Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

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 whitened.

Rospo was suddenly busy with his work.

Caterina went over to the Sovrintendente. “Let me help you,” she said. “Don’t let the stress kill you.”

“Fuck the stress,” said Grattapaglia. “It’s being indoors. Last thing I’m going to do here is find out who the damned mugger is. You coming?”

Caterina hesitated. Her shift ended in half an hour.

“Sure,” she said. “Just let me call my mom, tell her I’ll be late again.”

Grattapaglia surprised her by suggesting they go on foot.

“It’ll calm me. We catch the mugger, we can call a car.”

As they were crossing Ponte Garibaldi, she pulled the blow-up of Emma’s ID photo from her shoulder bag and showed it to Grattapaglia.

“The kid who knew nothing about the mugging?” she said. “I think he might have seen her, but he did not identify her.”

Grattapaglia looked at the photo carefully. Emma waited for a crude comment, but none was forthcoming. “Who is she?”

Caterina explained. Grattapaglia nodded, “This has nothing at all to do with the muggings.”

“I know. I just thought I’d tell you what I was doing down there with that kid. Look, I know you’re the one who’s going to be doing all the work and all the talking for the next few hours, and I’m basically going to be in your way… but I was wondering, could you…” she delved back into her shoulder bag and pulled out a photo of Treacy.

Grattapaglia looked at the photo of Treacy in one hand, Emma in the other. “You want me to ask about the girl and Treacy as well as the muggings?” said Grattapaglia.

“As a favor.”

They veered right toward the Jewish school, for no other reason than that Grattapaglia seemed to want to shoot the breeze with the four patrolmen guarding the entrance. Caterina waited in the shadows, listening to a stream of guffawing misogyny.

Then they walked to a bar where the bartender greeted Grattapaglia like an old friend and nodded warily at her.

“Wait here,” Grattapaglia told Caterina, and he and the bartender disappeared into a back room. Ten minutes later, he reemerged.

They left the bar, Grattapaglia whistling, swaggering slightly as he occupied the absolute center of the street, forcing young people and tourists to move to either side of him.

Caterina realized the price to be paid for asking a favor was she would have to chisel information out of him.

“Did that bartender see Treacy or Emma?”

“Emma. I didn’t even know the name,” said Grattapaglia. “He knew the Englishman. But he couldn’t remember if he had seen him on the night in question.”

“Shit, I just remembered something,” said Caterina. “Her name would not have been Emma. Use the name Manuela instead.”

“Whatever you say. I still don’t know who she is.”

Caterina explained, and Grattapaglia listened attentively, bending down in a way that reminded her a bit of Blume. Tall men, the two of them. Broad, too, though Grattapaglia was out of shape.

“Now I know who I’m talking about, I might be able to ask better questions. Maybe I should have been told before now. You seem to be in a privileged position with the Commissioner.”

Caterina was glad of the dark that hid her face. She changed subject as casually as she could manage. “The bartender you were just talking to, was he working that night?”

“ Porcaccia la misera! I forgot to ask.”

He was jerking her about, but he was also doing what she had asked and so she kept quiet.

He walked on a bit, then said, “Yes, he was working that night. No, he didn’t see them.”

In the next bar, on Piazza Santa Maria, a bartender in a starched white outfit with gold buttons glanced at the photos and became immediately adamant that Treacy had not been there. About the girl he knew nothing.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

The bartender sprayed blue detergent on the zinc counter and wiped it even cleaner.

“I’m not saying I don’t know him. I do. That’s why he doesn’t come here anymore.”

“You won’t serve him?”

The bartender touched his toothbrush mustache with his finger, and spoke in soft and confessional tones, throwing an anxious glance at two well-dressed men with briefcases seated at the table outside. “He threw up vomit and blood all over a table of Germans. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but a guy that age and that sick should know better than to drink like that. Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“Not surprised,” said the bartender, and dried droplets from the sink.

They left the piazza and reached the third bar. A fug of marijuana sat above the fifty or so people sitting outside.

A thin skinhead Roma soccer “Ultra” with blue arms was trying to stare them down.

Grattapaglia led the way toward the farther of the two ancient tin tables to his left, which was occupied by three men, two of whom had hardly taken their eyes off them since they arrived.

Grattapaglia said, “Let’s have something here. It’s always very informative.”

Caterina was not so sure, but she sat down and ordered a granita while Grattapaglia ordered a beer. When the bartender came back, Grattapaglia asked him who had been here on the previous Friday night.

“Can’t say,” said the bartender, bending down to put the beer and granita on the table. Caterina pulled out the photos but Grattapaglia forestalled her, placing his outsized hand on her arm.

“No. First the muggings. Also, not here. You can’t ask Danilo questions in full view of everyone. He could be telling us anything, as far as they’re concerned. So the only move open to him is to tell us nothing and make sure they all see him saying nothing. Do you follow?”

“I think so,” said Caterina.

“OK.” He handed her back the photos. “You keep these. This is your gig, and I want them to understand that. Now, see that Brazilian over there?”

Emma looked and saw a small guy dressed in a Brazil soccer strip wearing a baseball cap.

“Every time we meet that guy, we yank off his cap and throw it away. Then he has to buy one, to hide the fact his head is the size of a pin. He’s so sensitive about it.” Grattapaglia spluttered into his glass, evidently recalling the last time this fun had taken place.

Beside him sat a sagging fiftyish man with long curling locks of gray hair and an unfinished mustache over dead lips.

“That’s Fabio the Failure,” said Grattapaglia. “Whenever I’m depressed at still being a sovrintendente at this age, and think I’ve made a mess of my life, I just think of Fabio, and it cheers me up. In the 1970s, Fabio got a walk-on part in a film and has been living on the glory ever since. Well, the glory, a disability allowance, and a little extra from some casual housebreaking. Uh-oh, what have we here?”

A third person, the one ostentatiously not looking at Grattapaglia and Caterina, sported a tight-fitting T-shirt and large orange glasses with pimp jewelry and ethnic tattoos on his arms. His underpants were hitched up to his stomach, the waistline of his jeans rested halfway down his backside. The other two treated him with the deference due to a prince.