Free Big Italy by Timothy Williams

victims and they leave it as victims. Whores are not like you and me, Commissario Trotti. There are things that you and I believe in—things like affection and caring and warmth. We don’t need Berlusconi’s telenovelas to teach us how to feel, because our emotional equipment’s already soundly in place, given to us by our parents, by people who care. At home and at school. You and I, when we were little, we mattered.” She shook her head. “Whoring’s merely the end result of everything that’s gone on before. They’ve never been loved, and so they don’t know how to do it.”
    “Eva loves her boy. She loves him as she loves herself. She wouldn’t talk of anything else.”
    “Whores don’t know what love is.”
    “Then why do they have sex?”
    “Whatever love is, for the prostitute it’s got nothing to do with the physical act in the back of a stuffy Fiat or behind the bushes off the highway. Whores can open their legs but not their hearts. What affection they have, they pour into animals orstuffed dolls or into people they don’t have to live with. People like you, Piero.”
    “Like me?”
    “You can’t imagine how many dolls and little animals these women have—each cell is a menagerie.” Bianca Poveri pointed to the letter. “That note’s not really for you at all. It’s for hers.”
    “What can I do to help her?”
    “Your Eva realized long ago her son was beyond her.” Bianca raised the silk shoulders of her blouse. “How old is he now? A grown man? What does her son need from a woman he’s scarcely ever met? But you see, commissario, unlike her son, you’ve been good to her. In Italy, she dreamt of Uruguay. And back in Uruguay she spent her time dreaming of Commissario Trotti.”
    “I can’t help her.”
    “Your Eva doesn’t want help. She simply needs somebody to remind her she’s a human being.”
    He shrugged. “Human being? I gave up being that years ago.”
    “Wrong again, commissario.”
    He put his head back and laughed.
    “You’re a good man—in your way.”
    “How on earth does Alcibiade put up with a wife wearing the trousers?”
    Unexpectedly the face softened and a gentle grin made its way along her lips. “You think I wear the trousers in the Poveri home? You underestimate our little girl. Anna Giulia has both Alcibiade and me around her chubby finger. In the organization chart of the Casa Poveri, I come just after the tortoise, just before the yucca plant.” The proud smile vanished. “You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”
    “The letter?” Trotti frowned. “Of course I’m going to take it—though for the life of me, I don’t see how I can help Eva.”
    “You’re going to take the job?”
    “Job?”
    “Commissario Piero Trotti, it’d be a shame if you were to leave the Questura tomorrow.”
    “What job?”
    “No point in being coy. There’s been talk of a center for several months and I wasn’t the only one to recommend you to the Questore, if that’s what you think.” Unblinking, she looked him in the eyes.
    Perhaps his mouth had fallen open.
    “And now you start quoting European Community statisticsto me. You know, you’d be making a lot of people happy, and not least me.”
    “You knew about the job?”
    “I was asked if I wanted to head the team. I’d much rather work with you, Piero Trotti.”
    “My wife escaped to America to get away from me.” There was a long silence. “I don’t know many people who want to work with me. My daughter’s now in Bologna.”
    Bianca Poveri asked fondly, “And Tenente Pisanelli?”
    “Avoids me.” Trotti shrugged. “Seems to think it’s my fault he’s not married.”
    “I’m too young for the job. No experience. Whereas you …”
    “Yes?”
    “Unlike me, commissario, you never lived through 1968. Or at least, you grew up at a different time, at a time when things were simpler. You have your solid values anchored in a simpler time. I’m a child of the sixties. All that stuff,