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that occurs to him tonight makes him smile. Outside the rich kids’ school that morning he saw the blonde girl again. Always surrounded by her girlfriends. One of them, a cute brunette, even came over to buy a baggie, but he’d already sold everything he had. Too bad, because maybe he would have given it to her and kicked in the ten euros for Antonio himself, in exchange for the blonde girl’s name, or even her cell number.
    He decides that when things start spinning along at full capacity, the first thing he’ll do is trade in his motor scooter and get a real motorcycle instead. He’s seen the blonde taking the bus home from school, or getting in her girlfriend’s micro car, one of those tiny unlicensed cars. So if he shows up outside the school on a real motorbike, maybe not like the one Antonio rides, but one at least as good as the bikes those idiots he goes to school with ride, then she’d really have no option but to accept a ride home from him. Then he’d know where she lives.
    But first, Mirko thinks as he climbs the road homeward, he’ll need to do something for his mother. A man, if he’s a real man, has to pay his debts before anything else. And his mother brought him up, making sure he had everything he needed. He hadn’t been forced to steal, he’d never pulled any of the bullshit that other kids in the quarter got up to, because his mother, even if she was single, made sure that his every whim was satisfied.
    So now, Mamma, the first lot of money is for you. I’ll take you out to the movies, and then to dinner in a restaurant. And then maybe I’ll get you some new clothes. A flowered dress, like the ones you used to look at wide-eyed in the shop windows on the Via Toledo, when you used to come pick me up from school.
    By now he’s almost home, he’s in the courtyard. He props his motor scooter in its usual place. He looks up: the window is illuminated. Never once has he come home to find her asleep, even if he stays out as late as he has tonight. But tonight is special, Mamma. Because so many different things have happened, all of them wonderful. Now let me lock the chain on the scooter, and I’m hurrying upstairs to tell you all about it.
    Tonight it begins.

CHAPTER 12
    Lojacono didn’t really mind much when they asked him to stay on for the night shift. He could spend his sleepless night gazing up at the police station ceiling or at the ceiling of his studio apartment. What difference did it make?
    Usually they’d keep him out of whatever was happening, to avoid the risk that he might be involved, however marginally, in some ongoing investigation; at most they’d send him out for a street brawl or a mugging–small-time stuff. At least that way they got some use out of him; he was still a noncommissioned officer after all, even if he was an extra officer over the allotted staff. A day-tripper, as he’d heard Giuffrè call him, ironically. A day-tripper, on duty at the booby hatch.
    But once everyone had left except the night watch, the San Gaetano police station turned into a place that was almost half decent. The silence, the lights turned off, the whistling of someone down the hallway. If places have a soul, Lojacono thought to himself, that soul comes out at night.
    Giuffrè told him that his willingness to work night shifts baffled him. If they fucked you over, shipping you out to a place where there’s nothing for you to do except play poker against your computer, and taking everything you owned away from you, why don’t you pay them back in kind? Look after your own interests and refuse to go out of your way to help.
    The little man with a pot-belly and Coke-bottle glasses had a point. For that matter, that’s how he behaved, calling in sick regularly and doing no more than the bare minimum. Lojacono felt sure that the station captain had never even seen Giuffrè; he literally succeeded in becoming invisible when he needed to.
    As the night dragged on in a silence torn apart only