The Crocodile (11 page)

Lojacono nodded. “Yes, I saw that. Unfortunately, I doubt they’ll stop, at least until they know we have some real leads.”

“That’s right. Which is why we’re going to call a press conference and announce that we’re following a lead on Camorra involvement, in connection with drug dealing at the girl’s high school. There will be a collective circling of the wagons in the city’s highest social circles, a few indignant protests. But if nothing else, it’ll drive the pushers out of the area for a while.”

Piras got to her feet. Lojacono understood that the conversation was over. He was sort of sorry: the woman knew her business, as well as being easy on the eyes.

“That might even be the right solution, who can say? There’s only one thing that can prove us wrong.”

“What’s that?”

Lojacono was already on his way to the door. He paused. “Another murder.”

She lies motionless on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Eleonora decides that she’d rather die. And so she prays for that.

The most absurd thing, the strangest thing of all, is that she feels guilty. As if she had been the one, all by herself, who had decided; as if she had laid the foundations herself, as if she’d conceived the child on her own, and she was trying to inflict it on him, as a penalty, as a condemnation.

She wonders whether she chose the wrong time. Maybe she should have talked to him in bed, after making love, when everything is tender and sweet and there is gratitude in the air for the pleasure shared. Perhaps she should have murmured it to him in the shadows, when the afternoon light poured in horizontal stripes through the half-closed wooden blinds, turning their bodies to gold and their thoughts to baby blue.

Maybe she shouldn’t have arranged to see him at the university, in the very spot where they had first met. She should have avoided a place that could have completed the circle, imprisoning their emotions in crystal like the prince and princess in some fairytale.

Fairytales don’t exist, and Eleonora knows it. Her mother had told her so, in no uncertain terms, during their last conversation before she left: Don’t dream. Dreams will kill you if you’re not careful.

But unfortunately I did dream, Eleonora thinks. I let myself be lured into another dream, where I was a penniless princess gathered up by the prince and carried straight into Paradise. But I was no princess. And he was no prince. And there is no Paradise.

She had told him as a gleaming shaft of sunlight suddenly broke through the clouds above them. She’d waited for it, that ray of light; she’d hoped for a good omen. And she’d even forgiven him for that first glance of terror and estrangement, aghast as he was. And the endless silence that had followed.

But not the words. Those were unequivocal, horrible. A chilly verdict.

“I can’t,” he’d said. “I can’t.”

“What does that mean?” she had asked him. “What can’t you?”

He sat there, shaking his head, without a word. Then he brusquely got to his feet, saying, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go now. I need to think.”

She’d talked to him that night, at the usual time. One ring, two, a third. Then his voice, so different from usual: frosty, distant.

“I need to think,” he’d said again. “This changes everything; you understand that, don’t you? It wasn’t part of the plan. I need to think.”

“What about me?” Eleonora had asked. “Don’t you see that I’m part of this too? You think I don’t have dreams, plans, opportunities? Weren’t you there too, when this happened?”

Silence. Silence on the other end of the line, silence in his heart, silence in his soul. And then: “Just think, what would my father say? Can you imagine? At the very least, I’d have to move, we’d have to move. And it would kill him. Plus, I’m a long way from getting my degree. I’d have to look for a job, give up studying. Scrape by, for the rest of our lives: me, you, and . . . it.”

Eleonora decides that she could forgive him anything, except for referring to his child as a stumbling block on the path to happiness.

She’d sat there in silence for a long time. She’d listened to him breathing into the receiver, and he really had seemed like a stranger to her.

In the end, she had said to him, “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t stand to lose you. Let me know what you decide to do.” And she’d hung up the phone.

A whole day had gone by. A night, a morning, an afternoon, an evening. And now it was night again. Eleonora hadn’t eaten, she hadn’t gone out, she hadn’t got out of bed, she didn’t remember sleeping, but she did dream.

She dreamed of death.

She saw herself in a bed, in the middle of the room. She saw, in succession: her mother, white-faced, dry-eyed; her father, distraught with grief, incredulous, despairing; her friends from the university, one by one, with the awkward expression of people who have missed an opportunity, who are full of regret at not having had more time together.

Even his father was there: still a stranger, stiff, sanctimonious, a scrupulous shadow falling over his face, a hint of suspected guilt.

But not him. In the dream, he wasn’t there. Eleonora wonders if she’ll ever see him again.

Then the phone rings.

She had been watching him all through the evening as he sat, lost in thought, his gaze wandering, one glass of wine chasing another. She couldn’t wait for the dining room to empty out enough so that she could leave her young assistant to manage the tables and go sit at his table.

It had been a while since Letizia had last seen him look the way he did when he first came to that city: bewildered, disoriented, unhappy. Slowly, one burst of conversation or smile at a time, he had opened up to dialogue and friendship, and a gentle and ironic nature had emerged, along with a flow of memories of another life.

With her heart rather than her head, Letizia sensed that Peppuccio—a nickname for Giuseppe that only she, in that city, used for Lojacono—was emerging from his solitude; albeit with effort, pain, and regrets, he was starting to sit up and look around, the way someone might after suffering a terrible loss. After all, the man had left behind not only a marriage and a love story, but also his entire life. And his daughter—a bond that could not be forgotten.

She had known men devoid of all instinct for family, men who—once they were out of the house—thought of their children as financial burdens and nothing more. But that wasn’t the way he was. The girl’s silence, the barrier his wife had erected, and his inability to alter his daughter’s obvious intention to eliminate him from her life—all these things were wounds that refused to scar over.

She liked the man. She understood that it was time to level with herself. And the fact that Lojacono clung to his past the way he did, hindering any attempt to build a new life in the present, only prompted a sense of tenderness towards him in Letizia. In some odd way, in fact, it made him more attractive.

Over the last few months, night after night, she had seen that pain fade, become a mist hanging over his soul. The sudden moments of depression still came and went, but they became fainter with time. You get used to everything. Smiles had become more frequent, teasing jibes directed at her and the city, comments about the food. Peppuccio was starting to thaw, she had decided happily.

But tonight the pain and sadness were back, dense as a bank of winter fog. And they were looking for resolution at the bottom of a wineglass.

When she was finally able to take a break, Letizia wasted no time.

“So what’s up? Are you trying to break the world record for the amount of red wine consumed in one evening? And look at that: you’ve hardly touched your pasta. Should I order a fresh bowl for you? Is there something wrong with it?”

The man raised his eyes to hers. “I guess I’m not hungry tonight.”

Letizia sat down, drying her hands on her apron, and faked a laugh. She’d long since learned that it was pointless to question him; if he wanted to talk, he’d do so without prompting.

“That’s a bad sign. Must mean you’re in love.”

Lojacono said nothing, turning the wineglass between his palms. Then he spoke.

“You know, when that boy was killed and they called us, I was asleep, catching a nap on the foldout bed they have for the guys on the graveyard shift. I don’t dream about Marinella often, though I think about her all the time, as you know. And that night, that very night, I dreamed about her.”

Letizia listened attentively. “What did you dream?”

“She looked exactly like the last time I saw her, when I left and she refused to give me a parting hug. She was at a disco, or she had been, then . . . Well, it didn’t go well, I don’t want to think about it. And as the car she was riding in . . . That’s when the phone rang, and I woke up. And as you can understand, I still have that weight on my chest.”

“I get it. But you shouldn’t dwell on it. It was a bad dream, that’s all. You know, in this city we say that dreaming someone has died makes them live longer.”

Lojacono smiled sadly. “I know. I know that a dream is just a dream. But then, when I was there, I saw the face of the boy’s mother. There was a woman, must have been a neighbor or a relative, I don’t know who, comforting her. And she wasn’t talking. But her face . . . She was such a wreck.”

Letizia shivered. “I can imagine. Poor Luisa. That son of hers was all she had in the world. Since then, I’ve heard she never leaves her flat, not even for food. Her neighbors bring her something to eat from time to time. I don’t have the nerve to go see her, though maybe I’ll try someday soon.”

“Sure, I can see why. That kind of grief is intolerable to be around, even at a distance. That night, it looked as if she was screaming but she didn’t make a sound. Or she did, but it was a sort of sigh, a hiss. I can’t seem to get it out of my mind. And I’ve seen dead people, in my time. And survivors, relatives of murder victims, plenty of them. But not like her.”

“Listen, Peppu’, it strikes me that you’re spending too much time on this thing. Those kids aren’t your daughter. This is a nasty city and unfortunately this kind of thing happens.”

Lojacono’s eyes were lost, empty. “Then I attended the girl’s funeral. I don’t even know why I went; I just wanted to understand. And there were all her friends, her classmates—you can imagine, it was a terrible thing. And the mother, oh, the mother . . . At a certain point, she started talking out loud, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And the things she said . . . She was raving, obviously. As if she’d lost her mind. I was right across from her, so I got a good look at her eyes. I felt as if I was looking straight into hell.”

Letizia decided to put an end to the torment. She took his hand.

“Now listen to me. I don’t like this whole business. You’re taking on a burden that doesn’t belong to you, and in the shape you’re in, you can’t afford it. Otherwise you’re going to lose your mind and then they really won’t let you see your daughter ever again. These murders, these two dead kids—it’s atrocious, chilling, unnatural. But we don’t know who did it, and we don’t know what it was about. Money, drugs, extortion; this city has a lot of different faces. But you have nothing to do with it, your daughter has nothing to do with it, none of us has anything to do with it. And you’re not going to solve matters by hanging around eating your heart out over it.”

Lojacono stared at her. A light gleamed in his slanted eyes.

“You don’t understand. The paper said he was a crocodile because of his tears, but that’s bullshit. He’s a crocodile, that’s true, but it’s his technique that makes him one. Do you know how crocodiles hunt? They can’t swim fast, they have short legs, and they can’t chase their prey. And yet they’re among the oldest animal species on the planet. Evolution left them as they are, and you know why? Because they’re perfect. The crocodile is a perfect death machine.”

Letizia shook her head. “I don’t get it. What does the crocodile have to do with anything? That’s a gimmick some reporter dreamed up.”

“True, but without knowing it that reporter hit the nail on the head. Listen to me: a crocodile selects a location—in the swamps, in the muddy waters of the savannah—and it takes time making its choice. A lot of time. The place where it knows its prey will go, sooner or later, for water. And then it positions itself under the surface of the water, every so often breaking the surface with its nostrils so it can breathe. And it waits. It waits.”

Letizia was holding her breath. Lojacono’s voice was little more than a murmur.

“Finally, the victim arrives. It sniffs, it looks around. Its instinct tells it that there’s danger here, but it needs to drink. It sees nothing dangerous there, in that specific place. So it lowers its head to the surface of the water.”

Silence. At a nearby table someone laughed, and others joined in. Lojacono went on.

“That’s how he hunts. And that’s our Crocodile’s technique. He knows their activities, their routines, their schedules. He knows where the kids will go, what they’ll do when they get there. And when they approach his jaws, he fires. A single shot, with a small-bore pistol; not very accurate, but he can’t miss. Because he’s studied carefully. He’s laid his plans, for who knows how long. And like real crocodiles, he’s cold-blooded.”

For the first time, Letizia understood the hell that her friend carried with him in his soul. She also understood what a born cop he was.

“So have you told your colleagues about this? Have you talked about it to anyone else?”

“No. I told the young woman, the prosecutor, that as far as I was concerned, the Camorra had nothing to do with it. But the things I described are sensations, ideas, impressions. You can’t work with your imagination; you have to work with the facts. What am I going to tell them: that I dreamed about my daughter and I saw the faces of two mothers and so I’ve decided that the killer isn’t a Camorrista?”

Letizia thought that over. Outside, a motorcycle ripped through the quiet of the night.

“Well, I still think you ought to. Maybe you could talk to her, that prosecutor. From what you tell me, she’s the only one willing to listen to you.”