“I have no idea what he is on about,” said Nightingale. “No one loved him. Not even his own mother, if I recall his drunken confessions, which unfortunately I do. But I have no context to judge the meaning here. You really ought to let me have the notebooks.”
“I will,” promised Blume. “As soon as I work out one or two things for myself. Meanwhile, to judge from the uncharacteristically agreeable smile on your lawyer’s face, I don’t think he understood a fucking word of that. Explain it to him on your way out.”
Chapter 26
The youth did not say anything, but he sat down as asked.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Sandro.”
“Sandro, I want you to tell me what you know about the muggings of foreign tourists.”
“Nothing.”
Caterina’s feet hurt. Her bra strap was cutting into her side like it was made from bailing wire, and her eyes and nose felt hot, dry, and flaky.
“Your friends will be here soon. It will take twenty minutes at most.”
“I know nothing.”
“What was this I heard about you seeing something?” she asked, not holding out much hope for a meaningful response. It was probably a setup, Grattapaglia getting his revenge by showing her the sort of stuff he knew she couldn’t handle.
His suspension from duty, still her fault evidently, was just hours away. But she did not need him to prove she could not do what he did. She already knew that. She did not have his bulk, swagger, girth, experience, age, his bullying instincts and capacity for sudden violence, his slyness and menace. Maybe Blume was punishing her, too.
Stay there and question this one, Grattapaglia had ordered her; ordered her though she was his superior in rank; I’ll round up a few more. Then he abandoned her, against regulations, with a male youth and no supervisors anywhere.
The youth was shaking his stupid shaved head and mumbling something incoherent. What did you have to do to a child to allow him to become like this? Ignore him. That was probably all it took. That and the bad luck of giving birth to him in the first place.
She tried again, probing gently at first, then with more insistence. All she got were monosyllables. After twenty minutes, she had established that Sandro knew nothing about tourist muggings. All he knew is that when a patrol came to move him and his friends off the bridge, he had told the two cops they were cowards, hassling him and his friends but not bothering about rapists.
“What rapist?” asked Caterina automatically, wishing she hadn’t bothered.
“Maybe not a rapist. I don’t know.”
Which was why she shouldn’t have bothered asking.
“When was this?”
“On Tuesday, April 4.”
The precision seemed uncharacteristic, and caught her attention. “You remember the date?”
“It was three days after my birthday.”
“Happy birthday. How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“An adult now. What time did you see this incident?”
“Around three, four in the morning.”
“Where?”
“That piazza with the bar on the corner, you know. Trees. Behind Vicolo del Moro.”
“Are you talking about Piazza de’ Renzi?”
“I don’t remember the name.”
“Can you remember the name of a bar or anything?”
Sandro cleaned his nose with the back of his hand. Caterina fished a packet of Kleenex from her bag. “Use a tissue, for Christ’s sake, child. Clean your hand.”
He wiped his hand across his sleeve and said, “There’s a bar with two umbrellas. The bartender’s an asshole. I totally tagged the front of his bar.”
“You spray-painted his walls? I’m not going to follow up on this, so just say yes or no.”
“He caught me doing a throw-up on a wall once. It wasn’t even his wall, but he thought he’d intervene. He reported me to the cops, but not before he had tried to blind me spraying the aerosol into my eyes. So we’ve been targeting his bar.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
They were interrupted by shouting and curses and trampling feet that announced the arrival of Grattapaglia and three more youths. Two girls, no older than sixteen, and a kid who looked about fifteen.
They all wore tattoos and metal studs and rings on their faces, and as soon as they entered the basement, they seemed to converge on Caterina. They were aggressive, but they crowded her also like kids around a teacher, or greedy toddlers around a mother with candy. Two of them were clutching bottles of beer by the neck.
“You didn’t take the drink away?” Caterina asked Grattapaglia, who was standing with one foot against the wall.
“You afraid they’ll use the bottles as weapons? These creatures?”
A greatly pierced and abscessed girl walked with a sideways lurch, as if the bottle of Ceres she held in her hand weighed heavily.
Caterina said, “OK. Both of you put your bottles on the floor. Both of you.”
She stood patiently as a torrent of abuse flowed toward her, moving back and forth a few steps trying to show it did not bother her, but it did.
When they had stopped cursing her, they looked at each other for new ideas. Then the young boy detached himself from the group, picked up a beer bottle, and dangled it at his side. He went up to Caterina, leaned closer, then belched loudly in her face, opening his mouth wide.
It was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
Grattapaglia took his foot off the wall, stepped forward two paces and, with a lazy, sweeping slow-motion movement of his arm, slapped the kid across the face. He opened his fingers at the last moment to lessen the blow, but the kid still fell sideways as if shot. The beer bottle dropped straight to the floor and cracked and rolled.
The pierced girl came running over, screaming. She knelt down beside him and cradled his face. The other two shuffled around, bumping into each other like blinded animals in a pen, unable to decide whether to stay or go. The girl began to cry, rubbing the back of her hand across her perforated nose.
Caterina was beside Grattapaglia now, her lips drawn back, the tendons on her neck throbbing. “What the fuck was that? The child is about fifteen, younger maybe.”
“I hardly touched him. It was a slap, not a punch.”
“That’s not what you do to a child.”
“He’s bigger than you,” said Grattapaglia.
She looked at the youth whose head the girl was trying to lift and cradle. The scarlet weal on the boy’s face showed the white outline of Grattapaglia’s fingers.
“I’m going to sue you fuckers,” said the boy, pushing the girl away and struggling into a standing position.
“That’s likely,” said Grattapaglia. “You really look like the sort of person who has a personal lawyer on a retainer.”
“My parents will sue for me. When they hear this, they’ll sue. My father has contacts. When I tell them, they’ll… they’ll…” He pointed to Caterina. “What’s your name? You’re going to jail, puttana.”
Caterina tried to touch the child’s face, but he pushed her hand roughly away.
