Commissario Luigi Palma looked up from the papers on the desk in front of him and tried to catch the voices that reached him through the door he’d left ajar.
His rule had always been never to shut himself up in his office. He wanted his coworkers to feel free to come in and talk to him whenever they needed to; but here, in Pizzofalcone, one of his two doors gave onto the large room that he had decided to convert from a cafeteria into a shared office for the investigative squad, and he worried that some might think he was trying to keep an eye on them. That would achieve the opposite effect: Instead of a first among equals, a sort of older brother whose job it was to supervise investigative activity, rather than to give orders, he would become a mistrustful warden looking to eavesdrop on their conversations.
Any attitude could easily be misunderstood. He was well aware that this wasn’t going to be easy; even the chief of police, in their last conversation before assigning him the post, had all but tried to talk Palma out of taking the job. Palma was on his way up, and sooner or later a cushier, more prestigious position would open up somewhere, and he’d have a chance to make the most of his considerable abilities.
But Palma had never liked things easy and, truth be told, he didn’t have a lot to lose. The chief of police, though, had no way of knowing that.
Palma was much less interested in his career than one might have imagined by looking at the absolute commitment he lavished on his work. The truth was simple: He had nothing else in his life.
He’d lost both parents a few years ago, first his mother, shortly thereafter his father. They were elderly; Palma thought of himself as “the son of old parents” since he’d been born when his father was in his fifites and his mother in her forties. His older brother had Down syndrome and had died at the age of twenty, leaving a crater of calm grief in the hearts of his kin that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. Palma wanted children of his own, but the woman he’d married didn’t; she was consumed by her work as a doctor, which left no room for anything else. And so, over time, though neither had wanted it to happen, a deep abyss had carved itself between them, and it had been a relief for them both when they had decided first to separate and, later, to divorce.
At that point, Palma had taken a look around. A gentle, affectionate, effusive man who no longer had a birth family, and hadn’t created one of his own. Man proposes, fate disposes.
Since he had a natural gift and inclination for running groups, in the end, his job had become his family. And inevitably that had been recognized, which resulted in his serving as deputy captain in a quiet precinct in a residential district where, after his superior officer had taken seriously ill, he’d had a chance to shine as the youngest and most dynamic official in the city’s police department.
When his superior officer, the commissario, had resigned to fight his last battle, Palma expected to be promoted to the now empty office; and that’s what his men—many of them his seniors—would have wanted; they all valued his sincerity and modesty. But what’s logical and right is so rarely done in this world and a woman with more prestigious credentials and stronger political support in Rome had arrived from another city.
It was neither anger nor envy that had prompted him to leave after that. Quite simply, he knew it would be impossible to keep the precinct running efficiently. He needed to step aside: If he had stayed on, his men would have defied the authority of their new commanding officer and continued to turn to him for help, since he knew the district, the men, and the balance of power in the precinct.
It was then that the affair of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone had gone down, delivering a true body blow to the public image of the local police. Like so many of his colleagues who battled from dawn till dusk, with hard work and great pain, against the decay of life on the streets and in the vicoli, largely at the hands of their own inhabitants, Palma had been disgusted, had felt immense rage. But when he learned that the chief of police intended to shut down the precinct entirely, admitting de facto defeat, he rebelled against the idea.
And he asked to take over command of the precinct himself.
An impulsive gesture, no doubt. And a risky one, for sure. But also a way out of the stagnant pond his career—and his life, in a way—had become. A new place, a new situation. And a new group. Something like a new family.
The human resources that had been assigned to him, at least on paper, didn’t leave much hope for success. The four bastards, dismissed for conspiring to run a grim drug-dealing ring, had been replaced by new bastards, stray dogs whose original precincts had been all too eager to get rid of them: the hamfisted Aragona, protected by nepotism, tin-eared and offensive, intrusive and rude; the enigmatic Di Nardo, who’d fired her handgun inside her old station house; the silent Romano, subject to outbursts of rage during which he wrapped his powerful hands around the throats of suspects and colleagues alike. And Lojacono? The Sicilian known as “the Chinaman” for his strange almond-shaped eyes? No, he wasn’t a reject, Palma had actually requested him. Not that Di Vincenzo, Lojacono’s previous boss, hadn’t been delighted to be free of him: the mark of infamy that the Chinaman carried with him, that of a transfer away from his home territory because of allegations made, though never proved, by a Mafia turncoat about Lojacono’s collusion with organized crime, was exactly the kind that could never be forgiven in law enforcement circles. But Palma had watched Lojacono in action during the hunt for the Crocodile, a serial killer who had terrorized the city months before, and had clearly recognized Lojacono’s talent, his fury, his emotional involvement: Those were qualities he sought in his investigators, the things that were needed to succeed in that profession.
Even the two staff members who had survived the purge carried out by the internal affairs commission had proven to be anything but burdens.
The elderly deputy captain Pisanelli knew everything there was to know about the precinct where he was born and where he’d worked his whole life. He was an honest and empathetic man, a source of solid and extensive information that helped to make up for the fact that nearly all the others were pretty much new to the place. If not for his unfortunate obsession with a series of suspicious suicides, he would have been an ideal assistant.
As for Ottavia, at first he’d wondered whether he ought to deploy her in the field, working investigations; then he’d come to understand just how invaluable she was as support staff. The intelligence she managed to cull from the web was at least as valuable as her colleagues’ legwork out in the vicoli and streets of the city, if not more so. She saved them hours and hours of work by instantly assembling mountains of information that would otherwise have cost a tremendous effort to obtain.
Certainly, Palma had to admit to himself, as he listened to the woman laughing at Aragona’s nonsense, the knowledge that she was right there, in the next room, warmed his heart.
He was far too experienced to fail to sense the danger: Nothing good could come when the simple pleasure of working together transformed itself into something different. He was there to supervise a team of police officers, to save the precinct and make it work efficiently; she was there to perform important tasks. It would be unforgivable for either to assign ulterior motives to the other’s appearance in the office each morning. Moreover, while he might be unattached, she was married and had a son, a son who was afflicted with autism.
And after all, he might be fooling himself. Maybe those smiles, that solicitous care, the low tone of voice she used only when she spoke to him, were all just figments of his imagination: He was seeing and hearing what he wanted to see and hear. Maybe it was just his own desire playing tricks on him. Too many nights spent sleeping on his office couch, avoiding the messy studio apartment that he didn’t have the heart to call home; too many Sundays spent tossing back beers in front of the television, not even watching the screen; too many memories, by now so faded that he was actually afraid he might have made them up in order to fill a vast emptiness.
It wasn’t sex that he was yearning for; he’d always thought sex without feeling was meaningless. When he met up with his few friends, old classmates who stubbornly insisted on getting together every couple of months, he stoically bore their mockery; in their opinion he’d slowly become just like their old Religious Studies professor, preaching the joys of the meditative life to a group of pimply and perennially horny teenagers. But Palma wasn’t looking for female company with no strings attached. He wanted to assuage his loneliness; another man’s wife or girlfriend, with her own family, her own life, her own problems, could hardly do that.
Those excellent reasons, however, smashed themselves up against the reality of Ottavia’s face when she got to the office every morning, before all the others. And he lost the battle, miserably, fracturing himself into a thousand specks of subtle pleasure. What harm is there, his subconscious argued, if, after all, nothing is going to happen? If you don’t declare yourself, if you don’t go for her, if you don’t let her think that your interest is any more than merely professional? He knew that he was lying to himself, but he had no wish to erect excessive defenses around himself; come to think of it, he wouldn’t have even known how.
He listened to her voice as she answered the phone, smiling at the warm sounds to which he was quickly becoming accustomed.
Then he stopped smiling.