Tuesday

At police headquarters, things went on as usual, even without Rocco. Officer Casella was on duty at the front entrance, Deruta and D’Intino were struggling to deal with a lost ID or two, Deputy Inspector Caterina Rispoli was on the telephone in the little ground-floor office, Antonio Scipioni was busy taking crime reports. Italo Pierron seemed to be the only one who missed his boss. Standing in the doorway, he was looking into Rocco’s empty office. The desk, the locked window, the bookshelf with the books of law that had never been cracked, the crucifix on the wall, the photo of the president of Italy, and the calendar. He only happened to notice it for the first time on that sunshiny spring day. The calendar was stuck at the eighth of September of the year before, the day that Rocco had first begun duty at Aosta police headquarters. The deputy chief had never so much as looked at the calendar. Many were the times that he’d told Italo that as far as he was concerned, each day had been like any other for years now. And aside from whether it was hot or cold, he couldn’t detect any other substantial differences.

“What do you have under your arm?”

Italo whipped around. Standing in the middle of the hallway was Caterina.

“Nothing, I was just taking a look at the office.” He glanced down at the construction paper that he had rolled up in a tube. “Oh, you mean this? It’s just something I wanted to hang up. Sort of a joke.”

Caterina pointed at the roll, her curiosity piqued. “Well, what is it?”

“You’ll see in just a minute.” He walked over to the wall next to the deputy chief’s office door. He unrolled the construction paper; then he pulled a pack of colorful thumbtacks out of his shirt pocket. He had a hammer tucked into his belt. He tapped the tacks into the construction paper on the wall. Then he stepped back to admire his work. “What do you say, is it straight?”

Caterina studied it. “Yes. I think it is. But what is it?” And she stepped closer and started reading.

Italo had divided the sheet of construction paper into five large rectangles that represented a ranking of Rocco Schiavone’s multiple pains in the ass, from sixth to tenth degree. By now everyone in the office was familiar with that list. It rose from sixth ranking, an array of milder annoyances, all the way to the top, tenth degree, where the very worst pain in the ass of them all perched solitary and cruel: an open case.

Caterina broke out laughing. “So you know them all?”

“The ones I know I wrote down here. Then, as we go along, we’ll come up with others, and we can keep adding them until we’ve devised a complete overall view of the matter.”

“Have you tried calling him?”