Massoni turned down the volume. “There’s a commissioner who’s visited you already? He knows about Clemente?”
“He knows something. His card is in my wallet.”
“Give me it.”
Pernazzo gave Massoni Blume’s card.
“What does this guy have on you? How did he get to you so quickly?”
“I don’t know. But he’s got nothing on me. Nothing unless I tell him.”
“If you bring my name into it, or Alleva’s, you’re dead, you get that?”
“I got that.”
They had reached Pernazzo’s house. Massoni turned off the engine, then said, “Turn off the radio, Pernazzo.”
Pernazzo turned it off. When he turned around, Massoni was pointing a black pistol straight at his forehead.
“There is one way to make sure you don’t talk.”
“There is another way,” said Pernazzo, his voice rising to a squeak.
“This is the best way I can think of,” said Massoni.
“Not if I’ve written a full confession, naming you.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“No. I thought this might happen.”
“We’ll tear your place apart before the police get there. We’ll find it first,” said Massoni.
“It’s a blog on the Web. So far it’s an inactive blog without public access. They’ll take a while, but if I get killed, sooner or later the police will check my Internet activity and find it. That’s something you can’t do, no matter how many people you intimidate.”
Pernazzo closed his eyes tight and counted to three. Nothing happened. He kept counting. When he had reached seventeen, Massoni said, “So what’s your idea?”
Pernazzo opened his eyes again. “It’s not really an idea. It’s a trust thing. We’re warriors, right? We need to team up. Drive back to the pizzeria, and I’ll show you how.”
“If I drive you back there, what’ll you do?”
“Trust me. You’ll see.”
“What about this policeman and the confession you’ve put on the Internet?”
“Then we deal with that. It’s all part of the compact we have to make.”
Massoni shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he turned the car around.
10:45 P.M.
A quarter of an hour later, they were back at the scene of the accident.
“OK. Double-park sideways, on the road, but not in a way that blocks the traffic.”
“There’s a free space there,” said Massoni.
“No, double-park: it’s better.”
Massoni, finally, did as he was told.
“Now,” said Pernazzo. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a second.” He hopped out of the car, scuttled across the road, disappeared into the pizzeria. Two minutes later, he was back. He rapped on the driver’s side, and Massoni rolled down the window.
“OK. Let’s stay here five minutes.”
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
Massoni rolled up the window, turned up the music on the radio, and left Pernazzo outside, standing next to the car.
Pernazzo allowed slightly more than five minute to pass, then signaled to Massoni to get out. “Come on.”
Massoni followed Pernazzo across the road, onto the sidewalk. Pernazzo stopped, moved in against the wall. Massoni stopped, too, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk.
“You’re kind of noticeable,” hissed Pernazzo. “Stand to the side.”
“Noticeable for what?”
A group of seven people left the pizzeria and walked right past them chatting. Not one even glanced at them.
“You’re right,” said Pernazzo, easing himself away from the wall. “We just look like we’re waiting for a table. Ah!”
A woman and a man were walking out, arms linked. Massoni recognized the man as the one they had had a bit of fun with earlier. A child was trying to swing on the woman’s free arm. The silky-haired girl was behind. The four turned left, in their direction, and Pernazzo walked out in front of them.
Enrico Brocca and his wife unlinked arms. She was already backward, putting her hands over the child’s face, leaving her husband standing there alone.
Pernazzo raised his arm and fired his new Glock point-blank into the bald man’s heart.
As the man fell backward, Pernazzo fired into the middle of the egg-shaped face. The bullet came out the back of his skull like an exploding aerosol, so that when his head hit the concrete it was almost with a splash.
Pernazzo went over to the inert form on the sidewalk and fired into the lower abdomen, releasing a faint smell of beer.
Then, instead of retreating in the direction they had come from, Pernazzo continued in the same direction, passing by the wife, who was shielding her silent children’s eyes.
“That’s how you do it,” said Pernazzo over his shoulder. “Now you and me, we got a bond of trust we can’t break.”
Massoni stuck his hands in his pockets, put his head down, and walked quickly away from the scene.
Pernazzo had no time to savor it. People were arriving. Someone made a swallowing noise nearby, and he turned to see the woman, still huddled with her children, resolutely not looking at him.
He thought of the policeman then spat on the barrel of his Glock and rubbed it to make sure it wasn’t too hot to go back into his waistband. He wove his way through hissing traffic on the slippery tarmac, scampered down a narrow alleyway, eyes agleam, and was soon lost to sight.
42
SUNDAY, AUGUST 29, 5:55 A.M.
Dressed in a new T-shirt with cutaway sleeves, low-slung jeans, and sunglasses, Pernazzo sat at the dining table, unpicking his mother’s crocheted doily. He wondered if Commissioner Blume would return as threatened. Thanks to his hypersleeping, the police would never catch him napping.
At eight in the morning, he went into the bathroom and cut the sides of his hair very short, then took a razor to what remained. He looked at himself in profile, which is probably the angle the photographers would have when they took shots of him.
From eight until midday, he played online. At eleven he boiled two hot dogs and an egg in a pan and, as he ate them with ketchup, began to wonder if he wasn’t being unduly pessimistic. Police raids took place in the morning. The commissioner had maybe been bluffing.
At midday, he left the house, caught a bus down to a place in Porta Portese, and inquired about getting a tattoo on his upper arm. It would cost a hundred and twenty euros. Shortly after he came home, he went for a scheduled nap of twenty minutes, but woke up after only ten.
He spent two hours writing the confession he had bluffed to Massoni about, and posted it, limiting reader access to himself.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, he held Blume’s card in his hand and thought about calling him up and saying,
