serious people who work hard and mind their own business. And if they got high, at the very most it was with a round of grolle, local multi-spouted mugs of grappa and coffee, passed around communally. The days of Rome were over, a city where dope was processed as if on an assembly line. The days of decent opportunities, lucky breaks—those days were over. How much longer would he be forced to languish in this purgatory? He lived in the richest city in Italy, with a per capita income to rival Luxembourg’s, but after four months he had nothing to show for it. Then he thought about Sebastiano. Who would be coming up north tomorrow. And if Sebastiano was willing to take a plane all the way to Turin and then a train, in the middle of winter, there must be a reason, and a very good one.
That thought electrified him to the point that he found himself on his feet, rubbing his hands together. Only when his hand was on the door handle did he remember the joint with a homemade filter sitting in his ashtray. He went back, slipped it into his pocket, and finally left his office.
The streets were deserted. The cloudy gray sky promised more snow to come, and the black lava rock mountains seemed ready to swallow the landscape all around them. Italo Pierron drove, eyes on the road, while Rocco was on his cell phone.
“And yet it’s not that hard, D’Intino! Listen to me carefully.” Rocco spoke slowly and clearly, as if he were addressing a none-too-bright child. “Find out whether, in the city or province of Aosta, especially in Val d’Ayas, there have been any missing-person reports, people who didn’t come home, you see what I mean? Not just since yesterday; let’s say in the past month.” Rocco rolled his eyes. Then, with infinite patience, he repeated the concept: “D’Intino, listen: for the past month. Is that clear? Over and out.”
He punched the OFF button and looked at Italo, whose eyes were glued to the road ahead. “Tell me, is D’Intino playing with me or is he really that dumb?”
Italo smiled.
“Where’s he from?”
“He’s Abruzzese. From the province of Chieti.”
“Doesn’t he have any pull down there? No connections? Couldn’t he go back down there and stop busting our balls?”
“I don’t know, Dottore.”
“Everyone in Italy has a connection. I had to wind up with the one brain-damaged mental defective who doesn’t even have a relative or friend who can pull some strings for him.”
They left the car in a parking space at the hospital, even though a security guard had told them not to because that was the chief physician’s spot. Schiavone did nothing more than pull out his badge and shut up the zealous functionary of the Health Ministry.
They walked downstairs and past the laboratories until they finally reached the double glass doors where Fumagalli worked. The morgue.
“Dottor Schiavone?” asked Italo in a faint voice.
“What is it?”
“Do you mind if I wait here for you?”
“No. You come on in with me and enjoy the show. Didn’t you choose to be a policeman?”
“Actually, no, I didn’t. But it’s a long story.” He dropped his head and followed his boss.
There was no need to take off his coat, because the autopsy room was more or less the same temperature as outside. Under Fumagalli’s lab coat Schiavone could see a turtleneck sweater. He wore latex gloves and a sort of green apron spattered with brown splotches. “And to think I complain about my shitty job!” Rocco said to him.
As usual, Fumagalli didn’t bother to say hello, limiting himself to waving his hand in the two policemen’s direction and leading them to the second room, which was a small waiting room. There the doctor gave both policemen a surgical mask, plastic shoe covers, and a strange paper smock.
“All right, the two of you come with me.”
In the middle of the room was a nice big autopsy table, and on top of the table lay the corpse, mercifully covered with a white cloth.
In the room you could hear a faucet drip, along with the continuous hum of the recycling air vents, which were spreading a mixture of ferocious stenches as they circulated the air in the morgue. Disinfectant, rust, rotten meat, hard-boiled eggs. Italo Pierron felt as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus, bent over and clapped his hands to his mouth, then hurried away to lose the breakfast that had just come surging up his esophagus.
“All right, now that we’re alone,” said Rocco with a smile, “have you had a chance to work on him?”
“I’ve tried to reassemble all the pieces. I’ve done easier jigsaw puzzles,” the doctor replied, and uncovered the corpse.
“Fuck!” came out of the deputy police chief’s mouth, clear and loud and straight from the heart.
There was no body. There was just a series of shredded pieces of flesh, more or less reassembled to form an object that only remotely resembled anything human.
“How can you work with this?”
Fumagalli cleaned his lenses. “Nice and slow. Like doing art restoration.”
“Sure, but those guys are fixing a masterpiece, and it’s a pleasure to look at.”
“This is a masterpiece too,” said Fumagalli. “It’s God’s handiwork, or didn’t you know?”
In the deputy police chief’s head, the suspicion that lengthy and involuntary interactions with human corpses had finally undermined the Livornese physician’s mental equilibrium finally became a certainty.
“Can I smoke in here?” asked Rocco, slipping his hand into his pocket.
“Of course. You want me to get you a whiskey, or maybe something a little lighter? Shall I put on some lounge music? Would you like that? All right, let’s get to work.”
The medical examiner pointed to a point on the corpse’s right pectoral: “He has a tattoo.”
Some writing and signs that Rocco couldn’t decipher. “What’s it say?”
“Maa vidvishhaavahai,” said Alberto. “Luckily, I was able to read it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s a Hindu mantra. It means roughly: ‘May no obstacle arise between us.’ ”
“And how do you know that?”
Alberto smiled behind his thick-lensed glasses. “I’m a guy who knows how to find out things.”
The dead man’s face was crushed. Out of the red-and-black mush, which reminded Rocco of a painting by a major Italian artist whose name he couldn’t quite recall, jutted teeth, bits of lips, yellowish filaments.
“This is the first strange thing,” Alberto began, lifting a piece of handkerchief that must once have been a bandanna.
“Indeed, how very strange,” said Rocco, “a piece of handkerchief. Never seen anything like it.”
“All
