The Crocodile (7 page)

Allegra walks out of the front entrance of the school, snickering, “And the best thing is that no one can see me but him. God, it makes me laugh! Did you see the look on his face?”

Giada has long since learned that her girlfriend is capable of anything, but this latest thing is especially upsetting.

“Yes, but seriously, aren’t you scared to do it? What if he gets pissed off and tells the principal or, even worse, your parents? Do you realize you could be excluded from every school in the city?”

Allegra stops and turns gracefully to look at her. “Are you joking? There’s no telling the trouble he’d get himself into. My word against his, but it would be simple to make him look like a dirty old fiend, which, by the way, is what he would be, if he only had the nerve to take a step forward. Believe me, I have him by the balls; there’s nothing he can do.”

“This totally freaks me out. I don’t understand how you work up the nerve to do these things. I mean, even the thought of it: you take a seat in the front row, you slip off your panties, and you start swinging your legs open and shut. Isn’t it kind of gross?”

Allegra blithely dispenses with her objections. “But why should it be? First of all, I’m not letting him touch it, I’m just letting him look at it. And it kills me to watch him! First he turns red, then white, then he comes out in spots. Then he looks up, then to the side, everywhere but there; he starts babbling, then he takes a hundred quick glances at it, you know, he goes completely stupid, and he doesn’t even understand the lecture on ancient Greek that he’s supposed to be explaining to us. And when it’s all said and done, have you seen my grades? Eight out of ten, as smooth as silk, and you know I never even bought the textbook.”

Giada shakes her head, laughing. “You’re going to get arrested sooner or later, I guarantee it. Leave aside the fact that you’ll have him on your conscience. I mean, he’s ancient, he must be at least fifty, and you’re going to give him a heart attack. Plus he’s a priest. You’ll go straight to hell is what’ll happen.”

Allegra dismisses her objections with a delicate gesture of her hand. “Priest or no priest, he’s a leering, drooling old man and he’ll never have the courage to take action. The other day he even said to me: ‘Signorina, when you have time we should talk. You have need of spiritual comfort.’ Oh right, as if! I already know the kind of spiritual comfort he has in mind for me; you wouldn’t catch me dead alone with him. Anyway, whatever, you want to come to my house? I’ll give you a ride.”

“No way. The other day we came this close to dying in a car crash. Whenever I’m in the car, you talk to me instead of watching the road. No thanks. I’ll take the bus.”

“All right, do what you want. If you insist on being a pathetic loser, be my guest. Go to hell, talk to you later.”

“Go to hell, see you later.”

Giada doesn’t mind taking the bus; it’s taller than the wall that runs alongside the road and she can take in the whole panorama on both sides of the hill. On one side, Nisida, the beach at Bagnoli that’s gradually emerging from the ruins of the old factory that’s being knocked down; and on the other side, the bright blue bay, crisscrossed by the wakes of boats. When all’s said and done, she decides, this is a beautiful city. When viewed from a distance.

She has a fuzzy memory of a day when her father took her running down by the sea. She was small, and he’d pretend to leave her behind, then he’d stop and stand there, laughing. She treasures that memory, tucked away in a corner of her mind. She pulls it out every now and then, secretly, when she’s alone.

She boards the bus and sits in the front, as usual. She thinks about her mother. Yesterday they had another fight and in the end, like always, her mother broke down in tears. You can’t have an argument with her mother; before you know it, tears well up in her eyes, whatever you say, like turning on a tap. And she’ll say: you’re the only thing that matters in my life. The only thing.

Giada doesn’t like that sense of responsibility. It keeps her from feeling free to have fun, like any ordinary kid her age. The thought of her mother, who practically lives only for her, paralyzes her.

With her head resting on the filthy glass, she thinks back to the argument. She wants to stop going to violin lessons, she doesn’t feel any particular aptitude, and that old bitch of a music teacher scheduled her lesson from eight to nine at night, so when she comes home the park is deserted and it kind of scares her. Her mother retorted that in that case she should be scared on Saturday nights too, when she comes home at midnight. And Giada shot back that everyone else in the world, comes home at four in the morning on Saturdays, while she is the only one who has to be home by midnight, and anyway, at that time of night on a Saturday there’s lots more people around than on a Wednesday night at nine o’clock. And then her mother said that if that bastard of a father of yours, instead of going to America with his girlfriend, had stayed here to be a father, he could have helped you with school. And then she broke down crying. As usual.

Recalling this, Giada sighs gently. She decides that she has a lot of life left to live, that she wants nothing more than to live it, and she doesn’t understand why they won’t just let her.

Almost her stop. She looks up. The bus is empty. No, wait, there’s someone all the way in the back; an old man, maybe.

She stands up and gets ready to get off.

Letizia flopped into a chair at Lojacono’s table. “Mamma mia, I’m shattered tonight. I really am turning into an old woman. There was a time when I bounced from one table to another like a young gazelle.”

The inspector smiled, giving her a wink. “Ah, you look like a schoolgirl, you know. Come on, it’s obvious that all the men who eat here must be interested in you, because if it was for the cooking . . .”

Letizia picked up a fork from the table and pretended to stab him with it. “Hey, how dare you? Let me tell you, there’s no better ragu anywhere in the city, which means anywhere on earth. And you know that perfectly well, since you eat it almost every night.”

Lojacono patted his belly. “Of course I do, and take a look at what you’re turning me into. When I first started coming here I was an athlete and now I look like a sixty-year-old captain of industry.”

Letizia blushed imperceptibly. “No, no, I assure you, you look fine. You’d have to eat a lot more ragu than that. But listen, I heard you were there last week when they killed the son of that nurse, Luisa. Is that right? What happened exactly?”

“Yeah, I was on call that night. Such a pity; he was just a boy.”

Letizia shrugged. “Sure, he was young, but they get started early here. I hear that he’d started to run with the wrong crowd, that . . . he was getting busy.”

“What do you mean, he was getting busy?”

“You know, easy money. Take something across town, a bit of petty drug dealing. They recruit them early. They call them
muschilli
—gnats. And then, little by little, they ease them into the business. Who knows, he could easily have broken some rule without even realizing it.”

Lojacono drank another sip of wine. “I don’t know about that. It strikes me as odd; it doesn’t seem like a typical Mafia hit. They’re arrogant, you know. When they teach someone a lesson, they want the lesson to be out there, for everyone to see. But what about the mother—can you tell me anything about her?”

Letizia extended her arms disconsolately. “What can I say? I’ve known her practically forever. She had this son, nobody seems to know who the father was, and she worked her fingers to the bone to bring him up right. She made sure he lacked for nothing. She worked for a while in some clinic somewhere and now she does home care, injections, IVs, stuff like that. There are times when she’s out all night sitting up with some invalid, which means the boy hangs out, or I guess used to hang out, on the streets, getting to know all these little losers. That’s the way the world works sometimes.”

Lojacono looked into the middle distance, lost in thought, before saying, “There were tissues on the ground, right near where the boy was killed. A number of tissues, as if the person who used them had been there for a long time. Hours, for all we know. So a guy stands there, in the dark, in the pouring rain, for hours, waiting for a kid to come home so he can shoot him in the head, one shot, small caliber pistol, a toy gun. A handgun you could carry in your pocket. That’s no Camorrista, take it from me.”

Letizia listened, holding her breath. “Tissues? You mean like paper tissues? Can’t you test them for DNA? I saw a TV show the other night—”

Lojacono waved his hand dismissively. “Forget about those TV shows, they’re full of shit. Somebody finds a fingerprint and before you know it they have the murderer’s horoscope. Giuffrè, a guy who works in the same office as me, saw the forensics report that the medical examiner sent in: lachrymal secretion. And cell flaking, which means that when he wiped the tears off his eye, little scraps of eyelid skin stuck to the tissue. They analyzed everything, but all they were able to determine was the gender: male.”

Letizia was perplexed. “What do you mean, tears? So the murderer was crying?”

“Not necessarily. Maybe he has a cold. It’d make perfect sense: all that time standing in one place in this wet chilly weather. Anyway, this is secret information—in theory not even I should know about it—so do me a favor and keep it to yourself. Still, I like the way they’re moving fast. The assistant DA is young but she knows what she’s doing. I saw her that night and she strikes me as one of those women who aren’t satisfied with just being attractive but want to get out there and do something.”

Letizia got a hollow feeling in her stomach, but she remained expressionless. “So you had a chance to determine that the lady prosecutor is attractive, did you? I hope you got her phone number. Maybe you’ll both have a chance to talk the case over at your leisure . . . Why don’t you bring her here for a nice intimate dinner?”

Lojacono burst out laughing. “So you can poison the two of us? Don’t be silly, you know I’m not the kind of guy who does that sort of thing.”

Letizia gave a hollow laugh, and poured herself a glass of wine.

Eleonora sits motionless on the step. And she waits.
She knew it wasn’t something she could tell him on the phone. These aren’t things you can talk about at a distance. This is news that has to be delivered in flesh and blood, that needs to hover in the ambient air. This is news that has to fall into a familiar space, not hurtle through some unknown and undefined ether. This is news that must meet the eyes of the recipient, news that must resonate, giving an image of pupils, mouth, complexion, each and every slight change.

Eleonora didn’t bring the sheet of paper with her. It struck her as pointless; harmful, actually. As if she needed a document as proof, certification of the fact.

This is hard news to deliver. You don’t know whether it’s good or bad news you’re bringing. You’ll only know it when you see his face, in the very instant that the word falls into the space between you and turns solid: either a rose or a stone, a note of music or a knife blade.

Eleonora trembles. A terrible fear has taken hold of her. She understands in some obscure way, because her woman’s intuition tells her so clearly, that nothing will ever be the same as it was once she speaks to him. For better or for worse, nothing will ever be the same.

Eleonora dug deep over the last few nights, seeking the courage she would need. She hunted through the conversations, the stories, even the laughter that she’d shared with him for traces of that courage. For the first time, she felt older than him, as she studied his temperament, his character, wondering whether he’d be capable of handling the words she had to say to him, whether he could proudly present her to his family, the way she hoped.

As the endless hours of night tick past, it occurs to Eleonora that she doesn’t really know him after all. She’d always believed that the only thing that mattered was their love, the love she glimpsed in his eyes when he saw her coming towards him, the love she felt in her own heart when she thought of him; but she really doesn’t know him at all. What does he do when they’re not together? What does he think, how does he amuse himself, what are his fears? Perhaps that information could help her guess how he’ll react. Information that she doesn’t yet possess, and perhaps never will.

Eleonora runs a hand over her face. She couldn’t stand to lose him. She tries to think positively, the way her father always told her to do: if you ask for trouble, trouble will answer. If you ask for good things, good things will come to you. Papa, how I wish you were here with me, right now. But instead, I also have the problem of how to break this news to you.

Suddenly, Eleonora has lost all faith. Suddenly, all the promises she was given, on the beach or in bed after making love, seem to be written on the wind. Everything she believed in, everything she relied upon, has melted away like the snow back home. Now she sees that she’s given everything to someone she knows nothing about, with no possibility of getting it back.

But just as Eleonora lost it, she regains it, her faith. Her heart restores that faith to her, intact. She can’t be so badly mistaken. Love is love, isn’t it? It’ll find a way. Aside from all the obstacles, above and beyond a few broken dreams and a few others that will have to be adjusted, life will triumph, and life is the two of them, after all.

Eleonora thinks of his father. She thinks of the man whom she has yet to meet. She thinks of the strictness that he described, the man’s rigidity. She thinks that perhaps a man who loves his son so intensely will understand why she is now becoming so accustomed, so tenderly accustomed, to the fragment of life that she carries within her. There should be a certain degree of understanding, from one parent to another. Love is a universal language.

Eleonora looks around her. She chose to meet in the university park, the place they first met. It’s a talisman, it’ll bring her luck, of that she feels certain. She’ll see him coming towards her, like he did the first time, with his easy, confident gait, his broad shoulders, slightly jug-eared—one more thing about him that she loves so much. She’ll see him first and she’ll smile in his direction. Then he’ll see her and he’ll break into a happy smile, as he does every time he sees her. And everything will be fine.