A Cold Death - Antonio Manzini

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here?”

      She hurried into the bedroom, hoping to find the signora there. The bed was unmade. Sheets and duvet heaped in a corner. The armoire thrown wide open. She backed away, cautiously, toward the kitchen. “But what …?” Then her foot hit something on the floor. She looked down. A cell phone, shattered.

      “Burglars!” she shouted and, as if someone had placed a cold, menacing blade against her back, she stiffened, turned, and ran. The antique afghan carpet that lay rumpled on the floor tripped her up. Irina sprawled headlong and banged her knee on the floor.

       Chunk!

      The muffled sound of a kneecap cracking, followed by a stabbing pain penetrating directly into her brain. “Aahh!” she screamed through clenched teeth, and holding her knee with both hands she got to her feet. She aimed straight toward the sliding pocket entrance door, certain that behind her lurked a couple of scary-looking men, their faces concealed by balaclavas, black, and with the sharp teeth of ferocious beasts. She banged her shoulder against the panel of the sliding door, and it quavered, shivering the smoked glass. Now another stab of pain sank its fangs deep into her clavicle. But this one she felt less. Irina mustered all the adrenaline she had in her body and limped out of the Baudos’ apartment. She hastily slid the door shut behind her. She was panting. Now that she was on the landing she felt a little safer. She looked down at her knee. Her stocking was torn and drops of blood stained her pale white flesh. She licked two fingers and ran them over the wound. The pain had shifted from keen to dull and throbbing, but it was now a little easier to take. Then it dawned on her that she was not even remotely safe on the landing. If the burglars were inside the apartment, how hard would it be for them to open the door and slaughter her, to stab her with a knife or beat her to death with a crowbar? She started limping gingerly down the stairs and shouting: “Help! Burglars! Burglars!”

      She pounded on the doors facing the third-floor landing, but no one came to answer. “Help! Burglars! Open up! Open up!”

      She continued downstairs. If she could, she would have been taking the steps two at a time, but her knee wouldn’t let her. She held tight to the handsome wooden handrail and thanked God that she’d put on the counterfeit Hogan sneakers that morning, sneakers that she’d purchased at the flea market near her house: at least they had rubber soles. If she’d been wearing leather soles on those marble steps, she could easily have slid down two or three flights flat on her ass. She tried knocking on the second-floor doors. She pounded with her fists, pushed the doorbells, and even kicked, but there was no one home. No one came to the door. Only from one apartment did she hear the hysterical yapping of some tiny dog answering her knock.

      A building full of dead people, she thought to herself.

      Finally she reached the ground floor. She tugged open the front door and lurched out into the street. It was deserted. Nothing in sight, not even a shop or a bar where she could ask for help. She looked at the buildings lining Via Brocherel. No one at the windows, no one entering or leaving. The sky was leaden and gray. There were no cars. At ten in the morning it seemed as if the world had ground to a halt, at least in that street: as if it were paralyzed, as if she were the only living creature in the whole neighborhood. “Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Then, as if by some miracle, an old man appeared at the corner wrapped in a heavy scarf with a little mutt dog on a leash. Irina ran straight toward him.

      Retired army warrant officer Paolo Rastelli, born in 1939, lurched to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman with no overcoat, her hair standing straight up, and limping with a badly bloodied knee was galloping straight at him, her mouth gaping like a new-caught fish. She was shouting something. But the warrant officer couldn’t hear what it was. All he saw was her mouth wide open, as if she were chewing the chilly air. He decided to turn on the Maico hearing aid he wore in his right ear, which he always kept off when he took Flipper out for his walks. Flipper was a mix of Yorkshire terrier and thirty-two other breeds. The dog was more volatile than a flask of nitroglycerine. A dry leaf in the wind, water gurgling down a runoff pipe, or just Flipper’s diseased imagination was enough to set that fourteen-year-old mutt off, yapping in an irritating high-pitched bark that sent shivers up and down Rastelli’s spine, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. As soon as he switched it on, the hearing aid shot a burst of electric static into his brain. Then, as he expected, the white noise sharpened into Flipper’s shrill yapping, until he could finally hear words with some meaning pouring out of the woman’s open mouth: “Help, help, somebody help me! Burglars!”

      Flipper had lost most of the vision in his right eye, and his left eye had been useless for years. The dog wasn’t barking at the woman, he was barking at a traffic sign tossing and clattering in the wind on the other side of the street. Paolo Rastelli had only seconds to make up his mind. He looked behind him: there was no one in sight. There wasn’t time to pull out his cell phone and call the police; by now the woman was just yards away, galloping toward him as if demonically possessed, shouting all the while: “Help! Help me, Signore!” He could turn and run from that latter-day fury with her straw-blond hair, but first he’d have to reckon with the pin in his hip and his wheezing lungs, already on the verge of emphysema. And so, just as when he was a raw recruit, a private standing guard at the munitions dump, he remained rooted to the spot, standing to attention, waiting for trouble to wash over him with all the ineluctability of malicious fate, cursing Flipper and the dog’s midmorning walks, cursing at the constant need to take a tiny yapping dog out to piss and break off work on his crossword puzzles.

      It was 10:10 on the morning of Friday, March 16.

      When the alarm went off, it was twenty to eight. Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone had been stationed in Aosta for months now, and as he did every morning he walked over to the bedroom window. Slowly and intently—like a champion poker player fanning open the hand of cards that’s going to determine whether he wins or folds—he pulled open the heavy curtains and peered out at the sky, in the vain hope of a glimpse of sunlight.

      “Shit,” he’d muttered. That Friday morning, as usual, a sky as oppressive as the lid of a pressure cooker, a sidewalk white with snow, and natives walking hurriedly, bundled up in scarves and hats. Now even they feel the cold, Rocco had thought to himself. Well, well, well.

      The usual daily routine: shower, coffee pod in the espresso machine, shave. Standing in front of his clothes closet, he had no doubts about how to dress. Same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the same as tomorrow and so on for who knows how many days yet to come. Dark brown corduroy trousers, cotton T-shirt underneath, wool T-shirt over that, wool blend socks, checked flannel shirt, V-necked light cashmere sweater, green corduroy jacket, and his trusty Clarks. He’d done some rapid mental calculations: six months in Aosta had cost him nine pairs of shoes. Maybe he really did need to find a good alternative to desert boots, but he couldn’t seem to. Two months ago he’d bought himself a pair of Teva snow boots, for when he’d had to spend time on the ski slopes above Champoluc, but wearing those cement mixers around town was out of the question. He’d put on his loden overcoat, left the apartment, and headed for the office. Like every morning, he left his cell phone powered down. Because his daily ritual still wasn’t complete when he got dressed and left for the office. There were still two fundamental steps before really starting the day: get breakfast at the café in the town’s main piazza and then sit down at his desk and roll his morning joint.

      The trip into police headquarters was the most delicate phase. Still wrapped in the dreams and thoughts of the night before, his mood as bleak and gray as the sky overhead, Rocco always made a muted entrance, as darting and slithery as a viper moving through the grass. If there was one thing he wanted to avoid, it was running into Officer D’Intino. Not at eight thirty, not first thing in the morning. D’Intino: the police officer, originally from the province of Chieti, a place the deputy police chief despised, possibly even more than he hated the inclement weather of Val d’Aosta. A man of D’Intino’s ineptitude was likely to cause potentially fatal accidents to his colleagues, though never to himself. D’Intino had sent Officer Casella to the hospital just last week by backing his car into him in the police parking lot, when he could perfectly well have just put the car into first gear and driven straight out. He’d crushed one of Rocco’s toenails by dropping a heavy

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