“I’m sorry,” she said.
“The fuck you are. I’m suing.”
“Stop it,” said Caterina. “Nobody’s getting sued.”
She had had enough. “Sovrintendente, get these kids out of here. Put them back wherever you found them, send them to social services. Just so that you and they get the hell out of my sight. Now!”
“I thought they might have seen something.”
“Sandro stays with me,” said Caterina. She looked over at his white face. He had put his thumb in his mouth. When he saw her looking, he started biting at the nail, rubbing his teeth, rolling his eyes as if the police exasperated rather than terrified him.
To her surprise, Sovrintendente Grattapaglia did what she asked.
When the clumping up the stairs and babble of voices had died away, she repeated her question. “What did you see?”
“I already said. I saw this old guy try to grab a girl. I saw him do it. Then she lashed out and punched him and ran away. And the old guy fell and didn’t get up.”
“How do you know he didn’t get up?”
“I went over to him. I was going to give him a kicking, and I don’t have a problem saying that. But when I got there I could see he was, you know, out of it.”
“Do you mean unconscious?”
“Almost. His eyeballs were sort of swimming around and then they floated right up into his head, out of sight. Like this.” Sandro rolled his eyes around.
“I don’t need the visuals, thanks. Did the man say anything?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘Call her back.’ Amazing he could say that.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s all I heard.”
“Did he have an accent?”
Sandro scrunched up his face. “Can’t say. His voice was all husky and sort of gurgly. Maybe he had an accent. What sort?”
“Forget it.” She did not want to start suggesting details to him. “Did you call an ambulance?”
“For a rapist?”
“I see you’re quick to condemn, Sandro. Just like those people who look down on you and your friends.”
“Someone tried to rape my girlfriend Elvira.”
“That was the older girl in here just now? The one with the red hair extension?”
“What’s a hair extension?”
“Your girlfriend’s string of red hair. It’s not her own.”
“I thought it was dyed. Yeah, Elvira got attacked once, but didn’t report it.”
“You said tried. Did she get raped or not?”
“She said no. She said one grabbed her from behind, the other started ripping at her clothes. She said she fought and spat. When she screamed she was HIV positive, they ran off.”
“When was this?”
“A few months ago.”
“Where?”
“Monte Mario.”
“An old guy that time, too?”
Sandro looked puzzled. “No, no. She said two young guys.”
A different time, different place, different attacker. “So you were sort of revenging her, even though this was someone else?”
Sandro shrugged. “Old guy molesting a young woman.”
“Did you see him attack her?”
“No. He was trying to hold her. An old guy like that.”
“How do you know she was a young girl? It was dark, she ran before you arrived.”
“She had long silver-blond hair. I heard her voice, which was young, and then when she ran. You can sort of tell someone’s age from how they move, you know?”
“What age would you say she was?”
“I don’t know. She could have been sixteen, she could have been maybe as old as thirty, but no older.”
Caterina made Sandro go back over the events twice more, and then made him do it in reverse chronological order while she checked against her notes. His story did not change. He saw the girl push the old man, then run. The old man lay on the ground. Sandro went over to him but did not help. He did not see anything wrong with his own behavior. He told the story a fourth time, and again mentioned that his original reason for going over to the old man was to kick him, not help him. In not kicking him, Sandro felt he had shown restraint.
“Also, I didn’t steal money or anything from him.”
“That was good of you, Sandro.” Caterina reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a blow-up of Emma’s ID photo.
“Sweet!” said Sandro. “Who’s that?”
“You’ve never seen her?”
“I’d have remembered a face like that. What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” said Caterina. “Just an idea.”
Caterina accompanied Sandro back up to his friends, who were seated on the plastic bench at the entrance on the first floor, eating pizza and drinking cans of Coca-Cola.
“I may be in touch.” She gave him a half-push, half-caress on the shoulder to propel him down the corridor.
She watched as the sorry little crew gave their Sandro a welcome fit for a returning warrior king. They piled out of the station into the evening air, their energy returned, their spirits temporarily lifted as they were given back the excessive freedom that was killing them.
She went back up to the operations room, where Grattapaglia was beginning to clear his desk.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Not that will help us with the muggings.”
He shrugged and turned back to his work.
Caterina said, “Where did they get the pizza and Coca-Cola?”
“From the pizzeria a taglio down the road, I suppose,” said Grattapaglia.
“You accompanied them, right?”
“Of course. You told me to keep an eye on the scumbags.”
“You took them out and brought them back. Did you buy the pizza for them, too?”
“Dumb little fuckers spend all their money on drugs,” said Grattapaglia. “Who else was going to pay?”
Chapter 27
For the next half hour, Grattapaglia slammed things on his desk and kicked at chairs, while Caterina stood in front of a large-scale map of Trastevere, pulling out and putting in the pins showing where the muggings had taken place. The map had been on the wall for three months, and the number of pins had gradually expanded.
She had to pass by Assistente Capo Rospo’s desk on her way to turn on the overhead lights, and he took the opportunity to say, “Those pins don’t mean shit.”
“They all converge around two places,” said Caterina.
“Yeah, two hotels. Big fucking surprise that, finding tourists in hotels.”
“This hotel has more than…”
She had to stop talking, because Grattapaglia’s metal desk drawer refused to slide, and Grattapaglia smashed the side of his heel into it several times, swept the stuff from his desk, and left it on the floor.
“ Ma vaffanculo a tutto! ” Grattapaglia clenched and unclenched his fists, then rubbed his left bicep and
