“Let’s start again, I’d say, from the moment you set up the camera.”
“Again? That story again?”
“Exactly. I liked it too, the way you tell it, the tripod leveled, certain little tricks…” The glance at Virginia Brizzi, police inspector, doesn’t hide a sincere admiration for her lovely face. Dr. Maggi, Judge for Preliminary Investigations, has never made a secret of his passion for beautiful women. “There are interesting details in this story. Wouldn’t you agree, Inspector?”
Virginia Brizzi nods and picks up the thread.
“Tell us about the camera, Mr. Pezzella. Positioning, settings, all of it.”
Flavio Pezzella reaches for the empty paper cup. Maggi takes the bottle of Lurisia, pops the cap and flicks it toward the wastebasket, missing. He pours the two fingers of water left.
“Then start the story from there.”
Pezzella drinks and holds the last sip in his mouth. It’s warm by now, and the interrogation room is so unpleasant: no windows, stale air, dirty beige paint on the walls, a fake mirror the size of a blackboard, one empty chair and no clock on the wall. Dust here and there. It could be any hour, and Maggi knows it well, which is why he covers his Tissot with his shirt cuff. The inspector wears no watch.
“Is this the headquarters where the anarchist flew out of the window?”
The paper cup jumps on the table as Maggi slams his fist down.
“Don’t make your position worse, Pezzella!”
“What floor are we on, fourth, fifth? Just to know if there’ll be time for a prayer when I go flying…”
Virginia Brizzi raises a finger to eye level and shakes her head. She is a sight, with that gray in her irises that doesn’t suffer the morgue light of the neon tubes. Her voice is solemn as a countdown.
“Pezzella, this isn’t going well!”
The cup slides to the middle of the table.
“Then more water. One that came out of a fridge, not out of a camel’s ass.”
Maggi speaks without blinking.
“The first part of the story, from the camera on, and you’ll have all the cold water you want.”
Pezzella runs his tongue behind his lips. He’d pay for a toothbrush with half a centimeter of toothpaste. He starts out short of breath.
“There was a spot in the garden with the perfect angle on the bed, but I bet you’ve heard this story already.”
“But…”
“I was getting to it, Judge.”
Virginia rests her hand on the cuff that covers the watch, and Maggi signals that the floor belongs to the suspect.
“But that part of the garden, under a weeping willow, is completely in shadow and it’s impossible to spot anyone from inside the house. There’s a pond there, a few centimeters deep, with a muddy, yielding bottom.”
“How many centimeters?”
“Thirty, maybe forty, Inspector.”
“Not ideal for setting up a camera. How did you manage?”
“I increased the surface under the tripod’s feet.”
“How?”
“Empty bottles, Inspector. Just like that one. The plastic recycling bin was overflowing.”
“Wide bottoms, and those, what do you call them, those little bumps that grip in the mud, am I right?”
“Exactly, and I beheaded those bottles. Otherwise it’s impossible to fit the tripod’s feet in, don’t you think?”
Maggi leans over the table.
“You beheaded them with an Opinel knife, you said, very similar to the one the coroner believes killed poor Grazia Garbini, and which you say you can’t find anymore.”
“Because it slipped and fell into those thirty or forty centimeters of murky water. The bottom should be dredged. Why don’t you order it, Judge?”
“Very simple: I suspect you killed that woman.”
“Killed her, sure, with no motive, when I was being paid to spy on her and document her lover, and, since you’ll ask me for the hundredth time anyway, I’d taken three thousand euros as a down payment.” Pezzella studies the judge’s watery eyes and sees a brief slip, a kind of interference, a glitch in the signal. Before finishing he spreads a smile. “All invoiced, you can check.”
Maggi bares his teeth like a wolf.
“But in the video you can make out a certain amorous activity, and look at that, no lover in sight.”
Virginia Brizzi is tired. You can tell by the way she pulls her torso back as Maggi raises his voice.
“The video shows there was room for two under that sheet, and you can make out a certain,” the finger-quote gesture is childish and out of place but Pezzella suffers it for the umpteenth time, “animal rhythm, if you’ll pardon the expression, but no trace of a lover. There’s your motive. The victim practices autoeroticism and you find out: no lover, nothing to prove. You see a promising job slipping away and maybe you’d have to return the deposit, you lose control of the situation, you go into the house and the rest is history…”
Pezzella tries in vain to work out what time it is, how long he’s been sweating his backside on the worn fabric of that chair. He knows he’s said it before, but he says it again. It’s part of the game. He explains, gesticulating.
“In the video you can see the killer reflected in the bedroom mirror, and I know, Judge, you’ll ask me again why, whoever it was, he never ended up in frame directly, and my answer will be the same one I already gave: I-don’t-know.”
Maggi stirs the saliva in his mouth. His shirt collar is paying its toll. At the end of a long day, stubble speckles his cheeks. He’s still as a sniper.
“What you call ‘the killer’s image reflected in the mirror’ is a pareidolia, Pezzella. Do you know what that is?”
Head in hands. Fingers rubbing the eyebrows, wrinkling the forehead. The thoughts gather with effort.
“No, it isn’t my brain assigning a human shape to a random figure. It’s an image, reflected maybe, but moving coherently, and my camera recorded it at minute twenty and…”
Maggi hurls the empty bottle to the floor, where it bounces until it stops in the corner of the room. So much for cold water.
“Bullshit!”
“It’s not bullshit. You have to get that video expertly examined!”
Maggi crushes the cup and the inspector jumps to her feet. The act no longer holds. Something creaks in the characters of the good cop and the bad cop.
Virginia Brizzi opens a negotiation.
“Let’s take a break, Judge. We’ll pick it up in a couple of hours, I’d say.”
“Of course, so our friend can come up with more,” finger quotes, “amenities.”
Pezzella is exhausted. Racing heart, stiff legs, tingling in his lips. He thinks of the victim’s husband, of when he’d given him the job. He remembers him in his office, shy and awkward, with sweat stains under the arms and his shirt hanging out of his trousers.
“You take care of it, Pezzella, you come with excellent references as a private investigator but I’ll warn you, it won’t be easy. A thousand times I’ve been on the point of catching that son of a bitch with my wife and a thousand times he’s vanished from under my nose, literally.” A tremor had run through him from hips to neck.
Maggi leaves the room, followed by Virginia, who gives the suspect a nod of farewell. The door is locked.
Pezzella is alone.
Him, the hum of the neon tubes and a dull tramping coming from the floor above.
He gets up, unsteady, his head seems connected to his neck by a greasy marble. He walks the perimeter of the room and repeats it until he’s dizzy. On the last lap he kicks the empty bottle. He notices that the third tile of the baseboard is about to come off and that the electrical outlets are a criminal offense. He looks at himself in the mirror without recognizing himself and greets, with a smile of dirty teeth, whoever is watching him from the next room.
He dreams of a glass of water, a bed with clean sheets, a woman to console him.
The victim’s husband had advanced him three thousand euros in cash and had resolved a tension, one that had lasted the whole meeting, with a crooked smile.
“I took it from my wife’s account. She thinks it’s to pay the builders at the beach house.”
Some revenge, Pezzella had thought. The client had walked out leaving the door open.
Pezzella looks at the chair that has driven his femurs into his hips, that has treated his buttocks like a bed of nails, though standing is just as painful. A pang of hunger seizes him.
When he closes his eyes he sees the image that crosses the mirror in the victim’s bedroom, black, enormous.
Every time the same shiver down his spine.
The corridor of police headquarters is paved with obnoxious studded rubber. From some room, the noise of a printer; from another comes a curse; and one window in two won’t open for neglect. So much for throwing anarchists out of them, thinks Maggi, while planning a ham-and-mayonnaise sandwich at the bar on the corner, an ice-cold beer and a somewhat bolder approach to Virginia, who follows two steps behind. He thinks that with those eyes, those tits and those legs she could have been a model, and instead she chose to gather mold in a police station.
The elevator is at the floor. Maggi steps aside and gestures at the sliding doors open on a wide mirror, the slightly bronzed kind that softens flaws.
“After you, Inspector.”
Virginia steps in and looks toward the exit.
“Thank you for the invitation, Judge. I’ve got a hole in my stomach this big, but I have a stack of papers to sign waiting on the second floor.”
“We’re on the fourth, Inspector. You’ll keep me company for only two floors down. Pity.”
Maggi steps in himself, presses two and then zero. “You hurry up, then, sign with your initials and join me at the bar. My treat.”
Virginia puts on an expression suspended between a smile and a grimace of annoyance. The elevator starts with a jolt and Virginia says nothing. The doors open on the second floor, with the same wretched studded rubber floor, but she, back to the mirror, doesn’t get out.
“We overdid it with that suspicion.”
“You think?”
She takes a step into the corridor and turns, the dossier folder clutched to her chest. Maggi cuts the photocell beam by stretching a leg out into the corridor.
“You’re saying we’ve been combing dolls’ hair?”
“I don’t know, but we have to work on that reflected image in the mirror, Judge.” As she says it she feels a shiver down her spine.
“Ah yes, the pareidolia. Let’s work on it, Inspector, but let’s not waste too much time on illusions for the gullible.”
Virginia takes a step back. “We’ll think it over.” She turns her back and walks away.
Annoyed, Maggi lifts the leg that blocks the cabin and steps in. And she’s got a fine ass too, he mutters as the doors close with a hiss.
Something hasn’t worked. Things banging, corners, tight spots.
Maybe I’m not at my best, thinks Maggi, hair a mess, he supposes, he sniffs his armpit, a bit of fatigue. Maybe bags under his eyes. As the elevator descends, he turns to look at himself in the mirror.
In the cabin with him there is nobody, only a reflection in the mirror.
It is a man, imposing. Much taller, pitch-black eyes that pierce like pins, thick hair, glossy as a stage wig, pale complexion, ashen lips, expressionless face. The bronzed surface of the inner mirror corrects no flaw.
He is behind him, towering over him. The glint of a blade crosses the mirror.
Before anything else, it is a shiver down the spine.
Like the anarchist falling from the window, Maggi has no time for a prayer.
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