been picked up a few evenings earlier by a patrol from the San Giovanni police station: the evening before the crime: picked up for loitering, no identification papers: and on well-grounded suspicion of prostitutional activity in a public place (Santo Stefano Rotondo!), activity for which she was not licensed (a mere amateur, in short). She had insulted the arresting officers, calling one of them "Sergeant Fathead." She had offended, "admittedly probably with only sporadic activity and, on that evening, in an entirely occasional form," she had been caught in flagrant contravention of the Federzoni orders for the reformation of the urban sidewalks under booted regime, "in accordance with that special regulation from the Minister of the Interior on February fourteenth, you know the one, Ingravallo, regulation number seven hundred eighteen—help me out on this—Ingravallo, with that memory of yours!—concerning the moralization of the Capital." Ingravallo didn't open his mouth. "And held for suspicion of complicity in a theft," Di Pietrantonio reminded his chief. "What theft?" "A chicken." "Where'd she steal it?" "Piazza Vittorio." The morning of Wednesday the sixteenth, after the round-up of the nymphs, Corporal Juppariello of the San Giovanni station had shown her to the two women who had suffered the robbery three days before: a chicken-seller and another woman who sold slippers. A theft of an old pair of shoes from this latter, and a chicken, too, nearby, from the next stand: plucked and neckless, as it turned out, but in compensation with three feathers in its ass. And the ones who snatched them, both shoes and chicken, were two characters, a boy and a blond girl, "who had wandered around for some time along the street, in that very crowded hour, then they had separated, and had mysteriously disappeared with the merchandise." The chicken-seller's wife, who was the one who yelled loudest of all, "at first" had thought she recognized in Ines, Cionini Ines of Torraccio, the very blonde who she believed had snitched the feathered creature, or rather, de-feathered. "On second thoughts," however, she seemed to hesitate. A sample chicken, to enlighten the police, had been taken to San Giovanni, in every way similar to its colleague which had vanished from sight three days before—it was now Sunday the 13th—and the same with the two shoes: accused and accuser were then coached together to Santo Stefano, the shoe lady with them. Questioned at headquarters, Ines had sustained and sworn, with many a "I hope to die if it's not true," that she knew nothing of the fowl, in the first place: that she was an apprentice seamstress, though without employment at present: and that she had worked, as a trouser-maker at I Due Santi, just beyond le Frattocchie. "And then what?" Then she had been reduced to coming to Rome, to look for work. "It's no shame to have to look for a job." The chicken let off a terrible stink: it, too, had been taken to the station, along with the two shoes, both lefts; once at Santo Stefano del Cacco, the bird had apparently taken fright and, though dead, it had shat, there on Paolillo's little table: not much, though, to tell the truth. "Let's hear this Ines!"
Fumi swung around in his chair, pressed the button, and asked for Piscitiello, he charged Paolillo to have Piscitiello hand the girl over to him, if she hadn't already been shipped off to Regina Coeli. Paolillo, after a short while, brought in a rather well-supplied girl, with two marvelous eyes in her face, very luminous, shiny; but she was incredibly dirty and disheveled, and her stockings! her cloth shoes, half in tatters, with one toe sticking out. A gust of the wild, not to say worse, breathed into the room; a smell: "Mmm! get a load of that!" all of them said to themselves, mentally.
After a certain amount of preamble concerning her vital statistics, Ines .. . Ines Cionini, questioned a while by Doctor Fumi and some by Don Ciccio, examined from head to foot by Corporal Pestalozzi, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, and Paolillo and, behind them, a little by Grabber,