When Lojacono got back to the office, he encountered a highly excited Giuffrè.
“At last, at last, you’re back. Mamma mia, what a morning! I have a lot of things to tell you. Come in, come in.”
The inspector shook his head wryly. His colleague’s excitement amused him, and he sensed that the stout little sergeant cared every bit as much about what was happening as he did, if not more.
“Calm down, Giuffrè, you’re working yourself up into cardiac arrest. Then I’d have to live the rest of my life with you on my conscience. So tell me: what happened?”
Lojacono used a distinctly Sicilian form of the past tense that seemed to catapult the question into a distant, ancient past. Giuffrè blinked.
“Listen, Loja’, let’s come to an understanding. There’s a normal past tense in Italian, and there’s your weird, remote past tense, but no one understands it outside of Sicily. If you want to know what happened this morning, ask me in plain Italian. Otherwise, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lojacono shot the sergeant a disgusted glare. “Listen, professor, if you want to tell me, go ahead; otherwise keep it to yourself. If I wanted to go back to school, that’s what I would have done, and I would have gone one better: I would have studied up on how to deal with people like you.”
Giuffrè waved his hand. “No skin off my back. I’m smart enough to figure out what you’re saying for myself. Anyway, while you were out, guess who came to the police station for a little visit? Piras, none other. As hot and furious as ever. She walked in and headed straight for Di Vincenzo’s office, without even knocking–Pontolillo told me all about it. And then she started yelling: you could hear her downstairs. He kept coming up with explanations and excuses but she didn’t even stop to listen.”
Lojacono received this information with interest. “And just why did she throw this tantrum?”
“So the news does interest you, huh? Because you haven’t seen today’s papers. Well, here’s the thing: this whole story of the Crocodile murders seems to tickle the fancy of the press. Every reporter in town is coming up with theories of his own—it’s a new Camorra torpedo, a psychopathic killer, a sex maniac, a child molester. And every one of them claiming that the police, as usual, have no idea what’s going on. Every article mentions Piras’s name, and if you ask me, her career is hanging by a thread on this thing.”
Lojacono shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what the hell do we care about Piras’s career? If anything, I’d like to know what they suggest we do to catch the murderer, who might very well decide to go on killing.”
Giuffrè scratched his face meditatively. “Well, it’s not so much about Piras; it’s the pressure this puts on Di Vincenzo, who turns around and squeezes all of us in here. I hear that ever since that little girl was murdered he’s been out of his mind; he’s afraid to go home for fear something’ll happen when he’s not here, and that poor Pontolillo is all over the place, running around like a headless chicken. Anyway, they’ve reached out to all their informants, they’re going through the whole neighborhood with a fine-toothed comb, trying to figure out what links there could have been between Lorusso and the girl from Posillipo. If you ask me, none at all. Those are two completely distinct and separate cities; at most someone like Lorusso might snatch a handbag from someone like De Matteis, and that’s the closest they’ll ever come.”
Lojacono was skimming the newspapers that lay spread out on Giuffrè’s desk. “Well, they’re certainly tearing us a new one here. But these are strange murders. I’ll say it again–if you ask me, this has nothing to do with the Camorra. In this city, you use the Camorra as an umbrella: anything that happens, you blame the Camorra, directly or indirectly. I know that habit–more or less the same thing happens where I come from. But I don’t think people should let themselves be pushed off course. This time, I think these kids were killed for some other motive.”
Giuffrè started swaying back and forth on his toes again. “But I know you have a theory. Why don’t you tell the rest of us about it, Loja’? Maybe you’re right–you catch this damned Crocodile, and you get us out of the booby hatch. What a slap in the face that would be for that bastard Di Vincenzo.”
Lojacono shook his head. “Giuffrè, you could make me seasick right here on dry land, even though I’m an island-dweller from birth. Do me a favor and stop bobbing around. And no, I don’t have a theory. The only reason I went to the girl’s funeral was so I could see if anyone there had also been present at the scene of the Lorusso murder, but there was no one I recognized. And the only reason I did that was to kill some time. You know I’m under direct orders to stay away from casework. As a distraction, in other words. To divert my thoughts.”
The sergeant stopped swaying but kept smiling. “You can’t fool me, Loja’. Someone who’s trying to get his mind off something goes to the movies or hires a whore; he doesn’t go to the funeral of a murdered teenage girl. I know that the policeman sleeping inside you has been awakened. If you track down the murderer and they rehabilitate you, can I come with you? I’m sick and tired of being stuck here in the Crime Reporting Office, hearing people whisper behind my back that I must have received special treatment because I was a driver for a member of parliament. The truth is I’m a bloodhound, and I know everyone. I can be useful. Well, is it a promise?”
In spite of himself, Lojacono smiled back. “You talk like we’re a couple of prisoners exiled to the island of Monte Cristo. O.K., it’s a promise. After all, what do I have to lose? The last people on earth who are likely to catch this Crocodile are you and me. Still, to kill time, we can keep an eye on the investigation. We need something to talk about all day, right?”
Giuffrè clapped his hands in delight. “No, I have faith in you, Loja’. If you ask me, you’re just like yours truly–much, much better than a few idiots upstairs think we are. The crucial thing is to find an opportunity, a situation, so we can show them what we can do. What do you think: is it a good idea to be going over the whole quarter with a fine-toothed comb in search of information, the way they’re doing?”
Without even looking up from the newspaper, Lojacono shook his head. “Information’s always good to have, and they can’t think of anything else to do. But you watch: it won’t amount to anything. I’ll say it again—there’s only one thing I know for sure: the Camorra has nothing to do with these killings.”
Just then, Piras walked past the open door of the booby hatch and came to an abrupt halt.