33. Card Thirty-Six
CARD THIRTY-SIX
VALERIA
The last page is not in the third person.
This document has been prepared in the format used by Isabella D’Amato because she taught it to me by dying and leaving it in a box.
I am aware that a confession to fifteen homicides is not destroyed, is not weeded, is not lost, and does not stop existing when the person in it stops existing.
I am aware that it will be indexed and that the index will be kept and that in fifty years it will be somewhere, in a building, with a number on it.
That is the entire reason I have written it.
On the second page of Appendix A there is a card in my mother’s hand in which she wrote down what my mother said, in my mother’s words, and did not improve them. Her name is at the top of it. Annamaria Serra. Aged 31. Two rooms off Chalkstone Avenue. Worked nights at the laundry.
She is not in anything else. There is no grave with her name on it, there was no service, the rooms are a car park, and the only two people who ever wrote her down are dead.
I have been looking for thirty-one years and there is nothing, and I could not put her anywhere myself, because I have spent my life making sure that nothing I touch is ever written down.
So I have put her here.
I understand exactly what I have done. I have made my mother permanent by attaching her to fifteen bodies. I have asked myself whether there was a better way of doing it and there was, and it was to be a different man, and I did not manage it.
This is not remorse. I have been trying to find some since Friday morning and what I have instead is a very clear view of the arithmetic.
Fourteen men are dead who would not otherwise be.
Nine women are alive who would probably not otherwise be.
I am not able to make those two numbers into a sentence and I have stopped trying.
And there is a boy of nineteen who is in neither column and never has been, and who is the only one of the fifteen that anybody asked me for, and I want somebody reading this in fifty years to notice that it is the one I got wrong.
One last thing, and then I have finished.
On Friday morning I knelt down on a kitchen floor on Bond Street and asked a boy of nine whether he wanted to go, and he thought about it for a long time and then he asked me if it was because he had done something.
I have wanted, every day since I was nine years old, for somebody to ask me that question so that I could say no.
Nobody ever did. So I asked him.
It is the only good thing I have ever done and it took me thirty-one years and I would like it recorded that it cost nothing.
It took eleven seconds and I did not have to be a better man to do it, I only had to get down on the floor, and any one of the people in this file could have done it for me at any point between 1995 and now, and none of them did, and I do not blame a single one of them, because I did not do it for anybody else either for thirty-one years.
That is the finding. That is the whole finding.
Somebody ask the next one.
Fabrizio Serra 28 August 2026
Underneath, in his own hand, the last thing on the page:
OUTCOME: I do not get to fill this one in either. F.S.
We come out onto Washington Street at ten to five.
Lorenzo stands on the steps and does not go down them.
“He has been in that house since I was fourteen,” he says.
“I know.”
“I gave him a biscuit.”
“I know.”
And my husband sits down on the step of the Providence police department in a four-thousand-dollar coat, and puts his head in his hands, and I sit down next to him on the cold stone and do not tell him it is all right, because I promised him on Friday that I would not.
After a while he says, “The thing about the biscuit is I did not even like him.”
“What?”
His voice is completely destroyed. “I gave him a biscuit because I was showing off. And he has carried it round for thirty-one years and put it in a police statement.”
“Yes.”
“There was nothing in it. Valeria, there was nothing in it.”
“I know,” I say. “That is what he is telling you. That it does not have to cost anything.”
I go back to Hope Street at seven.
Renata is sitting on a kitchen chair in a room with nothing else in it, in front of a piano, with the light coming across.
I tell her all of it and I do not arrange any of it, and I tell her the paragraph he wrote about her, word for word.
She listens with her hands in her lap.
Then she says: “Of course he did.”
“Renata.”
“Do not.” She waves it off, and she is not crying.
“He is not going to change on a Tuesday. He has never once asked anybody for anything.” She looks at the piano.
“He has taken it off me. Yes. And he has also made it so that I get to be eighty-one in a room with my mother’s piano in it instead of in a cell, and both of those are the same act, and I am going to have to live in a house with both of them. ”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to write to him,” Renata Alba says.
“He will not answer.”
“He answered once.” She almost smiles. “He telephoned me on Friday morning and used eleven words. That is a fifteen-year correspondence with an eleven-word reply, and I have decided that is a rate I can live with.”
I drive home in the dark.
The cards are still on the kitchen table where I left them four days ago, thirty-five of them, and the elastic band is in the pocket of my coat where it has been since Friday.
I sit down and I take out a pen.
My own notebooks are stacked at my elbow, every page folded once down the middle with a thumbnail, as my mother taught me, which is a fold you can undo.
I do not touch card thirty-five. The blank stays blank, because it is not mine to close.
Instead I take a fresh card off the top of the pack that Isabella D’Amato bought in nineteen eighty-something and never got through, and I rule a box on it with a straightedge, badly, because I have never done it before, and because a ruled line is one you cannot take back.
And at the top, I write:
Woman: SERRA, Annamaria. 31. Two rooms off Chalkstone. Laundry, nights.
Recorded by: Valeria Rinaldi. 28 August 2026.
I did not know her. I am writing her down because there are now two places in the world with her name in them, and one of them is a homicide file, and a person should not have to be a murder to be remembered.
This is the other one.
Then I put the card at the front of the box, in front of card one, where nobody has ever put anything.
And I go upstairs to my husband.