Adam's Rib (23 page)

A pile of snow beside the sidewalk reached out and nipped at the deputy police chief's left Clarks desert boot.

“Goddamn it . . . no, Signora, as far as I know he's fine. Why do you ask?”

“I'm so anxious. He went up to Pila this morning on the cable car and he's had his cell phone turned off ever since.”

“He went to Pila?”

“He said that he needed to get up into the mountains, and far away from this . . .” She swept her right hand in a circle to indicate everything around her.

“No, Signora, you'll see, he must just have wanted a little time to himself. We came for another reason.”

“Would you like to come in? Can I offer you anything?”

Italo was already heading for the house. Rocco threw
his arm out to block him. “Maybe you can tell us. It's just a question. Was Esther ever in a serious car crash?”

“Esther? No. One time she was in a fender bender, but they exchanged information and the insurance companies took care of it. But why? Is there some complaint from an insurance company?”

“No, Signora,” said Italo, “don't worry about that.”

“It was strictly a formality,” said Rocco, looking down at his shoe, which had already changed color.

“Are you sure you don't want a cup of coffee? You ought to get yourself a pair of shoes that are better suited for the snow.”

Rocco looked at the woman. “You know, Signora? You aren't the first person to give me that advice.” Then with a smile he went back to the car. Italo snapped her a sharp salute in farewell, then turned to follow his boss.

“WHAT CAN I TELL YOU? I'D HAVE TO GO DO A SEARCH
in the archives.” The man was unhelpful, speaking quickly in an unmistakable attempt to dispose of that unexpected visit from the police as soon as possible. “Do you have any idea of how long that would take me?”

The hospital's administrative director looked like anything but the administrative director of a hospital. Crewneck cashmere sweater, dark blue corduroy trousers. He wore a pair of glasses with lenses tinted light blue, like a Hollywood movie star. His flowing white hair clashed with his chubby round face. He sat there, knuckles pressed down on
his desktop, and he hadn't invited Rocco, much less Officer Pierron, to take a seat and get comfortable in either of the two leather office chairs facing his desk.

“Don't you have a secretary, Dottor Trevisi?” asked the deputy police chief.

“It's Wednesday. Wednesdays are always a nightmare. What with scheduled visits and walk-ins, you can't even imagine the rush. Listen, why don't we do this: you leave me the note and I swear to you that in less than”—he glanced at the clock—“six hours I can give you the information you need.”

“Let's say three hours.”

“Five.”

“Four, and we have a deal!” said Rocco, extending his hand. The director took it and shook it without understanding why. He took a sheet of paper and started writing. “Now then, Deputy Police Chief, do me a favor and remind me . . .”

“Certainly. I want to know whether and when you hospitalized, or even just treated in an emergency room visit, a woman named Esther Baudo. Baudo was her married name. Her maiden name was . . .”

“Sensini,” Italo put in promptly.

Trevisi was taking notes without looking up, whispering with his Cupid's bow mouth each word as he wrote it: “. . . emergency room, Sensini married name Baudo . . .”

“If you'll forgive me for putting in my two cents, I'd take a look under traumatology. I want to know how and why.”

“. . . how and why . . . excellent!” The administrative director looked up. “Well then, if there isn't anything else . . .”

“No, actually there is one more thing.”

“Go right ahead, Dottor Schiavone.”

“You just try not getting back to me in four hours and I'll be back with a nice little document signed by a judge.”

“And would you mind telling me what I'd find written in that document?”

“Dottor Trevisi, it's not as if I came to see you because I don't have anything better to do. This concerns a murder. I hope that I've made things clear once and for all. Have a good day.”

He turned and exited the office, with Italo hard on his heels. Trevisi immediately picked up the phone: “Annamaria? Please come to my office . . . there's some research I need you to do . . . of course, right now; when did you think? At New Year's? Who the hell cares if it's Wednesday!”

“SHALL WE GO VISIT D'INTINO?” ASKED ITALO AS
they walked down the hospital stairs.

“What is this craze everyone seems to have about going to visit him?”

“He doesn't have family here in Aosta. We take turns bringing him water and cookies.”

Rocco stopped. “And do you usually go with Caterina or on your own?”

Italo blushed. “Listen, Rocco, this thing with Caterina . . .”

“You want the whole story? I originally planned to take some serious revenge. Like put a note of demerit into your
file and ask the police chief to have you transferred. But then I took a good look at you. You're just a pathetic loser with a mouth that belongs on a piggy bank, and when are you going to find another girlfriend?”

“And so?”

“And so I forgive you. In the name of the Father . . .”

“Oh go fuck yourself, Rocco.”

“But at least once you need to tell me what she's like in bed.”

“That's personal.”

“Have you ever heard of a place called Scampia? Or Macomer? How about Sacile del Friuli?”

“Shall I start from when we got undressed?”

“Good idea. While we head into town, because we have somebody to go see. And even if it's technically strictly a pedestrian zone, we're going to take the car. Are we or are we not the police, for fuck's sake!”

“You're not going to add a note of demerit to my file because without me who do you have left at headquarters?” said Italo, with a wink and a smile.

“Well, I'd have Caterina. And believe me, she'd be plenty.”

“What a bastard.”

“You have no idea. Come on, start talking. Let's start with her nipples.”

OFFICER ITALO PIERRON WALKED INTO THE TOMEI
clothing shop, following his boss like a bloodhound at the heels of a hunter. The only difference is that a bloodhound
knows what it's doing; it knows its job. Find the birds and scare them into the air. Instead, all Italo could do was look around in bewilderment and check the price of a pair of Church's shoes.

In his impeccable Prince of Wales tweed suit, Signor Tomei, proprietor of the Very English menswear shop that bore his name, hurried toward the two policemen with tiny steps. “Dottor Schiavone! I'm so happy you dropped by. As I told you on the phone yesterday, my wife has something to tell you.”

And with a theatrical gesture he brought his wife, Finola, onstage. A woman with the most prominent chin Rocco had ever seen. This wasn't a chin, Rocco thought: it was a downspout.

“
Buongiorno
, Commissario.” The English accent gave away her origin.

“Deputy Police Chief,” said Rocco.

“Yes,” said the woman. “I wanted to speak with you. Because . . . I remembered a very important thing.”

“I'm all ears.”

“My husband told me . . . and I started thinking. I thought and I thought and in the end I remembered.” She looked Rocco in the eye and delivered her showstopper, but in English: “
A tie!
”

“I don't understand.”

“The lady that is dead . . . she came to buy a necktie for her husband.
A tie
. That's what was in the bag.”

Rocco looked at Italo, who wasn't understanding much but who was pretending to take interest in the conversation. “Can I see one?”

“Certainly. She bought a regimental tie. A very nice one. Cashmere and silk.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but are regimental ties the ones with diagonal stripes?”

“Exactly!” said Finola, who had in the meantime pulled three gleaming ties out of a display case. “You see? This is what they look like . . .”

“And if I asked you to identify that tie, would you be capable of doing that?”

“Certainly,” Signor Tomei immediately butted in. “I could spot one of our ties from a mile away. You know why?” he smiled connivingly. He picked up one of the ties and turned it over. “You see? On the back we've added the logo of our store. Nothing could be easier!”

A small white label, also made of silk, was stitched to the back of the tie, and it bore the name “Tomei,” embroidered in an oval of laurel leaves. “That's our trademark. These ties are exclusive to us. They come from Ireland. Oh, Lord, they're actually made in India, but the design and everything else is pure Irish.”

“Wait, is Ireland part of Great Britain, or is it Ireland?” were the only words to emerge from Italo's mouth; it was unclear why he'd felt called upon to vocalize his presence, which was otherwise entirely unnecessary in the shop. All he got in response was a scornful glare from Rocco, and another equally contemptuous glance from Finola, who couldn't let the question go unremarked. “Ireland is Ireland, Officer, and it's officially called Eire. Ulster, that is, Northern Ireland, is part of Great Britain. The capital of Ireland
is Dublin. For Ulster, it's Belfast. If you want to know more about it, you'd need to read a book about Michael Collins.”

Rocco brought the conversation back to the tie. “One last thing. Can you tell me the price?”

“For that tie? It's not for the weak of heart . . .” said Signor Tomei.

“Well?”

“About seventy euros. But you know, it's made of silk and it's practically a one-off, handmade. You see, cashmere-silk blend is a process that requires . . .”

“You don't need to talk me into buying one, Signor Tomei. All I need is the information.”

“Sorry. Force of habit.”

“Don't think twice. Signora Finola, you've been extremely helpful.”

Finola Tomei smiled and revealed a spacialist array of teeth. Spacialist in the sense that in the upper arch a canine was missing, and in the lower arch, two incisors. If you added to that fact the consideration that her teeth were enormous and stuck into her gums with no particular rhyme or reason, Finola Tomei's mouth seemed like the result of a frontal collision with a trolley. Rocco stood there, captivated, gazing at her. It was Italo who brought him back to earth. “Very good, Dottore, shall we go now?” he asked, shaking Rocco by the arm. Rocco smiled, winked at the husband and wife, and left the shop, escorted by Officer Pierron.

“A GARGOYLE. DID YOU SEE THAT, ITALO? SHE LOOKED
like a gargoyle, one of those statues on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.”

Italo smiled: “Pretty amazing. But more than one of those gadgets, those gargoyles, if you ask me she looked like one of those deepwater fish, what do you call them, abyssal fish. You know the ones: translucent, with tiny bodies and huge mouths?”

“You know, you're right?”

“I've seen ones on Animal Planet that are truly frightening.”

“It's true, an abyssal fish. This is the first time it's happened to me.”

“What?”

“The first time I've found a resemblance between a woman's face and an animal. It's never happened to me before.”

“That's because you've never seen my aunt,” said Italo. “Someday I'll introduce you. But you'd better brace yourself. Just imagine: she's eighty-two years old and she hasn't left her house since 1974.”

“Can't she walk?”

“No, no, she can walk, and how. It's just that one day she decided she didn't feel like going out anymore. She says that everyone out in the world is crazy these days. Aunt Adele, that's her name. She's four foot eleven and she only talks at night. One look at her and your jaw would drop.”

“And why should I meet her?”

“Because there's no better cook in the whole valley, believe me!”

“Then you know what I say, Italo? I say let's go have dinner at the Pam Pam, you and me. It's my treat. And bring Caterina too.”

“And just what reason do you have for being so generous?”

“Because I'm depressed, because it's March twenty-first, the first day of spring, and it's an important date and I don't feel like eating alone. Is that enough for you?”

IN THE END THIS IS HOW HE ALWAYS WOUND UP FEELING.
Tired and disgusted. Dinner with Italo and Caterina hadn't helped much. He'd laughed, he'd drank, he'd done his best to take his mind off it. But it hadn't worked. When all was said and done, the vacuum of death weighed on him worse than any other preoccupation. Because by this point Rocco Schiavone knew who was guilty of the murder. It had taken him just a few days to figure it out, to chase down and catch the killer, the idiot, the person who had chosen to upset the natural balance of things. Who had extinguished a human life—for what? Personal conceit? Anger? Madness?

But in order to understand whatever it was—conceit, anger, or madness—Rocco had had to plumb the depths of it, the way a good actor does before portraying a character. And in order to enter into the role, he'd have to go into the
diseased head of those people, put on their filthy flesh like an overcoat, camouflage himself, and drop into the depths, the sewers, searching with a flashlight for the most indecent, the filthiest parts of a human being. And he'd have to stay down there, in the sewers, in the swamp, lying in ambush until the murderer, the bastard wandered into range. Then he could finally surface into the fresh air and try to get clean again. Only to get all that filth off him, it would take days, even months. And some of it always stuck to his skin, impossible to scrub away.

He knew that if he continued in that profession, he'd never be able to get the filth off him.