Marialuigia Moreno drew marks in the dust with her fingernail. She hadn’t used the piano again since. She felt a twinge of regret for having neglected it. She grabbed her wrist in the fist of her other hand and ran her forearm over the fall covering the keyboard.
She opened it.
Without sitting down, she tried out the keys. They responded well, the piano was still in tune. She pulled up the bench, felt for the pedals with her feet, and started to play.
She picked the chords she loved least, the ones that made up the song that had bought Vialdi his double-decker penthouse. She played a blues arrangement of the song, the music and the intentional off-key notes violated the silence of the melancholy become sound.
Every twelve beats, she let the words drop from her mouth, in a sung sigh, Tu sei tu. Only those words, no more. The other words were all ugly, they’d have fogged the black and white of the keys, as well as the sentiment that was driving her voice.
She tried to stop but she couldn’t do it.
She sat there keeping company with her memories for a period of time she was unable to reckon with any accuracy, then she tore herself away from the piano and went off once again to break the seals on an apartment that did not belong to her.
Captain Malanò was enjoying the sound of the waves from his studio apartment with its galley kitchen. Stretched out on his couch, he listed the fruit of his imminent happiness.
He was going to have, he was going to be able to, he was going to say, he was going to defeat, he was going to exult in triumph.
The prophecy of all things good had been undermined, if only slightly, by his memory of the phone call with Adami: after meeting with Liguori and Occhiuzzi he’d felt obliged to tell him what he thought about the serial killer. Adami told him that he’d already laid out the facts that didn’t convince him to Occhiuzzi and Liguori.
“Oh, that’s no big thing,” Malanò told himself, deeply hooked, “a serial killer could certainly fixate on a family, with people who have something to do with the same line of work, or who knows what all else. What do I care about what does or doesn’t happen in statistical terms? Who gives a damn about statistics! Even the murder of the drunk night watchman might very well be connected to something entirely different. This Adami is such a nitpicker. He thinks everything’s neat and settled. Easy to say! I’m feeling my way here, looking for logic where there might not even be any. And that’s that.”
Martusciello heard the breathing of his wife, fast asleep by his side. He didn’t want to awaken her, but his thoughts refused to leave him alone in sleep, and his feet followed his thoughts in their restlessness, in spite of him.
I’d like to know what relationship there is in my body between noggin and my dogs! he thought to himself. What a bad habit I have: I can’t seem to think clearly if my feet aren’t moving.
The captain gave in to the restlessness of his feet. He got out of bed, groped for his clothing in the dark, got dressed and spruced up in the bathroom, and a short while later was out in the street.
He stopped a taxi and asked to be taken to a gambling hall near the stadium.
“I hear you, friend. I always come to this part of town to do my betting, too. The betting sheet has an entirely different kind of poetry, in the shadow of the San Paolo stadium. If you want a sure thing I suggest that you go play Series B at Zivi’s. Tell them that I sent you. My taxi number is Modena 19.”
“Now that I have a recommendation I feel more confident.”
“I’m just telling you things that anyone could tell you: it’s just because Zivi’s is open round the clock, and after all, I wouldn’t want you to have come all this way for nothing, right?”
The streets around the stadium were empty and the neon streetlights made them look uglier than they were. The captain kept walking until he was able to calm down feet and head. He saw his theories collapse, like oil on water. They took unexpected shapes, and were in any case insubstantial, changeable.
The slight uphill climbs toward the stadium made his thoughts move laboriously. For some time now, the captain had lost the benefit of his confidence in the facts. A good mood might change his outlook on decline and turn it into a fun slide, but that didn’t happen often, and certainly never when he was sensing the presence of some preordained confusion.
While Liguori and Blanca were on their way back from Verona she had called him from the highway to tell him how it had gone. She also told him about the conversation with Adami.
His northern colleague’s misgivings weren’t far from his own. Martusciello could smell a nicely crafted farce, put together with an abundance of resources. He’d recognized a beautifully prepared banqueting table, even before he accepted a case he didn’t really want: the presence of just one night watchman on the night of the murder, found murdered, note the coincidence, with an unorthodox caliber; the corpses of the Singing Maestro and Julia Marin both tricked out in a manner designed to scream scandal, passion, and insanity; Vialdi’s personality and fame and sins spotlighted in every statement, practically with the same identical words. Every element seemed to have been buffed and polished and put right in its place. Too shiny, too perfect.
“Maybe it’s because the village donkeys have no time to waste,” thought Martusciello. “They don’t look only at the hand that makes the rabbit pop into view, and if someone forces them with the right lights, they’ll get up on all fours, after all they have something to do with their heads, trot around, and place themselves behind the stage. And they take a stab.”
After coming to an acceptable conclusion, which as we need hardly point out, was radically different from the one that Malanò was trying so hard to find, he walked into the betting parlor.
He spoke to a man who had the air of an habitué.
“Vialdi told me to come, I’m looking for the lawyer.”
“Vialdi’s dead and the lawyer wouldn’t be here at this time of night.”
The man lifted his shoulders into a shrug and he was gone before they dropped back down.