Rocco smiled and bent over to help his partner back up. “Good job, Italo! I knew you wouldn’t fail me! Albè, you owe me dinner! Give me a hand here!”

“Promissio boni viri est obligatio,” said Albert, quoting an old Latin saw about honoring your obligations. “And to think I lost by just fifty-five hundredths of a second, damn it all!”

Together they picked up the policeman and hauled him out of the morgue. They laid him down on a bench in the hallway.

“Now what are we going to do? Wait for him to wake up?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’ll be up and on his feet in two minutes,” said Rocco. They left him stretched out on the bench with his feet elevated, and turned around and went back into the autopsy room.

This time, Rocco focused on the body.

Mimmo Cuntrera’s corpse was a perfectly normal corpse, something that, sad to say, Rocco had already seen dozens of times before. The off note was that the body was already in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.

“I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” said the deputy chief. “Well, I mean, he’s a little bit rotten. Where is this horror flick?”

Alberto Fumagalli smiled. He went over to the table beside the gurney and picked up a white T-shirt. He picked it up, as if to show off how perfectly white it had come out in the wash. “Well?” he asked.

“Well, what?” He was starting to get on Rocco’s nerves.

“They brought him to me from the prison with this T-shirt on him. A white T-shirt, made in China, if you ask me. Cotton. And it was still on him when I laid him on the gurney.”

“I continue to fail to see what’s so odd about it.”

“Look here.”

The stitches around the sleeves had been torn open at several points.

“So it’s ripped. So what?”

“It’s torn.”

“In Rome, we’d say it was ripped.”

“Well, you’re in Aosta, so you can say that it’s torn.”

“Okay, all right, Alberto, it’s torn. What about it?”

“Before I put him in the refrigerated drawer last night, it wasn’t torn. So what happened?” The medical examiner’s question hung suspended in the silence of the morgue.

“I don’t know. Was he not dead?”

“Domenico Cuntrera was deader than Julius Caesar.”

“Did someone sneak in here last night in a state of delirium and tear up his T-shirt?”

“No. There’s only one answer.”

“He’s a zombie?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, Rocco. He’s not a zombie. This body swelled up on me.”

“Isn’t that what all corpses do?”

“Let me try to make myself clear. This corpse blew up on me to a ridiculous extent and then, in just a few more hours, it deflated.”

“And what does that make you think?”