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“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.”
