A Few Drops of Blood

by Jan Merete Weiss

  “Yes.”

  The short barrels would make the shot go wide. Like the wounds on the two men.

  “You know weapons?” he said.

  “Wherever did you get this?”

  “It would be unprofessional to say.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to take this off your hands.” She flipped open her ID.

  “Fuck. You looked familiar. I shoulda guessed. How about I give you the rose and I keep the gun? A hundred euros I paid for it, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How about I bring you in for dealing in stolen goods? You know the seller?”

  “Nah. A young stud.”

  “I’ll need a description.”

  “Short and muscular, long hair. Maybe twenty-five. Jesus, keep me out of it.” In one motion, Tulio wrapped the shotgun in sheets of yesterday’s newspaper and handed it to Natalia along with the glass rose.

  “Bribing an officer is a crime.”

  “Give me a break, okay? I’m just a poor man trying to make a living.”

  “Right.” Natalia shoved the weapon into her carryall. “We may need you to come in to make an identification.”

  She and Angelina left Tulio swearing under his breath and made their way back toward their office on foot. Clusters of pedestrians thickened into crowds that surged around the railroad terminal. A gypsy couple with a gaggle of children approached a modest café until a tattooed barista shooed them away.

  “I’m glad you’re getting the chance to see this,” Natalia said. “Better than reading a guide book.”

  Every inch of sidewalk was taken, mostly by Nigerians hawking their wares. The locals were outfitted with folding chairs and umbrellas. The immigrants, more desperate, worked standing in the blazing sun. War and famine continued to churn refugees onto Italy’s shores. The Camorra took advantage of their vulnerability and made a tidy profit from the knock-offs they supplied them, especially Guccis and Rolexes. Bags and watches lay on blankets.

  “The police and Carabinieri could work night and day,” Natalia said, “and never even scratch the surface of the labyrinthine criminal system you’re seeing here.”

  Many had resisted, no one had triumphed. No prosecutor, judge, policeman, mayor, legislator, no president. The Camorra had subverted and compromised them all.

  Her nonna had told her stories of Salvatore Carnevale, a socialist hero in the fifties who compelled the gentry to share with their workers the profits from their olive harvest. A real feat, approaching the miraculous. Then Carnevale had set out to organize the quarry workers: Camorra territory. A mystic of sorts, he had declared, “Whoever kills me, kills Christ.”

  The mafia came after him on horseback, horse shoes sparking as they struck the flinty ground. Riding on the stars, the terrified peasants were quoted as exclaiming. Carnevale, all of thirty-four—dumped in front of his mother’s house like road kill.

  Natalia and Angelina turned onto Via Casanova and continued on past the car repair shops that shared the street with the Carabinieri station. In the foyer, the young officer on desk duty shoved his magazine into a drawer. Natalia clutched her carryall and walked up the two flights of stairs to Brigadier Portero’s office on the top floor.

  Portero, the in-house weapons expert, was the longest serving Carabiniere at the station. His dusty room wasn’t much bigger than a kiosk. Walking upstairs, he claimed, kept his weight down, although all five-feet, eight inches of him weighed well over 200 pounds.

  If he hadn’t come from a poor family, he might have gone to university and become a historian. Self-taught, he’d collected books since he was a kid. Natalia heard he owned hundreds of them; many were treasures. He even had a cabinet in his office with the overflow. That’s what he chose to do with his modest earnings. He never took a vacation. He never owned a car. If you had a question about their city, chances are he had the answer. Naples during the time of Bourbons—up until now.

  So, in a way he’d missed out on his dream. Who hadn’t, Natalia thought as she approached his door. But there were compensations being a Carabiniere: the occasional excitement of the job, the camaraderie, the opportunity to serve the community.

  Natalia had given up mourning her own aborted university career, though she liked to think that perhaps Portero would resume his studies when he retired. A solitary sort, he visibly enjoyed the collegiality at the station and his acknowledged expertise. Portero’s door stood open.

  “You have a minute, Brigadier?” she asked.

  “For you, Captain? Always.”

  Natalia exposed the gun, and together they slipped it into a plastic evidence sheath.

  “Don’t come across many of these,” he said, studying the weapon. “From the thirties. Hand crafted. Carvings like these I’ve seen maybe twice. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  A peacock preened on one side of the stock, and the sun fanned out on the other. Vine etchings crept along the barrel.

  “I suppose.”

  “A real mafia heirloom, trotted out for traditional honor killings and major vengeance. Any prints?”

  “Probably clean but we haven’t checked it yet.”

  “Figures.”

  Such a devastating weapon to shoot a human being. The carvings were lovely, if you could say that about an instrument intended for killing.

  “Tulio had it for sale,” she said.

  “Ricardo Tulio is back in business?”

  “It seems so, with a little help from his friends. Payment for his silence.”

  Portero sniffed the barrels. “Recently fired.”

  Back downstairs, she reported to Colonel Fabio.

  “We’re following a lead in the double murder at the contessa’s. Tulio was selling what’s possibly the murder weapon used on Vincente Lattaruzzo. A traditional lupara.”

  “The bloody shirt, the traditional weapon,” he said. “This has all the markings of a blood feud. Something left unaddressed from a long time ago.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “A peasant’s shirt?” the colonel observed.

  “Smacks of the countryside, yes sir. Why they would display the bodies in the contessa’s garden remains a mystery. We’re investigating the victims’ backgrounds … and the contessa’s.”

  “The contessa?” The colonel blinked rapidly, caught off guard.

  “I know she’s a personal friend, sir, but nonetheless … She needn’t know about it at this point.”

  “I appreciate your discretion. Do what you need to do, obviously. And let me know as soon as you find anything, as soon as she’s in the clear.”

  Back in her own office, Natalia rested her head in her hands for a moment, drew a long breath and called it a day. Angelina had already clocked out. Natalia needed an early night. Disrupted sleep was taking its toll.

  She walked home, her feet sore and heavy, made it upstairs to her door and undid the double locks. She dropped her keys in the foyer, placed placed her weapon in the top drawer of the hall table and shed her clothes on the way to the bedroom, where she flopped into bed and slept.

  She came awake as the upstairs neighbor clacked across the floor. Down in the narrow old street that fronted her building a truck transferred trash from a dumpster, winching it aboard. Metal screeched, then boomed. A toilet flushed upstairs, and the night grew quiet again.

  She got out of bed, undressed and slipped on one of Pino’s t-shirts and her pajama bottoms to step out onto the balcony. High clouds faintly haloed the moon. Not one star. She wished Pino were with her.

  In some ways, things had improved. The latest garbage strike had been over for months. Neapolitans no longer wore gas masks in the street, and Rome had finally dispatched the militia to help clean up the aftermath and deposit large metal containers around the poorer neighborhoods to accommodate the huge backlog of refuse. But collection continued day and night, often ruining sleep.

  Another victory for the Camorra gangsters. They’d caused the problem in the first place when their Don Aldo Gambini ordered his garbag
e collectors not to pick up any more trash after the city proposed purchase of an incinerator to cut hauling costs. When Gambini very conveniently was shot dead, Bianca Strozzi’s company won the removal contract from the city—the venture Lola ran for Bianca’s gang.

  A scrawny dog moved into the shadows across the courtyard. Then the burning arc of a cigarette tossed aside. Someone there walked quickly away farther into the alley. Afraid suddenly, she retreated back inside, carefully barring the louvered shutters.

  Had she ruffled some felon? Was the mob keeping tabs on her? Was it some errant husband sneaking home? The possibilities were too many. In any event, pissing off the lawless went with the territory and anxiety about it went with the job.

  When she and Pino worked together, they had an arrangement: They could summon one another day or night. They were natives born and bred in their dark city. They knew all the Camorra players and shared the sense of being outnumbered, often alone.

  After they became lovers, it became even easier to raise the alarm or confide her fears. Almost more than missing him as a lover, Natalia missed him as her partner and protector. She slept better with him around. Ironic, since she was probably the tougher of the two. Nonetheless…

  In the corner by Natalia’s bookcase was the broom her grandmother had placed in the doorway of her bedroom when she was an infant to keep away any witches wishing her harm. Should a witch turn up, she’d be forced to count each bristle, her nonna said. The task would take all night until the rising sun took away her power.

  Natalia collected the broom and carried it to her bedroom, leaned it on the threshold of the balcony and lay down on her bed, then took her five-shot house gun from the drawer in her night table and slipped it under her pillow.

  Chapter 7

  It was the day of Vincente Lattaruzzo’s funeral. Bagnatti remained in Dr. Agari’s custody, so far unclaimed.

  After Natalia showered, she surveyed her closet for something to wear. Not much to choose from. Mariel always encouraged her to amplify her wardrobe. Maybe if she had the style sense and the means of her best friend, she might have devoted more time to shopping. Though Natalia argued that she spent a fair amount of time in uniform, Mariel insisted there was no excusing her fashion crimes.

  Natalia located a black pleated skirt she hadn’t worn in years. Holding it to the light, she picked off a few pieces of lint, glad her friend wasn’t there to witness it. But even she couldn’t have found fault with the purple silk blouse. It was still in its dry cleaning bag, untouched since the time she dated that violinist. Had it been three years?

  After she finished dressing, she slathered styling gel on her wild wet curls and combed her hair, thinking again how she had to update the antique bathroom fixtures. She was reluctant to leave. Her four-room flat with its high ceilings and glass doorknobs was her refuge from the world, the only thing she owned outright, thanks to her father. Somehow her parents had collected a nest egg for their daughter—amazing, given the paltry salary her father earned as a city sanitation worker. Her mother had augmented it from the small income she earned mending clothes. They’d never traveled, and rarely did they even take in a film. Until Natalia had treated her mother to Florence, she’d never been farther than Potenza. Natalia showed her Dante’s house and explained that Galileo had trained his telescope on the heavens from a spot nearby. That evening, as they walked along the river arm in arm, the moon hung over them like a shiny locket.

  Natalia felt grateful every day for her flat, her niche in the world, with its cool marble floors underfoot and thick, protective walls adorned in pale yellow brocade. It always reminded her of them and the love that had brought her into the world.

  As she made her way downstairs and past the concierge’s rooms, Madam Luigina’s canary flooded the stairwell with song. Natalia continued down the stone steps to the ground floor of the two-hundred-year-old house. Its baroque aspect never went out of style in Naples: the inner courtyard plain, its balconies and iron banisters no more than ordinary. But on its exterior were several columns topped with decorative ribbon and floral designs that had survived the eons—a lucky happenstance when so many architectural jewels had been destroyed by Allied bombs during the war.

  Overhead, bed sheets swayed on a line, awaiting the brief daily intrusion of sunlight into the shadowed space. Natalia yawned. Queen Ann’s Lace and spindly weeds poked up through the cracks in the worn stone leading to the freshly painted, bright green outer door that she pulled shut with an ancient brass knocker shaped like the head of a lion.

  Her motor scooter was where she’d left it, hemmed in now by several other chained motorinos. Luckily it wasn’t too far. She could walk. Natalia pushed open the front gate. Via Giudice was nearly empty; Tribunali, quiet.

  Hair wild from sleep, Cecilia Bertolli, half owner of the Bertolli fruit stall, swept the walk in front of her shop. Her husband unpacked asparagus, the cigarette in his lips burned to ash.

  Natalia greeted them as she stepped into the street to avoid their boxes, then jumped back on the curb as a blue-and-white latte truck swayed toward her over the cobblestones, followed by a motorino driver with boxes of strawberries lashed to the back of his bike.

  On Via Duomo, the trees along the avenue were thick and green. Several homeless people slept in a huddle in front of the cathedral’s massive red doors. A white pug pulled its owner along, the leash taut. For a moment, its mistress lost her balance, her pink leggings and long, blousy top entangling with the lead until it threatened to topple her. Natalia just caught her and held her upright. The woman thanked her and picked up the dog, kissing it repeatedly.

  The boutiques hadn’t yet opened. Natalia ignored their window displays, instead looking at the reflected sky, hazy from the night’s rain. A day for witches, Natalia and Mariel would have said when they were children. They’d grown up with stories of witches who came from the mountains of Samio south of Naples and conspired there under the walnut trees. She and Mariel were convinced the hump-backed hag who lived in a ground floor basso two doors from her building was a witch possessed of magical powers to communicate with the dead. Mean boys used her hump as a bull’s eye for spit balls and other missiles. When she screamed at them, Natalia’s mother would rush to the balcony and threaten to call the police on them.

  “Shut up, garola!” they’d yell and flash their tiny middle fingers.

  As could have been predicted, most graduated to petty crime and manual labor, except for Sandro Altra and Benni Torrone, best friends to this day, who had taken up intimidating and killing for the Forcella gang.

  Undeterred by the hooligans, the crone predicted the futures of hundreds of Neapolitans and kept herself in wine with their donations.

  Natalia’s nonna had twice dragged her to the woman for readings without her mother’s knowledge, then hid the prescribed amulets beneath her tiny undershirt. Her grandmother tried to keep it from her, but Natalia knew a violent end is what the old woman had foreseen.

  The stormy night had deposited a carpet of pink petals on the streets of the San Carlo all’Arena district outside the Santa Maria Donna Regina church. By its entrance slept young people sprawled every which way, guitar cases and a soggy drum set beside them—giant sleeping caterpillars that, when they played their music, morphed into butterflies. Afternoons and evenings these minstrels performed on the Via San Biagio dei Librai, their songs wafting over the crowds of strollers she and Pino used to join like ordinary citizens.

  Natalia couldn’t imagine the lack of privacy the street dwellers endured. Two nuns came out and stepped around them. Someone had deposited a bottle of water. A passerby dropped a pastry on the ratty cloth beside them.

  A girl with pink-tufted hair opened her eyes, stretched and curled back up for more sleep. Church bells tolled. A dog—part German shepherd—lay stretched out beside her. It looked clean and well fed, more than could be said for its owners. She counted five kids, two of them boys spooned together. None more than eighteen.


  The stone entryway to the church was still damp. Natalia smoothed her curls and opened the small passage cut into the much larger chapel door. Stefano Grappi stood just inside, next to a confessional, eyes brimming and red. His thin wrists protruded from the too-large mourning suit. Greeting Natalia, he thanked her for coming. Either the suit was borrowed or he was losing weight drastically, as the griefstricken often did. Natalia surveyed the crowd, astonished by a young woman in a loud orange dress. Unthinkable to wear such a bright color at such a somber event. In the while since Natalia had attended a funeral, it looked like things had changed. Someone came in behind her. “Scuzzi.”

  Director Garducci, the consummate gentleman, greeting people, kissing women’s cheeks. He at least was wearing the appropriate black suit for his lover’s funeral and an obsidian and gold earring.

  The thick walls kept the interior cool. Vincente Lattaruzzo’s open coffin rested on a wooden bier near the altar. Beside it, his photograph on an easel. Several people gathered around the coffin. A few knelt in the pews, praying quietly. Others milled about, waiting for the mass to begin. Stefano joined an elderly couple in the front pew. Lattaruzzo’s parents? Probably. She checked the sparsely occupied pews but didn’t recognize anyone among the young professionals—no doubt colleagues of the deceased. Most prominent among the mourners were elderly women in black, alone or in pairs, who likely had never known the deceased but regularly attended everyone’s funeral, lonely women happy to break the solitude of their days. A few were, perhaps, simply ghoulish or seeking distraction. Most attended out of altruism. Their prayers, they believed, helped speed souls out of purgatory. Their prayers for the departed, they hoped, would be reciprocated by others when their time came. The grief displayed raised the family’s standing in the community, and the departed might finally have the respect he deserved in life but hadn’t gained until the moment of his eulogy.