Kitabı oku: «A Cold Death»

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY ANTONIO MANZINI

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FRIDAY

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?”