Free The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Page B

can’t tell you. There don’t appear to be any signs of struggle. Now we’re going to transport her to the morgue, where we’ll perform an autopsy.”
    With a curt nod he left the room, just as the men from the forensic squad arrived in their white overalls. Soon a different performance would unfold: cameras would flash and dust would be scattered over all the surfaces, as the team searched for tracks and prints. But something fundamental was missing, and the lieutenant hoped it hadn’t been carried off by the murderer: he knew very well how greatly their chances of identifying the guilty party depended on the immediate discovery of that something.
    Lojacono crouched down.
    Right under the leather armchair he found himself eye to eye with a Hawaiian ukulele player, who was smiling at him from inside a glass globe.
    The globe was smeared with blood.

XV
    W arrant Officer Francesco Romano is thinking back to the night before. To his return home, to be exact.
    He’s thinking as he sits at his desk, looking out the window at the wind pushing the clouds, while these new coworkers bustle busily around their useless desks, as if they’re moving in. Who gives a damn about a new desk, he thinks. What am I, an office clerk? An accountant, a bookkeeper? I’m a policeman. Or at least I would be, if they’d let me do my job.
    He drums on the desktop with the fingers of his left hand and he keeps his right hand stuffed in his pocket. He always keeps his right hand in his pocket. To keep it in line. To keep it out of sight. He thinks of that hand as if it were an undomesticated animal, a dangerous dog, not strictly legal, that you can’t take anywhere except on a very short leash, with a good stout muzzle. The problem is that Warrant Officer Romano can’t seem to put a muzzle on that hand. Even yesterday he couldn’t do it.
    He had been in an especially bad mood yesterday. His first day on his new job had been the final blow, and he’d plunged into a true depression. They’d sent him to work with a crew of lost men in a station house famous throughout the region for the lawlessness and incompetence of those who had worked there before. He was one of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone. Him of all people, the man who had solved dozens of cases. Him of all people, the most honest and incorruptible policeman who had ever lived. Him of all people.
    And you had to see them, his new colleagues. They looked like the contents of a junkman’s cart. The policeman’s dump, is what this place looked like. One of them might be a Mafioso; then there’s a green kid, the hapless product of nepotism, a kid who plays at being a cop; a psychopathic girl who’s obsessed with weapons; a good-natured mother and housewife; an old man who looks at a bunch of suicides and sees visions of murderers. And then there’s the commissario himself: a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, with all that fake enthusiasm.
    How did he wind up there, surrounded by this mess? Why is he, too, sitting there with all the others, in that dump?
    Blame it on the hand, he thinks to himself. Blame it on that damned right hand, which is now shut up in his trouser pocket. Until it comes out again, to do more damage.
    He remembers the last time, the time that resulted in his suspension. He remembers that little piece of shit, that two-bit idiot Camorrista: you can’t touch me, he said over and over, laughing in his face. You can’t touch me, you can’t do a thing. I know it and you know it too, that I had the drugs on my person; that I was the one who emptied my pistol into that stinking shithead. But since I was careful to toss it down the sewer, after polishing it thoroughly, you can’t touch me. And I’ve got a good lawyer, a first-rate lawyer. You just wait and see, I guarantee you that I’ll be out of here tonight before either of you two. And it was true, Romano knew it was true. And his