Corporal Marco Aragona made his entrance with a sort of dancer’s vaulting leap.
“Ladies and gentleman, a very heartfelt good day to you. Have you all seen what a lovely day we have, this fine morning?”
His greeting dropped into a weary, resigned silence. Lieutenant Lojacono raised his almond-shaped eyes from the file that lay before him and shot his young colleague a malevolent glare. Pisanelli, the veteran deputy captain, shook his head with a sigh.
Aragona persisted, raising his voice with an unmistakably offended attitude: “Here we go again . . . always ready to circle the wagons, aren’t you? Do you mind telling me what the hell has gotten into you all? You don’t even respond to a bright good morning around here?”
Ottavia Calabrese leaned out from behind the oversized screen of her desktop computer: “You’re absolutely right, Marco. Buongiorno! A fine good morning to you. Even though I have to say, it doesn’t seem like such a fine day to me. Last night the temperature dropped below freezing, and this morning, when I took the dog out for his morning pee, there was a layer of ice on the sidewalk.”
Aragona smiled and rubbed his hands: “My sweet lady, good mother that you are, what on earth could be wrong with a fine, cool winter’s day? In the town where my parents live it snows every year, but everyone’s cheeful and contented all the same.”
A man with broad shoulders and a bull neck who sat reading a newspaper at a desk off to one side grumbled: “What they have to be cheerful about in the snow and the cold, I’d honestly like to know. Cars slam headfirst into walls, old people slip and fall and break legs and arms, and you can’t stay outdoors.”
Aragona threw his arms out in Francesco Romano’s general direction: “Well, that’s no surprise, Hulk, to hear a complaint out of you. It would be different if I’d even once seen you, I’m not even saying laugh, but so much as smile in the past few months. Why don’t you try and see a glass half full at least once. The cold stirs up your energy, makes you feel like getting moving. Maybe even like doing some work, which strikes me as a rare commodity around here.”
Alessandra Di Nardo, who sat at the last desk at the far end of the squad room, broke off her work cleaning her regulation handgun and addressed Aragona with feigned brusqueness: “I hope you don’t mind if I point out that, like always, whether it’s hot out or cold, you’re always the last to arrive, so you don’t actually feel all this desire for hard work. Also, may I enquire, what on earth is this getup? Where did you get that sweater?”
Aragona made a show of being offended and patted the lobster-pink turtleneck he was wearing under his jacket: “It astonishes me that you of all people, the only young woman in this old folks’ home, should fail to appreciate the beauty and style of a color that brings a little cheer to the season. What’s more, this sweater costs . . . ”
Lojacono and Ottavia finished his sentence for him in a perfect chorus: “ . . . as much as everything the rest of us, put together, are wearing.”
“Exactly. Because you’re all old-school cops. Old-school cops like you are something you don’t even see in the cop shows from the Seventies. The profession adjusts to go with the times, it evolves, and you’re all still clueless. That’s why . . .”
Now it was Alex and Romano’s turn to finish his sentence for him: “ . . . I’ll be the first to get a promotion and get the hell out of this . . . ”
Aragona, waving his hand like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, finished up: “ . . . shithole of a police station here in Pizzofalcone!”
The door behind him swung open and Commissario Palma appeared. Everyone lowered their eyes to the work they’d been doing, except for Aragona, who hadn’t noticed a thing and therefore indulged in an exaggerated bow that displayed his hindquarters to his superior officer.
Palma gave him a slow, ironic burst of applause: “Bravo, bravo, Aragona. My compliments for your early-morning routine. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to know how we’re going to spend the day here at nursery school.”
The corporal darted hastily to one side, grabbed his glasses with blue-tinted lenses that had slid off his forehead, and with the other hand brushed back his Elvis-style quiff—which he cultivated for its two-fold function of concealing a spreading bald spot at the top of his head and adding a useful inch or so of height to his stature—and promptly sat down at his desk.
Palma glanced down at the sheets of paper he held in one hand, as if seeking comfort from them. Even first thing in the morning he had the usual weary, rumpled appearance, accentuated by the perennial five o’clock shadow of whiskers, the loosened knot in his tie, and the rolled-up shirtsleeves. His hair, too, dense and tousled, contributed to the general impression he gave of untidiness and overactivity.
“Now then,” he began, looking back up and around the room, “I’ve put together a work order. Pisanelli can supervise this project: let’s dig through all the cold cases, the unsolved murders, in other words. Let’s figure out whether there’s anything else we can do, otherwise we’ll just archive them with a brief report.”
Romano closed his newspaper and muttered: “Papers and files, there’s just no end of papers and files. If I’d known this was what it was going to be like, I’d have taken a job at the city recorder’s office.”
Ottavia addressed the commissario in a worried voice: “Dottore, are these orders from headquarters? Are they trying to tell us something?”
Lojacono, who was staring at his superior officer with an indecipherable expression, added: “Does it mean, for example, that they’re thinking about eliminating the precinct again, the way they were at first?”
Pisanelli broke in: “No, not that again? Haven’t we shown that we know what we’re doing? Are we going to carry that burden of original sin forever?”
He was referring to the notorious story of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone, as they were called and remembered by every policeman in the greater region: former colleagues in the precinct who had been tangled up in a very serious case of corruption when they’d set out to sell a shipment of narcotics that they’d confiscated in a raid. There had been a tremendous scandal and the small but historical police station had come very close to being shuttered once and for all. In the end the top officials had decided, on a provisional basis, to keep the precinct open and operating for a probationary period.
Giorgio Pisanelli, along with Ottavia Calabrese, was one of the few survivors of the arrests and early retirements that had come on the heels of the scandal, and he was especially sensitive to the matter: if things went south, he’d feel responsible for it, in spite of the fact that he, like his female colleague, had had nothing to do with that miserable chapter in the precinct’s history.
Aragona cut him off, making a show of his insufferable optimism: “Maybe it’s just a matter of clearing out stacks of old documents, don’t you think? They wouldn’t dream of closing us down: without us, without the new Bastards of Pizzofalcone, who would they gossip about in the other barracks?”
Pisanelli whipped around and glared at him. Generally speaking, he was the very picture of tranquility, but the sound of that nickname, the Bastards, made his blood boil: “Aragona, I’ve told you a thousand times: you don’t know as much as you think you do. They broke the law, and they’ll pay the price, but the people in the quarter, who wouldn’t have any protection from the criminal element if we weren’t here, aren’t to blame for that. We need to keep the lights burning in here and clean up the precinct’s image, we’re capable of doing it, so—”
Romano interrupted him, bitterly: “Sure, nice cleanup. You know they just sent us in to finish this place off, don’t you? Remember, every one of us has a blot on their record. Which means we’re all likely to pull some other boneheaded move. Just forget about it, go on.”
Palma took the reins: “You’re all complaining pointlessly. Worse than pointlessly. All we need to do is go back through the old cold cases, nothing more than that. It’s a project that we’ll set aside, obviously, as soon as anything new comes up. All right then, Giorgio, you coordinate with Aragona and Romano to get out the old files and start going through them—”
The sound of the phone ringing cut him off. As always, it was Ottavia who answered, and after a brief exchange, she hung up and said: “That was the switchboard from police headquarters. They just received a call, and apparently something serious has happened at number 32 Vico Secondo Egiziaca, just a short walk from here.”
Lojacono had already stood up from his desk and was putting on his coat.
“I’ll go.”
Palma nodded and added: “That’s fine. Di Nardo, you go with him. You can get a little fresh air for your handgun.”