His colleagues seemed to think nothing of spending the morning poking around a burnt-out car containing the remains of four local mobsters and then tucking into a nice charred roast at lunch, but Grimaldi lacked this ability to detach his professional and private lives. The experience had marked him even physically. His body was hunched, his head lowered, face averted, and his eyes peered up with the guarded, wary look of abused children. His hair had started falling out at an alarming rate, while deep wrinkles corrugated his face until by now he looked older than his own father — who still put to sea each night with his crew of illegal Algerian immigrants, and didn’t give a fuck about anything.
The usual fate of ex-Carabinieri is to join one of the many armies of private bank guards, but thanks to a local politician who had a word with a bishop who mentioned the matter to a monsignore in the Curia who had the ear of a certain archbishop in the Palazzo del Governatorato, Giovanni Grimaldi moved to Rome and became a member of the Vigilanza. Because of his experience and abilities, he was soon transferred to a select detective unit responsible directly to the Cardinal Secretary of State. In addition to investigating such minor crime as occurred within the Vatican — mostly petty theft — this group allegedly carried out a variety of covert operations which were the subject of considerable gossip among employees of the Curia. His children only visited him in the holidays now, and his wife in his dreams, for she had contracted cancer the year after he settled in the capital. The children now lived in Bari with Grimaldi’s sister, while he himself eked out a solitary life in a church property near the Vatican, trying to make ends meet for his absentee family, and to put a little aside for the future.