The youth was shaking his stupid shaved head and mumbling something incoherent. What did you have to do to a child to allow him to become like this? Ignore him. That was probably all it took. That and the bad luck of giving birth to him in the first place.
She tried again, probing gently at first, then with more insistence. All she got were monosyllables. After twenty minutes, she had established that Sandro knew nothing about tourist muggings. All he knew is that when a patrol came to move him and his friends off the bridge, he had told the two cops they were cowards, hassling him and his friends but not bothering about rapists.
“What rapist?” asked Caterina automatically, wishing she hadn’t bothered.
“Maybe not a rapist. I don’t know.”
Which was why she shouldn’t have bothered asking.
“When was this?”
“On Tuesday, April 4.”
The precision seemed uncharacteristic, and caught her attention. “You remember the date?”
“It was three days after my birthday.”
“Happy birthday. How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“An adult now. What time did you see this incident?”
“Around three, four in the morning.”
“Where?”
“That piazza with the bar on the corner, you know. Trees. Behind Vicolo del Moro.”
“Are you talking about Piazza de’ Renzi?”
“I don’t remember the name.”
“Can you remember the name of a bar or anything?”
Sandro cleaned his nose with the back of his hand. Caterina fished a packet of Kleenex from her bag. “Use a tissue, for Christ’s sake, child. Clean your hand.”
He wiped his hand across his sleeve and said, “There’s a bar with two umbrellas. The bartender’s an asshole. I totally tagged the front of his bar.”
“You spray-painted his walls? I’m not going to follow up on this, so just say yes or no.”
“He caught me doing a throw-up on a wall once. It wasn’t even his wall, but he thought he’d intervene. He reported me to the cops, but not before he had tried to blind me spraying the aerosol into my eyes. So we’ve been targeting his bar.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
They were interrupted by shouting and curses and trampling feet that announced the arrival of Grattapaglia and three more youths. Two girls, no older than sixteen, and a kid who looked about fifteen.
They all wore tattoos and metal studs and rings on their faces, and as soon as they entered the basement, they seemed to converge on Caterina. They were aggressive, but they crowded her also like kids around a teacher, or greedy toddlers around a mother with candy. Two of them were clutching bottles of beer by the neck.
“You didn’t take the drink away?” Caterina asked Grattapaglia, who was standing with one foot against the wall.
“You afraid they’ll use the bottles as weapons? These creatures?”
A greatly pierced and abscessed girl walked with a sideways lurch, as if the bottle of Ceres she held in her hand weighed heavily.
Caterina said, “OK. Both of you put your bottles on the floor. Both of you.”
She stood patiently as a torrent of abuse flowed toward her, moving back and forth a few steps trying to show it did not bother her, but it did.
When they had stopped cursing her, they looked at each other for new ideas. Then the young boy detached himself from the group, picked up a beer bottle, and dangled it at his side. He went up to Caterina, leaned closer, then belched loudly in her face, opening his mouth wide.
It was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
Grattapaglia took his foot off the wall, stepped forward two paces and, with a lazy, sweeping slow-motion movement of his arm, slapped the kid across the face. He opened his fingers at the last moment to lessen the blow, but the kid still fell sideways as if shot. The beer bottle dropped straight to the floor and cracked and rolled.
The pierced girl came running over, screaming. She knelt down beside him and cradled his face. The other two shuffled around, bumping into each other like blinded animals in a pen, unable to decide whether to stay or go. The girl began to cry, rubbing the back of her hand across her perforated nose.
Caterina was beside Grattapaglia now, her lips drawn back, the tendons on her neck throbbing. “What the fuck was that? The child is about fifteen, younger maybe.”
“I hardly touched him. It was a slap, not a punch.”
“That’s not what you do to a child.”
“He’s bigger than you,” said Grattapaglia.
She looked at the youth whose head the girl was trying to lift and cradle. The scarlet weal on the boy’s face showed the white outline of Grattapaglia’s fingers.
“I’m going to sue you fuckers,” said the boy, pushing the girl away and struggling into a standing position.
“That’s likely,” said Grattapaglia. “You really look like the sort of person who has a personal lawyer on a retainer.”
“My parents will sue for me. When they hear this, they’ll sue. My father has contacts. When I tell them, they’ll… they’ll…” He pointed to Caterina. “What’s your name? You’re going to jail, puttana.”
Caterina tried to touch the child’s face, but he pushed her hand roughly away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“The fuck you are. I’m suing.”
“Stop it,” said Caterina. “Nobody’s getting sued.”
She had had enough. “Sovrintendente, get these kids out of here. Put them back wherever you found them, send them to social services. Just so that you and they get the hell out of my sight. Now!”
“I thought they might have seen something.”
“Sandro stays with me,” said Caterina. She looked over at his white face. He had put his thumb in his mouth. When he saw her looking, he started biting at the nail, rubbing his teeth, rolling his eyes as if the police exasperated rather than terrified him.
To her surprise, Sovrintendente Grattapaglia did what she asked.
When the clumping up the stairs and babble of voices had died away, she repeated her question. “What did you see?”
“I already said. I saw this old guy try to grab a girl. I saw him do it. Then she lashed out and punched him and ran away. And the old guy fell and didn’t get up.”
“How do you know he didn’t get up?”
“I went over to him. I was going to give him a kicking, and I don’t have a problem saying that. But when I got there I could see he was, you know, out of it.”
“Do you mean unconscious?”
“Almost. His eyeballs were sort of swimming around and then they floated right up into his head, out of sight. Like this.” Sandro rolled his eyes around.
“I don’t need the visuals, thanks. Did the man say anything?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘Call her back.’ Amazing he could say that.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s all I heard.”
“Did he have an accent?”
Sandro scrunched up his face. “Can’t say. His voice was all husky and sort of gurgly. Maybe he had an accent. What sort?”
“Forget it.” She did not want to start suggesting details to him. “Did you call an ambulance?”
“For a rapist?”
“I see you’re quick to condemn, Sandro. Just like those people who look down on you and your friends.”
“Someone tried to rape my girlfriend Elvira.”
“That was the older girl in here just now? The one with the red hair extension?”
“What’s a hair extension?”
“Your girlfriend’s string of red hair. It’s not her own.”
“I thought it was dyed. Yeah, Elvira got attacked once, but didn’t report it.”
“You said tried. Did she get raped or not?”
“She said no. She said one grabbed her from behind, the other started ripping at her clothes. She said she fought and spat. When she screamed she was HIV positive, they ran off.”
“When was this?”
“A few months ago.”
“Where?”
“Monte Mario.”