He coughed softly, clearing his throat.
“Will she make it? I mean . . . will she respond to the therapy? The course of treatment, or whatever you call it here: is it going normally? Does she seem all right, is what I’m trying to ask.”
The doctor shrugged her shoulders.
“Hard to say at this point. There’s no hard-and-fast rule, every newborn responds with the resources they have. Giorgia is tiny, but she seems strong to me. It’s just a sensation, make no mistake, but if you ask me, she’s a stubborn little puppy. She just might make it.”
Romano, his eyes fixed on that tiny creature that was displaying such determination to survive, felt a sudden surge of dismay. He wished he could do something, anything, but there was nothing within his power. A puppy. She was nothing but a puppy. A stray puppy rescued from the garbage in a city seething with hatred and violence.
Without taking his eyes off her, he murmured to the doctor: “Excuse me, is it all right if I stay?”
The woman looked up at him, cocking an eyebrow.
“Why?” she asked him. And she waited, as if the answer were urgent and important.
Romano stopped to think. Then he said to himself, to the baby girl, and to the doctor: “Because there’s no place else where I can stay, no place but here. I named her, you understand? And tonight, I need to stay with her.”
The doctor nodded. Those were the words that she’d wanted to hear.
She gave Romano’s forearm a quick squeeze and then walked into the softly illuminated room.
Somewhere a carillon began to play a lullaby.
XII
No doubt about it, the best part of Corporal Marco Aragona’s day was breakfast.
And that had nothing to do with the fact that it was the most important meal of the day, at least if you trusted the word of the men’s health magazines that constituted his favorite reading material, nor with the breathtaking view of the city that you enjoyed from the roof-garden where breakfast was served. None of that was the reason.
Love had something to do with it.
Well, maybe love was an overstatement. Let’s just call it the refined aesthetic sense with which the corporal in question felt he was so amply endowed, a sense that was extremely gratified by the sight of a certain waitress who, by a strange allotment of tasks assigned her by the human resources office, crossed paths with him, indeed, at breakfast, and only then.
Aragona lived at the Hotel Mediterraneo, a luxurious abode that clashed sharply with the pittance his salary afforded him. The only reason he could afford it was the unstinting support offered him by his family, who were economically better than well off. To be precise, it was thanks to the support of his mother, who insisted on providing her little boy with at least a comfortable place to stay, living as far as he was from his home-town and her loving care.
And sure enough, the Hotel Mediterraneo was comfortable, extremely comfortable. Midway between police headquarters, where he had worked and where he might someday return—if Palma went on refusing to assign him duties of elevated responsibility—and the smaller police station of Pizzofalcone; a handsome hotel room, the full attention of the staff, excellent restaurant services, a splendid panorama before his eyes, and, most important of all, Irina.
He had read that name on the little tag pinned to the hotel uniform, a uniform that also constituted the only thing shielding Aragona’s ravenous glances from one of the most generous and buxom balconies he’d ever had an opportunity to gaze upon outside of the setting of porn movie houses, of which he had once been a tireless patron. And the bosom was not even the most significant physical feature of that wonderful woman, who approached him every morning and, with a dazzling, luminous smile, asked him a question teeming with hidden meanings and sweet-smelling promises: Can I bring something hot this morning, Signore?
Her eyes. It was Irina’s eyes that had riveted Aragona’s attention. Two pools of blue, two glittering mountain lakes, two gleaming mirrors into which he wished he could dive and drown in happiness. And after the eyes, there was the voice, hot as a scirocco wind, sharpened by a mysterious and captivating accent.
Immediately after making his first acquaintance with Irina, Aragona had undergone a spectacular and immediate about-face, however temporary it might have been, in his thoughts about immigrants from Eastern Europe. Just seconds earlier, he had been convinced that they all needed to be shipped back to where they came from, to make way for honest, taxpaying Italians; and the same number of seconds afterward, he was counting the blessings of living in a tolerant, open-armed nation, ready to offer real opportunities to anyone who deserved them. And no doubt about it, Irina deserved them. How she deserved them!
In the all-too-brief interactions that he managed to have with her every morning, on the roof-garden, he had deployed all the tricks of seduction learned from the police officers of the TV series of the seventies and eighties, and then practiced in front of the mirror: the dazzling, gleaming white smile; the sidelong glance; the smooth gesture of the hand removing the blue-tinted glasses and tracing an arc through the air; the deep low voice he used to ask her for a double espresso, ristretto, in a cappuccino cup, the longest and most elaborate order he’d been able to come up with. Recently their relationship had taken an important leap forward when she had unexpectedly asked: I saw gentleman on television, yes?
In fact, Aragona had appeared at a press conference where he and his colleagues had been given special mention for having solved a multiple homicide. It was just a camera shot that framed him in a way that, as he had decided after viewing it for the seventy-third time online, didn’t even do him justice in aesthetic terms, squeezed as he was between those two human skyscrapers, Lojacono and Romano. Still, she’d recognized him, and that’s all that mattered. Everything was proceeding in the right direction, and Aragona was in no hurry: sooner or later he’d get the opportunity to broaden the topic of conversation, moving on from eggs and bacon to more profound existential matters, such as an aperitif or even an invitation out to dinner. Certainly, he’d have to work up the nerve to speak to her, but he was a fiery, daring man, and a policeman who laughed in the face of danger: he could do that. The relationship had to be constructed one step at a time, morning after morning. The double espresso, ristretto, in a cappuccino cup, for that matter, spoke eloquently to anyone who wished to hear tales of adventurous nights spent extricating oneself from and cleverly dodging mortal dangers and savage criminals finally brought struggling to justice: an irresistible scenario for any woman, from Eastern Europe or otherwise.
That specific morning, however, his crafty approach maneuvers were forced to a sudden halt, because she wasn’t there at all. She had been replaced by an odious substitute, a brunette with eyeglasses, whose name tag, reading Lina, could barely be seen above a half-empty blouse. That snafu had ruined his appetite; he’d limited his order to scrambled eggs and bacon, a brioche with jam and butter, and two mugs of sweetened milk.
Thus the Aragona who strode briskly toward the police station was a man whose internal barometer was decidedly sinking toward bad weather. At least this time, he was thinking to himself, I’ll get there early and no one will be able to say a thing.
But when he came to the foot of the hill that rose up to Pizzofalcone, he ran into an unexpected obstacle: a young kid stood, feet planted, before him. There wasn’t a lot of room around him; the sidewalk, hemmed in by bollards to keep cars from parking there, left room for only one person to get by, and the kid was standing right in the middle. Aragona studied him, grim-faced. He was stout, dark-skinned, either Hispanic or Asian, with big liquid eyes. He was wearing a red T-shirt and a pair of jeans. The policeman moved to his right, and the kid mirrored him, shifting to his left. The policeman moved to his left, and the kid mirrored him, shifting to his right. The policeman stepped off the sidewalk, and to his disappointment, the kid stepped off the sidewalk to bar his path once again. The policeman scowled at him, and the kid faced that glare with a pleading expression. The policeman sighed defeatedly and pulled