As her hands carefully clean the malevizzi, the tender little thrushes caught in the branches of the olive trees where her true love played when he was a boy.
Love me.
And give me two children, so they won’t be alone for the rest of their lives. Let them have your eyes, those wonderful eyes, the color of salt waves on the rocks on a sunny morning, but without the sorrow. Let them have your fine tapered hands, and my tranquility, my faith in the future. Let them have your sensitivity and my gentleness. Let them have your acuity, and my openness to the world around me.
Love me.
As these hands arrange laurel leaves and thin slices of lard around the malevizzi, and as they sprinkle them with the sauce of olive oil, lemon juice, and white vinegar, which these same hands prepared earlier.
Because I’m the one who protects your happiness. The one who will fight for your happiness.
Love me.
Rosa, pretending to be asleep, smiled.
Ricciardi waited in a doorway until he saw Enrica leave his building. Only after she stopped and surveyed the street, somewhat sadly, and went back into her apartment building, closing the door behind her, did he move.
XXII
Just as they were getting ready to leave for Vomero, where Viper’s family lived, Ricciardi and Maione received an unexpected visit from Vincenzo Ventrone.
In his features and his demeanor, this was a very different man from the swaggering, self-confident person they’d met the previous morning. He held his hat in his hands, nervously twisting the brim. His face, pale and feverish, bore the marks of two sleepless nights. His mustache drooped inertly around his bloodless lips.
“I heard that you were at the shop, last night. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there, but I’ve really been feeling a little tired and I’d rather not let the customers see me, right now. For that matter, my son, whom you met, is well able to run the company. To tell the truth, there are times when I think that if I weren’t around, things might go even better.”
Maione, though he had instinctively disliked the man, felt a twinge of pity.
“A very accomplished young man, your son, no doubt. You can count on him.”
“Yes. I’m lucky to have him. I’ve thought about it quite a bit, you know. I understand that from your point of view, I . . . in other words, it could have been me. But it wasn’t me, you’ll see that: I have faith in you. But that’s not why I’m here now.”
Ricciardi and Maione waited until the merchant felt strong enough to continue. He seemed truly overwrought.
“She . . . Viper, you know. I really don’t know how to describe her, what kind of woman she was. You go to places like that out of curiosity, and in search of fun. To keep from thinking. Then you find yourself buying time, it’s the only place where you pay for time, where you buy a person’s time so they’ll listen to you. And so you start to talk. The first time, for a minute, the next time for five. And then it even happens that you find yourself just talking.”
The strain was unmistakable; it must have been a challenge to express his feelings, there in police headquarters, and in the presence of two policemen.
“For me, and I won’t be surprised if you don’t believe me, this was a loss. I’m not saying she was dearly beloved—I have a son, as you know. But Viper . . . Maria Rosaria, was a friend. A dear friend.”
Maione broke in, in a subdued, cautious tone of voice:
“Why on earth are you coming here to tell us these things?”
“Right. Right. Why am I coming to tell you?”
The question he had asked himself fell into a pool of silence. Then he said:
“Madame Yvonne explained to me, yesterday, that the doctor . . . in other words, that you’re done with the corpse, in the sense that we can proceed with the interment of the deceased. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Ricciardi replied, hesitantly.
“Yes, I imagine so. The doctor is done with the autopsy, he told me so yesterday, so I believe that you can, yes, certainly.”
Ventrone nodded.
“As you know, I work with religious men and women, so I have friends who can explain things to me. Catholic ritual denies religious interment to several categories of people: Freemasons and those who belong to heretical sects; suicides; anyone who dies in a duel; manifest public sinners. Unfortunately Viper was a member of that last category.”
Ricciardi broke in:
“Ventrone, I don’t see what we can . . .”
The merchant raised one hand:
“I beg you, don’t interrupt, this is already very difficult for me. Last night I got practically no sleep; but at a certain point I dozed off, and I saw Viper, the way she was when . . . when I saw her the last time, in other words, still alive. And she spoke to me, she asked me to make sure she was given a Christian interment. That’s right, those exact words, give me a Christian interment, she said. And I understood that I need to do something for her, to keep her from being tossed into a ditch who knows where.”
He sighed, and then he went on:
“Tomorrow, as you know, is Holy Thursday, the start of the Sacred Paschal Triduum. A normal funeral procession is unthinkable, the so-called respectable citizens would raise an outcry. I’ve spoken to several of my friends, people I’ve worked with for decades and who, by the way, owe me money: there’s a confraternity, a congregation that would be willing to accept the body for interment in a collective chapel, but under her own name. A Christian interment.”
He repeated the phrase, as if it were a curse word.
“The procession will have to take place in the morning, at a very early hour, to ensure it passes unobserved. The girls who worked with her, who were her family, will be there, they want to be there. And so will Madame, naturally. I’ll pay for everything, I’ve already made all the necessary arrangements, but I won’t be able to attend: I have certain duties toward my son, toward my company, and to the memory of my wife. I can’t possibly be there. But I owe her this, to ensure that she’s buried as she would have wanted. It’s a matter of mercy and simple humanity.”
He seemed to be on the verge of tears. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance, but they were at a loss for words. Once Ventrone had recovered somewhat, he went on:
“When they reach the cemetery, delivery of her body will be taken by the men of the congregation, and they’ll see to all the rest. There will also be a priest, who’ll remain inside the chapel to avoid being seen, and he’ll give the blessing. I paid him too. All I had to do was pay, you know? All you ever have to do is pay.”
There was an palpable bitterness in the man’s voice.
“Nonetheless, they explained to me that this anomalous movement of the girls, all together, has to be authorized by police headquarters. They’re prostitutes, and the fact that they’re going out into the street together could technically be seen as a form of solicitation. But we know that that’s not what’s going on, don’t we? They’re simply friends who want to accompany a woman on her last journey. I beg you, Commissario: I beg you as I’ve never begged anyone else in my life. Ensure that she’s not alone, in this journey. She was a woman who never did anyone any harm, in her all-too-brief existence. She doesn’t deserve that.”
After thinking it over, Ricciardi said:
“Don’t worry, Ventrone. I’ll be there. No one will interfere with Viper’s funeral procession.”
As they were walking to the terminus of the streetcar that would take them to Vomero, Maione said:
“Commissa’, are we certain that this is a good idea? I mean, presiding over the funeral procession of a whore. Sure, I understand, many of them are good people; but they’re still whores. And if anyone were to see you, and then went and told that idiot Garzo? The last thing we need is for you to be accused of patronizing bordellos.”
Ricciardi walked with his hands in his pocket
s, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him.
“What Ventrone said made quite an impression on me, you know? We’re investigating everyone else, all the people who might have killed the girl, but we’re not investigating her at all, or very little. What did she want from life? What had she decided about Coppola’s marriage proposal? And Coppola himself, for that matter, who was he and what did he really want from this woman? That’s why we’re going to the village where they both grew up: to understand who Maria Rosaria Cennamo was, before she became Viper.”
Maione wasn’t convinced.
“Forgive me, Commissa’, but I still don’t understand what the funeral procession at seven in the morning has to do with anything, and why you think you need to be there yourself.”
Ricciardi smirked.
“You know as well as I do, Raffaele. There’s nothing like a funeral, if you want to understand who a person really was. The faces of the people who attend, and the names of the people who don’t, will give me some very interesting information. At least I hope they will.”
They reached Piazza Dante, the point from which the city’s streetcars departed for all the main destinations.
Although it was hardly late in the morning, the broad open space was already filling up with people heading here and there, in part encouraged by the weather, which, as opposed to the day before, was warm and sunny. There were university students and lovely young women getting ready to catch the Number 2 streetcar, which would take them to the quiet little streets down by the water near the Cape of Posillipo, where they could talk and kiss in secret; vendors of dairy products and pots and pans who were loading their merchandise onto the Number 6 streetcar, destination Torretta Market; and scugnizzi who were getting ready to catch hold of the back of the Number 11 streetcar, heading for Portici and the black sand beaches of that district.
Maione had done his homework:
“Commissa’, we can choose between two possibilities: we can either catch the Number 7 Red, which will take us to Antignano, climbing up by way of Infrascata, or the Number 9, which goes to Arenella by way of Via della Salute, but then we’d have to walk part of the way at the end. What do you say, which streetcar should we take?”
Ricciardi shrugged.
“Whichever one leaves first. Ask the conductors. I don’t know the area, so I wouldn’t be able to say. But why don’t you just find out about the return schedules, I don’t want to take all day on this.”
“Commissa’, when has anyone in this city ever known a schedule for the departures and arrivals of the streetcars? If you ask me, no one ever will. It must be some kind of state secret. In any case, if you had a word once and for all with that idiot Garzo and had him give you a car . . . are we or are we not the mobile squad? But mobile how, by riding streetcars?”
Ricciardi adored Maione, and he valued all his qualities, including those the brigadier himself didn’t realize he possessed, but he was also well aware of the man’s one grave defect: his inability to admit that he was incapable of driving a car, and that when he was behind the wheel he became a very serious risk to public health and safety.
He decided to leave him in the relative bliss of ignorance.
“Forget about it, Raffaele, you can understand that after the crash I was in on the Day of the Dead, I have a certain aversion to automobiles. Let’s just take a nice ride on the streetcar.”
And after all, it’s such a beautiful day, he thought sadly; and for no specific reason, Livia’s wounded expression appeared before him.
XXIII
The first car to leave was the 7 Red, which went past the Archeological Museum and then made its way up Via Salvator Rosa, and uphill from there along Via dell’Infrascata, where a series of secondary country roads branched off toward trattorias and farms.
From the streetcar window, as they held tight against the jerks and jolts caused by the joints in the tracks, Maione and Ricciardi looked out on the changing landscape, as working class apartment blocks gave way to the sprawling and tangled mass of Mediterranean vegetation.
The Vomero neighborhood hadn’t changed much since the Great War: in a way, in fact, it constituted a holdover from the turn of the century, in a city that was constantly in a state of chaotic transformation. The hillside surmounted by the Castel Sant’Elmo, the last sorrowful image in the eyes of the emigrants as they steamed away from the harbor of Naples, was still for the most part verdant and unspoiled. There were scattered mansions constructed in the fetching stile floreale, or floral style of Art Nouveau, or else in imitation of the Romanesque and Gothic styles, flanked by dirt roads running through orchards and vegetable gardens—and only a very few of those roads were open to through traffic. A nucleus of buildings similar to those in the center of the city—tall, austere, nondescript apartment buildings—had sprung up like an invasive species of vegetation around the funicular railway stations, but all around them, the countryside had remained unchanged.
During the ride up, Ricciardi caught fleeting glimpses of shepherds and peasants, the occasional bricklayer hard at work, and as so often happened, at the foot of a scaffolding he saw the image of two men, one with a vast concave depression on the side of his ribcage and the other with an unmistakable fracture to his spinal cord, both of them murmuring about the extreme terror that accompanied their falls. The foundations of these buildings are sunk in blood, he thought bitterly. One of the prices of prosperity, but not the only one.
The driver announced the Antignano stop, and the streetcar stopped with a jerk. The brigadier and the commissario got out and found themselves in an open space, enclosed on one side by a wall of tangled vegetation and on the other by an agglomeration of shacks. A number of children, half naked, their skin dark as old leather, played with a rag ball held together with twine.
Maione got the attention of a couple of these urchins and, unlike their counterparts in the center of town, they didn’t take to their heels at the sight of the policemen’s uniforms. He asked them where he could find the Cennamo family.
Having been given directions, the two men headed toward the center of the village. On either side of the streets, little more than dirt tracks, larger buildings, relatively well kept and nearly all recently built, alternated with tumbledown shacks. The spring air brought scents of the nearby forest and the windows of even the poorest houses were adorned with vases of multicolored geraniums. There were children and plenty of animals, dogs and chickens and, in low enclosures, hogs, nanny goats, and sheep. The atmosphere was quite different from that of the rest of the city.
They found themselves standing before a building that, even though it was in the poorer part of the village, betrayed a different economic condition: pink plaster and wooden shutters painted green, balconies with bellied wrought-iron railings, and even a further vertical addition, still under construction. Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a glance and both mulled over the thought that, by a supreme twist of fate, money from Naples’s most straitlaced and devout families had flowed, through Ventrone’s perverse pleasures, into the pockets of a poor family that had given birth to a prostitute.
And both of them thought, sadly, that the woman had paid for that prosperity not only with her body, but with her life.
They knocked at the front door and were answered by a very young girl wearing a white apron. They even have a servant, thought Maione.
The housekeeper ushered them into a garishly furnished living room, which reminded Ricciardi of the bordello, with the exception of the statue of San Gennaro, which stood roughly a foot and a half tall, with an episcopal tiara and staff, under a glass bell on a mantel. Neither of the two policemen had any doubts about the gift’s provenance.
The girl came to the door and said:
“The Signora will be right down,” then dropped to her knees and went back to work, scrubbing the front carpet.
A few minutes later, a woman entered the room. She cou
ldn’t have been that old, and the life that she led certainly hadn’t always been comfortable. Her face was wrinkled and most of her teeth were missing, but her back was strong and erect. She was dressed in black, with an ample skirt and a light shawl over her shoulders; her dyed hair was surmounted by a clasp made of horn.
She addressed them roughly, staring meaningly at Maione’s uniform:
“What do you people want from us? We’re honest folk, we haven’t done anything.”
Maione was accustomed to that kind of reaction.
“Signo’, no one here is accusing you of anything. I’m Brigadier Maione of the mobile squad, and this is Commissario Ricciardi. And you are?”
The woman didn’t blink an eye.
“I’m Concetta Cennamo, the owner of this house. And you’re the ones who came to call on me; what is it that you want?”
Ricciardi decided to speak up.
“Signora, are you the mother of Maria Rosaria Cennamo?”
The woman stiffened.
“I was her mother, yes.”
“So you know that . . .”
She nodded again, just once. Then she said:
“Women like her, that’s what becomes of them. I hadn’t seen her in years, she was dead to me the day she became a streetwalker, instead of trying to raise her son like a respectable person.”
Her voice was cutting and harsh, and she spat out the words with an icy indifference that sent chills down one’s spine. That woman wasn’t grieving in the slightest.
Maione said:
“Signo’, can I ask you how you came to hear about what happened to your daughter?”
Concetta shifted her attention to the brigadier.
“I heard it from Peppe, Peppe ’a Frusta. His family lives nearby, right at the end of the road. I had to comfort him, he was sobbing like a little boy, he was inconsolable. He still loved her, as if she was the same girl she’d always been. As if she hadn’t become what she turned into.”
Vipers Page 12
