Puppies. Maurizio De giovanni

down their joint account. Maybe the latest worsening of his mood is a result of that very same thing.”

      “Really? I’m sorry to hear that. And now this trauma of finding the baby girl in the garbage: he’s grown so attached to the little one that he’s spending his nights in the hospital.” Ottavia stopped to think for a moment, then she added: “You know, chief, that’s why the squad is so important to us. Me, Giorgio, Francesco, Lojacono with his Sicilian homeland so far away, Alex expelled from her last workplace, Marco with his stupid arrogance, which is just a wall he’s built to defend against the rest of the world. All of us had pulled our anchors, all of us were drifting. Now we find ourselves together in this police station, and we feel eager and alive again, even good at what we do. And the credit is yours. All yours.”

      Palma blushed again, this time with pleasure.

      “I didn’t have anything to do with it. They wanted me to oversee the liquidation of the structure, just an ordinary piece of administration. But even a blind man could have seen how desperate you all were to survive, you had a grit and determination that needed to be exploited, to be allowed to operate at full capacity. Unfortunately, the issue of a shutdown hasn’t been resolved. It’s only been postponed. We still have a long way to go before they’ll stop thinking of us as the Bastards of Pizzofalcone.”

      Ottavia laughed.

      “Ah no, when it comes to that, we have to admit that that lunatic Marco has a point: We ought to be proud of being Bastards. Bastards we are and Bastards we will remain, because among other things, that way the team can go on working together. Plus, I love the nicknames Aragona has given us all: Mammina suits me down to the ground, while Giorgio really is the President.”

      Palma joined in the laughter, going on with the list.

      “And Lojacono really is the Chinaman, I challenge anyone to give him a better name. Romano can’t be anything but Hulk, because of how fast he loses his temper: maybe one of these days he’ll actually turn green. And Alex is an authentic Calamity Jane, always busy cleaning that Beretta of hers.”

      Ottavia nodded.

      “That’s why we have to go on solving the cases that turn up in the precinct, chief. We need this place. It would mean the end for us, if they split us up and sent us out as relief staff for other precincts. We’d lose our will to work, and probably even to live.”

      The commissario threw both arms wide.

      “Certain cases, though, can’t be solved by skill or even deductive reasoning. We’re not in a detective novel, you know, where all the clues line up at the end. Reality is much more complicated. In reality, every so often you need a stroke of luck, otherwise you just come up empty-handed.”

      Palma wouldn’t have bet a single euro on it, and yet in just a few minutes’ time, Ottavia’s phone was going to ring, she was going to answer it, and her face was suddenly going to light up.

      The stroke of luck was on its way.

      XIV

      What had happened was that Lojacono and Di Nardo had attempted to strike up one last fruitless contact with a small crowd of foreign women standing in a piazzetta, caught up in a rapt conversation in who knows what language.

      The two police officers had figured out by now that they needed to plan their approach with care, because if they went over together, only the girl they’d spoken to at the beginning would stick around; the others would fly away like a flock of pigeons at the sound of a handclap. As for the one they had interviewed, she gave a couple of monosyllabic grunts at most, pretending she didn’t speak Italian, shrugging her shoulders in a show of innocence and hurrying away as quickly as she could.

      And so they had come up with the following approach. Alex would walk over to the cluster of women, looking around wildly as if uncertain as to quite where she was. She’d ask directions, and then inquire as to whether any of them were interested in work as a housekeeper. Then Lojacono would show up, pretending to be Di Nardo’s husband who had finally found a parking spot for their car, and he’d say that a coworker of his had mentioned a young woman who was especially good at cleaning houses, only he just couldn’t remember her name, but what he did know was that she’d stopped working because she was pregnant. Did they happen to know who that was? Maybe she’d delivered her baby and now she was looking for a position.

      With this little shuck-and-jive skit, they’d at least managed to stir a bland interest among the women, and to prevent them from taking to their heels the instant they sussed out their real identity. In spite of that, they hadn’t managed to dredge up any useful information. Not even their skills at reaching the innermost thoughts of their interlocutors, a talent they’d honed in many lengthy interview sessions with witnesses and suspects, had done any good. If that young woman was from around here, no one seemed to know her. Which was odd because the community of immigrant women from Eastern Europe seemed pretty tight-knit.

      It was late afternoon by the time they decided to stop and get something to eat. They’d gone into a bar and taken seats around a tiny table, and now they were silently consuming a sandwich and an espresso. Lojacono reflected on their methods.

      “If you ask me, we’re going about this wrong,” he said, at last. “We ought to be searching through the professional associations, the jobs offices, the placement agencies. After all, what do we know about this girl? That she’s from Eastern Europe and that she was pregnant.”

      Alex chewed, swallowed, and said:

      “That maybe she was pregnant. We can’t be certain, because the priest never saw her. Maybe she was asking on a friend’s behalf, or for who knows whom.”

      Lojacono nodded.

      “Or else she had simply been seized by a doubt of a theological nature.”

      Alex played along.

      “Maybe she was a nun, and she was just ashamed to let anyone know that she didn’t know the answer to the question.”

      “Maybe it was the pope, in a really good disguise, out to test the priest’s knowledge.”

      “Maybe the priest just fell asleep in the confessional and dreamed the whole thing.”

      “Maybe . . . ”

      “Excuse me, Lieutenant. But who is it you’re looking for?”

      The two police officers turned around. The voice belonged to the woman who was sitting behind the cash register, a fat woman with heavy makeup and her hair pulled up in a towering beehive.

      They were pretty far from the police station, in a place where Lojacono, personally, had never been before, so he was surprised that they’d been identified.

      “Pardon me, but do we know each other?” he inquired.

      A cunning expression appeared on the woman’s face.