Blanca said goodbye to Sergio and reminded him of when she would be ready to go home.
The sergeant waited for the car to drive away.
She wanted to be left alone. She told herself that she was paying for Nini’s new independence with pieces of her own. She concluded it’s worth it: that girl was a daughter to her, more of a daughter than any child delivered in the blood of prayers and curses.
She stunned herself with the salt waves and the tufa-stone coast of the old harbor.
She needed freedom before seeing Liguori again. They hadn’t seen each other in the past thirty-seven days. The precise accounting was not merely a matter of adding up the length of their respective vacation days.
The detective had called his colleague twice during the month of August: I’m in Sicily, I’m in Ireland, and not much more. Blanca had smiled at that need for geographic coordinates and had settled in to wait. Liguori unsettled her, made her feel like leaving and staying. She sensed the danger of his voice: it penetrated into the furthest corners of her brain, almost like the music of Mozart.
The sergeant was a specialist at decoding sounds and intentions in wiretaps and environmental listening devices. She’d trained in Belgium; she’d had excellent teachers, nearly all of them sightless, and a natural predisposition for which she was in great demand.
It wasn’t part of her occupational baggage that allowed her to recognize in Liguori’s voice hesitation, elegance, refined sensuality, and a devastating blend of derision and gentleness from which she would be well advised to turn and flee.
Before walking through the main entrance she took a deep breath, straightened her summer dress, and briskly swung ankles and flat sandals. She couldn’t wear heels, she needed to sense the difference between pebbles and pavement.
Giuseppe Càrita, as all his colleagues, with the exception of Martusciello, were now resigned to addressing him, met her in the lobby:
“Sergeant,” he intoned. He had been taking elocution lessons for some time. “You’re looking particularly magnificent today.”
“Thanks, Giuseppe, how are your theatrical studies coming along?”
“Blanca, with you I can talk the way it comes naturally to me, I’ve found my own personal paradise. How wonderful it is to become different people: kings, lawyers, peasants, sons of bitches, Garibaldi, and Aisauer.”
“Who?”
“‘Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’ Those are his words.”
“Ah, Eisenhower. You’re performing Eisenhower?”
“We’re studying him in the auto repair shop where we rehearse. Our maestro . . . you understand who the maestro is, don’t you? He’s the actor who does the commercial for OraPerOra, the diet pill.”
“I can’t seem to recall.”
“Odd that you can’t seem to recall, because he’s famous. Anyway, our maestro takes pieces written and spoken by famous figures from history, blends them together in a phenomenal collage that only he could create, and has us recite them on Saturday evenings in front of relatives.”
“His relatives?”
“No, ours. Modestly speaking, I help to bulk up the audience because I have two . . . I have a large family. The maestro even offers me a discount, and lets me pay five euros instead of seven for the group ticket.”
“Generous of him.”
“I couldn’t say if it’s generous, because I already pay for the course, but True Art isn’t cheap, as you know. And enjoying multiple lives is priceless.”
Blanca had to agree.
She climbed to the floor where the captain’s office was located. The police officers moved silently and encouraged visitors to cause as little noise as possible. They explained to her that Martusciello had come back from his vacation with a dead-tired face and had announced that for the next few months he was going to lead a solitary life in the office.
Blanca was only slightly concerned, if at all. With her, Martusciello exhibited manners that he wouldn’t concede to other, lesser individuals.
She headed toward his office, expecting the faint scent of tobacco, salt air, sulphur, and the aroma of second-rate shaving cream.
She walked past a window. She didn’t see the shop fronts, the strolling pedestrians, three cats stretched out in the sunlight. She didn’t see the ship, in the nearby dry dock, offering the gaping mouth of its broken front hatch. She didn’t notice the women walking arm-in-arm with the last traces of summer.
But she did sense the stirrings of life, down by the waterfront.