Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Read Free Page B

and awakens to a nightmare.
    Burglary, Lojacono mused, is a very particular crime. It’s a rape of one’s sense of security, the brusque revelation that it’s not enough to lock the front door to keep out the violence of a world seething with pain and fear. It’s the police blotter dumped right at your doorstep, yes, yours, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, even if you might have believed yourself exempt from such grotesqueries, invulnerable to crime. It’s the end of tranquility, the event that gives one last violent shove to the orderly world you’ve labored to build, to the serenity of an oasis that you had considered inviolable.
    It’s no fun being a cop responding to a burglary call in somone’s home. You feel responsible, as if you’ve failed to provide the protection someone had every right to expect. In the victim’s gaze you can read a mute undertone of reproof. I pay my taxes, that gaze always seemed to say; I work hard and honestly, I lead a tough life, navigating a thousand personal hardships, and part of what I earn winds up in your paycheck. And here’s what I get for it: my home turned upside down, criminal hands rummaging through my possessions and robbing me not only of my valuables, but also of my domestic peace of mind. You have to admit that this is your fault, too, Mr. Policeman. Where were you while the thieves were pilfering my sense of safety and security? For all I know, you were sound asleep, digesting the dinner I paid for with my taxes.
    Lojacono checked the address that he’d jotted down on a scrap of paper. When the phone call had come in, there’d been no one in the office but him, Ottavia Calabrese, and Di Nardo, who’d just arrived. Early risers, his colleagues at the Pizzofalcone precinct: A good sign, though he suspected that it was more a result of existential lacks than any genuine love for the job. A man had sobbed broken phrases in dialect in a way that had struck him as virtually incomprehensible, and in fact he’d finally been forced to hand the receiver over to Alex.
    He turned to look at Di Nardo, tilting his head toward the apartment building’s front entrance. She nodded, taking in the usual knot of rubberneckers that always gathered mere seconds after any noteworthy event; a few yards further on, the squad car stood parked with a uniformed cop, arms folded across his chest, leaning against the door. The man nodded in greeting.
    Strange girl, Di Nardo was. Not that the others weren’t equally strange, and probably the strangest of them all was Lojacono himself. But there was something enigmatic about Alex. Graceful, silent, with finely drawn features, she emanated a sense of restrained force, as if she were ready to transform herself into something else. Lojacono had overheard Aragona, shameless gossip that he was, talking about a gunshot fired inside a station house and the officer who’d narrowly missed being hit, but he’d preferred not to delve deeper: After all, didn’t they all have some dark chapter in their pasts, there at Pizzofalcone?
    His train of thought betrayed him by bringing him an image of home, of the Sicilian province so full of light and shadows: the sudden smell of salt water on a gust of wind, the branches of the almond trees heavy with blossoms. And the memory of the testimony given by Di Fede, the mafioso he’d gone to school with; the words that had changed his life.
    Not all had changed for the worse, he thought as he cut his way through the crowd to reach the courtyard and the broad flight of steps that led upstairs from there. For instance, his wife, Sonia’s, true colors had been unveiled; she had dumped him and now she never missed the chance, during their rare phone conversations, to unleash a stream of venom and rancor. He’d met people he never would have otherwise, his new colleagues for example. Even his relationship with his daughter, Marinella, was