32. The Subject
THE SUBJECT
VALERIA
The piano goes in at eleven minutes past ten on Tuesday.
It takes four men and a strap and the doorway on Hope Street is narrower than the one on Doyle Avenue, so they take the door off its hinges to get it through, and Renata Alba stands on the pavement in her blue cardigan and watches a stranger remove a door for her and does not say one word.
They put it against the inside wall where the light comes across at four o’clock.
Before anything.
When they have gone, she goes and stands in front of it with her hands at her sides for a while, and then she opens the lid and plays four notes in the bottom octave, and three of them are dead.
“There,” she says.
And that is all she says about it, and I make everybody tea and get in the way exactly as promised, and at twenty past twelve my telephone goes.
It is Keane.
“Mrs Rinaldi,” he says, and his voice is wrong. “Is your husband with you?”
“He is at the house. What has happened?”
“A Detective Sergeant Marisa Padovano of the Providence police has been at my office since half past ten.” He stops.
“She has asked me to identify a ledger line and I have identified it, and I have telephoned you before I telephoned him because he is going to want somebody in the room when he hears it and it is not going to be me.”
“Martin. Say it.”
“Fabrizio Serra walked into the Providence police department at eight o’clock this morning,” Keane says, “and confessed to fifteen murders.”
He drives, and he does not turn the radio on, and once, at the lights on Broad Street, he says, “Eight o’clock,” and then nothing else for the rest of it.
Padovano is thirty-eight or so and she does not waste our time.
“He came in on his own, no counsel, and he has declined counsel three times in writing,” she says.
“He gave his name at the desk, and he sat in reception for forty minutes with a folder on his knee because we did not take him seriously. When somebody finally came out, he handed over the folder and said, I am going to need you to read the whole thing before you ask me anything, because it is in order and it will not make sense out of order.”
“And is it?” Lorenzo says.
“It is the most orderly document I have seen in nineteen years.” Padovano turns it round on the table. “It is ninety-one pages. It is typed. He has ruled boxes on it by hand with a straightedge, and he has done it in the third person.”
And there it is, in a format I could recognize across a room in the dark, because I have been handling it for four days.
Subject: the boy from card 35.
Padovano lets us read it in an interview room with a uniform outside and two cups of coffee that go cold.
Subject: the boy from card 35.
Note on this heading. The subject has no card of his own.
Isabella D’Amato did not open one, and the reason is set out on card 35 and is a good one, and this document is not a complaint about it.
But it means that between 4 February 1996 and today the subject has not existed on any piece of paper held by any person or body, and it is necessary for what follows that he exist on one.
This is that piece of paper. It should be filed with card 35, which is attached at Appendix A, and card 35 should not be separated from it.
8 December 1995. Aged 9. The subject is in the doorway of the back room of two rooms off Chalkstone Avenue while a woman from the Isabella D’Amato fund sits with his mother in the kitchen for one hour.
He watches the front door for the whole hour.
He is not able to hear what is said. When the woman goes his mother sits down on the floor with her back against the cupboard, which she has never done, and stays there, and he does not ask her why because he has already worked out that asking makes things worse and he is right about that and he will still believe it thirty-one years later.
12 December 1995. Aged 9. A man comes to the door.
The subject is taken out of the house. He is told nothing.
He believes, from the fact that his mother does not come and does not follow the car and does not stand in the road, that she has been asked whether she wants him and has said no.
He will believe this every day until 24 August 2026.
He is wrong. See card 35.
Same night. Aged 9. He is put in a hall in a large house, and a boy of fourteen is brought downstairs to look at him.
He counts the exits in the first two seconds because that is what he does in a new room, and he will do it in every room for the rest of his life. The boy of fourteen thinks he is shy.
The boy of fourteen takes him round every door in that house at midnight and tells him which ones stick. Nobody has ever given him information for nothing before, and he does not know what it is going to cost, so he carries it very carefully, and he is still carrying it.
He is given a biscuit. He does not eat it. He is asked when he is going back and he says it is better if he knows the day, and the boy of fourteen laughs and says nobody goes back from here.
The subject wishes to record that this was the single kindest sentence that has ever been said to him and that it was said carelessly by a child who has spent thirty-one years not knowing it, and that the subject has never corrected him, and that this document is the correction.
Lorenzo has both hands flat on the table on either side of nothing, and he is not making any sound at all.
4 February 1996. Aged 9. His mother dies.
He is not told for eleven days. When he is told, he asks whether there is going to be a service and is told no, and he says all right, and goes upstairs.
He does not cry. He is unable to and will remain unable to and has never regarded this as a hardship until quite recently.
March 2011. Aged 24. Card 19. R.A.
The subject goes to a back door on Doyle Avenue on the 14th and asks the woman whether the door sticks.
She says yes. It has stuck for nineteen years.
He returns on the 17th with a plane and a chisel and takes it off its hinges and does it properly on two chairs in the yard and sweeps the shavings, and she gives him a cup of tea and asks whether he is from the parish.
Between the 14th and the 17th her husband dies.
The subject wishes to be clear that the order of those three sentences is the order in which they happened and that he understood what he was doing on the 14th, and on the 16th, and while he was sweeping the shavings on the 17th.
He notes that she has written to him fifteen times and that he has not answered, and that this was cowardice and not discretion.
He further notes, and requires this to be recorded even though it does not assist him: no other person requested, encouraged, commissioned, suggested or had any knowledge of any of the fourteen.
Any document which appears to say otherwise was written by a person who had no idea what she was writing into and who was, at the material time, being paid money by the subject under a false description.
The second shot at Santa Caterina was not in the instruction. The subject bought one shot. The man on the tower saw a second target stand up into his scope and took him for free, and the room on Nepperhan Avenue is what the subject thinks of gifts.
2012. Aged 26. Daniel Orsi. 19.
This one is not on a card and never was, and it is the reason the number in this document is fifteen and not fourteen, and I have put it here rather than at the front because that is where it happened and I am not going to arrange it.
The subject is asked by S. Rinaldi to frighten a boy of nineteen. The words used were: frighten him, put a scratch on the car, make him understand there is a family. The subject agrees in under two seconds and asks no questions at all.
The subject wishes the following to be understood.
He was twenty-six years old. He had lived in that house since he was nine.
He had been told to do a very great number of things in seventeen years and he had done all of them and he had never once been asked for anything by anybody, and when S.
Rinaldi asked him instead of telling him, the subject was so pleased about it that he did not enquire what he was agreeing to.
He would like it recorded that he can remember the exact place they were standing.
Daniel Orsi died four days later. It was not intended by S. Rinaldi, and it was not intended by the subject.
The subject wishes to record what he has never said to anybody: that he did not go home afterwards and think about the boy. He went home and thought about whether he had done it well enough to be asked again. He is aware that this is the worst sentence in this document, and he has left it in.
S. Rinaldi should not be charged. He asked for a frightening and he got a death, and a man who asks for a frightening is not a murderer, he is a fool with a telephone, and there are a great many of those and I have never removed one.
Some months afterward the subject asked S. Rinaldi whether Daniel Orsi had a mother, and was told the question had not come up. He did not ask again for fourteen years. The answer is yes. She is alive, she is in Cranston, her name is at Appendix D, and somebody should go and sit in her kitchen.
This is the only death in this file that the subject did not choose.
I read that paragraph three times.
Then I put my hand over my mouth, because Renata Alba is sitting in a house on Hope Street this afternoon with three dead notes in the bottom octave and a letter in her cardigan pocket, and a man has just spent one paragraph of a ninety-one-page confession making certain that if she ever posts it, it will not be believed.
He has taken the decision off her.
Even as the very last thing.
The elastic on the subject’s wrist is a child’s, purple, from one of the nine kitchens.
On the fourteenth of March this year the woman’s daughter took it out of her own hair when he got up to go and asked him to keep it.
It is recorded here because in thirty-one years it is the only thing anybody ever asked him to keep, and because he wore it five months in a house full of people to see whether one of them would ask, and nobody asked.
Money.
The line in the Providence property ledger described as maintenance, legacy sites was created by I. D’Amato in 1979 and was used by her for the fund. After her death it was left in the books for fifteen years because nobody looked at it.
In 2011 the subject increased it to fund nine standing orders.
He did this by forging the authorization of a person who did not know, has never known, and could not have known, and who signs approximately fifteen hundred ledger lines every March without reading them because that is what a man in that position does.
The subject stole from Lorenzo D’Amato for fifteen years. Lorenzo D’Amato was unaware. The accountant M. Keane raised the anomaly internally in 2011 and was told, by the subject, in terms, that it had been dealt with at a level above him, and was thereafter deceived on the point annually.
Lorenzo gets up and walks to the wall and stands with his forehead against it.
“Every word of that is a lie, and it is going to hold, because it is the only version where anybody is left standing and he has built it so it cannot be pulled apart without four other people going down with it.” His voice is thick. “He is in a cell, and he has still done it again.”
“Yes,” I say.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Nothing,” I say. “That is the whole point of it.”