Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Read Online Free

different. And that was a good thing.
    For months he hadn’t even been able to talk to her, because of the barrier that Sonia had erected between the two of them. He’d missed his daughter, who wasn’t quite fourteen, with a kind of physical pain, one of the sharpest in his life. Then, little by little, they’d begun to talk on the phone again, and just two months ago he’d found her on his doorstep in the rain, fleeing the umpteenth screaming match with her mother, in search of solid ground that she thought she’d lost forever.
    No easy matter, Lojacono thought to himself. He’d left behind a tender and emotional little girl who still played at being a grown-up lady with her friends, pretending to make coffee dates and go shopping, who put on her mother’s clothes and burst out laughing in front of the mirror; now that little girl had become a silent, pensive young woman who dressed all in black, and whose almond-shaped eyes, so similar to his own, were often lost in indecipherable thought. He didn’t know how long she planned to stay, and he was afraid to ask. He didn’t want Marinella to have even the hint of a thought that she might be less than welcome. He’d informed Marinella’s mother that the girl was with him and that she shouldn’t worry, and had been forced to endure an endless series of recriminations. In reality, Lojacono wasn’t certain which solution would be best for his daughter: whether she should stay with a father who, because of his job, could spend very little time with her, and deal with a new environment, or whether she should go home to a place where she clearly wasn’t happy.
    Di Nardo’s low voice brought him out of his thoughts: “That’s the way in.”
    On the second floor landing there was only one entrance, whose wooden, single-paneled door stood ajar. The apartment building, originally, like so many others in the neighborhood, an aristocratic palazzo owned and inhabited by a single family, had undergone a centuries-long process of deterioration, while decades of social darkness had settled over the quarter as a whole. In the past ten years, though, the drop in rents combined with the increasing demand for apartments in the city center had reversed the trend, so that buildings in this part of town were slowly regaining their prestige. The graffiti on the outside walls had been scraped off, the plaster had been repaired, the flowerbeds in the ancient courtyards had been restored by skilled gardners to their onetime glory and filled with rosebushes and hydrangeas, flowers that on that warm May day seemed to glow with their own light.
    The apartment where the burglary had taken place was on the building’s second and main floor, the piano nobile. Unlike the other floors, this one hadn’t been subdivided into units with less floor space so that they could be more easily rented or sold; that meant the place must be really big. A security camera had been installed over the door; Di Nardo was looking at the camera, too. The young woman called Lojacono’s eye to the front door lock, which showed no signs of forced entry. The landing was illuminated by a large window which seemed locked, with the vertical metal latch lodged securely in the marble windowsill. Lojacono, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, opened the window and saw that it gave onto the interior courtyard. The brass plaque on the door read “S. Parascandolo,” beneath ornamental curlicues.
    At the entrance stood a uniformed officer who saluted them, snapping the tips of his fingers to the visor of his cap.
    â€œ
Buongiorno
, my name’s Rispo. We’ve been here for twenty minutes or so, we forwarded the call from the operations center.”
    A large foyer opened onto a hallway, and off to the right was the entrance to what might be a living room. Already in the hallway there were scattered garments, bags, and knickknacks littering the