The Crocodile (8 page)

Everything will be fine.

The old man walks by night down the street where the rich people live. He has read that prices go as high as a thousand euros per square foot around here. He’s only interested in knowing whether there are security guards, and what their routines are.

The old man learns quickly. He takes note of schedules, situations, habits. If you cordon off a place, he thinks, then you turn it into a little world unto itself with only a few inhabitants, and people all move in roughly the same way. Of course, if it were one of those places where everyone knows everything about everyone else, like his hometown, then it would be impossible to pass unobserved; but here, he’s become invisible. People’s eyes slide over him and move on, as if he were made of air.

Which is a good thing, he thinks. A very good thing.

The other morning, in fact, he’d found himself face to face with the girl. He was following the route, he felt sure that she’d accept a ride from her girlfriend, the way she almost always did on Wednesdays when she had violin lessons in the evening. But, like everybody else, she failed to see him entirely. A city full of phantoms.

He walks past the park. He’s decided that the right moment is in fact when she comes home from her violin lesson. The girl is right-handed, and she only uses her right hand: she’ll shift her violin case over to her other hand, she’ll pull out the keys to the street door, and she’ll open it. She never buzzes upstairs. And her routine never varies by more than ten minutes or so. There’s a night watchman in the park, but he doesn’t start his rounds until ten, at times ten-thirty.

Next to the small entry door set in the larger carriage door is a stunted tree, a sort of dwarf cypress; the old man has a vague notion that this is called a thuja tree. A person could hide right behind that little tree, provided he weren’t too tall. And that won’t be a problem for him.

He pulls a tissue out of his counterfeit designer duffel bag to dab at his weepy eye, and his hand brushes against the cold metal. The old man finds the contact deeply reassuring.

The street where rich people live is deserted tonight. He’s seen it at all hours, teeming with traffic or completely empty as it is right now.

A light rain starts to drizzle down, silently. The old man checked the weather report and knew that it would rain. It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s certainly helpful: there won’t be a lot of residents out taking a stroll tonight. Lots of people here have dogs, but by nine o’clock they’re all safe at home, eating dinner.

I bet it’ll be someone taking their dog out who finds the body.

Not that it matters, the old man decides.

Giuffrè rushed into the room, waving a newspaper in the air.
“Hey, Montalba’, did you hear the latest?”

Lojacono looked up from his book. “Listen, asshole, stop calling me that. I told you already, I find it annoying.”

The diminutive sergeant shot him an offended look. “Oh, nice manners! You know, I’m the only person in the whole city who even speaks to you. You could try to be a little more considerate, couldn’t you? Anyway, if you’re not interested, go fuck yourself.”

He turned to leave and Lojacono went back to his reading. Then Giuffrè stopped and spoke again.

“It’s pity, though. Because if you ask me, the news report I read in this newspaper really might interest you, Inspector Lojacono.”

Finally hearing himself addressed by his proper name, the inspector swung his feet down from his desktop and shut his book.

“All right, let’s hear it. Anyway, I know that you won’t leave me in peace until you’ve told me, and this book is unbelievably boring.”

“I like you better when you play poker against the computer. Maybe you’re frustrated because you always lose, but at least you’re not angry. Anyway, it’s big news. Yesterday, in the Via Manzoni, someone murdered a fourteen-year-old girl.”

There flashed into Lojacono’s mind, crystal-clear, the final scene of the nightmare that had been persecuting him since the night of the boy’s murder: his daughter hurtling into a car crash.

“That’s a shame. But it’s not exactly earth-shattering news, is it?”

“No, of course not. But if you put it together with the fact that since this morning Piras has called Di Vincenzo four times, and that right here,” he said, tapping the newspaper, “they talk about a single bullet to the head, it changes things considerably, don’t you think?”

Lojacono said nothing for a second, and then replied, “First: how do you know that Piras has called so many times? And second: give me that newspaper.”

When Giuffrè was especially pleased about something, he swayed back and forth on the tips of his toes. Lojacono found this habit maddening.

“It’s because Pontolillo, the guy who works in the admin department, has a mouth that’s as loose as my mother-in-law’s left slipper, the way he blabs. This morning, he buttonholed me over by the coffee machine and said she wouldn’t stop calling. In fact, they had started to wonder if there wasn’t a little flirtation developing, except that on the last phone call she was so pissed off that Pontolillo was actually scared. So I put two and two together because, what, you think you’re the only cop in here?”

Lojacono considered the question. “When I was small, I had an inflatable doll; I think I called it Ercolino, if memory serves. It swayed back and forth exactly the same way you’re doing right now, and I used to rain punches down on its face, to see if I could make it sway even more.”

Giuffrè stopped short, wearing a baffled expression. “Anyway, this thing is getting big. Read it. The newspaper even draws a link between the two murders. I wonder who their source is. And it mentions the notorious tissues. That’s why Piras was so hopping mad, if you ask me.”

The article was pretty blistering. The journalist reported the murder of G. D. M., a fourteen-year-old high school student in the better part of town, adding that she’d been killed with a single shot to the head as she was returning home from her violin lesson, around nine o’clock the night before. Nothing had been stolen, apparently. On the ground near the corpse the police had found a number of used tissues, a detail that suggested a connection to the murder of M. L., a sixteen-year-old boy murdered in San Gaetano a few days earlier. The reporter wondered what links there might be between the two victims, and what the police were waiting for to arrest the guilty party and bring him to justice.

The tone of the article wasn’t openly hostile, but it was clear that that was where it was tending. The article concluded with a striking image: a murderer waiting for his victims in the shadows, dropping tissues, wet with his tears, on the ground. A murderer’s tears: the tears of the Crocodile.

In fact, the image had even inspired the headline:
Crocodile Killer Strikes Again
. Lojacono understood how angry Piras was, and why: her name was the only one mentioned in the piece.

The newspaper was one of the most widely read local publications, and the other papers were likely to adopt the moniker. That in turn would capture the popular imagination, inevitably sensitive to the deaths of young people. As long as it was young Lorusso, the murder could be dismissed as a result of gang warfare; but laying hands on a girl from the upper reaches of the social hierarchy was sacrilege, pure and simple.

Lojacono turned to look at Giuffrè, who had started swaying back and forth again.

“As far as you know, were there any reports on the shell casings found on the scene?”

The sergeant suddenly stopped. “No, and how would I know anything about that? If you want, I’d be glad to look into it though. Not now—Pontolillo’s already left for the day—but first thing tomorrow morning . . .”

Lojacono had glimpsed a useful scrap of information at the end of the article.

“Do me a favor: tomorrow, see if you can find out whether they found a shell casing and if it matched the one from Lorusso’s courtyard. And one more thing: cover for me tomorrow. I have to attend a funeral.”

His cheeks are burning. That’s always been the symptom, ever since he was a small child, as far back as he could remember: burning cheeks.

And the sound of his pulse in his ears, as if his heart has climbed into his skull. Now, he’s well aware of the effects of stress, because he’s studied them, but that does nothing to diminish their scope and strangeness.

Donato walks out into the open air and heaves a deep sigh. He considers how in life you can do your best to plan things out, examine every angle, take into consideration all the pros and cons, but in any case it’ll always turn out differently than you expected, some unforeseen factor will always spin things on to another trajectory.

He knows that he didn’t skip over anything; he studied the way he usually does. In fact, better than usual. He knows he even managed to find the time, in the last few days before the final exam, to go over the material one last time, making sure there were no gaps in his preparation, no chinks in his armor. He knows that he calmly reviewed his state of mind the night before, trying to ascertain whether he really was as well prepared as he felt.

In other words, he ran through every item on his usual checklist, and he even double- and triple-checked. So what went so horribly wrong?

As he runs his eyes over the gardens that surround the teaching hospital, teeming with the usual crowd of students, nurses, professors, and assistants, some still in scrubs, others carrying their coats, straining to catch a few rays of pale sunlight after days on end of relentless, depressing drizzle, he starts to wonder whether his father might not have a point with that obsessive refrain of his. He always says that distraction and lack of commitment are subtle, treacherous adversaries: that they worm their way in and then hijack your mind before you even realize what’s happening.

He thinks about his father. About how he had hoped that this exam, his successful completion of it, would lay the foundations for the whole speech he was planning to deliver to him.

In his mind’s eye, he sees again the professor shaking his head in disappointment, toying with his exam booklet. He hears the silence in the lecture hall again, the silence that descended in the aftermath of his last answer. He remembers his own astonishment, confident as he was that he had given the exact answer required. He hears the professor’s deep sigh again, then the words that followed: suggesting he come back for the next session, because it’s such a shame that, with his grade point average and the family name he carries, this exam in particular, the most important exam of the whole semester, should be so far below his average.

And he sees himself too, stiff, cheeks flaming red, as he stands, nods, thanks the professor, and turns to go, with the burden of failure weighing on him.

He’ll have to tell his father that the exam didn’t go very well. He’ll have to tell him because no matter what, he’s bound to find out from someone in his network of spies and informers, possibly the very same professor who conducted the examination. His father will sit there, without a word, he can just picture him, and then he’ll finally nod his head sagely. If you did your very best, then you have nothing to be ashamed of. Which is to say: since failing the final exam is definitely not your very best, I feel sure you’ve done something you ought to be ashamed of.

And he’ll have to break the news to her too. He’ll tell her that there was an unexpected hitch in their plan, that the momentous dinner will have to be postponed. He’ll see the disappointment in her eyes, the sadness that he’d never willingly meet with his own eyes.

It’s only an exam, he tells himself. A goddamned university-level oral exam; just one of the hundred or so exams he’s taken and the hundred more that still await him. After all, I have my whole life before me.

From a distance, sitting on a bench, someone he’s never met watches him. And dabs away a tear from his left eye.

Lojacono had decided to take a taxi. With his salary—eighteen hundred euros a month, less the money he had to send to that bloodsucking vampiress Sonia, who for that matter actually earned more than he did—and minus what he needed for basic survival, he certainly wasn’t rolling in it; he could have taken public transport, no problem, and saved himself a little money.

But in that strange city, taking a bus could mean hours spent stuck in traffic, peering pointlessly out of the window, with the risk of missing the appointment entirely and leaving Giuffrè alone in the office too long. He’d taken the address from one of the numerous death notices that appeared in the paper. The disparity hadn’t been lost on him: the boy from San Gaetano, zero notices; the girl from the Via Manzoni, at least thirty. The printed announcements had supplied him with the full name, so hypocritically concealed behind initials in the newspaper article: Giada De Matteis.

You could learn so much from a death notice. For instance, it wasn’t hard to guess that she was the daughter of parents who had separated or divorced long ago. Some of the notices—most of them—“shared in the grief” of Marta, the mother; others “extended shocked condolences to the grieving father,” Luigi. It was clear that many were from friends of the girl, young people who must have been well off if you considered the sheer cost of all those announcements; a certain Debora had even published a lengthy poem that mourned a blossom cut short at the stem. Not many relatives, only an aunt and uncle, and the maternal grandparents. Lojacono had smiled dolefully as he read through the euphemisms and the circumlocutions: tragic passing, sudden loss, regrettable accident—as if one’s head intersecting with the trajectory of a bullet were nothing more than a piece of bad timing.

As long as he was taking a taxi, he was determined to enjoy the ride. Ever since his transfer, struggling to deal with the tempest that raged inside him, he hadn’t bothered to explore. He’d found a studio apartment in one of the tumbledown buildings near the police station, and the only streets he saw were the ones connecting his office, his apartment, and Letizia’s trattoria. He’d pondered this fact, wondering why he felt no desire to see a little more of that city; after all, people came from all over the world to admire its beauty. But the answer was obvious: could you really ask a man to enjoy sightseeing in what was, in the end, nothing more than a prison cell?