Aragona, on his way back into the office from an umpteenth routine control with accompanying face-stuffing of celebratory Jordan almonds and espresso—for heaven’s sake, Dotto’, it’s a special occasion, you can’t say no—was reflecting bitterly on the sheer number of births there were for a period when the topic of the day was zero population growth. True, for the most part these were immigrants who, according to Aragona’s point to view, were chowing down on food pilfered out of the mouths of the natives, which meant they were in such thriving states of health that they were multiplying like rabbits—still, though, as far as he was concerned, whatever the reason, there was a steady flow of little rug rats coming into the world, no doubt about it. Proof of the fact was that he, poor tired cop that he was, had spent the whole day surrounded by diapers and baby bottles, worse than if he was running a nursery school.
As he strode along with a frown on his face and a furrowed brow, the young officer also mulled over the thought of whether or not to ask his uncle the prefect to pull some strings to get him assigned to a new district. In fact, he had just finished busting his uncle’s chops to get him switched over to investigative operations, moving him out of a bureaucratic position at police headquarters that, while it might have been comfortable, was doing him no good in terms of his justifiable career ambitions—but the investigative operations didn’t have to be in Pizzofalcone, did they?
Pizzofalcone was a police station packed with losers and pariahs, the unwanted rejects from all the other police precincts. A place that was no doubt on the verge of being shuttered once and for all. A place that still bore the stain of the most serious case of malfeasance in human memory among the city’s law enforcement ranks. A place where the commissario, Palma, never missed an opportunity to load him down with the most humiliating tasks he could come up with.
Had anyone heard of an up-and-coming young officer like him, endowed with talent and investigative instincts, an officer who anyone could tell at first glance had been born for that profession, trotting up and down the staircases of apartment buildings with giant pink bows on the front door, asking: Excuse me, Signo’, the newborn baby girl, is she well? Do you mind if I take a look at her? Because, you see, the state police really want to make sure that we offer a hearty welcome to all new arrivals in this city, especially the baby girls. It’s just a routine operation, nothing out of the ordinary.
As was so often the case, he found himself wondering what Special Agent Jason Lush from Philadelphia Code would do in his situation. Philadelphia Code was one of his favorite TV shows. Jason Lush would have run his hand through his hair, staring intently at his commanding officer and then, in a baritone voice laden with superior wisdom, he’d have said: Chief, I can’t really agree, and I intend to proceed as I think best. After which he’d walk out the door, deaf to the shouted objections of that asshole he reported to, get into his unmarked car, and take off, tires screeching and car fishtailing as he drove to a face-to-face showdown with the criminals, unleashing his fists and a hail of .38 caliber bullets until he’d wiped out half of them and handcuffed the rest. No big deal.
One problem, if he was determined to reprise the scene with any precision, lay in the fact that you couldn’t really say that Aragona had a luxuriant head of hair; in fact, it took him at least ten minutes of hard work every morning in front of the mirror in the hotel room where he lived to complete the comb-over that, hopefully, concealed the horrible growing bald spot on top of his head. A picture flashed in front of his eyes of his father, by now almost completely bald: he could just envision the old man as he rooted and gobbled the bowl of pasta with ragú every Sunday at lunch. Maybe that shiny bald dome was hereditary. If a receding hairline did turn out to be congenital, then he knew what he would do. He’d shave his head bald: after all there were plenty of respectable precedents when it came to police work, first and foremost, Telly Savalas in Kojak. But for now, he’d still be able to muddle along in the illustrious footsteps of Officer Lush.
If there was one thing that Marco Aragona wanted, clearly, it was to be a cop. It had been his dream ever since he was a child, while his parents argued back and forth about whether he’d be a doctor or a lawyer, but in the end, he’d had his way. The problem, though, was that his colleagues treated him like a bottlewasher and delivery boy at a café, and the idea stuck in his craw.
They really were a fine gang of losers and misfits, the officers of Pizzofalcone. Thanks to his connections, Marco had had a chance to root through their professional histories, while he’d learned a few other things from the idle gossip of his former colleagues at police headquarters. Those colleagues included a violent sociopath who’d come close to choking the life out of more than one suspect; a young woman who was something of a menace, obsessed with guns, who’d actually fired her sidearm in the office and nearly killed a superior officer; a Sicilian cop who may or may not have been passing information to the Mafia. And what about the two officers who’d managed to survive the scandal of the actual Bastards of Pizzofalcone? A poor woman with a mentally handicapped son and a doddering old man with a fixation on suicides. Working in a menagerie, taking orders from a careerist, that’s what had become of a capable and intelligent budding detective like him, someone who was just waiting for the opportunity to show what he could do.
Okay, he had to admit that there was talk about him, too. People whispered that his advancement, such as it was, was the result of highly placed recommendations, and that if his uncle the prefect hadn’t been looking out for him, he’d probably be sitting in some basement office, date-stamping crime reports. But in his case, those were clearly vicious falsehoods, dictated by the envious resentment that seemed to poison the air.
He decided to make a stop at the little café across the street from the police station; after all that walking, he’d more than earned the right to a quick break. He took a seat at the only table and spoke to the proprietor, hard at work behind the counter.
“Peppe, make me an espresso and make sure it’s a good one, not one of those miserable stews, ciofeche, that you try to pawn off on the losers who come in here.”
The bar owner glanced around the café with a grimace, wary of any of his regular customers hearing that unfortunate piece of publicity. That idiot police officer behaved like a detective in some American cop show, but the opportunity to get first-hand news about the latest cases the local police were looking into was just too tempting.
“Excuse me, Dotto’,” he asked him, “but can you tell me anything about that baby girl you all found this morning? The whole quarter is talking about nothing else.”
Aragona shot him a piercing glance, over the rims of his blue-tinted glasses.
“So, do you seriously think that I, an officer who’s been assigned to investigate that very matter, and who’s been working on it all day long, would come in here to blab to you about the extremely important information that I’ve managed to uncover? What do you take me for? And another thing: how did you know that it was a baby girl?”
The bar owner blushed.
“Signora Luisa, who lives right upstairs, saw your partner, the big guy, carrying a little baby dressed in pink. And then Guida, the officer at the front desk, told me that . . . ”
Aragona interrupted him with a chilly smile.
“Ah, I should have known: Guida! I’m going to have to file a report, that way he’ll learn not to leak classified information to outsiders. Bring me my espresso, now, I can’t afford to waste any more time.”
By the time he left the café, ten minutes later, darkness had fallen.
From the gloom of an apartment building entrance, two dark eyes followed him until he vanished into the interior of the police station.
X
Commissario Palma, leaning as usual against Ottavia’s desk, seemed focused on the evening traffic rushing past outside the half-opened window. The April air ventured in gently without knocking, full of promises.
Now