trying to kill her,” Alex weighed in. “Otherwise, as is far too often the case, they would have tied her up in a bag and tossed her in some dump on the outskirts of town, where no one would ever have seen her again. No, they wanted this baby girl to live. Or, at the very least, they hoped she would.”
“Di Nardo is right,” said Ottavia. “She was clean, she’d recently been bathed; at that age, babies are constantly soiling themselves. And let’s not forget the clothing that she was wearing, a onesie and an embroidered bib: quality products, you might even say, luxury items. It was clear that someone was taking care of her. She wasn’t a newborn baby being dumped in the garbage, without a second thought.
Pisanelli scratched his head.
“I remember one time, long ago, the mentally disabled daughter of a local lawyer gave birth to twins and dumped them in the toilet; a delivery boy from a nearby grocery store who’d been making home deliveries had gotten her pregnant. No one had even noticed that she was pregnant. She was a very fat girl. The girl’s parents were wealthy, well-educated people, but no one had even noticed what was happening.”
Aragona’s jaw dropped.
“Twins? And nobody noticed? She must have been a barrage balloon, this girl! And she flushed them down the toilet? Didn’t it get stopped up? Who found out it had happened, the plumber?”
Palma helplessly threw both arms wide.
“Aragona, you really make a person want to shoot you, I’m not kidding. Enough yakking, let’s get to work. Loja’, I think you might be right, but seeing that we don’t have anything else, let’s get on the phone to all the hospitals and get lists of all the babies delivered in the last . . . let’s say the last four days. Only baby girls, of course, or fraternal twins if one was a girl. Then we can go door to door around here and see if we happen to notice anything out of the ordinary.”
Aragona emitted a faint moan.
“But why can’t we use the phone? We’ll ask for the phone numbers and . . . ”
Palma gaped in disbelief.
“Oh right, so that whoever happened to abandon her can just say: thanks for asking, Officer Aragona, everything’s fine here. We commend you for your courtesy and kindness, but now we’d rather you go somewhere else and arrest some real criminals, instead of bothering honest taxpayers like ourselves.”
“Sorry, chief,” Aragona objected, “but how can they claim to be honest if they’ve just abandoned a baby girl right next to a dumpster? They could never tell such a bald-faced lie!”
Palma ran his eyes around the squad room, at his wits’ end.
“Please, someone get him out of my sight, otherwise I’ll wind up on the front page of all the newspapers: Police Commissario Murders Corporal by Wringing His Neck; The Rest of the Precinct Squad All Testify That It Was a Justified Mercy Killing. No, let’s get busy. I’ll call the investigating magistrate and ask police headquarters if they’ll give us an extra squad car to offer support. Ottavia, do me a favor, try to reach Romano on his cell phone and find out if it looks like the baby girl is going to survive.”
Just then, the phone on Pisanelli’s desk started to ring.
VII
Clutching tight to the railing of the narrow little balcony.
Taking deep breaths in an effort to regain his calm.
Letting his eyes slide over unimportant details: the thousand cigarette butts in the untended little garden below, the tarnished aluminum frames of the half-open windows, the distant voices of a couple of male nurses chatting and laughing in the courtyard, just a few dozen yards away.
Trying to fathom the reasons for this new tempest in his soul.
One of the reasons Giorgia had left him was certainly the issue of children. Because—and Romano was more than positive that this was the case—his wife had started to distance herself from him well before that regrettable moment of rage that had driven him to hit her. It couldn’t have been his hand—that momentary loss of self-control that Giorgia herself must have known was utterly trivial, unimportant—that had put an end to their love story.
On that subject, too, however, Francesco would have had a thing or two to say, if there had been anything like an explicit and ongoing dialogue between them instead of that sea of silence that had, first, swept around them, and then ineluctably drowned them. If only, my love, you had sat down and looked at me and told me: Fra’, I want a child, I absolutely want it, with every ounce of my soul. If you’d only said that, Romano thought to himself, I would have answered you. And we would have gone to see a doctor, a good one, a top-notch doctor. We would have gone abroad, where you can do all those damned things that are forbidden by law here. We would have signed up for an adoption, been put on a waiting list if a baby refused to come, even with all the treatments imaginable, and so they might have given us a little girl, just like this one, this little girl that someone abandoned next to a dumpster as if she were a piece of trash, just so much garbage.
But no, not even once had Giorgia spoken to him about the children that never came. And yet, when they’d first become a couple, there had been children in their dreams, absolutely. Romano even remembered the fun they’d had imagining who they’d look like, the features they’d doubtless inherit.
This was before the silence. Before that terrible sickness that had killed them.
As the years went by, Francesco had started to feel uneasy whenever he and his wife happened to be around children, especially very small ones. On the street, at the homes of the few friends they socialized with, at restaurants or movie theaters, at the supermarket. They had only to cross paths with a young mother pushing a baby carriage, hear a baby’s wail from the other side of a display rack, or even drive past a school and Giorgia would suddenly fall silent, while he would sense a sudden stab of guilt in his chest that he had no reason to feel, and that therefore irritated him, driving him to fold inward, shutting out the world in a pool of vague, unmotivated melancholy. And then they would make furious, despairing love, as if they were both seeking help to save themselves from a private hell of loneliness, sealed tight against any prospect of salvation.
Romano couldn’t be certain of it, but now that he was on the terrace of the pediatric hospital, it seemed to him that this had been his exact thought when he’d first heard that sobbing peep issuing from the heap of garbage: how different it all would have been, if they’d only had a child. At the very least, now, he would have had an excuse to call her up and talk, and Giorgia couldn’t have avoided it.
A child as a topic of discussion, a point of interest, something tying them together, like a chain to keep his wife anchored to him. What a horrible way to think of a tiny creature, a flesh and blood child struggling for its life. Suddenly he felt guilty toward that minuscule being he had found on the ground, discarded like an old doll.
While he was sunk in these thoughts, a woman poked her head in at the door leading to the internal hallway.
“Excuse me, you’re the policeman, aren’t you? The one who brought in the newborn baby you found in the street?”
Romano thought she looked incredibly youthful. She was small in stature, with a pair of enormous light-blue eyes set in a face free of wrinkles, fair skinned, with a faint voice. Her unkempt blonde hair was barely restrained by a hairclip atop her head. She wore a stethoscope around her neck and a lab coat without a nameplate: instead there was lettering embroidered on the lab coat in bright colorful thread that read: Hi, I’m Doctor Susy.
Francesco nodded, feeling ill at ease for no good reason, as if he’d been caught red-handed doing something wrong. He stood up and extended his hand.
“Francesco Romano, warrant officer. Pizzofalcone police precinct. Yes, that’s right, I’m the one who . . . I mean, yes, I found her. I found her next to a . . . ”
The woman stood looking him in the eyes with the attentive expression of someone trying to make up their mind about something.