Puppies. Maurizio De giovanni

berating God for failing to come to her aid.

      She’d asked a simple, terrible question.

      Don Vito had made an effort to gather additional information. With the practical spirit that always guided him, he had probed for a crack in the poor girl’s armor, trying to understand just what was going on, and how he could possibly come to her assistance. But that’s not what she wanted.

      She wanted to know if she could expect to go to hell.

      She wanted to know if she would be cursed to eternal damnation for what she was going to have to do. If God Almighty Himself would be able to pardon the sin that she was inevitably going to have to commit.

      Even a father confessor with Don Vito’s limited experience had realized that he was walking on eggshells. If he had tried to step out of the confession booth, take a look around to give the silhouette of that face a color, an expression, and even a name, he would certainly have caused that woman to flee. There was nothing he could do but try to prolong the dialogue in the hope of extracting a few more words.

      He had told her that there was no sin, no fault on earth that God cannot pardon and redeem. That no sin must necessarily be irretrievable. That however grim the situation, there was surely a way to remediate it, and that he, Don Vito, would be delighted to help her, if only she would tell him her name, or where she lived.

      I live right nearby, Father, the girl had replied. Right nearby. And I’ll give it some thought, I promise you that. I’ll give it some thought and I’ll come back to see you. Tomorrow or the next day.

      The priest had made the mistake of imparting absolution, before hastily emerging from the confession booth. By the time he emerged, she had already disappeared.

      He had returned to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli every day for a week, even after Don Salvatore was back on his feet and had fully resumed his normal duties. He hoped that the young woman might come around again, as she had promised, but he hadn’t seen her.

      There were so many whom hunger or need drove to the parish church. Santa Maria degli Angeli stood at the center of a mixed quarter, which included commercial and residential streets, but also an impenetrable maze of narrow lanes—the vicoli—where all manner of criminal pursuits flourished. Don Vito couldn’t free himself of the terrible sensation that something bad had happened to the young woman. That voice formulating the question continued to echo in his head, and the worst thing was that he couldn’t speak of it to a soul, because he was bound by the secret of the confessional.

      The evening previous, he had finally gone to talk to Father Guarini, who’d listened to him with great attention: his conversations with his spiritual father had the same value as a confession, and they were therefore every bit as much bound by the seal of secrecy. The elderly priest had lingered in a lengthy silence after Don Vito had finished his story, then Guarini had told him that, if in his conscience he had sensed impending danger, if there was something grievous that could still be averted, then he absolutely had to find some way to intervene.

      He, who had always counseled reflection first and foremost, was now urging him to act, and hastily.

      The second that the digital clock on the nightstand said it was six, Don Vito leapt out of bed.

      V

      There had been a time when Officer Giovanni Guida was a real policeman, one with legitimate career aspirations. Then he had married, fathered three children, put on weight, and veered toward more comfortable ambitions.

      This, at least, was how he preferred to think of it. In actual fact, it was a slightly too-lax attitude, a lack of combativeness, and a healthy dose of inborn laziness that had finally provoked his superiors to relieve him of duties where he was more likely than not to cause harm and, eventually, to transfer him to the Pizzofalcone precinct, which, rumor had it, was about to be shuttered.

      At first Guida, assigned to stand watch—or sit watch, really—at the front entrance and to accept crime reports, had done his best to confirm the worst that everybody seemed to think of him, spending most of his day with his shoes propped up on the desk and the sports newspaper spread out in front of him. A few months earlier, the new investigative team had come on line, replacing the notorious Bastards of Pizzofalcone, the four police officers who had decided to set up shop on their own, peddling confiscated narcotics. The case had aroused quite the uproar and the press had taken cowardly advantage of the opportunity to sling shit into the fan. As a result, the higher-ups in law enforcement had made clear, loudly and in chorus, their utter disgust for the dirty cops—some of them a bit hypocritically, seeing that they weren’t without sins of their own—and they’d called for the elimination of the venerable little police station and its precinct located in the heart of the city.

      Actually, Guida suspected that Pizzofalcone had been slated for elimination for some time now, Bastards or no Bastards. Close to police headquarters as it was, crushed between two major precincts like San Gaetano and Torretta, its existence didn’t really make all that much sense. And so, when replacements had been found for the arrested officers, it immediately struck him as obvious that the criterion for recruitment had been the same as the one that had led to his transfer: relegate to that precinct all those employees who could be sacrificed elsewhere, and perhaps with tremendous relief.

      It had in fact been one of these new arrivals, none other than Lieutenant Lojacono, who on his first day of service in the precinct had harshly upbraided him for his slovenliness, as if placing him face-to-face with his own image in a mirror, making him feel like the very emblem of degradation and dissolution, uselessness made flesh.

      Since then, Guida had never again showed up looking slovenly, not even when he was certain that no one could possibly be observing him. He’d even gone on a diet, and he’d started carefully shaving the scattered hair that still grew at the base of his gleaming skull. His wife, after overcoming an initial phase of bafflement and suspicion that Guida might have found himself a girlfriend, had been delighted with the transformation, and now, at night, after those three devils they had for children had finally gone off to sleep, she rewarded him with a renewed enthusiasm in their sexual relations.

      Palma, the young new commissario, had already paid him a number of compliments. The only one who didn’t seem to notice the change was, to his immense chagrin, none other than Lojacono. But sooner or later, Guida felt certain, he’d win accolades from the lieutenant, too. It was just a matter of time.

      One of the key factors was punctuality. A good front-entrance guard had to be at his post earlier than all the others, he had to constitute an anchor for the rest of the structure. That was fundamental. And so Guida, to avoid traffic, had developed the habit of showing up for work even before the clock struck seven.

      That morning he was lining up the various forms for reporting crimes on the counter when a shadow fell over the daylight from the front entrance: it was Hulk, hurrying in with what looked like a doll cradled in his arms.

      Guida had no special fondness for Warrant Officer Romano, a cop with a perennially grim expression, and he’d heard terrible stories about him. But what he spotted in Romano’s eyes was bewilderment, profound concern, and, above all, a desperate need for help. He emerged from his booth and walked toward him.

      “Guida, Guida,” Romano shouted, “it’s a baby. A real, live baby, and it was in the . . . oh my God, it was in the garbage, you hear me? In the garbage!”

      The officer, who had held babies in his arms for more nights than he cared to remember, carefully took the baby from Romano’s hands.

      “Give it here, Roma’, give it to me. Let’s take it upstairs to your offices, that way we can keep it warm. Actually, now that I look at it, it strikes me as a baby girl, unless they dressed her all backwards.”

      Romano shot a glance at the little bundle and only now seemed to notice the pink onesie and the bib upon which a little pink embroidered puppy, looking girlish and with a ribbon between its ears, was winking a long-lashed eye.

      Upstairs, no one was in yet. They turned on the lights. Romano took off his jacket and Guida lay