The Sleeping Nymph, page 30
“Three times.”
She shoved him aside and leapt to her feet. She could have eaten him alive.
“Ouch!”
“Do you realize you’re throwing everything away?” she yelled. “Your whole future down the drain.”
She saw him lower his eyes, then look up again. He was trying to smile, to go back into hiding.
“You sound like my mother,” he said in an affectedly playful tone.
Teresa doubted it. His mother wasn’t there because his mother was part of the problem. She realized then that she couldn’t go back into hiding, either.
“I know your secret,” she told him.
Marini’s face was like a cold, rigid mask.
“There’s no secret,” he said blankly. “It’s always been in my file, very clearly spelled out.”
“Not completely,” she corrected him.
Marini slowly sat up. The ice pack fell to the floor. His hands gripped the edge of the bench. His chest was heaving. Teresa pictured his heart, struck by a fatal blow yet beating still, thumping against his ribs until it hurt. She would have given anything to soothe that pain, but first she had to carve his chest open and rip out the monster that was feeding on him. She had to make Marini look it in the eye, so he could see how easy it could be to banish the ghost that haunted him. All he had to do was forgive himself.
She watched him shrug his shoulders.
“A man beating his wife and child isn’t exactly news, Superintendent,” he told her. “He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. You know the statistics better than I do.”
Teresa hazarded a step toward him.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said.
She saw him gasp, watched him flinch as if he’d been struck again.
“You’re out of line.”
Teresa took another step, inching closer to the child he had once been.
“You didn’t kill him,” she repeated, louder this time.
Massimo shook his head.
“Enough,” he said.
Teresa said it again.
“Enough!” he said, shouting now, one hand raised as if to stop her, as if to implore her not to break the fragile balance he was trying so desperately to hold on to.
“You were only a child, Massimo. You’re not at fault.”
He shook with a powerful shiver. Something inside him seemed about to erupt.
“I pushed him,” he hissed. “It was me.”
“No. It was him. You were a ten-year-old boy against a forty-year-old man. He was so drunk he could barely stand.”
“I said enough!”
Teresa took some papers from her bag: photocopies of old autopsy reports.
“Your father had a fracture in his head that predated his death,” she pushed on, showing him some notes on an image of the back of a skull. Clearly visible in a spot somewhere just above the inferior nuchal line was a partially calcified crack. “That fall wouldn’t have killed anyone, but your father’s skull was as fragile as a clay pot: it was that preexisting fracture that killed him. It would have killed him even if someone happened to slap him in the back of his head.”
He lifted his eyes to look at her. She could see how desperately he wanted to believe her. But the past was putting up a fight.
“How did you get hold of this?”
Teresa dodged the question.
“They should have made this clear both to you and to your mother,” she said, “but perhaps they thought it wasn’t relevant; you weren’t guilty anyway.”
He opened and closed his mouth twice before he managed to speak.
“Not relevant?” he stammered.
“Blame it on the incompetence, the inexperience or the apathy of those who were supposed to investigate the case. But whatever it was, it wasn’t a homicide.”
She knelt in front of him. “It’s the truth,” she whispered. “You didn’t kill him.” She spread her arms wide. “You’re not a killer, Massimo. You were only trying to defend yourself. It was a tragedy.”
“Go away!”
Teresa thought again of the photographs in his file, that little boy’s back, skinny and covered in bruises. She thought of that mother who’d been unable to protect her son, just as Teresa herself had failed to do. She thought of all the barbed comments with which she’d tormented him over the past few months to try to figure out what had pushed him to seek shelter in some small provincial town, and of the formidable self-control he’d displayed when they’d worked together on a case involving the abuse of minors.
She pushed the photocopied images right up to his face and forced him to look.
“Stop being a traumatized kid, start acting like a cop and tell me what you see!”
His face was a picture of despair as he studied the grayscale images before him, but soon a kind of relief began to spread over it until it finally crumpled in an outburst of liberating tears.
Teresa cast aside the autopsy report from an old case that had nothing to do with the father of the young man before her and with it, she also cast aside a portion of her professional integrity.
But if it helped to save Marini, then no matter. She had made the conscious decision not to write any of this down in her new diary. She had discovered, in fact, that her illness granted her a kind of freedom that her sense of ethics had previously always denied her: the freedom to fabricate evidence without any adverse effects on her conscience. Soon she would forget about this episode, and it would be as if it had never happened.
She hugged him hard. She held him as he tried to wriggle free, to push her away, even as his face turned toward her, leaned into her shoulder. His struggle soon turned into a helpless clinging. Teresa made his suffering her own, absorbed it like venom. It would course through her veins in its diluted, no longer lethal form until the day her heart stopped beating.
They were quiet for a long time, sitting next to each other, Marini’s head resting on Teresa’s shoulder. If anyone who knew them had come across them now, they would have thought the scene bizarre, to say the least.
Teresa waited patiently until Marini was ready to talk.
“I’ve spent all of my life thinking I carried part of him inside of me. Like some kind of sickness,” she heard him say.
Teresa saw herself from the outside. How tiny she looked, and yet she was the one holding this young man together.
“You still think that,” she said.
“The evil gene. I read about it in some articles on psychiatry.”
“A fascinating theory, to be sure, but one that has yet to be proven true. You’ll have read about that, too, I expect.”
“So you don’t believe in it?”
“I believe it’s reassuring to blame evil on factors beyond our control, and even better if it’s some sort of genetic flaw. But that’s not the case with you, Marini.”
“So we’re back to surnames now?”
“It’s true that particularly serious cases of psychosis can lead to heinous crimes, but to speak of an actual ‘evil gene’ strikes me as fantasy. Experiences are crucial, environments are crucial and so are dozens of other variables. You know that.”
“I guess I felt like evil must have infected me.”
“It did infect you. It infects anyone who’s ever been subjected to violence.”
“Including you.”
“Including me. But we’re stronger. And you’re exceptionally resilient.”
Marini looked up at her.
“I think that’s the first time you’ve ever called me anything nice.”
“Really? I’d better fix that, then: you’re also a terrible fighter. How many times did he get you?”
He laughed, cradling his ribs.
“I did a pretty good job on him, too.”
“Is that a joke? He could probably go out and run a marathon now, if he wanted to.”
They fell silent.
“If there really were something wrong with you, Marini, if there were even the tiniest shadow of a doubt about that, you wouldn’t be here. They’d never have let you be a cop,” she told him.
“My mother never forgave me,” he confessed. “She still loved him, despite everything. After that day, she couldn’t even bring herself to look at me.”
Teresa took hold of his chin and made him look at her.
“You’re wrong. She can’t look at you because she’s overwhelmed with guilt. The fear of standing up to him made her complicit in his actions. You had no choice but to fend for yourself.” When he made as if to protest, she squeezed his chin harder. “She can’t look you in the eyes because she’s ashamed.”
She watched as a new glimmer of hope relaxed his features.
“Have I ever fed you any bullshit?” she asked him.
“Never.”
“Then I think you can trust me on this one, too.”
Teresa saw in the flutter of his eyelids the last traces of doubt finally leaving him.
“I know it’s not my place to say this, but I think it’s really unfair that life hasn’t given you a child,” he said eventually.
“I do have a child,” Teresa sighed. “He was never born, but he’s mine. And I have you lot to worry about, too. I think I spend more time mothering you all than I do being a detective.” She got up and pointed to the showers. “Now, go and get yourself cleaned up. We’ve got a case waiting to be solved. If you’re up to it, you might as well come and give us your usual worthless input.”
Marini laughed.
“Yes, Superintendent.”
She gave him a curt nod.
“Parisi will drop you back home. Do me a favor and try to be on time tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”
Teresa turned around, one hand already on the door.
“You’ve got something more important to do now. You’ve got to free her, too.”
She saw him swallow.
“What?” he said.
“Tell her you forgive her. That’s all she needs to start living again. And I know this for a fact.”
He got back to his feet.
“There’s something I need to ask you, Superintendent. Was your ex-husband Albert Lona?”
Teresa was surprised by the question, but even more surprised by his courage. Had the circumstances been different, had he chosen the wrong moment, she would have torn him to shreds.
“No, he’s not my ex-husband.”
She saw him hesitate, another question on the tip of his tongue. She was tempted to put him off with some withering remark, but she found that she couldn’t—and perhaps she would never be able to again, not after what they had shared with each other.
“Albert Lona was a colleague. We were the same age, but our personalities and our values couldn’t have been more different,” she told him. “He realized what was happening to me, noticed the bruises under my makeup, the fear in my eyes, even my pregnancy. He offered me what he considered to be a way out. I rejected his offer, and that same night I lost my child because I wasn’t able to protect him.”
In the silence that followed, Teresa could almost hear her heart and Marini’s beating out of synch.
“So Lona offered to arrest him?” Marini exhaled.
She gave him a bitter smile.
“No. He told me he loved me.”
72
Killing had come easy to the Tikô Wariö. Fear had guided the swift glide of its blade toward Emmanuel’s withered chest, where the knife had lodged itself in flesh to the tune of a thrush singing in the trees and a squirrel rustling for acorns among the leaves. The old man had fallen like the hollow trunk of a long-dead tree, emitting a sigh that could have been mistaken for the low whistle of the wind blowing through gnarled blueberry shrubs.
Taking the man’s heart was natural and logical, it was attack as the best form of defense, an act at once savage and entirely innocent.
But although it had been easy enough to kill, there had been consequences which, in the heat of the moment, the Tikô Wariö had failed to foresee.
An act whose purpose had been to protect something had resulted in a secret being revealed.
Or—perhaps—it had been the Tikô Wariö’s yearning for deliverance that had guided its hand and set in motion a terrifying yet inevitable chain of events.
There were certain roots that burrowed so deep that they became harmful. They turned carnivorous, they fed on life. And there were certain ties that not only meant everything, but also brought death. Ties that nourished even as they smothered.
The blade, still stained with blood, shone in the beam from the flashlight. With the soil brushed away, the skeletal hand surfaced in the darkness of the silent forest, so that the knife could be laid across the worn phalanges of what had once been its fingers.
Evil is hereditary. The true sin was love. And love had caused death.
Everything else was only devotion and sacrifice.
73
So perhaps evil didn’t have to be passed on from father to son. For the first time ever, Massimo allowed himself to hope it might be true, clinging to Teresa Battaglia’s words to find his way out, once and for all, from the fear that imprisoned him. She had guided him along a path she had signaled with her own suffering: she had shown him the past she still carried with her. Considering who she was, the way she was and her position, that couldn’t have been easy. And he would always be grateful to her for it.
He had just arrived to meet the superintendent at an address she’d texted him, but just as the sun was rising, and before climbing up the stairs to the apartment she’d indicated, he followed her advice.
When his mother picked up, Massimo didn’t even wait for her to say hello.
“I know that what I’m about to say will be painful for you to hear,” he began. He pictured her sitting down on the chair by the console table, holding the phone, no rings on her fingers. Her hands shaking.
“When it happened . . . when he died,” he continued, “I thought I had saved you. We were free at last. I didn’t understand the silence. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t even look at me anymore. I felt like a monster.”
His voice cracked over that last word, and he heard a muffled sob at the other end of the line.
“And do you realize now why I was like that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Say it, Massimo. Please.”
“I forgive you, Mom.”
“I wasn’t able to protect you,” she said once she’d calmed down, “but you’re different: you’re not like me, you’re not like him. You’ll be a strong father, a good father. This is your chance to be happy.”
Massimo didn’t tell her that he’d already paid far too steep a price for his new beginning, that Elena had left the day before.
He’d spent all night outside her hotel, sitting on the pavement, staring at the black sky between the street lamps. He’d fought the urge to run to the train station, as if there was a chance he’d find her waiting there, like a character in a fairy tale with a happy ending.
Elena hadn’t answered his calls. Their roles had been reversed. But the only reason Massimo hadn’t gotten in his car and driven for as long as it took to find her was that there was a killer on the loose. His front door had been smeared with blood-red paint in some kind of cryptic act of intimidation. She wouldn’t be safe with him, not yet—though not for the reasons he had previously imagined.
He couldn’t bring her back to his place and he couldn’t abandon Superintendent Battaglia, either.
The pink-hued rays of the sun warmed his face as he bid his mother farewell, promising to visit her soon, and he climbed the stairs to the apartment where Superintendent Battaglia was waiting for him. But it was Blanca who opened the door.
“Hello,” he said, injecting a genuine smile into his greeting.
“Hello,” she replied.
Massimo was fascinated by her ability to find his eyes with her own simply by following the trail of his voice. All she needed was a single word to sketch out a mental map of her interlocutor’s face and find where his or her gaze lay—though it was probably something she did to put people at ease rather than for her own benefit.
She showed him inside. Hers was a humble, spartan home and Massimo’s stomach dropped at the memory of how unpleasant he’d been with her when they’d first met. She was a fighter, and he would have to show her a great deal more consideration and respect than he had done so far.
Smoky was watching him from the couch, his head poking dejectedly from between his paws. Massimo had never seen him look so depressed.
“What’s up with him?” he asked.
“He’s in detention. He’s been naughty.”
Massimo sniffed the air. It smelled of broth.
“I brought breakfast,” he said, handing her a bag of warm croissants. “But it smells like you’re already making lunch.”
Blanca was startled by the sound of a cough coming from the kitchen.
The bag fell to the floor and they both bent down to pick it up.
“I’ll get it,” Massimo offered.
Blanca was blushing now and looking uncomfortable. He helped her back up.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
Superintendent Battaglia walked out of the kitchen.
“She’s all right,” she said, brushing him off. “Why don’t you take a seat here in the living room?”
Massimo looked at the couch. It was the only thing there was to sit on and currently it was occupied by a dog that had never been particularly well disposed toward him. He looked at the superintendent again.
“I think I’d prefer the kitchen.”
“The kitchen’s not allowed.”
Just then, the sound of something breaking in the bedroom: there was somebody else in the house. Teresa and Blanca disappeared, leaving the kitchen unguarded. They’d looked worried, which surprised Massimo. Was one of Blanca’s relatives visiting? But that wouldn’t explain why the superintendent was involved.
She shoved him aside and leapt to her feet. She could have eaten him alive.
“Ouch!”
“Do you realize you’re throwing everything away?” she yelled. “Your whole future down the drain.”
She saw him lower his eyes, then look up again. He was trying to smile, to go back into hiding.
“You sound like my mother,” he said in an affectedly playful tone.
Teresa doubted it. His mother wasn’t there because his mother was part of the problem. She realized then that she couldn’t go back into hiding, either.
“I know your secret,” she told him.
Marini’s face was like a cold, rigid mask.
“There’s no secret,” he said blankly. “It’s always been in my file, very clearly spelled out.”
“Not completely,” she corrected him.
Marini slowly sat up. The ice pack fell to the floor. His hands gripped the edge of the bench. His chest was heaving. Teresa pictured his heart, struck by a fatal blow yet beating still, thumping against his ribs until it hurt. She would have given anything to soothe that pain, but first she had to carve his chest open and rip out the monster that was feeding on him. She had to make Marini look it in the eye, so he could see how easy it could be to banish the ghost that haunted him. All he had to do was forgive himself.
She watched him shrug his shoulders.
“A man beating his wife and child isn’t exactly news, Superintendent,” he told her. “He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. You know the statistics better than I do.”
Teresa hazarded a step toward him.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said.
She saw him gasp, watched him flinch as if he’d been struck again.
“You’re out of line.”
Teresa took another step, inching closer to the child he had once been.
“You didn’t kill him,” she repeated, louder this time.
Massimo shook his head.
“Enough,” he said.
Teresa said it again.
“Enough!” he said, shouting now, one hand raised as if to stop her, as if to implore her not to break the fragile balance he was trying so desperately to hold on to.
“You were only a child, Massimo. You’re not at fault.”
He shook with a powerful shiver. Something inside him seemed about to erupt.
“I pushed him,” he hissed. “It was me.”
“No. It was him. You were a ten-year-old boy against a forty-year-old man. He was so drunk he could barely stand.”
“I said enough!”
Teresa took some papers from her bag: photocopies of old autopsy reports.
“Your father had a fracture in his head that predated his death,” she pushed on, showing him some notes on an image of the back of a skull. Clearly visible in a spot somewhere just above the inferior nuchal line was a partially calcified crack. “That fall wouldn’t have killed anyone, but your father’s skull was as fragile as a clay pot: it was that preexisting fracture that killed him. It would have killed him even if someone happened to slap him in the back of his head.”
He lifted his eyes to look at her. She could see how desperately he wanted to believe her. But the past was putting up a fight.
“How did you get hold of this?”
Teresa dodged the question.
“They should have made this clear both to you and to your mother,” she said, “but perhaps they thought it wasn’t relevant; you weren’t guilty anyway.”
He opened and closed his mouth twice before he managed to speak.
“Not relevant?” he stammered.
“Blame it on the incompetence, the inexperience or the apathy of those who were supposed to investigate the case. But whatever it was, it wasn’t a homicide.”
She knelt in front of him. “It’s the truth,” she whispered. “You didn’t kill him.” She spread her arms wide. “You’re not a killer, Massimo. You were only trying to defend yourself. It was a tragedy.”
“Go away!”
Teresa thought again of the photographs in his file, that little boy’s back, skinny and covered in bruises. She thought of that mother who’d been unable to protect her son, just as Teresa herself had failed to do. She thought of all the barbed comments with which she’d tormented him over the past few months to try to figure out what had pushed him to seek shelter in some small provincial town, and of the formidable self-control he’d displayed when they’d worked together on a case involving the abuse of minors.
She pushed the photocopied images right up to his face and forced him to look.
“Stop being a traumatized kid, start acting like a cop and tell me what you see!”
His face was a picture of despair as he studied the grayscale images before him, but soon a kind of relief began to spread over it until it finally crumpled in an outburst of liberating tears.
Teresa cast aside the autopsy report from an old case that had nothing to do with the father of the young man before her and with it, she also cast aside a portion of her professional integrity.
But if it helped to save Marini, then no matter. She had made the conscious decision not to write any of this down in her new diary. She had discovered, in fact, that her illness granted her a kind of freedom that her sense of ethics had previously always denied her: the freedom to fabricate evidence without any adverse effects on her conscience. Soon she would forget about this episode, and it would be as if it had never happened.
She hugged him hard. She held him as he tried to wriggle free, to push her away, even as his face turned toward her, leaned into her shoulder. His struggle soon turned into a helpless clinging. Teresa made his suffering her own, absorbed it like venom. It would course through her veins in its diluted, no longer lethal form until the day her heart stopped beating.
They were quiet for a long time, sitting next to each other, Marini’s head resting on Teresa’s shoulder. If anyone who knew them had come across them now, they would have thought the scene bizarre, to say the least.
Teresa waited patiently until Marini was ready to talk.
“I’ve spent all of my life thinking I carried part of him inside of me. Like some kind of sickness,” she heard him say.
Teresa saw herself from the outside. How tiny she looked, and yet she was the one holding this young man together.
“You still think that,” she said.
“The evil gene. I read about it in some articles on psychiatry.”
“A fascinating theory, to be sure, but one that has yet to be proven true. You’ll have read about that, too, I expect.”
“So you don’t believe in it?”
“I believe it’s reassuring to blame evil on factors beyond our control, and even better if it’s some sort of genetic flaw. But that’s not the case with you, Marini.”
“So we’re back to surnames now?”
“It’s true that particularly serious cases of psychosis can lead to heinous crimes, but to speak of an actual ‘evil gene’ strikes me as fantasy. Experiences are crucial, environments are crucial and so are dozens of other variables. You know that.”
“I guess I felt like evil must have infected me.”
“It did infect you. It infects anyone who’s ever been subjected to violence.”
“Including you.”
“Including me. But we’re stronger. And you’re exceptionally resilient.”
Marini looked up at her.
“I think that’s the first time you’ve ever called me anything nice.”
“Really? I’d better fix that, then: you’re also a terrible fighter. How many times did he get you?”
He laughed, cradling his ribs.
“I did a pretty good job on him, too.”
“Is that a joke? He could probably go out and run a marathon now, if he wanted to.”
They fell silent.
“If there really were something wrong with you, Marini, if there were even the tiniest shadow of a doubt about that, you wouldn’t be here. They’d never have let you be a cop,” she told him.
“My mother never forgave me,” he confessed. “She still loved him, despite everything. After that day, she couldn’t even bring herself to look at me.”
Teresa took hold of his chin and made him look at her.
“You’re wrong. She can’t look at you because she’s overwhelmed with guilt. The fear of standing up to him made her complicit in his actions. You had no choice but to fend for yourself.” When he made as if to protest, she squeezed his chin harder. “She can’t look you in the eyes because she’s ashamed.”
She watched as a new glimmer of hope relaxed his features.
“Have I ever fed you any bullshit?” she asked him.
“Never.”
“Then I think you can trust me on this one, too.”
Teresa saw in the flutter of his eyelids the last traces of doubt finally leaving him.
“I know it’s not my place to say this, but I think it’s really unfair that life hasn’t given you a child,” he said eventually.
“I do have a child,” Teresa sighed. “He was never born, but he’s mine. And I have you lot to worry about, too. I think I spend more time mothering you all than I do being a detective.” She got up and pointed to the showers. “Now, go and get yourself cleaned up. We’ve got a case waiting to be solved. If you’re up to it, you might as well come and give us your usual worthless input.”
Marini laughed.
“Yes, Superintendent.”
She gave him a curt nod.
“Parisi will drop you back home. Do me a favor and try to be on time tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”
Teresa turned around, one hand already on the door.
“You’ve got something more important to do now. You’ve got to free her, too.”
She saw him swallow.
“What?” he said.
“Tell her you forgive her. That’s all she needs to start living again. And I know this for a fact.”
He got back to his feet.
“There’s something I need to ask you, Superintendent. Was your ex-husband Albert Lona?”
Teresa was surprised by the question, but even more surprised by his courage. Had the circumstances been different, had he chosen the wrong moment, she would have torn him to shreds.
“No, he’s not my ex-husband.”
She saw him hesitate, another question on the tip of his tongue. She was tempted to put him off with some withering remark, but she found that she couldn’t—and perhaps she would never be able to again, not after what they had shared with each other.
“Albert Lona was a colleague. We were the same age, but our personalities and our values couldn’t have been more different,” she told him. “He realized what was happening to me, noticed the bruises under my makeup, the fear in my eyes, even my pregnancy. He offered me what he considered to be a way out. I rejected his offer, and that same night I lost my child because I wasn’t able to protect him.”
In the silence that followed, Teresa could almost hear her heart and Marini’s beating out of synch.
“So Lona offered to arrest him?” Marini exhaled.
She gave him a bitter smile.
“No. He told me he loved me.”
72
Killing had come easy to the Tikô Wariö. Fear had guided the swift glide of its blade toward Emmanuel’s withered chest, where the knife had lodged itself in flesh to the tune of a thrush singing in the trees and a squirrel rustling for acorns among the leaves. The old man had fallen like the hollow trunk of a long-dead tree, emitting a sigh that could have been mistaken for the low whistle of the wind blowing through gnarled blueberry shrubs.
Taking the man’s heart was natural and logical, it was attack as the best form of defense, an act at once savage and entirely innocent.
But although it had been easy enough to kill, there had been consequences which, in the heat of the moment, the Tikô Wariö had failed to foresee.
An act whose purpose had been to protect something had resulted in a secret being revealed.
Or—perhaps—it had been the Tikô Wariö’s yearning for deliverance that had guided its hand and set in motion a terrifying yet inevitable chain of events.
There were certain roots that burrowed so deep that they became harmful. They turned carnivorous, they fed on life. And there were certain ties that not only meant everything, but also brought death. Ties that nourished even as they smothered.
The blade, still stained with blood, shone in the beam from the flashlight. With the soil brushed away, the skeletal hand surfaced in the darkness of the silent forest, so that the knife could be laid across the worn phalanges of what had once been its fingers.
Evil is hereditary. The true sin was love. And love had caused death.
Everything else was only devotion and sacrifice.
73
So perhaps evil didn’t have to be passed on from father to son. For the first time ever, Massimo allowed himself to hope it might be true, clinging to Teresa Battaglia’s words to find his way out, once and for all, from the fear that imprisoned him. She had guided him along a path she had signaled with her own suffering: she had shown him the past she still carried with her. Considering who she was, the way she was and her position, that couldn’t have been easy. And he would always be grateful to her for it.
He had just arrived to meet the superintendent at an address she’d texted him, but just as the sun was rising, and before climbing up the stairs to the apartment she’d indicated, he followed her advice.
When his mother picked up, Massimo didn’t even wait for her to say hello.
“I know that what I’m about to say will be painful for you to hear,” he began. He pictured her sitting down on the chair by the console table, holding the phone, no rings on her fingers. Her hands shaking.
“When it happened . . . when he died,” he continued, “I thought I had saved you. We were free at last. I didn’t understand the silence. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t even look at me anymore. I felt like a monster.”
His voice cracked over that last word, and he heard a muffled sob at the other end of the line.
“And do you realize now why I was like that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Say it, Massimo. Please.”
“I forgive you, Mom.”
“I wasn’t able to protect you,” she said once she’d calmed down, “but you’re different: you’re not like me, you’re not like him. You’ll be a strong father, a good father. This is your chance to be happy.”
Massimo didn’t tell her that he’d already paid far too steep a price for his new beginning, that Elena had left the day before.
He’d spent all night outside her hotel, sitting on the pavement, staring at the black sky between the street lamps. He’d fought the urge to run to the train station, as if there was a chance he’d find her waiting there, like a character in a fairy tale with a happy ending.
Elena hadn’t answered his calls. Their roles had been reversed. But the only reason Massimo hadn’t gotten in his car and driven for as long as it took to find her was that there was a killer on the loose. His front door had been smeared with blood-red paint in some kind of cryptic act of intimidation. She wouldn’t be safe with him, not yet—though not for the reasons he had previously imagined.
He couldn’t bring her back to his place and he couldn’t abandon Superintendent Battaglia, either.
The pink-hued rays of the sun warmed his face as he bid his mother farewell, promising to visit her soon, and he climbed the stairs to the apartment where Superintendent Battaglia was waiting for him. But it was Blanca who opened the door.
“Hello,” he said, injecting a genuine smile into his greeting.
“Hello,” she replied.
Massimo was fascinated by her ability to find his eyes with her own simply by following the trail of his voice. All she needed was a single word to sketch out a mental map of her interlocutor’s face and find where his or her gaze lay—though it was probably something she did to put people at ease rather than for her own benefit.
She showed him inside. Hers was a humble, spartan home and Massimo’s stomach dropped at the memory of how unpleasant he’d been with her when they’d first met. She was a fighter, and he would have to show her a great deal more consideration and respect than he had done so far.
Smoky was watching him from the couch, his head poking dejectedly from between his paws. Massimo had never seen him look so depressed.
“What’s up with him?” he asked.
“He’s in detention. He’s been naughty.”
Massimo sniffed the air. It smelled of broth.
“I brought breakfast,” he said, handing her a bag of warm croissants. “But it smells like you’re already making lunch.”
Blanca was startled by the sound of a cough coming from the kitchen.
The bag fell to the floor and they both bent down to pick it up.
“I’ll get it,” Massimo offered.
Blanca was blushing now and looking uncomfortable. He helped her back up.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
Superintendent Battaglia walked out of the kitchen.
“She’s all right,” she said, brushing him off. “Why don’t you take a seat here in the living room?”
Massimo looked at the couch. It was the only thing there was to sit on and currently it was occupied by a dog that had never been particularly well disposed toward him. He looked at the superintendent again.
“I think I’d prefer the kitchen.”
“The kitchen’s not allowed.”
Just then, the sound of something breaking in the bedroom: there was somebody else in the house. Teresa and Blanca disappeared, leaving the kitchen unguarded. They’d looked worried, which surprised Massimo. Was one of Blanca’s relatives visiting? But that wouldn’t explain why the superintendent was involved.
