SUNDAY, AUGUST 29, 5:55 A.M.
DRESSED IN A new T-shirt with cutaway sleeves, low-slung jeans, and sunglasses, Pernazzo sat at the dining table, unpicking his mother’s crocheted doily. He wondered if Commissioner Blume would return as threatened. Thanks to his hypersleeping, the police would never catch him napping.
At eight in the morning, he went into the bathroom and cut the sides of his hair very short, then took a razor to what remained. He looked at himself in profile, which is probably the angle the photographers would have when they took shots of him.
From eight until midday, he played online. At eleven he boiled two hot dogs and an egg in a pan and, as he ate them with ketchup, began to wonder if he wasn’t being unduly pessimistic. Police raids took place in the morning. The commissioner had maybe been bluffing.
At midday, he left the house, caught a bus down to a place in Porta Portese, and inquired about getting a tattoo on his upper arm. It would cost a hundred and twenty euros. Shortly after he came home, he went for a scheduled nap of twenty minutes, but woke up after only ten.
He spent two hours writing the confession he had bluffed to Massoni about, and posted it, limiting reader access to himself.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, he held Blume’s card in his hand and thought about calling him up and saying, Well, dickhead, are you coming to pick me up or not? Or, Hey, cop . . . I thought you said you were . . . Or maybe he could be ironic—formal. Am I speaking to the commissioner who paid an invasive visit . . . ?
At three o’clock, he reevaluated the evidence against himself and decided that, as long as they didn’t take DNA samples, it didn’t amount to much. He had no idea what his rights were regarding the surrender of fingerprints. Nor could he work out how the cop came to him so quickly.
Maybe he needed a lawyer. He could phone the notary who had handled the transfer of the property deeds from his mother to him. Maybe the notary knew a lawyer.
At four o’clock, he was listening to Radio DeeJay and heard about an incident in which a policeman had been killed and two others injured. They gave the name of the dead policeman, but not the injured ones.
On the six o’clock bulletin, they gave the names of the suspects as Alleva and Massoni. They warned that both men were armed and dangerous and asked the public to keep a lookout. There was no further mention of Clemente, already yesterday’s news. Later, on RAI 1 television news at eight, the two cases were linked. The fugitive cop-killers were wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of an animal rights activist. A magistrate standing on a flight of steps refused to comment on any of the cases. Pernazzo boiled himself another two hot dogs, opened a can of tuna, and drank some long-life milk. It looked as if he was not a suspect, after all. Part of him felt some disappointment.
He put aside his anxiety and enjoyed a good night’s gaming, faction versus faction. He outfought and outplayed everyone, and a few players remarked on his phenomenal stamina and gameplay. The only bad moment came when one of his so-called companions disagreed with him about the value of an Arcanum of Focus.
“You pull down way too much hate, you die overmuch, and your mana pool is the smallest,” Pernazzo warned him.
“Dont knock js cuz u so stoopid u dont get it.”
Pernazzo stayed calm, gave the kid some sound advice. “Smooth it out with stat gear and balance your pve. You need hp REAL bad as a +dmg lock whos thrown out most of their stm gear that +200 is total worth it. Evrybdy know +dmg tunnelvision instead than stats is unkorrect if u R planning high-end attx.”
But the crackhead wouldn’t listen. Pernazzo almost logged out in his frustration. The policeman did not come that day.