Adam's Rib (2 page)

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 at 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?”