Day of the Dead

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “And you found out about the child.”

  “Yes, I did. And it just seemed odd to me, how attached she was to him. This bottomless love she had for a little bastard boy . . . forgive me, Commissario. Poor little thing, after all. But I came to the conclusion that this child might be something else to her, something different, something more. Perhaps this was her son, the child born of that affair. Even if he wasn’t, I still could blackmail her with those letters. You know it yourself, Commissario, in this city, defamation moves mountains. I could insinuate the suspicion, based on the fact that she’d had the affair.”

  Ricciardi was putting together the pieces of the puzzle.

  “So you started to dig.”

  Sersale nodded.

  “Precisely. I gave a little money to that disgusting pig of a sexton, a truly filthy creature, just so that I could get a chance to talk to the boy alone. I met with the boy several times; the sexton simply assumed I was a pervert, and let me tell you, I came very close more than once to beating his repulsive face in with with my cane. I have to admit that the little boy was pitiable: he was a little runt, skinny as hunger itself, and with a stutter that would break your heart. It took him half an hour just to get out a couple of words.”

  Ricciardi was starting to see where Sersale was heading with this.

  “You were trying to find out whether the woman had a special attitude toward the boy, weren’t you? Signs of motherly love, in other words.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I tried everything on him, blandishments and threats, though I never hurt him, so I could find out what I could about how she behaved; but there was never anything solid, Commissario. Clearly, she loved the boy, but she never said anything special to him, never gave him anything unusual. The boy called her Signora, he adored her, and he was enormously devoted to her. But he would have bonded with anyone, like he did with the stray dog that used to follow him everywhere, and I was even sorrier for the dog than the boy. But it was just because she was the only one who treated him decently.”

  “So you gave up.”

  “That’s right. I was hoping to use the letters and the boy, but I finally realized that I wouldn’t achieve anything more than dragging my brother’s name through the mud, with nothing in return. But no, I haven’t given up. I’ll talk to her again, the witch, and I’ll threaten to make the letters public. Without the boy, it’ll be harder, I know: especially because she’d never made a move to adopt him, or at least take him home to live with her.”

  Ricciardi thought to himself that it was for exactly that reason that Carmen had condemned herself to eternal regret.

  “One more thing, Sersale: Who, as far as you know, would have had any ill will toward Tettè? Was there anyone, for instance, who could have faced suspicion if the corpse had been found near a private home or a shop?”

  Sersale thought it over, then shrugged.

  “The other boys didn’t much care for him, that much is certain. They had it in for him and for his dog. In fact, the last time I saw him, I had the distinct sensation that they were about to do him or the dog some harm. The sexton, too, let me say it again, struck me as the kind of guy who would sell you his sister for a couple of lire. But who could have any reason to care about a little kid like him?”

  Ricciardi nodded, sadly. Who could have any reason to care about a little kid like him?

  “Watch out for yourself, Sersale. Folks in the vicoli don’t kid around. They might leave you with more than a warning, next time they catch up with you. If you change your mind and decide to tell us the names of the loan sharks, you know where to find me. In the meanwhile, until we settle all our questions about Tettè’s death, I’d recommend you not leave town.”

  LII

  Seven days earlier, Sunday, October 25

  The man with the limp drags Tettè toward a parked car, at the corner of the street. The knot of boys has moved off and is now watching from a distance, eager to find out what’s about to happen.

  The dog, however, takes up a position on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, sitting on his haunches. Tettè thinks: run, dog. Run away. If those boys catch you they’ll poison you, like that poor cat that hadn’t done anything wrong. But the dog doesn’t run away. He sits and waits.

  The man with the limp puts him in the car, in the front seat, and then goes around and gets in on the other side. It doesn’t feel to Tettè the way it does when he goes for a drive with his angel; she puts him in the backseat, like a wealthy young master being driven by his chauffeur. Plus, he doesn’t like this car. It stinks of smoke, and it’s dirty.

  The man with the limp grabs him by the arm and twists it, hurting him. Listen, you retard, did you think about what I asked you? What does Carmen say to you, when she takes you out? What do you talk about? What did she tell you?

  Tettè speaks, in spite of the serpent. He understands that if he doesn’t say anything, it’ll just be worse. We talk about me, about my life, about school, he manages to say, with great effort. It takes him a long time to say it. And now it’s started raining, fat drops landing on the car windows and windshield.

  What do you call her? What does she tell you to call her? I call her Signora, says Tettè. I call her Signora, what else should I call her? He thinks to himself that he also calls her my angel, but he keeps that to himself.

  The man with the limp looks him hard in the eye, and nods his head. He understands.

  What does she give you? What gifts does she bring you?

  Tettè’s eyes fill with tears. Where are you, my angel? he wonders. The group of boys hasn’t moved, in spite of the steady rain. His arm hurts, in the man’s grip.

  She doesn’t give me anything, he says softly, as the serpent coils around his throat, choking him. Nothing. She just buys me food. One time, he wants to say but can’t, she gave me a wooden toy car, tiny but just like hers, only Amedeo saw it and he stepped on it and crushed it; then I gathered up all the little pieces of wood and tried to put it back together, but it fell apart.

  So then, Tettè would like to say but can’t, one time when I was stealing in an apartment for Cosimo, I saw a toy car on the floor, maybe it belonged to the child of the signora who was laughing with Cosimo. And I took it, but that was the only time I stole anything for myself.

  And I keep it in the cabinet, I colored it with my school pencils. It’s not as nice as the one my angel gave me that Amedeo stepped on, but it makes me think of my angel’s car. And the happy hours we spend together.

  That’s what Tettè would have said, if the serpent hadn’t been coiled around his throat; and if his thoughts formed into words, instead of confused images that got mixed up and overlapped in his mind.

  The man with the limp gives him a disgusted look and says: you’re useless. You’re a useless thing. And you’re getting my car filthy, too, with all the mud and slime you have on you.

  Get out, he says. You’re useless, and you disgust me.

  He opens the car door, pushes the boy out onto the pavement, and drives off.

  Tettè looks up and sees the gang of boys, Amedeo leading them, heading straight for him.

  Behind him, the dog starts to snarl.

  LIII

  Alone again, and back out in the pouring rain, Ricciardi thought back over the conversation he’d just had with Sersale, the man with the limp.

  His problems, the life he led, and the company he kept aside, the man struck him as sincere; but experience had taught him what extraordinary passions need can stir in the darkness of the human soul. He’d seen terror painted on the man’s face, in his eyes, when he was being attacked, and Sersale himself had told him that the only source of funds available to him was his brother’s estate, kept securely under lock and key by Carmen.

  It might be, and Ricciardi certainly wasn’t willing to rule it out, that Sersale had approac
hed the woman and threatened to harm the child and, when his threats were ignored, he’d gone ahead and carried them out; even Tettè’s death might have been a skillfully arranged setup, to keep anyone else from figuring out what the child meant to his benefactress and the man who hated her.

  He felt a stab of sorrow pierce his heart. Perhaps the little orphan had just been a pawn on a chessboard, where the stakes were tawdry and all too material.

  He ran a hand over his forehead, which was hot with fever. Perhaps that’s not how it went at all, and all the internal struggles of the Fago family aside, the boy had just died accidentally, the way everyone had said from the outset; and then a merciful hand had gathered the poor corpse from the gutter where it was lying and placed it in a more dignified position where it could be easily found. That, too, was a possibility: he couldn’t blame anyone who was afraid to say that they’d found a dead child on their front doorstep.

  The streets were deserted, under the once-again heavy rain. Everyone was enjoying their Sunday inside the four warm and cozy walls of their own homes. From the venerable old apartment buildings and from the bassi came the smells of burning firewood and the holiday banquets that were being devoured, garlic and onions, sauces that had burbled away for an entire day in heavy pots to delight the palates of those who now rested, comfortably listening to the radio and sipping ersatz coffee.

  He walked past a vicolo where a tragedy had taken place the week before: a room below street level, where a very poor family was sleeping, had been flooded by a surge of sewer water; the heavy rain had swept down from the hillside a large branch wrapped in dead leaves and garbage. This plug had effectively stopped up the sewer, causing the water to back up. For the parents and the two children, caught unawares in their sleep, there’d been no escape. Their bodies had only finally been found two days later, due to the difficulty of draining the liquid waste from their home.

  Ricciardi saw them now, standing translucent in the pelting rain, at the door of the place that had been their home. They were murmuring indistinctly the words of their dreams, through lips gaping open to reveal blackened tongues, mouths gasping in the attempt to get a final mouthful of air. The little girl was the only one who had woken up, Ricciardi saw, but no one had listened to her. She was shouting: water, Mammà, wake up, the water’s coming in. They were all drenched with filthy water.

  The street is populated with the dead more than with the living, Ricciardi mused as he strolled along with his hands deep in his trench coat pockets, as icy rivulets ran down his back, penetrating through his clothing.

  Loneliness, he mused, is an infectious disease. I’m infected, and I carry it within me. Or perhaps it is loneliness that carries me within it.

  He sensed movement behind him; he half turned and out of the corner of his eye he saw Tettè’s dog, following him some twenty feet back. How can I rest, he wondered, and enjoy my Sunday off, if my client is so eager to see how much progress I’m making? It’s just that I’m not really making much progress at all, dog, as you can see for yourself. I’m right back where I started.

  Carmen, he thought: I have to ask her. She alone, since she knows him, can tell me whether Sersale threatened to harm the child; whether she thinks her brother-in-law would be capable of doing such a thing.

  A powerful wave of dizziness swept over him, and he staggered. His fever was climbing and he felt as if he were walking in a dream state. He could feel his strength ebbing away. He looked around, spotted a bench, and fell down onto it. The neighborhood looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t have said why. There was no one in sight. Even the dog seemed to have vanished: that is, unless I dreamed it up in the first place, he thought to himself.

  As he sank into a stupor, he saw around him first his mother, then Rosa, Enrica, and Livia, their loneliness, and he decided that he must have infected them with his disease. He thought he saw himself playing alone, imagining the playmates and friends he’d never had. Only when he turned to look more carefully did the child have Tettè’s hollow, absentminded face.

  Then came darkness.

  Wrapped in her warm housecoat, Livia was smoking a cigarette and allowing her thoughts to roam freely. She’d always been afraid of Sunday afternoons, just before nightfall; it was the time when loneliness reached out its fingers, just like the darkness, expanding into people’s lives, placing people face-to-face with their souls, stripping away any last possibility of continuing to lie to oneself.

  During the years of her marriage, she’d been so terribly alone; her husband was always traveling, gone on endless concert tours, with the clear understanding that the last thing he wanted was for her to accompany him; he liked the freedom to be with his countless lovers. Not that she was any less lonely when he was home, she thought with an ironic smile.

  Even now, I’m alone, she realized; but the color of my loneliness has somehow changed. Then I was in despair, and now I’m full of hope.

  She walked over to the window, which rattled from the rain, and thought back to the winter night when she had looked out from her waterfront hotel room and seen Ricciardi, on the street, in the swaying light of the streetlamps, in the foam from the storm-tossed sea. What that man did to her soul was pretty close to what the wind had been doing to the sea that night. She smiled at herself, because she’d just imagined she’d glimpsed him, sitting on a bench in the pouring rain, right outside her front door.

  And then she realized she wasn’t imagining a thing. It was really him.

  Enrica was uneasy. She couldn’t have said why; Sunday had gone its wet, gray way, a wet Sunday Mass in the pouring rain, no stroll in the Villa Nazionale, just lunch and the radio, followed by a light dinner. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  But she felt wrong, somehow: a vague tightness in her chest, a fear of some kind, an anxiety. Really, she should say, a sense of anguish.

  She’d finished her reply to Ricciardi’s letter. To tell the truth, she’d finished it at least five different times, having rewritten it whenever she thought of another thing to say, another thing to explain, another thing to leave unstated. She sensed that this would be the last push, converting the glances out the window, the tentative waves, and the smiles from a distance into a full and actual acquaintance: a transformation into her dream of strolls hand-in-hand, movie theaters, and downtown cafés.

  Then why this sense of anguish?

  She put the idea of a presentiment out of her mind. She didn’t believe in those things, and she didn’t like to think about them. She went to the window to look out at the rain; through the wet glass, she saw the building across the way, the windows of Ricciardi’s apartment.

  In one of them, the one in the living room that she now knew so well, she saw Rosa, looking out.

  Livia was drying Ricciardi off, using a large cotton towel.

  The maid stood watching from the door of the bedroom, concerned and uncomfortable: she had seen her own mistress run out of her bedroom, grab an overcoat from its peg, and shoot out of the apartment, leaving the front door wide open behind her; from the window she’d seen her rush out onto the street, in the pouring rain, in her slippers and wearing her housecoat beneath the overcoat, bareheaded; then she had seen her signora approach a man sleeping on a bench, quite possibly a hobo or a panhandler; she’d seen her throw her arms around the man and help him to his feet; then she’d seen her help the man along as he stumbled woozily. And bring him into the building, and then into the apartment.

  Now her mistress had removed his trench coat, his jacket, his tie, his shirt, and even his undershirt. The articles of clothing were strewn across the floor, in puddles of water; and she was drying him, rubbing his head and his hair with a dry towel. He was staring blankly, his eyes red, with dark circles underneath them. A skinny man, pale, and possibly quite sick.

  Livia turned and spoke to her maid, in a state of extreme agitation.

  “Adelina, hurry: go s
ummon Arturo, the chauffeur. Tell him that I need him. And bring me another dry towel . . . no, first heat it up on the stove. And hang up these clothes to dry, right away. And make a cup of herbal tea.”

  She turned her focus on him now, as Adelina left the room:

  “Ricciardi, answer me . . . what’s wrong, why were you out in the rain? What happened to you, tell me!”

  He looked at her as if he had no idea who she was.

  “The child, the child . . . that’s me, don’t you understand? He’s dead, but I can’t see him, I just can’t see him. And I don’t know what he’d say to me, and the dog, what does the dog want from me?”

  Livia looked at him and didn’t even try to understand. He was feverish and delirious. He was trembling and muttering.

  “No, don’t try to get up. Calm down, you have a fever, a very high fever. Here, lie down, don’t worry about a thing. I’m here, I’ll take care of you.”

  Adelina returned with the herbal tea, accompanied by the chauffeur who was hastily buttoning his uniform.

  “Arturo, go and summon the doctor . . . what’s his name, the physician who lives downstairs? Mirante, that’s it. I know that it’s Sunday, but that doesn’t matter! Tell him that I need him here immediately. Make sure he comes directly. And you, Adelina, help me, let’s get him into a bed, in the guest room.”

  In her terrible concern for the fever that she could feel in every part of Ricciardi’s body, even though she couldn’t understand a word he said in his delirium, Livia couldn’t help but think that now she was no longer alone. Not anymore.

  Now she had someone to look after.

  LIV

  Dr. Mirante came in a hurry; he was a short, middle-aged man, with a large mustache, a careful comb-over on top of his cranium, and a prominent belly. Being invited into the home of the beautiful and mysterious neighbor whom everyone was talking about, so late at night, had flattered him, making him hope that the reason might be quite another. And so, when he found himself in the presence of a feverish Ricciardi, he made no attempt to conceal his disappointment.