A tall young man with dreadlocks had just appeared in the front door of Marienplatz. He hesitated, as if he’d just resisted the temptation to turn on his heels and stride away. Then he met Lojacono’s eyes and walked over.
“Who are you?”
Alex and Lojacono turned toward the allegedly discreet Tatiana who, even though she’d declared her iron determination to mind her own business, showed no sign of picking up bucket and brush and getting back to work. Perhaps, with the story she’d told, she was convinced she’d now earned the right to be a spectator during the interview.
“Domenico Foti, I imagine,” the lieutenant began. “I’m Lojacono and this is Di Nardo, we’re from the Pizzofalcone police precinct. We need to speak with you, sir. Can we move somewhere a little quieter?”
The young man’s eyes darted from one officer to the other, as if trying to gauge their intentions. At last he nodded and walked out the door, to Tatiana’s unmistakable disappointment, as she turned back to her drudgework.
Across from the pub’s entrance was a small café. They sat down and Lojacono ordered a couple of espressos. Nick shook his head no when the policeman asked if he wanted anything.
The lieutenant scrutinized the young man and decided to probe a little.
“Signor Foti, do you have any idea why we’re here?”
“No, none at all.”
Was he faking it? Even if he had nothing to do with the murder, could he really not have heard a thing, not have seen the evening news or heard anyone chatting on the street?
“We understand that you’ve been in contact with Grazia Varricchio, who lives on Vico Secondo Egiziaca. Is that right?”
“What do you mean, in contact? She’s my girlfriend. Why?”
“Is it true that the two of you quarreled recently?” Alex butted in.
“Ah, so it’s about that. Tatiana couldn’t wait to tell someone, could she? It was just an argument, and maybe it got a little bit out of hand, but an argument all the same. I don’t know why you would—”
Lojacono interrupted him.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“It would . . . would have been the evening she came here. It was Saturday night. After we fight, she has to simmer down a little bit, you understand? I just wait, and in the end she calls me up and—”
Alex persisted.
“But you haven’t talked since then? You haven’t gone by to see her, or—”
Nick jumped to his feet.
“Listen, do you want to tell me what the problem is? If she came in with a complaint about me smacking her, well, after we left the place she punched me and scratched me, just look at this.” And he pointed to red marks on his right forearm.
Lojacono stood up and put a hand on his shoulder, gesturing for him to sit down again.
“I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you, Signor Foti. Grazia and her brother were found dead in their apartment yesterday morning. They were killed.”
Right then and there, the young man’s expression remained unchanged. Then a look of astonishment swept over his face. He even tried to put on a very strained shadow of a smile, almost as if he were certain that Lojacono was making some sort of strange, incomprehensible joke.
He tried to speak but couldn’t do it. He stared at Alex, as if pleading for help. This isn’t something you joke about, ma’am, can’t you explain to this man that he needs to tell me right away that it isn’t true? I get it, you’re a couple of friends of Grazia’s, or maybe of her brother’s, and now she’s going to jump out of the woodwork and laugh at me: There, you see how you’d feel, if you lost me forever?
Forever.
Lojacono and Alex waited, in silence. How they loathed that aspect of the policeman’s job: bringing news of someone’s death. Their faces were the ones that would appear before Domenico Foti’s eyes every time he thought back to that moment.
Unless he was just acting.
Unless he had been the one who snuffed out two young lives on Vico Secondo Egiziaca.
Unless the scratches that he was still pointing to, as if paralyzed, had been the result of the last, dying, desperate attempt of the woman he had loved to defend herself.
Nick’s lower lip began to quaver, and his hands—which he had placed on the table—started shaking too.
“How . . . how did it happen? What do you mean, killed? An accident? The water heater, the kerosene stove . . . it’s cold out, she hated the cold. She was always complaining about the cold. What do you mean, killed?”
Lojacono sighed. He just hoped this wasn’t all an act, his grief seemed so genuine.
“No, it wasn’t an accident. We can’t go into the details, but this was murder. A double homicide.”
Nick squinted.
“The father. The father. Have you tried talking to the father?”
“No, we still haven’t been able to track him down.”
“She . . . was afraid of him. She thought he might come here, to this city, to take her home. He had called her, he’d threatened her. He . . . do you know about him? He was in prison, he killed a man.”
“Signor Foti, where were you on the night between yesterday and the day before?”
The question had been asked by Alex in a courteous tone of voice, but it exploded like a bomb, triggering a reaction in the young man of absolute and unmitigated surprise, as if someone had just asked him to lay out the principles underlying the science of quantum physics.
He opened both eyes wide and raised one hand to his chest.
“Where was I? Wait, do you think that . . . We just had a spat, we’d argued like that a million times, at least. She was the love of my life, I adored her. I never would have hurt her, never.”
Lojacono decided to reassure him. Whether he was innocent or guilty, this wasn’t the moment to lean in hard.
“Please try to understand, it’s police procedure. You were seen fighting just two days earlier, and we are required to follow every lead. It doesn’t mean that we suspect you or anyone else. It’s too early for that. But we do need to get a complete overview of the situation. I would imagine that it’s in your interest as well as ours to help us break this case as quickly as we can.”
Foti continued staring at them as if in the throes of a hallucination. He seemed to have plunged into some terrible nightmare and was just hoping to wake up from one moment to the next. He drew a deep breath.
“I was at home, sleeping. Which is what I’m always doing, when I’m not either working or playing music. Because I play the guitar and I sing, and every so often I even manage to get paid for it. That’s why I came to this city, to see if I could get anyone to notice me. And she, Grazia, came here on my account. Oh my God.”
Alex and Lojacono were all too familiar with that mental process whereby, step by step, as the mind linked events together, the scenario took on a new form and the sense of guilt was reapportioned. If I had never come here for my fucking stupid music career, the young man was thinking, Grazia would still be alive.
Unless, of course, all that was just part of his act.
“Where do you live? Could someone have . . . ”
“No. No one could have. I live all alone in a basement studio apartment in the Spanish Quarter. On Via Speranzella, 18. Since I get home late at night, I needed a place with a separate entrance, as well as a place that costs next to nothing. I think rats would turn their noses up at the place, but I don’t care. Anyway, I went to sleep at ten and woke up very late the next morning. Since the club was closed that day, I didn’t have to go to work.”
Which meant, no alibi. No witness. Lojacono decided to change the subject.
“What was your relationship with Grazia’s brother like? Were you friends?”
Nick couldn’t seem to make his way back into the territory of reality. He was in a state of shock.
“Who, Biagio? We knew each other from town; back there, everyone knows everyone. But when Grazia and I . . . when we started dating, he had already left. We’d run into each other, from time to time, we’d say hello, but he was a very private guy, closed to the world. He loved his sister very much, and that was something we had in common. I don’t know, he might not have cared much for me. I think he would have preferred someone with a job in a bank, or even better, a university professor. But instead Grazia had fallen in love with me.”
He started crying. Then he began to retch, and Lojacono was afraid he was about to vomit on the floor, after which his shoulders began to shake as his eyes filled with tears and his face contracted at regular intervals into a grimace of grief.
He went on talking through his sobs.
“Not long ago, we spent an evening together, the three of us, at their house. We ate dinner, we had fun. Biagio asked me about my plans for the future. He even said that, if I really wanted to cut a record, maybe he could help me out with the money. We were very different, but out of love for Grazia, who could say, maybe we could even have become friends. And now . . . him, too. God, God . . . What am I going to do now? Can you tell me what I’m supposed to do?”
Alex and Lojacono exchanged a glance.
There was no answer to that question.