The Crocodile (29 page)

The policeman swings his gun around, aiming it as he blinks rapidly to accustom his sight to the partial darkness.

“Freeze. Don’t move.”

The silhouette becomes a short man, with a bundle in his arms, swaying gently, rocking, lulling. He’s old, or at least he’s no longer young. He raises one hand to his eye and dabs at a tear. Lojacono realizes he’s in the presence of the Crocodile.

At the same time, he sees that the bundle in the man’s arms is the baby.

There they stand, face to face. Lojacono, legs apart, duty revolver held at arm’s length, one hand bracing the other, aims at the old man while he continues to rock the baby gently while mumbling the lullaby. Lojacono’s eyes, by now accustomed to the half-light, spot the long barrel of a pistol with a silencer in the hand holding the bundle.

Behind him comes the father’s dull lament, bemoaning his child like the sigh of the wind.

The seconds go by and nothing happens. Lojacono knows that he can’t fire without the risk of hitting the baby, but if the man were to do anything dangerous, he’d still have to pull the trigger. He shifts the sight at the end of his gun’s barrel imperceptibly towards the man’s head, the vital point that’s farthest from the bundle that his target is holding in his arms. He breathes deeply, trying to instill in himself the requisite cool calm.

The man speaks in a low voice.

“Silence. It’s time for a moment of silence, don’t you think? There’s really no need to say anything more.”

Lojacono frantically scans the room, hunting for some way of getting the baby out of the grip of that man’s arms. Out of the Crocodile’s jaws. Behind him, the baby’s father keeps up his dull lament.

At that moment, Lojacono’s eyes are attracted by a faint reflection on the floor, against the wall across from the old man. He wonders what it is, looks up and sees a picture frame with broken glass; inside the frame is a drawing, the face of a child.

With a stain in the middle of it.

He works backwards, reconstructing the trajectory: he reaches the bundle in the murderer’s arms; he understands the path the bullet followed from the gun to the drawing; what it passed through to get there.

Lojacono murmurs, “No. Fuck, no. No.”

While the father says, his voice breaking into sobs, “Let her go, I beg you. Let my daughter go.”

And the old man says solemnly, “I’ll let her go. The way you let mine go. Only my daughter was older when she died.”

And he gradually turns the baby girl to face them, displaying the hole in the middle of the tiny forehead.

Then he lets her drop.

Murmuring, “Sweetheart, my darling,” he points the pistol at his own head.

And then pulls the trigger.

Sweetheart, my darling,

These are the last words I’ll write you. Tonight I’ll be with you in heaven, I’ll look into your sweet eyes, I’ll hold your hands in mine. I’ll hold you in my arms, the way I did when you were small, and I’ll sing you the lullaby that you used to love so well.

Hush-a-bye baby, oh, I’ll give you a star.

And I’ll give you a star—a Stella. Isn’t it a wonderful coincidence that the baby girl—his girl—is named Stella, the star?

You never did know what kind of child you would have had, my darling. Whether it would be a boy or a girl. Maybe you would have had her, this same baby; after all, it’s the same father. Maybe I’ll give you back your daughter, sending her straight to heaven, to stay with you. She’s yours by right, after all.

Your letter, the last one you wrote, the one they gave me after I got the news you were dead. The desperate account of the last days of your life, of what they had done to you, the names and the places; the classmate who recommended the best place to get an abortion, the nurse and the doctor who were bantering light-heartedly while rummaging around in your viscera, laughing at some idiotic joke.

And him, the guiltiest of them all, the one who seduced you and deceived you and then abandoned you, to go off and build himself a wonderful new life on the smoking ruins of your grief.

I found them all. I found them with their children, with their happiness that hadn’t been amputated the way ours was.

While I was hunting them down, your mother was dying, consumed from within by your death. Death rattle after death rattle, gasp after wheeze. She spent sixteen years dying, dying a thousand times every day, every time with your name on her lips.

Not me. I lived so that I could do what I had to do. So I could dream of seeing you again.

I don’t believe in the things they tell us, you know. The good, the bad, heaven and hell. I believe in love and I believe in hell on earth. I’ve experienced hell on earth, and I am experiencing love right now. No one can keep me away from you any longer, my darling. No one can keep me away from my wonderful, sweet baby girl.

Once I’ve finished with the baby, the only one left to punish will be the last guilty party, the worst of them all.

The man who collapsed under the pressure of shame.

The man who refused to take you back under his roof, baby or no baby. The man who immediately sent you the money you needed to avail yourself of the services of that butcher, telling you not to show your face again until you had done what you needed to do.

Me. Myself. The worst of them all. The first murderer.

My eye won’t stop tearing up. It seems right, you know. I never cried when I should have, and now I have to weep for all eternity.

Sweetheart, my darling. The time has come.

My darling, I’m coming to see you.

Death is a dance, Lojacono thinks. A dance choreographed by a second-rate artist.
By now darkness has fallen. Many hours have gone by and people are still looking out of every window in the neighborhood, in thrall to an insatiable curiosity. He watches the dance of death: medical examiners, mortuary officers, coroners and assistant coroners, forensics teams, the ambulance that came to cart off the baby’s mother, in a catatonic state, and the father who seems to have turned into an old man all at once.

While the dance was playing out, he asked around. It didn’t take him long to find out that the hotel across the way had a guest named Felice De Falco, and this guest—whose room, it so happens, overlooked the Masi villa—had everything in it that he had used in his identity as a killer: binoculars, bullets, paper tissues.

The same tissues they’d found on the ground, in the nook in the external wall of the neighboring property. The Crocodile’s last stakeout.

Lojacono looks at the floodlights that now illuminate the scene of the crime for the final inspections. All that time, all that effort for something that’s already happened. For a tragedy that can no longer be averted.

He can feel the scorching burden of defeat. He knows that he has lost. The Crocodile was victorious, even though he is dead and Lojacono is still alive. He took what he wanted and left nothing behind him but a long letter on the desk of his hotel room: the ravings of a soul led astray by grief and sorrow.

Leaning against the low wall overlooking the Bay of Naples, Lojacono watches the city gradually light up in the falling darkness. He thinks about a short, elderly man moving through that city, from one end to the other, thirsting for innocent blood. And no one could see him. You were invisible, Crocodile; like me. And when we caught sight of each other, it was too late. Too late for everything.

A few minutes ago Giuffrè had called him. “Bravo, my colleague. You see? You were right all along. They’ve stopped calling you Montalbano, you know. Now they call you the Crocodile. After all, you’re the one who caught him in the end.”

So I’m the Crocodile now, Lojacono muses. Maybe that’s right. I’m alone, I’m desperate, and I’m invisible. With an insatiable hunger for love.

From a distance, Laura Piras watches Lojacono. Behind him, the city lies spread out like a sleeping beast.

Piras knows what the police inspector is thinking: that was certainly no victory. She thinks the same thing. No victory ever ended with a dead six-month-old baby.

Paradoxically enough, though, it was the death of that baby girl that reawakened a gnawing hunger for life inside her. She’s gone too long without life. She’s spent too long suffering, grieving.

And the terror that swept over her as she watched him walk into the face of danger, climbing those stairs with a gun in his hand, made it clear to her that the time had come to return to the world.

Through the tears that well up in her eyes, she glimpses behind Lojacono the outline of a tall, gangly young man, bespectacled, with a turtleneck sweater and a messy mop of hair on his head, turning one last time to wave goodbye to her.
Ciao
, Carlo, she thinks.
Addio
. So long, God be with you.

And she wonders when it will occur to the inspector to invite her out to dinner, or whether she ought to make the first move.

About thirty feet away, Lojacono shakes himself out of his reverie and builds up his courage. He pulls out his cell phone, scrolls through the contacts list, and finds the name he’s looking for.

With a deep sigh, he pushes the green button. He waits, with his heart in his mouth: one ring, two rings, five.

Just as he’s about to push the red button resignedly, a girl’s voice says uncertainly, “Hello?”

Lojacono’s gratitude goes out to: Luigi Merolla, Fabiola Mancone, Valeria Moffa, Luigi Bonagura, Paolo Ferradino; angels who watch over this unfortunate city.

To Giulio Di Mizio, and to his eyes that survey death. To Maria Pia Salerno, and her eyes that survey life.

To Giulia, Maria Paola, and Antonio, that night in Milan. To the wonderful Corpi Freddi, that night in Mantua.

The author’s gratitude goes, as always, as long as he can remember, and forever: to Paola.

Maurizio de Giovanni, March 2012

Maurizio de Giovanni lives and works in Naples. His Commissario Ricciardi series, including
I Will Have Vengeance
(Europa 2013),
Blood Curse
(Europa 2013) and
Everyone in Their Place
(Europa 2013), are bestsellers in Italy and have been published to great acclaim in French, Spanish, and German, in addition to English. He is also the author of
The Crocodile
(Europa 2013), a noir thriller set in contemporary Naples.