The Fatal Touch (33 page)

“Almost. His eyeballs were sort of swimming around and then they floated right up into his head, out of sight. Like this.” Sandro rolled his eyes around.

“I don’t need the visuals, thanks. Did the man say anything?”

“Yeah. He said, ‘Call her back.’ Amazing he could say that.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s all I heard.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Sandro scrunched up his face. “Can’t say. His voice was all husky and sort of gurgly. Maybe he had an accent. What sort?”

“Forget it.” She did not want to start suggesting details to him. “Did you call an ambulance?”

“For a rapist?”

“I see you’re quick to condemn, Sandro. Just like those people who look down on you and your friends.”

“Someone tried to rape my girlfriend Elvira.”

“That was the older girl in here just now? The one with the red hair extension?”

“What’s a hair extension?”

“Your girlfriend’s string of red hair. It’s not her own.”

“I thought it was dyed. Yeah, Elvira got attacked once, but didn’t report it.”

“You said tried. Did she get raped or not?”

“She said no. She said one grabbed her from behind, the other started ripping at her clothes. She said she fought and spat. When she screamed she was HIV positive, they ran off.”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago.”

“Where?”

“Monte Mario.”

“An old guy that time, too?”

Sandro looked puzzled. “No, no. She said two young guys.”

A different time, different place, different attacker. “So you were sort of revenging her, even though this was someone else?”

Sandro shrugged. “Old guy molesting a young woman.”

“Did you see him attack her?”

“No. He was trying to hold her. An old guy like that.”

“How do you know she was a young girl? It was dark, she ran before you arrived.”

“She had long silver-blond hair. I heard her voice, which was young, and then when she ran. You can sort of tell someone’s age from how they move, you know?”

“What age would you say she was?”

“I don’t know. She could have been sixteen, she could have been maybe as old as thirty, but no older.”

Caterina made Sandro go back over the events twice more, and then made him do it in reverse chronological order while she checked against her notes. His story did not change. He saw the girl push the old man, then run. The old man lay on the ground. Sandro went over to him but did not help. He did not see anything wrong with his own behavior. He told the story a fourth time, and again mentioned that his original reason for going over to the old man was to kick him, not help him. In not kicking him, Sandro felt he had shown restraint.

“Also, I didn’t steal money or anything from him.”

“That was good of you, Sandro.” Caterina reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a blow-up of Emma’s ID photo.

“Sweet!” said Sandro. “Who’s that?”

“You’ve never seen her?”

“I’d have remembered a face like that. What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” said Caterina. “Just an idea.”

Caterina accompanied Sandro back up to his friends, who were seated on the plastic bench at the entrance on the first floor, eating pizza and drinking cans of Coca-Cola.

“I may be in touch.” She gave him a half-push, half-caress on the shoulder to propel him down the corridor.

She watched as the sorry little crew gave their Sandro a welcome fit for a returning warrior king. They piled out of the station into the evening air, their energy returned, their spirits temporarily lifted as they were given back the excessive freedom that was killing them.

She went back up to the operations room, where Grattapaglia was beginning to clear his desk.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Not that will help us with the muggings.”

He shrugged and turned back to his work.

Caterina said, “Where did they get the pizza and Coca-Cola?”

“From the
pizzeria a taglio
down the road, I suppose,” said Grattapaglia.

“You accompanied them, right?”

“Of course. You told me to keep an eye on the scumbags.”

“You took them out and brought them back. Did you buy the pizza for them, too?”

“Dumb little fuckers spend all their money on drugs,” said Grattapaglia. “Who else was going to pay?”

Chapter 27

For the next half hour, Grattapaglia slammed things on his desk and kicked at chairs, while Caterina stood in front of a large-scale map of Trastevere, pulling out and putting in the pins showing where the muggings had taken place. The map had been on the wall for three months, and the number of pins had gradually expanded.

She had to pass by Assistente Capo Rospo’s desk on her way to turn on the overhead lights, and he took the opportunity to say, “Those pins don’t mean shit.”

“They all converge around two places,” said Caterina.

“Yeah, two hotels. Big fucking surprise that, finding tourists in hotels.”

“This hotel has more than . . .”

She had to stop talking, because Grattapaglia’s metal desk drawer refused to slide, and Grattapaglia smashed the side of his heel into it several times, swept the stuff from his desk, and left it on the floor.

“
Ma vaffanculo a tutto!
” Grattapaglia clenched and unclenched his fists, then rubbed his left bicep and whitened.

Rospo was suddenly busy with his work.

Caterina went over to the Sovrintendente. “Let me help you,” she said. “Don’t let the stress kill you.”

“Fuck the stress,” said Grattapaglia. “It’s being indoors. Last thing I’m going to do here is find out who the damned mugger is. You coming?”

Caterina hesitated. Her shift ended in half an hour.

“Sure,” she said. “Just let me call my mom, tell her I’ll be late again.”

Grattapaglia surprised her by suggesting they go on foot.

“It’ll calm me. We catch the mugger, we can call a car.”

As they were crossing Ponte Garibaldi, she pulled the blow-up of Emma’s ID photo from her shoulder bag and showed it to Grattapaglia.

“The kid who knew nothing about the mugging?” she said. “I think he might have seen her, but he did not identify her.”

Grattapaglia looked at the photo carefully. Emma waited for a crude comment, but none was forthcoming. “Who is she?”

Caterina explained. Grattapaglia nodded, “This has nothing at all to do with the muggings.”

“I know. I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing down there with that kid. Look, I know you’re the one who’s going to be doing all the work and all the talking for the next few hours, and I’m basically going to be in your way . . . but I was wondering, could you . . .” she delved back into her shoulder bag and pulled out a photo of Treacy.

Grattapaglia looked at the photo of Treacy in one hand, Emma in the other. “You want me to ask about the girl and Treacy as well as the muggings?” said Grattapaglia.

“As a favor.”

They veered right toward the Jewish school, for no other reason than that Grattapaglia seemed to want to shoot the breeze with the four patrolmen guarding the entrance. Caterina waited in the shadows, listening to a stream of guffawing misogyny.

Then they walked to a bar where the bartender greeted Grattapaglia like an old friend and nodded warily at her.

“Wait here,” Grattapaglia told Caterina, and he and the bartender disappeared into a back room. Ten minutes later, he reemerged.

They left the bar, Grattapaglia whistling, swaggering slightly as he occupied the absolute center of the street, forcing young people and tourists to move to either side of him.

Caterina realized the price to be paid for asking a favor was she would have to chisel information out of him.

“Did that bartender see Treacy or Emma?”

“Emma. I didn’t even know the name,” said Grattapaglia. “He knew the Englishman. But he couldn’t remember if he had seen him on the night in question.”

“Shit, I just remembered something,” said Caterina. “Her name would not have been Emma. Use the name Manuela instead.”

“Whatever you say. I still don’t know who she is.”

Caterina explained, and Grattapaglia listened attentively, bending down in a way that reminded her a bit of Blume. Tall men, the two of them. Broad, too, though Grattapaglia was out of shape.

“Now I know who I’m talking about, I might be able to ask better questions. Maybe I should have been told before now. You seem to be in a privileged position with the Commissioner.”

Caterina was glad of the dark that hid her face. She changed subject as casually as she could manage. “The bartender you were just talking to, was he working that night?”

“
Porcaccia la misera!
I forgot to ask.”

He was jerking her about, but he was also doing what she had asked and so she kept quiet.

He walked on a bit, then said, “Yes, he was working that night. No, he didn’t see them.”

In the next bar, on Piazza Santa Maria, a bartender in a starched white outfit with gold buttons glanced at the photos and became immediately adamant that Treacy had not been there. About the girl he knew nothing.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

The bartender sprayed blue detergent on the zinc counter and wiped it even cleaner.

“I’m not saying I don’t know him. I do. That’s why he doesn’t come here anymore.”

“You won’t serve him?”

The bartender touched his toothbrush mustache with his finger, and spoke in soft and confessional tones, throwing an anxious glance at two well-dressed men with briefcases seated at the table outside. “He threw up vomit and blood all over a table of Germans. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but a guy that age and that sick should know better than to drink like that. Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“Not surprised,” said the bartender, and dried droplets from the sink.

They left the piazza and reached the third bar. A fug of marijuana sat above the fifty or so people sitting outside.

A thin skinhead Roma soccer “Ultra” with blue arms was trying to stare them down.

Grattapaglia led the way toward the farther of the two ancient tin tables to his left, which was occupied by three men, two of whom had hardly taken their eyes off them since they arrived.

Grattapaglia said, “Let’s have something here. It’s always very informative.”

Caterina was not so sure, but she sat down and ordered a granita while Grattapaglia ordered a beer. When the bartender came back, Grattapaglia asked him who had been here on the previous Friday night.

“Can’t say,” said the bartender, bending down to put the beer and granita on the table. Caterina pulled out the photos but Grattapaglia forestalled her, placing his outsized hand on her arm.

“No. First the muggings. Also, not here. You can’t ask Danilo questions in full view of everyone. He could be telling us anything, as far as they’re concerned. So the only move open to him is to tell us nothing and make sure they all see him saying nothing. Do you follow?”

“I think so,” said Caterina.

“OK.” He handed her back the photos. “You keep these. This is your gig, and I want them to understand that. Now, see that Brazilian over there?”

Emma looked and saw a small guy dressed in a Brazil soccer strip wearing a baseball cap.

“Every time we meet that guy, we yank off his cap and throw it away. Then he has to buy one, to hide the fact his head is the size of a pin. He’s so sensitive about it.” Grattapaglia spluttered into his glass, evidently recalling the last time this fun had taken place.

Beside him sat a sagging fiftyish man with long curling locks of gray hair and an unfinished mustache over dead lips.

“That’s Fabio the Failure,” said Grattapaglia. “Whenever I’m depressed at still being a sovrintendente at this age, and think I’ve made a mess of my life, I just think of Fabio, and it cheers me up. In the 1970s, Fabio got a walk-on part in a film and has been living on the glory ever since. Well, the glory, a disability allowance, and a little extra from some casual housebreaking. Uh-oh, what have we here?”

A third person, the one ostentatiously not looking at Grattapaglia and Caterina, sported a tight-fitting T-shirt and large orange glasses with pimp jewelry and ethnic tattoos on his arms. His underpants were hitched up to his stomach, the waistline of his jeans rested halfway down his backside. The other two treated him with the deference due to a prince.

Grattapaglia picked up his beer and walked up to the table, big smile on his face. He looked like he belonged. He waved Caterina over to join him and his friends.

“Weather’s changeable, isn’t it?” said Grattapaglia. “Hot one minute. Raining the next. Empty the contents of your pockets and place them on the table.”

“Go fuck your mother,” said the tiny Brazilian, glancing sideways to see if Orange Glasses appreciated how hardassed he could be. Caterina noticed the Brazilian lisped slightly.