The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Giovanni Maurizio de

Author:Giovanni, Maurizio de [Giovanni, Maurizio de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Crime, thriller, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781609453251
Amazon: B079MH47YS
Goodreads: 38474938
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

XXXIV

What were you thinking? What was in your mind when you did it?

Lojacono was sitting in the little anteroom of the forensic squad’s laboratory, his head resting on his hands, which were on the table, fingers intertwined. His almond-shaped eyes had narrowed to slits, and there was no discernible expression on his Asian features. As if he were sleeping. But he wasn’t: he was looking.

He was looking at the glass sphere, its top smeared with a dark stain. The only object on the spotless laminate countertop, white against the white floor, between white walls, illuminated by the white light from the ceiling fixture. The white ceiling.

A faint reflection gleamed off the curved surface of the glass.

Aragona, the only dark patch in the room, except for Lojacono himself, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortably. He would have liked to know what was going through his colleague’s mind.

What was going through Lojacono’s mind? Death.

He was trying to receive a message from that innocent object, a piece of kitsch that had ended the life of a woman he’d never met. He was trying to intuit why that glass sphere, created to—best case scenario—make children smile, had ultimately become the instrument of an act as irrevocable as murder.

Don’t you know that murder is a serious matter, Glass Ball? Lojacono mused. Murder is a very serious matter, that touches lots of people. You see this place, Glass Ball? People rushing to and fro, in white lab coats, serious and efficient; instruments, test tubes, microscopes. And parked outside are armored cars, and there are phones ringing, uniforms, handguns, tears, and laughter. All propelled by the murder.

Murder ought to have the right, since it’s such a serious matter, to be executed via gunshot or, at the very least, via sharp blade. Murder deserves to be repaid with a complicated piece of machinery, such as an electric chair, or a sophisticated device such as the ones used to administer lethal injections. Murder calls out for historical tools of execution: the garrote, or the guillotine, or the gallows. Murder is a serious matter, not a joke.

From inside the globe, a woman’s smiling face stared back at him. Inside the sphere was a sort of dancer, from the Caribbean or Hawaii, with a flower wreath, her probably bare chest covered by a tiny guitar and, underneath, a skirt made of long green leaves.

A ukulele. It came to him in a flash, the name for that little guitar. Ukulele. Marilyn Monroe played one in Some Like It Hot, that movie with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; he’d probably seen it ten times. She was so beautiful, Marilyn Monroe was.

De Santis, on the other hand, wasn’t beautiful. That is, even aside from the fact that she was now dead.

Aragona coughed softly. Lojacono didn’t blink.

She wasn’t beatiful, okay. So what? Did she deserve to die in such an absurd way for the crime of not being beautiful? Clubbed in the back of head with a glass ball?

Glass ball, glass ball.

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