A Cold Death

“Seven thirty. Can you make it?”

“I will if I can. That’s a promise.”

“Do what you like. See you later. If you can make it.” Nora hung up. The woman’s closing words had been colder than the sidewalk around Piazza Chanoux.

It’s a chore to maintain human relations. It takes commitment, determination, and willingness: you have to face life with a smile. None of these things were in Rocco Schiavone’s toolkit. Life dragged him rudely from one day to the next, yanking him by the hair, and whatever it was that drove him to live from one day to the next, it was probably the same force that was making him put his left foot, shod in Clarks desert boots, in front of his right foot, similarly shod. One step, another step, as the Italian Alpini used to say to themselves as they marched through the Ukraine in temperatures of 40 degrees below zero in the long-ago winter of 1943. One step, another step, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone kept saying to himself—he’d been saying those words ever since that day, that distant July day in 2007 when his life had been snapped in half once and for all, when the boat had overturned, and he had been forced to change course.

It had been a hot, sticky Roman day. The seventh of July. A day that took Marina away from him forever. And with her, everything that was good in Rocco Schiavone. He’d spend the rest of his life with nothing to guide him but his instinct for survival.

The man walked up to the front door of the apartment building on Via Brocherel. Streamlined helmet and high-impact sunglasses, pink and blue skintight bike shorts and jersey in power Lycra, covered with advertising slogans, white calf-length socks, and shoes with the toe higher than the heel, making him walk like a circus clown.

Click clack click clack, went the iron plates on the toes of his shoes, as Patrizio Baudo walked his bike, stepping awkwardly to accommodate the padding in the seat of his bike pants. He observed the apocalyptic scene on the street outside his building. The police, rubberneckers, and even some guy with a TV camera.

What’s happened? he thought as he kept walking.

He walked up to a petite blond policewoman with a sweet face and big beautiful eyes, and expressed his thoughts aloud: “What’s happened?”

The policewoman sighed: “There’s been a murder.”

“A … what?”

“Just who are you?” asked the policewoman.

“Patrizio Baudo. I live here,” he said, and raised one hand with a fingerless glove to point at the windows of his apartment.

Inspector Rispoli focused on the man’s face, so that she could actually see her reflection in his sunglasses. “Patrizio Baudo? I think that … come with me.”

He hadn’t had time to change yet. Sitting in his cycling jersey and shorts across from the deputy police chief, Patrizio Baudo had however taken off his sunglasses and helmet. He’d handed his bike over to a police officer; you don’t leave a piece of fine equipment like that, easily worth six thousand euros, out on the street, even if you do live in Aosta. His face was pale, and there were two red stripes beneath his eyes. He looked like someone had been slapping him around for the past ninety minutes. He sat there in a daze, slack-jawed, staring blankly across the desk at Rocco. He was trembling, hard to say whether in fear or from the cold, and held his hands between his legs, still clad in leather cycling gloves. Every so often he’d raise his right hand and touch the gold crucifix that hung around his neck. “Let me get you something warm to put on,” said the deputy police chief as he picked up the receiver of his desk phone.

Phascolarctos cinereus. Commonly called the koala bear. Patrizio Baudo resembled nothing so much as the little Australian marsupial, and that was the first thing that had come into Rocco’s mind when the man walked into the room and shook his hand. The second thought was to wonder why he hadn’t already detected that resemblance from the photographs scattered throughout the apartment. The proportions, he replied inwardly. You can see them much better in person. The eyes are so much better than a camera lens at judging space and units of measurement. All it took was a quick glance at the jug ears, the small, wide-set eyes, and the oversize nose square in the middle of the face, practically covering the small, lipless mouth. To say nothing of the weak, receding chin. Every detail of that face shouted koala. There were, of course, differences. Aside from the differences in diet and habitat, what distinguished the animal from Patrizio Baudo was the hair. The little marsupial had lovely, cottonball hair, while Patrizio was bald as a billiard ball. This was a habit of Rocco’s, to compare human faces to the features of a given animal. Something that dated back to his childhood. It all started with a gift his father had given him when he turned eight: an encyclopedia of animals that had a section full of wonderful illustrations done at the end of the nineteenth century, depicting lots and lots of birds, fish, and mammals. Rocco would sit on the carpet in the family’s little Trastevere living room and spend hours poring over those drawings, memorizing names, amusing himself by finding resemblances with his teachers at school, his classmates, and people in his neighborhood.

Casella walked in with a black jacket and gave it to Patrizio Baudo, who immediately wrapped it around his shoulders. “How … how did it happen?” he asked in a faint voice.

“We still don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Patrizio’s dead, dark little eyes suddenly flamed up, as if someone had lit a torch in the pupils.

“It means we found her hanged in your den.”

Patrizio put his gloved hands over his face. Rocco went on. “But the situation isn’t entirely clear.”

The man took a deep breath and looked at the policeman, his eyes filled with tears. “What do you mean by that? What isn’t clear?”

“It’s not clear whether your wife killed herself or was murdered.”

He shook his head and ran his hand over his weak chin. “I don’t … I don’t understand. She hanged herself … how could someone else have possibly killed her? Are you saying someone hanged her? Please, I don’t understand …”

Caterina Rispoli came in with a cup of tea. She gave it to Patrizio Baudo, who thanked her with a half smile but didn’t drink any. “Please explain, Dottore. I don’t understand …”

“There are details concerning the death of your wife that just don’t make sense. Details that make us think it might have been something other than a suicide.”

“What details?”

“We’re strongly inclined to think that it’s been staged somehow.”

Only then did Patrizio Baudo gulp down a mouthful of tea, which was immediately followed by a shiver. He once again touched the crucifix with his gloved right hand. Rocco shot Officer Casella a look. “I’ll have you taken home now. Please, take anything you’ll need. But I’m afraid you won’t be able to stay in your apartment. The forensic squad is conducting an examination. Do you have somewhere you can stay?”

Patrizio Baudo shrugged. “Me? No … maybe at my mother’s?”

“All right. Officer Casella will accompany you to your mother’s house. Here in Aosta?”

“Not far. In Charvensod.”

Rocco stood up. “We’ll keep you informed, don’t worry.”

“But who was it?” Baudo suddenly blurted. “Who could have done such a thing? To Esther … to my Esther …”

“I promise I’ll do everything I can to find out, Signor Baudo. I assure you.”

“I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Just like that? From one moment to the next? What is this? What’s happening?” He looked around in bewilderment. Caterina had dropped her gaze, Casella was fixated on some indeterminate point on the office ceiling, while Rocco stood there, chilly and detached. Deep inside him a rage was burning that wasn’t all that different from what the other man felt. Patrizio finally burst into tears. “I can’t take this …” he murmured under his breath, crumpled up on his seat like an abandoned rag.

Rocco put a hand on his shoulder. “Tomorrow I’m going to need you, Dottor Baudo, once you feel a little stronger. We believe that there was a theft from your home.”

Patrizio went on sobbing. Then the emotional tempest subsided as quickly as it had come. He sniffed and nodded to the deputy police chief. “Not tomorrow. Now.”

“Right now you’re too—”

“Right now!” said Patrizio, leaping to his feet. “I want to see my home. I want to go home.”

“If nothing else, you can get changed, no?” said Casella, inappropriately. Rocco incinerated him with a single glance. “He can’t go around dressed like a clown, you know,” Casella added under his breath, justifying his comment to Rispoli.

“All right, Dottor Baudo, let’s go,” said Rocco, taking the cup still full of tea and setting it down on the desk.

“Don’t call me dottore. I never went to college.” He strode briskly out of the room, followed by Rocco and Inspector Rispoli.

Italo drove the police BMW without revving the motor, carefully avoiding the worst potholes. It was easy to avoid the worst potholes in Aosta. Because there weren’t any. At least not compared with the streets of the Italian capital, where the native Romans had given a name to every lurch and jolt and where trying to accelerate on the sanpietrini—the Romans had named their cobblestones after St. Peter—was an excellent way of procuring a spontaneous abortion. Patrizio Baudo looked out the passenger window. “I’m starting to hate this city,” he said.

“I can understand that,” replied the deputy police chief from the backseat.

“I’m from Ivrea. But you know how things are, right? I found a job here and then … Esther’s from here, from Aosta. We were great friends, you know? I mean, before we got married. I don’t even know how it happened. First we were friends, then we fell in love. Then all the rest.”

Patrizio’s pale legs were trembling slightly. He clutched at his thighs with both hands. He’d loosened the Velcro wrist fastenings of his bike gloves, but he still wore them.

“Signor Baudo, how was your wife this morning?”

“I didn’t see her. On Fridays I only work afternoons, so I get up at six and go out for a nice long ride. Do you ever ride a bike, Dottore?”

“No. Not me. I played soccer.”

“When I was twenty I was on a team. I wanted to become a professional cyclist. But that world is just too hard, too dirty. You might just wind up being second banana, in the middle of the pack during the final sprints, nothing more than that. Maybe I wasn’t really all that good. Every now and then I go out for amateur races.”

Italo stopped at the light. Patrizio sniffed, but with his face turned to look out at the street, so Rocco couldn’t tell if he was crying or just coming down with a cold.

“You’re the last person to have seen Esther. So last night …”

“Right, last night. The usual. She went to bed around ten, maybe ten thirty. I stayed up to watch a little television. There was a movie about some guy who brought salmon to Yemen. So that people could fish for them. Have you seen it?” Rocco said nothing. He knew that Patrizio was just giving voice to a jumble of disconnected thoughts. He was concealing behind words the pain and grief that hadn’t yet clearly surfaced in his heart, and in his head. “It wasn’t bad. The movie, I mean. What I can’t understand is why a person would sit in front of the television set channel surfing without actually watching anything. Do you do that?”

Patrizio sniffed again. But this time his shoulders were trembling. And this time Rocco understood that he was crying.

When they got to Via Brocherel, the van of the forensic squad was already parked outside. Two officers were unloading equipment. A third officer, fair-haired and short, was putting on his white jumpsuit. Italo had double-parked the car and the deputy police chief was walking toward the street entrance, followed by Patrizio Baudo. The press wasn’t there yet, which struck Rocco as odd. But evidently the meeting of the regional assembly to decide on an amateur bicycle race was considered hot news. Just one less pain in the ass, thought Rocco.

The young fair-haired officer went over to Rocco. “Dottore! Special Agent Carini, forensic squad …”

“Welcome to the crime scene. Is your boss with you?”

“No, Dottor Farinelli will join us later. He’s working on a murder down in Turin.”

This was the first time that Rocco had ever heard the expression “down in Turin.” As far as he was concerned Turin had always been “up.” I’m going up to Turin. But “down to Turin”—that’s the way they said it in Aosta. Sort of like when you’re south of the equator, where the water goes down the drain spinning counterclockwise.

“We need to enter the apartment, Carini. This is the victim’s husband.”

The special agent looked at Patrizio Baudo, still dressed in his biking gear. “I should actually talk to my boss … let me call him right now and—”

“You don’t need to talk to anyone. Give us some shoe protectors and latex gloves and stop busting my chops.”

The special agent nodded. “Certainly. Wait here, I’ll bring you everything you need.” He walked over to the van, where his colleague was all ready with briefcase and biohazard suit.

Patrizio looked at the building as if this were the first time in his life he’d seen it. “Is … is my wife still upstairs?”

“I don’t think so, Signor Baudo.” Rocco turned to a young officer standing guard outside the ground floor entrance. “Has the morgue truck been by already?”

The young man nodded.

“Who’s up in the apartment?”

“Scipioni, I think.”

Rocco looked at Patrizio. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Certainly. It’s my home.”

Patrizio couldn’t seem to make up his mind to enter the apartment. He just stood there, with the paper cap on his head, wearing latex gloves and plastic overshoes, looking at the front door from the landing while the policemen readied their gear. Officer Scipioni, who was standing sentinel outside the apartment, was engaged in a conversation with a very elderly woman, pale as a sheet with blue hair that matched her dressing gown. There were punks on the King’s Road in the late seventies who wouldn’t have dared to try out her look, Rocco mused as he considered her hair. The woman was nodding her head, holding both hands to her face.

“Shall we go in?” asked Rocco.

Patrizio opened the door and the hinges creaked.

“There’s been a break-in!” exclaimed Officer Carini as he studied the lock.

“No. That was me, the first time I went in,” Rocco replied. Next came the master of the house.

Baudo walked slowly, unspeaking, his eyes focused and sad. He shot a glance at the French door that led onto a small balcony. Someone had put his bicycle out there. The first thing he did was bring the bike in and lean it against the credenza in the living room. Rocco’s alert eyes caught every detail: the man seemed to be caressing a daughter, not a piece of athletic equipment. “It’s a Colnago … more than six thousand euros,” he said, as if that was justification enough. “Where … where did you find her?” Rocco pointed to the den. Patrizio silently moved toward the room, softly as a ghost. He opened the door. The cable dangled from the lamp hook. He stood in the doorway, gazing silently. It seemed as if he was sniffing the air. Then he heaved a deep sigh and went back to the bedroom. “We only have one thing of real value in the apartment,” he said as he walked by the deputy police chief.

As soon as he saw the room, he jerked in alarm. “They’ve been in here too …” He went to pull open the drawer of a small side table under the window. Then his eye lit on the blue velvet box that Rocco had set on the tabletop. He looked inside, with a bitter smile. “So they found it.”

“What was in it?”

“It’s where we kept our gold.”

“Your gold?”

“Yes. Nothing much. A watch, a few bracelets, my cuff links, and a brooch that my mother had given Esther. A pretty pin, with a peacock. With green and blue stones. It belonged to my grandmother, just think.” He sat down on the bed. Tears poured from his eyes like an open faucet. “Is that all my wife’s life was worth?”

“You did all right, my wife’s wasn’t even worth a euro. Just the price of a nine-millimeter round,” Rocco felt like saying to him, but he said nothing.

“Esther always was unlucky,” Patrizio said, looking at the floor and stroking the bed as if his wife were lying on it, fast asleep. “She always had bellyaches. You know what I used to call her? Estherichia coli,” and he started chuckling under his breath. “Estherichia coli instead of Escherichia coli … but all she needed was a massage and she’d get over it. It was a nervous disorder, if you ask me.” He dried his tears. Then he looked up at Rocco. “I’m a believer, Commissario, but I swear to you that right now I just couldn’t say. Where was God when someone was killing my wife? Can you tell me where God was?”

There was probably no question that Rocco Schiavone was less suited to answer.

“Please, take me to my mother’s place. I just can’t take this anymore … I can’t take it anymore.”

The deputy police chief had been sitting in the district attorney’s waiting room for more than half an hour, looking at the wood grain on Judge Baldi’s door. Funny how he managed to see different shapes in it every time.

On that chilly March day, what popped out of the grain was a dolphin and a rose, though the rose actually looked more like an artichoke than a rose. But if he looked at it the other way around, it became an elephant with just one ear. The door swung open and the imaginary wood-grain fresco disappeared, replaced by Judge Baldi’s face. “Well hello there, Schiavone! Have you been waiting long?”

Rocco stood up and shook hands.

“Come in, have a seat.”

Standing next to the bookshelf, a young man in jacket and tie was gathering a series of enormous file folders full of documents. “Let me introduce you to Judge Messina. Aldo, this is Deputy Police Chief Schiavone, who’s been working with us for just a few months but has already solved one case brilliantly. Am I right?”

Judge Messina was obliged to set down his armful of folders so he could shake hands with Rocco. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said, with unmistakable emphasis.

“And you still shake my hand?”

Messina smiled. “I wouldn’t refuse to shake anyone’s hand. If you’ll excuse me.” He gathered up his folders again and left the room. The first thing that Rocco Schiavone noticed was that the photograph of the judge’s wife was now gone from the desktop. The last time he’d seen it, the picture had been lying facedown. Now he felt certain it was tucked away in one of the desk drawers. That’s always a bad sign. The magistrate’s marriage was on its way out. The eve of the final breakup. Baldi swept his blond bangs out of his eyes with a quick flick of the hand and sat down at his desk. “Now then, what news do you have for me about what happened on Via Brocherel?”

“It was a murder. I’m sure of it. Esther Baudo—that’s the victim’s name—was beaten and then strangled. The hanging seems to me to have been staged. Plus, the room where we found the corpse was dark, with the shutters down. But when I walked in and I turned on the light, there was a short circuit. Which means that the woman hanged herself in the dark …”

“Or else, after she hanged herself, someone lowered the blinds. Right?”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one, Dottore. I’m still just sniffing around.”

Baldi stretched both arms in the air. “And do you like what you smell?”

“Smells like shit, as usual.”

“The husband?”

“He’s a sales representative, works in athletic equipment. Clean record, no run-ins with the law, a traffic ticket or two. But something was stolen.”

The judge nodded, thoughtfully. “Burglars caught in the act who then decided to stage the whole thing?”

Rocco shrugged. “Why not? Maybe they did it just to throw us off the trail. Still, there’s something about it I don’t like.”

“Do tell.”

“Actually, two things. The first thing, you see, is that we have a kitchen that was turned literally upside down, like there’d been a tornado. A real authentic mess. But the bedroom, where the valuables were hidden—in a small velvet box containing the family gold—was searched scientifically. They might have opened a couple of drawers, at the very most.”

“As if they knew where to look. So what about the mess in the kitchen?”

“Exactly. It doesn’t add up. Plus, I think the burglars had been in that apartment before.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There was no sign of breaking and entering on the door or on the windows. If they got in, either it was because Signora Baudo knew them or else because—”

“Because they had the keys,” concluded Judge Baldi, getting to his feet. He was hyperactive: he couldn’t sit listening for more than five minutes at a time. He walked over to the window and stood drumming his fingers on the glass. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to work solo, Schiavone. I’ve got some problems on my hands.” Immediately an image flashed into Rocco’s mind: the wife’s picture dumped into a drawer, if not actually tossed in the trash. Baldi stopped drumming and started whistling softly. Rocco recognized the Toreador song from Bizet’s Carmen. “We are on the trail of one of the biggest tax evasion cases I’ve ever worked on, me and the finance police and the Carabinieri. There’s just an endless supply of tax evaders, you know that?”

“I can imagine. I can’t do a lot of tax evading with my paycheck.”

Baldi turned around and smiled. “If we all just paid our taxes, the tax burden would be much lighter. You know that, I know that. But it seems as if the Italians aren’t interested in the fact. This really is a strange country, isn’t it?”

Rocco braced himself for another pearl of wisdom from Judge Baldi, who always seemed to have some solution for the nation’s political and economic problems on his mind. His notions ranged from drafting cabinet ministers and secretaries from other countries, more or less the way that soccer teams are assembled, in order to have serious, well-trained, honest people running the government, to the elimination of banknotes so that all transactions would have to be conducted through credit cards. This would make all purchases traceable and make it impossible to conceal one’s income and evade taxes. “It’s a strange, deeply wasteful country,” Rocco said, encouragingly.

Baldi didn’t have to be asked twice. “True. Let me give you an example. Public funding of the political parties. Right now, they take the money as an electoral reimbursement, right?”

“Right.”

“And I don’t actually disagree with the idea. Better for them to receive public money than get funds from some powerful, manipulative lobbyist or other. But follow me closely here.” He turned away from the window and went back to his seat at his desk. “I say what we do is take parliamentarians, cabinet ministers, and undersecretaries off the state payroll, because that’s clearly a waste of public money. Instead, we should have deputies, senators, and everyone else paid directly by the parties that run them for office. In that case, politicians would get the proper salaries. And just think of how much money the treasury would save. What do you think? Wouldn’t it be a great idea?”

“But that would mean finally just giving up and bending over to take it from behind, and admitting that this country is in the hands of the political parties.”

“Well, are you saying it isn’t? Deputies and senators, commissioners and outside consultants, none of them are civil servants, Schiavone. They’re servants of the parties they belong to. And in that case, let the parties pay them!”

Rocco raised his eyebrows. “I’d have to give that some thought.”

“By all means, Schiavone. Think it over. And please, help me understand what happened to Esther Baudo. I leave that case in your hands. After all, it’s clear that I can rely on you.”