LITMIR.BIZ

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the old man, adjusting his hearing aid.

      “Café. Near here. Where.”

      “Around the corner. Take Via Monte Emilus and go about a hundred yards, and you’ll see the Bar Alpi. Do you have any news, Dottore? Is it true that they found the lady hanging by a rope?”

      Irina too stood gazing at him apprehensively.

      “Can you keep a secret?” Rocco asked in an undertone.

      “Certainly!” Paolo Rastelli replied, puffing his chest out proudly.

      “I can too!” Irina chimed in.

      “So what do you think, I can’t?” Rocco retorted and walked away, leaving them both openmouthed.

      As was to be expected, the retired warrant officer’s dog, Flipper, promptly began barking again, this time at the NO PARKING sign. The former noncommissioned officer glared down at the yappy little mutt and brusquely switched off his hearing aid. At last, the world turned silent, muffled and cottony once again. A giant aquarium he could gaze at with detachment. With a smile and a slight forward tilt of the head, he bade farewell to Irina and resumed his daily stroll, heading for home and the crossword puzzle.

      As the wind blew, pushing chilly gusts of air under his loden overcoat, Rocco decided that all things considered, it could have gone worse. A suicide just meant a series of bureaucratic procedures to get out of the way, the kind of thing you could take care of in an afternoon’s work. His plan was simple: leave the bureaucratic details to Casella, talk to Rispoli and find out what idea she’d come up with for Nora’s present, go home, get a half-hour nap, take a shower, go back out and buy the present, go out to dinner with Nora at eight, after an hour and a half pretend he had a crushing migraine, take Nora home, and then hurry back to his place to watch the second half of the Roma-Inter game. Acceptable.

      Just as the wind died down and a fine chilly drizzle began to pepper the asphalt, cold as the fingers of a dead man’s hand, Rocco stepped into the Bar Alpi. A strong smell of alcohol and confectioner’s sugar washed over him, like a warm, welcome hug from a friend.

      “Buongiorno.”

      The man behind the counter gave him a smile. “Hello. What’ll it be?”

      “A nice hot espresso with a foamy cloud of milk … and I’d like a pastry. Do you have any left?”

      “Sure … go ahead and take what you like, right there …” He pointed to a Plexiglas case with an electric heater where breakfast pastries were on display. Rocco grabbed a strudel while the barista ratcheted the porta-filter into place and punched the button that applied pressure to the boiling water. He heard the clack of billiard balls from the other room in the bar. Only now did he notice that the walls were covered with pictures of Juventus players and black-and-white team scarves. Rocco went over to the counter and poured half a pack of sugar into his coffee. It took awhile for the sugar to sink into the hot dense liquid. A clear sign that this was a good espresso. He took a sip. It really was good. “You make a first-rate espresso,” he told the barman, who was busy drying glasses.

      “My wife taught me how.”

      “Neapolitan?”

      “No. Milanese. I’m the Neapolitan in the family.”

      “So, you’re saying that you’re a Neapolitan who roots for Juventus and that a woman from Milan taught you how to make espresso?”

      “Plus I’m tone deaf,” the man added. They both laughed.

      Another sharp clack from the next room. Rocco turned around.

      “You want to play some pool?”

      “Why not?”

      “Look out, those two are a pair of professional sharks.”

      Rocco slurped down the last of his espresso and strode into the next room, finishing off his strudel in a shower of crumbs down the front of his overcoat.

      There were two men. One wore the jumpsuit of a manual laborer, the other a suit and tie. They’d just set the cue ball down on the table and were about to begin a game of straight pool. When they saw Rocco they both smiled. “Care to play?” asked the man in the jumpsuit.

      “No, you guys go ahead. Mind if I watch?”

      “Not at all,” said the one who looked every bit the estate agent. “Just watch me dismantle Nino, here. Nino, today I’m not taking prisoners!”

      “Ten euros on the best out of three games?” asked the manual laborer.

      “No, ten euros a game!”

      Nino smiled. “Then I’ve already made my end-of-year bonus,” he said, and shot the deputy police chief a wink.

      The estate agent took off his jacket while the laborer chalked his pool stick with a vicious grin.

      Clack! And the three ceiling lamps that illuminated the green felt of the billiards table went dark simultaneously.

      “Well of all the damned … Gennaro!” shouted the estate agent. From the bar the proprietor called back: “The power always goes out when it’s windy like this!”

      “Try paying your electric bill, and maybe that’ll stop it from happening!” called the man in the jumpsuit, and he and his friend shared a hearty laugh.

      But Rocco remained straight-faced, leaning against the wall, lost in thought. “Holy shit!” he said, between clenched teeth. “I’m an idiot! Why didn’t I think of it? What a shitty profession this is!” Cursing, he left the game room before the astonished eyes of the two pool players.

      “Albe’, tell me that what I’m thinking doesn’t hold up!”

      “Run it by me again, Rocco,” said the medical examiner, as he leaned over Signora Baudo’s corpse.

      “When I walked in, I switched on the light. And it short-circuited. So that means it was turned off before, right?”

      “Okay, Rocco, I’m with you.”

      “Obviously, when she fell the poor woman yanked loose a couple of wires. When I flipped the switch I caused a short circuit. What does that mean? That she hanged herself in the dark. How did she do it? She lowered the blinds, fastened the noose, and let herself drop?”

      “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Fumagalli, “and so?”

      “So it must mean there was someone there with her. Whoever it was must have lowered the blinds after she hanged herself. Jesus fucking Christ!” Rocco cursed through clenched teeth.

      “And listen,” Fumagalli said, “as long as you’re here, I have something else to point out. Look at this.” He pointed to the victim’s fair skin.

      They walked over to the corpse, which Deruta and Rispoli had lowered to the parquet floor. “The cable is too thin to leave a bruise like that. You see it?” Alberto Fumagalli pointed to the purple stripe on Esther’s neck. It was a couple of finger widths wide. “When the cable dug into the flesh, it just left a narrow stripe; you see it? In other words, it wasn’t this cable that strangled her. That much is clear. And did you get a good look at her face?”

      Rocco sank into the leather armchair in the den. “Of course. She was beaten up. Do you know what that means?”

      Fumagalli said nothing.

      The deputy police chief continued with a low rattle, from the chest, a distant sinister gurgle like a rumble of thunder, warning of an oncoming storm. “That means this isn’t a suicide. It means I’m going to have to deal with this thing, and it also means a series of pains in the ass unlike anything you can even imagine!”

      Fumagalli nodded. “So now I’m going to take this poor creature to my autopsy room. And you’d probably better call the judge and the forensic squad.”

      Rocco suddenly jumped out of his chair. His mood had shifted

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