The Crocodile (22 page)

As raindrops carried by a listless wind streaked the plate glass, distorting and defacing the view of the bay, Piras recounted the story of a nurse who had an affair with a married man; of a doctor, still young and ambitious, who wanted an office in the fashionable center of town. She told her about an address on a nondescript street in a transient neighborhood, about young women eager to rid themselves of what they’d come to think of as nothing more than a burden. She told her about the duo’s four years working together, about how that period came to an end with an awkward, unplanned pregnancy that resulted, however, in a baby boy who was wanted and loved, in spite of all the challenges.

De Matteis sat bolt upright, listening, without any change in expression. When Piras had finished speaking, she sat for a moment in silence.

Then she said, “How ironic. Just think, Rinaldi’s now famous all over the city for his fertility treatments. It’s entirely possible that among his clients are some of the girls who went to see him back then for the opposite problem.”

“In any case, if Inspector Lojacono’s theory is correct—that the Crocodile’s intended victims are you three and not your children—then you’re the missing piece of the puzzle. I’m here to ask you to make an extra effort, signora: I’d like you to try to remember whether, in the years between 1992 and 1996, you had any contact with this business of Lorusso’s and Rinaldi’s. Any interaction, direct or indirect. Please.”

The silence dragged on. Piras couldn’t tell, as she looked at De Matteis’s rigid expression, whether she was making an effort to remember, or if she was thinking about something else, or whether she was simply searching for the right words to put an end to the conversation. At last, she spoke.

“I never got my degree, and I had absolutely no interest in education. But my father did set one condition on the money he gave me: I had to study. So I was still enrolled, technically, and I’d make sure to sit my course exams every so often until, in the end, I got married in 1998 when I was pregnant with Giada. At that point, my father had resigned himself to the situation, too.”

Piras waited, relieved that De Matteis was finally reconstructing her memories.

“Back then, we had a lot less fun. We tried things out a little at a time. It wasn’t the way it is these days; today, a fourteen-year-old girl could teach us things. Why, I’ve read text messages that girlfriends of Giada’s sent her that would . . . But let’s forget about that. We got started at an older age, and we were far more naïve, and as a result some of us got ourselves into trouble. And among the girls of what we used to call good families, it was a much more common occurrence. Of course, we couldn’t go to a hospital or a private clinic; our parents were sure to find out, and they’d have heart attacks at the very least. They belonged to a generation that was much less open than we are to dialogue and forgiveness.”

She paused to take a sip of the tea that the housekeeper had brought in. The two women looked as if they might be talking about the weather, or their holidays.

“It had never happened to me, until Giada. And at that point I wanted a home of my own, and he was handsome as could be and rich to boot, so why not? But it did happen to plenty of my girlfriends, many of them now anti-abortion crusaders. There was an address and a phone number circulating among us, though none of us knew exactly who the doctor was. I’d heard that he was good, fast, and, most important, very discreet.”

Piras took in every word, her attention focused closely. She was afraid that if she asked questions, the woman might shut down again. But still, she needed to narrow the field.

“And thinking back to that period, do you remember having contact with any woman who might have known him in any way?”

“I never went there, not even to accompany any of my girlfriends. I vaguely remember that it must have been on the street you mentioned, and I remember that fact because it wasn’t far from the university, but at the same time it wasn’t so close that you might happen to pass by, and I decided that the choice of location must have been intentional. But it could have been a different street number, and we might be talking about two different things, I couldn’t say.”

Piras made one last desperate effort.

“And can you remember if you recommended him to anyone, possibly a girl from outside your social circle? I don’t know, some girl you’d only met once or twice, at the university or at the beach, anywhere else . . .”

De Matteis, who was finishing her tea, furrowed her brow. She carefully set down the cup and dabbed at her lips with an embroidered napkin. Then she turned to look at Piras as if she were seeing her for the first time.

“You know, now that you make me think about it . . . I couldn’t say exactly when, but not too long before I quit school entirely, so it must have been in 1996 when I sat my last exams . . . There was a girl there, cute, from out of town. She was young, much younger than me, I’d say early twenties, maybe twenty-two. We used to hang out, chatting, with a bunch of other girls, and we hit it off. We never saw each other off campus. One day she called me at home. I didn’t even remember who she was—she had to remind me. And she told me that . . . yes, in short, that she needed that address and number.”

Piras held her breath. A gust of rain splashed against the plate glass.

“I remember her: a little wisp of a voice, a delicate face. She wasn’t from here. You could hear the accent, but ever so slight.”

“And what did you tell her?”

De Matteis shrugged her shoulders.

“I decided to give her a hand. I felt sorry for her. Who knows what son of a bitch had wormed his way into her heart. I got the information and gave it to her.”

Piras gave a long sigh and then asked, “Do you remember this girl’s last name? Or the town she came from, or anything else that could help us to find her?”

De Matteis shook her head decisively. “I don’t think I ever even knew her last name. We were taking different courses and anyway, like I told you, I didn’t spend much time at the university. It’s been so many years, I can’t even imagine how I came up with the memory just now.”

Piras couldn’t conceal an expression of bitter disappointment. She had felt she was so close to the solution and now she saw it slipping through her fingers again. How could she track down that girl and complete the circle without more information?

Then suddenly De Matteis said, “But I do remember her first name. She had the same name as the main character of my favourite novel,
Il resto di niente
. Her name was Eleonora.”

Eleonora finishes writing and gets wearily to her feet.
Her fever has been rising relentlessly over the past few days. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness has grown flimsy; she can no longer distinguish between thoughts and dreams.

Earlier, she’d been stretched out on the bed, flat on her back. The pain has faded from stabbing to dull, as if her weakness and listlessness had struck some sort of pity into it. She should have taken her medicine but the scrap of paper with the name of the antibiotic that the doctor dictated over the phone is still at the bottom of her purse, forgotten.

She looks around: her bedroom looks like a dump. Remnants of food she tried to eat, half-finished drinks, dirty clothing. It’s obvious from every detail that she no longer has any desire to live, Eleonora thinks.

It’s odd, what happened to her. Until she made her way to the address that her classmate at the university gave her and she climbed the stairs of that building, deep down she’d never really thought about the baby. She’d only thought about the man she’d loved, about what he’d given her and what he’d taken away. She’d thought about her father and her mother, about how they’d react, about what they’d say to her. She’d thought about herself, about what would become of her, about what she ought and ought not to do. She’d even thought about the people from her hometown, about the gossip that would undermine her parents’ respectability.

But she’d never thought about the baby.

A clump of cells deep in her belly, like a piece of undigested food, something to be expelled as soon as possible, and then forgotten.

A piece of lost love, or a piece of love that never really existed except for in her imagination, the fantasy of a small-town girl living in a big city for the first time.

A mistaken dream, an idea of happiness posited at exactly the wrong moment.

An impediment, an insurmountable obstacle lying between her and the attainment of her dreams.

It had been everything to her, from the moment she first glimpsed it in the form of a line of type on an impersonal lab test result, except what it really was.

A baby. Her child. Flesh and blood, a gaze, a voice, thoughts in a mind. A hand on her face, the smell of its breath, the intensity of love. Her child.

In a feverish dream, in the pain of her own empty womb, Eleonora glimpsed him. She imagined seeing him at school, serious and responsible, his little black smock and a book bag. Playing football with grit and commitment, not especially good but fiery and stubborn. Running straight towards his grandparents, hugging them tight. And in her arms, fast asleep with a smile on his face.

In the fever and the pain of her own empty womb, Eleonora met the son whose death she had decreed. She watched him being born a thousand times; she felt the searing pain of losing him. She felt him sail away from her on the wings of her own lost love, becoming a ghost of the past like the man who, together with her, had conceived him on that very same bed, on an afternoon of dreams and caresses.

Eleonora waited for her fever to subside and then she dragged herself to the table. She picked up her pen and wrote a note to the one person who had always understood her even before she opened her mouth to speak, and she enclosed the story of the seed that had been planted in her belly. She told that person of her dreams and her illusions, describing how they had vanished into the air so that she no longer wanted to go on breathing. She described places, faces, and feelings. She included first and last names, because she wanted to be sure that none of this would be forgotten.

Most important, she described her baby, the baby that would have been: the facial features that now no one would ever see, the imaginary resemblances and the hypothetical character traits. And as she reread it, she decided that there had never been a baby as real as this one.

As she wrote, in order to ensure that all of this would be remembered, Eleonora realized that without her little angel she had no desire to go on living. Without her child’s love, without the honor and affection of her family, she knew she lacked the strength to go on. She could have overcome every obstacle, but not the absence of her baby.

As she wrote, Eleonora realized that she had striven, paid for, and pleaded for her own unappealable guilty verdict.

Eleonora has sealed the envelope. She’s written a name on the front. Someone will deliver it.

She gets up and struggles to open the window. The air—damp, muggy, and foul with smog—rushes into the room. Eleonora climbs on to the windowsill. It takes quite an effort, what with her fever, what with her empty womb.

And like the rain, like her tears, she falls.

De Matteis looks thoughtfully up at the ceiling. Then she turns to Piras.

“And there’s one more thing that I remember, now that I think about it. A few months later I went back to the university, to pay my enrollment fees, and I bumped into a classmate who told me that the girl had killed herself. Sad story, eh?”

The old man keeps the lights off. He’s accustomed his eyes to the shadows; he can make out the silhouettes of the furniture and other objects. That’s all he requires. He has what he needs in his hands, the only object of any importance.

A pair of binoculars.

He took his time picking them out—almost twenty days of internet research. The street is twenty-five feet and five inches across: the satellite map is accurate to the twentieth of an inch. The thickness of the two walls amounts to one yard eleven inches, and it’s twenty feet from the outer wall of the property to the wall of the villa. His choice had fallen on a pair of roof-prism binoculars—an older technology but much more reliable over short and middle distances.

The old man moves cautiously over to the curtain and, without opening it, focuses his binoculars on the villa through the central opening.

There are two windows lit up, plus one that emits the pale blue brilliance of a television set. On the upper floor is the baby girl’s bedroom. He can just glimpse the bars of the crib, with the colorful butterflies turning overhead. Every so often, the baby’s hand spins the butterflies as she extends her fingertips to touch the lowest-hanging one. The little one learns quickly.

In the kitchen on the ground floor, the woman moves around, busy with countertops and utensils. Near the microwave is the room monitor, picking up the sounds in the baby’s bedroom. He’ll need to keep that in mind.

In the little living room he can glimpse, in the half-light, the silhouette of the man’s feet propped up on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Still at home, the old man thinks.

He looks at his watch—the glowing phosphorescent spheres show 9:05
P.M.
He sees the small red car slow down and pull up in front of the gate. The young woman says goodbye to her boyfriend, their heads merge in the shadow for a long, lingering moment: a sweet kiss, see you later. She gets out and blows another kiss, then wiggles her fingers.
Ciao, caro
.

She walks up to the single-button intercom and rings. Through the kitchen window, the old man sees the woman move briskly and buzz the front gate open. She presses the lower button. So that means: top button, answer; bottom button, open gate.

The girl enters, turning one last time to look at the red car, which pulls away and vanishes down the street. Good boy, the old man thinks. Never leave a girl alone waiting to be admitted. These are dangerous times we live in.

The hall light comes on; the woman opens the door and welcomes the girl inside.
Prego
, come right in. Come with me to the kitchen; let me show you what I’ve prepared for the evening. You can eat some of this, and here I’ve got milk for the little one—all you have to do is heat it up.