“A fucking bastard,” clarified Pino.
Pecorilla was the foreman in charge of assigning the areas to be cleaned, and he nurtured an undisguised hatred for anyone with an education, having himself managed to finish middle school, at age forty, only thanks to Cusumano, who had a man-to-man talk with the teacher. Thus he manipulated things so that the hardest, most demeaning work always fell to the three university graduates in his charge. That same morning, in fact, he had assigned to Ciccu Loreto the stretch of wharf from which the mail boat sailed for the island of Lampedusa. Which meant that Ciccu, with his accounting degree, would be forced to account for the piles of trash that noisy mobs of tourists, many-tongued yet all sharing the same utter disregard for personal and public cleanliness, had left behind on Saturday and Sunday while waiting to embark. And no doubt Pino and Saro, after the soldiers’ two days off duty, would find the Pasture one big glory hole.
When they reached the corner of Via Lincoln and Viale Kennedy (in Vigata there was even a Cortile Eisenhower and a Vicolo Roosevelt), Saro stopped.
“I’m going to run upstairs and see how the little guy’s doing,” he said to his friend. “Wait here. I’ll only be a minute.”
Without waiting for Pino’s answer, he slipped into one of those midget high-rises that were not more than twelve stories high, having been built around the same time as the chemical works and having just as quickly fallen into ruin, when not abandoned altogether. For someone approaching from the sea, Vigata rose up like a parody of Manhattan, on a reduced scale. And this explained, perhaps, the names of some of its streets.
Nene, the little guy, was awake; he slept on and off some two hours a night, spending the rest of the time with eyes wide open, without ever crying. Who had ever seen a baby that didn’t cry? Day after day he was consumed by an illness of unknown cause and cure.
The doctors of Vigata couldn’t figure it out; his parents would have to take him somewhere else, to some big- shot specialist, but they didn’t have the money. Nene grew sullen as soon as his eyes met his father’s, a wrinkle forming across his forehead. He couldn’t talk, but had expressed himself quite clearly with that silent reproach of the person who had put him in these straits.
“He’s doing a little better, the fever’s going down,” said Tana, Saro’s wife, just to make him happy.
~
The clouds had scattered, and now the sun was blazing hot enough to shatter rocks. Saro had already emptied his cart a dozen times in the garbage bin that had appeared, thanks to private initiative, where the rear exit of the factory used to be, and his back felt broken. When he was a few steps from the path that ran along the enclosure wall and led to the provincial road, he saw something sparkle violently on the ground. He bent down to have a better look. It was a heart-shaped pendant, enormous, studded with little diamonds all around and with one great big diamond in the middle. The solid-gold chain was still attached, though broken in one spot. Saro’s right hand shot out, grabbed the necklace, and stuffed it in his pocket.
The hand seemed to have acted on its own, before his brain, still flabbergasted by the discovery, could tell it anything. Standing up again, drenched in sweat, he looked around but didn’t see a living soul.
~
Pino, who had chosen to work the stretch of the Pasture nearest the beach, at one point spotted the nose of a car about twenty yards away, sticking out of some bushes a bit denser than the rest. Unsure, he stopped; it wasn’t possible someone could still be around here at this hour, seven in the morning, screwing a whore. He began to approach cautiously, one step at a time, almost bent over, and when he’d reached the taillights he quickly stood straight up. Nothing happened, nobody shouted to fuck off, the car seemed vacant.
Coming nearer, he finally made out the indistinct shape of a man, motionless, in the passenger seat, head thrown back. He seemed to be in a deep sleep. But by the look and the smell of it, Pino realized something was fishy. He turned around and called to Saro, who came running, out of breath, eyes bulging.
“What is it? What the hell do you want?”
Pino thought his friend’s questions a bit aggressive but blamed it on the fact that he had run all that way.
“Get a load of this,” he said.
Plucking up his courage, Pino went up to the driver’s side and tried to open the door but couldn’t: it was locked. With the help of Saro, who seemed to have calmed down, he tried to reach the other door, against which the man’s body was partially leaning, but the car, a large green BMW, was too close to the shrub to allow anyone to approach from that side.
Leaning forward, however, and getting scratched by the brambles, they managed to get a better look at the man’s face. He was not sleeping; his eyes were wide open and motionless. The moment they realized that the man was dead, Pino and Saro froze in terror—not at the sight of death but because they recognized him.
~
“I feel like I’m taking a sauna,” said Saro as he ran along the provincial road toward a telephone booth.
“A blast of cold one minute, a blast of heat the next.”
They had agreed on one thing since overcoming their paralysis upon recognizing the deceased: before alerting the police, they had to make another phone call. They knew Deputy Cusumano’s number by heart, and Saro dialed it. But Pino didn’t let the phone ring even once.
“Hang up, quick!” he said.
Saro obeyed automatically.
“You don’t want to tell him?”
“Let’s just think for a minute, let’s think hard.
This is very important. You know as well as I do that Cusumano is a puppet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s a puppet of Luparello, who is everything—
or was everything. With Luparello dead, Cusumano’s a nobody, a doormat.”
“So?”
