Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Read Free Page A

obsession with a series of suspicious suicides, he would have been an ideal assistant.
    As for Ottavia, at first he’d wondered whether he ought to deploy her in the field, working investigations; then he’d come to understand just how invaluable she was as support staff. The intelligence she managed to cull from the web was at least as valuable as her colleagues’ legwork out in the
vicoli
and streets of the city, if not more so. She saved them hours and hours of work by instantly assembling mountains of information that would otherwise have cost a tremendous effort to obtain.
    Certainly, Palma had to admit to himself, as he listened to the woman laughing at Aragona’s nonsense, the knowledge that she was right there, in the next room, warmed his heart.
    He was far too experienced to fail to sense the danger: Nothing good could come when the simple pleasure of working together transformed itself into something different. He was there to supervise a team of police officers, to save the precinct and make it work efficiently; she was there to perform important tasks. It would be unforgivable for either to assign ulterior motives to the other’s appearance in the office each morning. Moreover, while he might be unattached, she was married and had a son, a son who was afflicted with autism.
    And after all, he might be fooling himself. Maybe those smiles, that solicitous care, the low tone of voice she used only when she spoke to him, were all just figments of his imagination: He was seeing and hearing what he wanted to see and hear. Maybe it was just his own desire playing tricks on him. Too many nights spent sleeping on his office couch, avoiding the messy studio apartment that he didn’t have the heart to call home; too many Sundays spent tossing back beers in front of the television, not even watching the screen; too many memories, by now so faded that he was actually afraid he might have made them up in order to fill a vast emptiness.
    It wasn’t sex that he was yearning for; he’d always thought sex without feeling was meaningless. When he met up with his few friends, old classmates who stubbornly insisted on getting together every couple of months, he stoically bore their mockery; in their opinion he’d slowly become just like their old Religious Studies professor, preaching the joys of the meditative life to a group of pimply and perennially horny teenagers. But Palma wasn’t looking for female company with no strings attached. He wanted to assuage his loneliness; another man’s wife or girlfriend, with her own family, her own life, her own problems, could hardly do that.
    Those excellent reasons, however, smashed themselves up against the reality of Ottavia’s face when she got to the office every morning, before all the others. And he lost the battle, miserably, fracturing himself into a thousand specks of subtle pleasure. What harm is there, his subconscious argued, if, after all, nothing is going to happen? If you don’t declare yourself, if you don’t go for her, if you don’t let her think that your interest is any more than merely professional? He knew that he was lying to himself, but he had no wish to erect excessive defenses around himself; come to think of it, he wouldn’t have even known how.
    He listened to her voice as she answered the phone, smiling at the warm sounds to which he was quickly becoming accustomed.
    Then he stopped smiling.

IV
    I n the morning, the police go on their rounds of burglaries, Lojacono was thinking to himself as he climbed the steep
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, surrounded by noisy shop assistants putting out merchandise for sale on the street, feral mopeds in search of unlikely routes, and sleepy kids with backpacks slung over their shoulders. Apartment burglaries float to the surface only when the sun rises, washed up by the night onto the shores of dawning consciousness, when the victim of the burglary discovers his or her new condition,