Read Online Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar - Free Book Online

anything odd, unusual? Had there been any changes in his academic performance? What about his mood? Nothing, nothing at all. If Dodo had been unhappy, if he’d planned to run away from home, to do something foolish, he’d shown no warning signs. Everything had been perfectly normal, everything had gone just as usual, everything had been calm.
    Except for the fact that Dodo had just vanished into thin air.
    The original footage, in black and white, was pretty grainy; to be fair, the cameras were meant to catch someone removing paintings from the museum without permission, not people kidnapping children. Ottavia had done a little digital magic and managed to improve the resolution ever so slightly, and now they were all watching video coverage of a sleepy morning at the museum as if it were an adrenaline-charged thriller.
    Before putting on his glasses to see from the sideline to which he’d been relegated, Pisanelli had closed the shutters, bringing darkness a little earlier than the impending nightfall would have.
    â€œGuida, make yourself useful,” Lojacono had said brusquely, “turn the light off.”
    It had become a kind of sadistic game to berate Guida, a sloppy, lazy beat cop who’d been kicked off his beat for manifest incompetence and put on front desk duty at the precinct house. On his first day at Pizzofalcone, Lojacono had dressed him down quite sharply for the state of his uniform and the informality of his salute, and since then, Guida had lived in holy terror of the lieutenant and been absolutely determined to reestablish his lost professional standing. With a single, sharp reproof, the Chinaman had achieved the objective that had eluded dozens of senior officers: He’d turned Guida into a perfect, spit-polished policeman, his salute timely and decisive. The metamorphosis had earned Guida the mockery of many of his coworkers and the approval of Palma, Pisanelli, and Ottavia, who’d all known him for years: Lojacono alone pretended not to notice the change, to Guida’s immense chagrin and the others’ endless amusement.
    At the lieutenant’s command, therefore, Guida sprang into action, and then trotted back to his previous location from where, if he craned his neck, he could glimpse the computer screen.
    Ottavia hit fast-forward, and for nearly a minute the picture remained unchanged, unruffled by any human presence, until a museum guard appeared and jetted back and forth across the room like a rocket. Calabrese slowed the film back down to normal speed and said: “There. The museum’s open now.”
    The lightning-fast guard turned human again, sleepy and slow. He turned on the light, checked the paintings on the walls, stuck his hand down his pants, and yawned as he scratched himself. “And to think,” Aragona said bitterly, “I shook hands with him when we left, that piece of shit.”
    Guida snickered, but was then instantly silenced by a glare from Pisanelli. The screen emptied out again, then, after another five minutes telescoped into a few seconds by the magic of technology, it was filled by Sister Beatrice and her group of schoolchildren.
    The teacher stopped in front of each painting to listen to the docent’s explanations. The children trailed after her, looking bored; some of them lagged behind the larger group, trading soccer cards. Just as they were all about to move on into the next room, the silhouette of Christian Datola, Dodo’s friend, appeared.
    â€œThere, stop it here,” said Romano. “This is the little boy who hung back with the child we’re interested in. It’s been exactly . . .” and here he looked down at the video’s time stamp, “. . . seven minutes. The boy, his name is Christian, said that the last time he saw Dodo the child was still waving, from a distance, at this blonde woman we’ve all heard about. That means that, at this same point in time, the security