The Crocodile (13 page)

I creep around the city, doing what I need to. I watch from my hiding places, I never look anyone in the eye, crawling along, clinging to the wall. And I realize that all these people, running to and fro, cursing and swearing, listening to music on their headphones and chewing their gum, dead-eyed—all these people actually protect me. They’re like a shifting wall that I can hide behind.

I think of you, my darling. I think of all the time you spent here, alone. Without me. I think of how you suffered. It won’t be long now, you know. Not long at all.

This time it’ll be even easier; this time there’s no danger of anyone coming by with a dog. I still laugh. Did I tell you that I found some splashes of beagle pee on the cuffs of my trousers?

Writing to you keeps me company. I hope you like it. It warms my heart, makes me feel as if I’m talking to you, even if I can’t hear you answer me. But soon we’ll sit side by side, and we’ll talk and talk—we’ll tell each other stories until our throats are parched.

Sometimes I can hear your laughter. It’s happened a lot in recent years. I took refuge in it, trying not to hear her gasp and wheeze.

I’ve often wondered about what I’d feel. I’ve thought about it, so much and for so long, about all this, every detail, every practical aspect, but I’ve never really known what I would feel. What feelings I would experience, in other words. And now I think I have the answer.

I don’t feel a thing.

I love you, my sweet and only darling—that’s the only thing I feel. I feel no joy, I feel no pain. I see them fall, I see them die. I see them pass away, give up the ghost. And I feel nothing when they do.

I stay and look, making sure that what I wanted to make happen really has happened. I watch as death moves from one corpse to another. I see a dawning expression on the faces of those left behind as the doors to hell on earth swing wide open. Which is what I wanted. But I don’t feel any satisfaction, nor am I brushed by even the shadow of regret.

I feel nothing.

All I feel is the powerful, overwhelming love that I have for you.

Dawn on a rainy day.
There’s not a specific moment when you see the dawn, on a rainy day. Suddenly it’s there, sliding into view while you had your mind on other things.

You feel it in the air. You watch as the night abandons the rain, step by step, and unexpectedly there’s a pallid light, translucent as a wet silk sheet.

It descends gradually, like a disease. It settles on the smoke-grey trees, washes the walls with tears, turns the glittering cobblestones dull and opaque.

Dawn on a rainy day constricts the breathing and, to the sorrows of whoever is still awake at that hour, it adds pain.

A girl in love has checked the time over and over, dialing a cell phone number over and over again, until she finally resigns herself to the fact that there’s no answer, and she falls asleep, fully dressed, in an armchair. Dawn arrives in the rain and caresses her from the window, without waking her, regretfully.

A father awakes and, as he heads for the bathroom, notices an empty bedroom, an untouched bed. Suddenly he feels fearful and looks out of the window at the rainy dawn. Below, he sees the garage door open. He hurries down in pajamas and slippers, steps outside, indifferent to the cold and damp. He walks into the garage.

A scream tears through the air.

The wet dawn folds back around that tear.

Like a chilly shroud.

*

Lojacono could hardly fail to notice that something had happened. In the alley, at the front entrance of the police station, there were two vans and a car emblazoned with the logos of the leading national television networks and surmounted by large dish antennae. The vehicles partly obstructed the already narrow passageway, and a uniformed policeman was arguing with the drivers in a spirited but unsuccessful attempt to get them to move.

Within the courtyard things were even worse. A platoon of journalists with microphones and digital recorders were pushing and shoving, trying to get inside the building, while two blank-faced cops barred the entrance. Lojacono was forced to signal to catch their attention before he could be allowed in. A young woman reporter wearing glasses realized that he was a cop and tried to grab his sleeve, but he wriggled out of her grasp.

Inside, it was relatively peaceful. Giuffrè was already swaying nervously.

“Do you mind telling me what the hell’s going on? What is all this ruckus?”

The little man snickered. “Oh, right, I almost forgot: what with you living in a cave and all, you don’t have a TV or a radio. But how do you manage to get any sleep with all that silence? I think I’d lose my mind.”

“Well, you’re right. Who gets any sleep? Are you going to tell me what’s happening or not?”

The sergeant puffed up his chest in pride. “First item on the national news. The whole country is interested in us, as you can see. The Crocodile has struck again. A university student, in the better part of Vomero, same technique, this time in the garage at his villa. It probably happened last night. His father found him this morning at dawn—a prestigious doctor, well known in this city, apparently a gynecologist.”

Lojacono flopped into his chair. “So they’re certain? There’s no doubt about it? It was him?”

Giuffrè nodded gravely. “Of course it was him. Unless there’s already a copycat out there. You know how it is these days. The minute you’re the subject of a front-page story, other people start trying to imitate you. But all the necessary elements were there: tissues on the sidewalk, a shell casing from a .22 pistol, a shot to the head, fired point-blank. He waited for the boy to sit down at the wheel and then fired before he could close the door. So it was him.”

The inspector stared into the void. “Another one. That makes three. What do we know about the kid?”

Giuffrè extended both arms. “I can’t help you there. All I know is what they said on the TV news. It happened last night, so the morning newspapers missed it. His name was Donato Rinaldi, he was almost twenty-three, studying medicine. He was on track for his degree, a good student. He live alone with his father, a widower. He was an only child. His father’s one of the most sought-after gynecologists in town, plenty of money, they broadcast shots of the villa where they live. They live there, instead of Posillipo like the other rich people in this city, to be closer to the hospital where the father is head physician. I don’t know anything else.”

“I don’t understand—if it happened on the other side of town, why are all these reporters here?”

The little man’s expression suddenly turned crafty. “Because we were the first to handle these murders, so we’ve had longer than anyone else to investigate, even if we haven’t found out a thing. So we’re especially to blame, don’t you think? Now they’re waiting for Di Vincenzo, to rip him limb from limb the second they get the chance.”

“Does he know?”

“Oh, you bet he knows. He’s here, locked in his office, and he has been since seven-fifteen this morning. He’s taking no calls. Pontolillo told me that Piras has already called three times. But he won’t answer and he even has his mobile turned off.”

Lojacono shook his head. “A single father. A widower. Lorusso was born to a single mother; no one ever knew who the father was. De Matteis’s mother is divorced; the girl’s father didn’t even come to the funeral. I heard a couple of people talking about it—he wasn’t able to get a flight back from America in time. And they’re all just kids.”

Giuffrè listened, rapt, his eyes magnified by his bottle-bottom glasses. “I can tell–the mind of the great detective is grinding into gear. Think, Loja’, think. I know it–you’re our one and only hope of ever getting out of here.”

“Get used to it, Giuffrè. I know less about all this than the others. All I’m doing is linking what facts I do possess, that’s it.”

At that moment Di Vincenzo walked past their office door, heading for the courtyard. He was as white as a sheet. His gait was rigid and he stared straight ahead. An instant later, the platoon of reporters exploded with a shout.

Now she knows she’ll never see him again. Her fear has turned into certainty.
Eleonora gets out of bed, stiff-limbed. She feels completely drained of energy. She struggles against an immediate, violent surge of vertigo and the retching urge to vomit that follows. She leans back against the wall, inhaling deeply.

As she washes her face with ice-cold water she feels a distinctly odd sensation: she sees herself from outside. Right there, in the bathroom of the flat she lives in, as if it were a movie and she were the only spectator, sitting and watching. She looks with detachment at this pallid, unkempt woman, with her rumpled clothing, her makeup smeared from sleep and tears. She could be any age, come from any walk of life. She is the very picture of loneliness and despair.

She’s alone now. And she’s scared.

She’s terrified by the thought of having to make her way through a hostile world. Having to decide for herself, and defend her decision. Having no one to rely on, no one in it with her.

It’s the first time in her life that anything like this has happened. There was always someone to take care of her, to point her in the right direction. Sometimes she followed her own instincts, but even so, she knew that she could count on help from others if needed.

Her family and her hometown surface in her mind. And she realizes how long it’s been since she bothered to think of them. What used to seem like a prison, an entangling net of pointless constraints, appearances, and formalities, suddenly looks like a safe haven, but too far across stormy waters to be reached. Perhaps she was wrong to leave. But now it’s too late, in any case.

She changes her clothes, every gesture slow and listless. She’d happily flop down on to the bed again, to sleep and sleep, to see if she could burrow into a place of peace amid her convulsive, agitated dreams.

But she can’t do that. She has to solve her quandary, at least in part. The most important part, the most urgent part. How paradoxical, she thinks: being left without him has given her the strength to do what he wanted in order to stay with her.

She starts laughing, softly. Soon her laughter grows in strength, until she is left wrung out and collapses on to a chair, bursting into tears.

At last she recovers and gets to her feet. She picks up her handbag, rummages inside it, and finds a crumpled scrap of paper. On it is a name and a phone number. She remembers scrawling down that information with a pencil.

A sunlit morning at the university, her merry classmate catching up on missed studies. Wealthy, happy, and full of irony—one of so many female students spending the winter at school. Daddy’s happy to foot the bill, and in any case there’s a line on Italian identity cards where you’re supposed to state your occupation: you have to put something down.

Between classes, a group of girls would chat about life, professors, and men. Not that Eleonora much enjoyed loitering there and engaging in that kind of conversation; her fellow students really did act like a flock of dumb birds. Still, that day the sun was warm and there were no dark clouds on the horizon. It was so agreeable to kill a little time like this, well aware that none of the tragedies the other girls were talking about would ever even graze her. To think about it now, sitting on the edge of her bed with that scrap of paper in her hand, prompted a stab of melancholy in Eleonora’s heart and a surge of regret at her lost happiness.

Her classmate was the oldest girl in the group. She acted like the queen of the world, well versed in everything. She knew the city and all its most prominent citizens; she boasted that she could reach out to anyone at any time of the day or night. And she had told them, as a demonstration of her power, a story that now came rushing back to Eleonora—as arrogant and abrupt as a slap in the face.

She turns the scrap of paper over in her hands. She tries to recall what thought, or what premonition, had led her to jot down that girl’s name and number. Once or twice she’d passed her in the halls of the school, and they’d exchanged a fleeting smile. Nothing more.

And now, she muses, here I am. You’re right. In the end everyone, sooner or later, needs something.

Eleonora gets to her feet and walks over to the phone.

The old man gets up from the desk.
As long as he’s been in that room, he’s done nothing but write, sleep, change his clothes, and use the bathroom. A few well-defined paths in the intervals between the long hours spent staking out places, monitoring and taking note.

Dabbing away at the perennial tear dripping from his left eye, the old man stands motionless. His thoughts run to what he has done. Slowly, methodically, he archives it all and focuses on his next moves.

He’s done the same thing every time: freed his mind of all the details that are no longer needed, all the things that have become superfluous, mere redundancy in light of what remains to be completed. Order, he thinks. First and foremost, order.

The boy, the student, was in a certain sense the easiest job of all to polish off. He had calmly catalogued his movements and activities, discovering to his relief that the boy was as methodical as he was, with strict routines from which he never wavered. And one in particular: Friday night.

Let the sky fall if it must, the boy went to his girlfriend’s flat every Friday night and only returned home quite late. First he spent time studying, then he’d shower, change, head downstairs to the garage to get out the car, drive to the far side of the city, and go up to his girlfriend’s flat. The old man suspected that the boy’s father knew nothing about the girl; from his usual safe distance he had observed the young couple arguing frantically, as she insistently begged him to do something and he assumed a wait-and-see demeanor. Given the life he led as a student, a steady routine of home and university, and the fact that the old man had never seen the girl come to his house, she could only be demanding one thing: an official introduction. Times change, the old man thinks, but only to a certain extent.