So he began walking, feeling strangely embarrassed.
The old woman, meanwhile, had taken out a small broom and had begun to sweep her corner. All around, against the walls, under a scaffolding in front of the billboards that displayed the timetables, the homeless were preparing for Christmas.
Some were already asleep, rolled up in newspaper sheets, sheltered in cardboard huts, having closed their eyes knowing nothing of tomorrow. Others, awake, scanned the void or tended to themselves like tired old cats. One had his pants rolled up; his calves were covered with scabs that he picked at conscientiously, one by one, concentrating, his eyes, like a stray dog’s, red with some awful disease.
Now the marshal was just a few meters from the old woman. She had her back to him and continued to sweep. Serene, with the air of one who is placidly seeing to her own domestic affairs. Bovio was about to call out to her, when he felt a pang of nostalgia and the blurred memory of some distant Christmas. Corridors, lights, and lost rooms. Voices of excited children, yearnings from the vortex of the past.
Absurdly, he realized that it was not his memory.
Just as absurdly, he thought that he must return it to the old woman.
He took a few more steps, almost staggering, with a buzzing in his head and the hand in his pocket contracted around the ten thousand lire.
“Marshal.”
The voice of the young police officer was like a rock smashing a window. The marshal turned suddenly, with a guilty expression, it seemed to him. He quickly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if hiding evidence; he began walking away in a hurry.
“What is it?” The voice sounded too high, and fake.
He didn’t turn back.
Beret
by Carlo Lucarelli
Translated by Kathrine Jason
Vicolo del Bologna
There’s a radio’s playing. It’s coming from one of the upstairs apartments, and it’s got to be turned way up because we can hear it clearly, low but clearly. So much the better. It helps drown out the noise we’re making.
Moretti gives me a look and nods, as if he’s read my mind. This has been happening more and more often recently. He looks at me, nods his head, and says what I was going to say. Either we’ve become telepathic or he can read my face like a book.
“Hurry up, move it!” Moretti says, and Agello pushes the key further into the keyhole. It makes a loud, metallic squeak, but it’s muffled by the music. The click of the lock is even louder, but now it’s a question of moments, split seconds.
Moretti raises the pistol, holding it near his face, the back of his hand against the wool fabric of the beret covering his forehead. He gives the door a kick, straight-on, with the sole of his shoe, and it opens. In split seconds, one split second, we’re all inside, me with the MP5 raised, selector set to rapid fire. Albertino, ready with the twelve-caliber SPAS, Moretti aiming the Beretta with two hands, thumb on thumb, and Agello, with another Beretta and his arm raised to hurl a grenade, the pin already out.
But hurl it where? The apartment is just this, this room behind the door — table, chairs, kitchenette, a fake brick archway from which a transparent curtain hangs, and beyond it a bed. The apartments in Trastevere are usually tiny, but this is extreme.
A split second. Being the closest, I take a step, brush the curtain aside with my arm, turn the barrel of the gun, but I can see right away that there’s nobody here.
No, actually, there is somebody: There’s a sound like a sigh behind a small door in the wall, next to the kitchenette. It’s barely louder than a murmur and it’s muffled in the music that floats down the stairwell to where we stand.
A split second. Moretti kicks the door and the lock in the small door rips away from the jamb. Moretti and Albertino and I step in, weapons raised, and Moretti yells, “Police, stop!” hollering so loudly that the music from upstairs suddenly stops.
The girl sitting on the toilet clearly has no intention of moving. In fact, if not for her lips, which are trembling, she could be dead. She’s sitting paralyzed, a roll of toilet paper in her hand and her underpants at her ankles, eyes fixed on us, in our black body suits and ski masks, crammed together in a bathroom of a few square feet, shower and all.
Moretti raises his fist and we all lower our weapons.
“Shit,” he mutters.
There’s a radio playing. It’s from an apartment across the hall, at the end of the landing. I know that because the last time the girl brought me food, I asked her and she told me it was coming from over there. She says she listened at the door and heard it. MTV, she said. It’s on practically all day, and it reaches all the way to my apartment, through two closed doors, not loud enough to be annoying but loud enough that I can hear it, as if the TV is on low in another room.
I’ve gotten used to it. That must be why I realized the second it stopped. Or maybe because first I heard a door slam, and then that shout I couldn’t understand. Rude assholes, I thought, but then the music stopped and that made me suspicious. So I got up from bed, grabbed the 356 from the bedside table, and went to the door.
“He’s not here,” Moretti yells down the stairwell, and moments later everyone comes up: agents in uniform, top brass, the chief of the mobile squad, and even the judge. They rush up the stairs to the landing. “Stay back, please. Police!” shouts an official as doors open. Nobody comes out, except one woman in a bathrobe and slippers on an upstairs landing who won’t back off from the railing, so we have to send an agent up.
“Bad tip,” says Moretti to the judge. “Marcos isn’t here and the girl’s got nothing to do with it, she’s shoots video for television. She went back into the bathroom, but I’ll bet she raises hell when she comes out.”
“Vicolo del Bologna,” the judge says. “Number 5B. The informant was sure.”
“The informant was wrong. This is number 5 and Marcos isn’t here.”
“What if he only got the side of the building wrong?”
I hear them knocking at the door. Police, open up! And they don’t rush right in. They’re cautious. They’re right to be.
We go in with our weapons ready, shoo away the people on the landing, take a quick look around, then the agents follow and we move on to other apartments. We begin on the third-floor landing. A huge dog leaps out from one apartment and Agello nearly shoots him. Next door there’s a journalist who wants to come along, and we have to shut him inside. Outside, the vicolo is blockaded and nobody can pass.
On the lam you can spend your dough well or badly. I spent it badly. I’m not saying on chicks and champagne — even though this one does bring food and she’d be willing. But at least I should have planned on having somewhere to run. That, yes. A skylight, the possibility of jumping down to another street. Here there’s no way out, just a clothesline suspended across a closed courtyard.
So I’m thinking there are only three possibilities. I surrender, open the door, slide the gun down the stairs, say, I’m alone and unarmed. Or I don’t surrender, grab the grenades on the dresser, throw them down the stairs, and then make a run for it with the submachine gun I keep next to the bed, and either I make it or I’m fucked. Or else, I stand ready with the pistol, the door open a crack, and decide what to do when the first mug appears.