticket or two. But something was stolen.”

The judge nodded, thoughtfully. “Burglars caught in the act who then decided to stage the whole thing?”

Rocco shrugged. “Why not? Maybe they did it just to throw us off the trail. Still, there’s something about it I don’t like.”

“Do tell.”

“Actually, two things. The first thing, you see, is that we have a kitchen that was turned literally upside down, like there’d been a tornado. A real authentic mess. But the bedroom, where the valuables were hidden—in a small velvet box containing the family gold—was searched scientifically. They might have opened a couple of drawers, at the very most.”

“As if they knew where to look. So what about the mess in the kitchen?”

“Exactly. It doesn’t add up. Plus, I think the burglars had been in that apartment before.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There was no sign of breaking and entering on the door or on the windows. If they got in, either it was because Signora Baudo knew them or else because—”

“Because they had the keys,” concluded Judge Baldi, getting to his feet. He was hyperactive: he couldn’t sit listening for more than five minutes at a time. He walked over to the window and stood drumming his fingers on the glass. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to work solo, Schiavone. I’ve got some problems on my hands.” Immediately an image flashed into Rocco’s mind: the wife’s picture dumped into a drawer, if not actually tossed in the trash. Baldi stopped drumming and started whistling softly. Rocco recognized the Toreador song from Bizet’s Carmen. “We are on the trail of one of the biggest tax evasion cases I’ve ever worked on, me and the finance police and the Carabinieri. There’s just an endless supply of tax evaders, you know that?”

“I can imagine. I can’t do a lot of tax evading with my paycheck.”

Baldi turned around and smiled. “If we all just paid our taxes, the tax burden would be much lighter. You know that, I know that. But it seems as if the Italians aren’t interested in the fact. This really is a strange country, isn’t it?”

Rocco braced himself for another pearl of wisdom from Judge Baldi, who always seemed to have some solution for the nation’s political and economic problems on his mind. His notions ranged from drafting cabinet ministers and secretaries from other countries, more or less the way that soccer teams are assembled, in order to have serious, well-trained, honest people running the government, to the elimination of banknotes so that all transactions would have to be conducted through credit cards. This would make all purchases traceable and make it impossible to conceal one’s income and evade taxes. “It’s a strange, deeply wasteful country,” Rocco said, encouragingly.

Baldi didn’t have to be asked twice. “True. Let me give you an example. Public funding of the political parties. Right now, they take the money as an electoral reimbursement, right?”

“Right.”

“And I don’t actually disagree with the idea. Better for them to receive public money than get funds from some powerful, manipulative lobbyist or other. But follow me closely here.” He turned away from the window and went back to his seat at his desk. “I say what we do is take parliamentarians, cabinet ministers, and undersecretaries off the state payroll, because that’s clearly a waste of public money. Instead, we should have deputies, senators, and everyone else paid directly by the parties that run them for office. In that case, politicians would get the proper salaries. And just think of how much money the treasury would save. What do you think? Wouldn’t it be a great idea?”

“But that would mean finally just giving up and bending over to take it from behind, and admitting that this country is in the hands of the political parties.”

“Well, are you saying it isn’t? Deputies and senators, commissioners and outside consultants, none of them are civil servants, Schiavone. They’re servants of the parties they belong to. And in that case, let the parties pay them!”

Rocco raised his eyebrows. “I’d have to give that some thought.”

“By all means, Schiavone. Think it over. And please, help me understand what happened to Esther Baudo. I leave that case in your hands. After all, it’s clear that I can rely on you.”

Baldi’s expression had changed. Now a sinister light glittered in his eyes.

“Of course I can rely on you.”

The magistrate’s mouth stretched out in a false, menacing smile. “And since I want to rely on you, look, I’d really like to get your version.”

“My version of what?”

“Of what happened in Rome.”

Oh my God, what a pain in the ass, thought Rocco, but he kept it to himself. “You know everything that happened; there are reports and documentation. I’m sure you’ve read them. Why dig into it again?”

“It seems to be an occupational hazard with me. I’d just like to hear your version. You’ve been here for six months now. You can tell me, can’t you?”

“All right then.” Rocco took a deep breath, got comfortable, and began. “Giorgio Borghetti Ansaldo, age twenty-nine, had a bad habit: he liked to rape young girls. I followed him, I stopped him, but there was nothing I could do about him. It just so happens that his father, Fernando Borghetti Ansaldo, is the undersecretary for foreign affairs. You may have seen his name in the news.”

Baldi nodded, brow furrowed in concentration.

“Okay. Giorgio didn’t shake his bad habit, and he kept it up until one day he practically killed a certain Marta De Cesaris, age sixteen, who lost her sight in one eye; a hundred years of therapy will never turn her back into the pretty, carefree high school student who attended the Liceo Virgilio in Rome. So I finally had my fill, I went to see Giorgio, and I gave him a serious beat-down.”

“Translate beat-down.”