A Few Drops of Blood

by Jan Merete Weiss

  “Did you find a problem with him?”

  “The truth? He was seen in Mergellina Park with one of the Gracci girls. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Yes. They’re friends. She had a crush on him a while back. He’s helping her out at present. She’s pregnant.”

  “Right. Natalia, I have no doubt about your friend’s honesty. But he’s naïve, in the best sense. Whether he should be allowed to resume duty given the circumstances, I can’t really say. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your private life is your private life. That is understood. I don’t have a problem with your relationship provided you don’t serve together. The situation with the Gracci girl is another matter. Be careful, Natalia. You’re doing a terrific job. There’s no reason you won’t be promoted in due course. I’d hate to see you jeopardize all you’ve worked for.”

  “Yes, sir. The second thing I wanted your advice about is the case I’m on.”

  “The double murder?”

  “Yes. I have several suspects, a countess among them.”

  “Fabio and Elisabetta’s friend.”

  “Antonella Cavazza, yes. The bodies were found in her garden. Her beloved father was betrayed by the fascists during the war and gruesomely executed by the Germans with piano wire.”

  “Slow and painful.”

  “Yes.” Natalia explained his brave work in the Resistance until he was reported by someone in the Lattaruzzo clan. And how after the armistice, the Lattaruzzos got out, fled to Naples, where eventually their grandson Vincente wound up a curator and socializing with the countess.

  “Oh, my.”

  “Several things at the scene pointed to vendetta.”

  “Scavullo settling scores for the contessa?”

  “Yes, except it was made way too obvious.”

  “Maybe he wanted credit for his crime,” Tucci said.

  “Perhaps. But I can’t shake the feeling that he’s playing us. That we are thinking exactly what he wants us to think.”

  “And now you have an added complication.”

  “Sir?”

  “Gianni Scavullo is about to be released.”

  “Which presents us with a whole other set of possible Camorra troubles in Naples.”

  “You mean, if he attempts to resume command of the clan. Would his son stand for it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s a hard one.” The major described Papa Gianni’s first years in the pen. He’d carried on with bravado, like nothing had changed. Furnished his cell like a hotel room. Luxury mattress, Persian carpet, easy chair, small bar. Had marble laid over the linoleum floor. Listened to opera on his stereo and watched soccer games played all over the world on his satellite dish TV. Hell, a barber came in twice a week, as did the capos. Twice a week Renata brought him home-cooked meals and salamis.

  “He had everything,” Natalia said. “Everything but freedom.”

  “Weekend furloughs in a facility near the prison: the next best thing. Conjugal visits there. Then came 41-bis. You remember?”

  “The program to isolate Camorra dons doing time, reduce their interaction with cronies and block their control of their gangs,” Natalia recalled.

  “Right. Contact was reduced to an hour a month, with the inmate in a glass cage, and communicating with visitors on handsets, all of them monitored and recorded.”

  “I remember,” Natalia said, “but that didn’t last long.”

  “Sadly, no. Human rights organizations lobbied it out of existence.”

  “And his relationship with Ernesto?” Natalia said.

  “At first Ernesto faithfully visited twice a week to get his orders and update his old man. Last couple of years, he visits once a month maybe. The old guys who worked for his father, he kicked to the side of the road. Promoted young ones—muscle-builder types, not long on brains. Can’t imagine Papa likes being disrespected or how his son turned out.”

  “Can you blame him?” said Natalia. “Ernesto is an arrogant bastard. Makes his father seem like a gentleman. In the past five years all but two of Gianni’s trusted associates have been sidelined. Several of his contemporaries died, some retired, a couple disappeared, as you know.”

  Tucci picked up his pipe. “You mind? I can open the window.”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Gianni hasn’t many allies left in the organization. And Ernesto doesn’t strike me as the type to concede his power. He’s not going to want to be his old man’s lackey again.”

  Natalia nodded. “But you think it unlikely Gianni Scavullo is in a position to regain control?”

  “I do. But he shouldn’t be underestimated either. He’s old school, as tough as they come. Even imprisoned, he had an enemy transferred to his penitentiary and put in the same cell block so he could personally kill him.”

  “Not like the mafia dons,” she said. “Not like his son, either, who delegates most everything, running his outfit from a distance, like an executive.”

  “Amazing how different generations are, father and son.” Tucci looked at his watch. “Come.”

  He treated her to a coffee in the canteen from where she could see into the window of the basso next door, framed by starched white curtains embroidered with green and yellow pears. Immediately she thought of stopping to see Antonietta, though a visit with her father’s only remaining sister was never a simple affair. It would involve hearing about all her current and past ailments, then being fed a heavy meal. During the requisite drinking of aurum (a heavy liqueur never to Natalia’s liking), followed by a cake made of maize flour—an interrogation would commence. About Natalia’s love life.

  But after leaving the major, a sense of obligation guided her to the basso tucked into a corner of the district.

  Its tiny porch was laced with a grape arbor. From it you could see for miles out over the city and the harbor. Natalia knocked and knocked again. Perhaps her aunt was out. Natalia decided to wait.

  Luckily, she wasn’t in uniform, or she would never have visited. Natalia made a point never to call on her zia in uniform. No need to complicate matters for her with her neighbors. Nosy they were; that was a fact. If they saw her insignia, Natalia had no doubt they would be at her zia’s door before she was out of sight. They’d pester Antonietta with questions about the Carabiniere visiting one of their own. Ironic that what went on in headquarters was hardly of interest. Headquarters had to do with the world beyond them. No matter that it was less than a hundred metres away. It might as well have been on the moon.

  Nearby several women had collected on the rectangular patch of concrete behind their apartments. Their desire was to smoke and gossip. That they ignored the spectacular view of their red and grey city was not surprising. It was that familiar in their everyday lives. They felt it more than saw it. It was there and would remain. Unchanged. And what did it do for them? Time spent staring at the expanse of their city and its harbor thick with ships they considered a waste. For the majority of them, a trip to Ischia or Capri would never have crossed their minds. So what did the picturesque ferries have to do with them? They much preferred to discuss who said what to whom, who had cheated on whom. Their lives were centered within the confines of their vici. Here were the people they dealt with on a daily basis. Everything they needed could be found here within these cramped blocks: church, market, café, funeral parlor. Neighbors, friends, enemies.

  If they needed something fixed, they rarely had to go far. When Natalia visited as a child, there was still a man in the neighborhood who repaired umbrellas. Natalia was often sent to his building with the offending item. Proud to be given the responsibility, she’d shout as loud as she could. He’d come to the window, see who was calling, then lower a bucket. She’d put the umbrella in and watch while he hauled it, swaying several stories, up to his apartment. Three days later it was her job to collect it. Good as new, she lifted it out of the bucket, placed the few lire in its place and was on her way, the tra
nsaction complete. An exchange based on trust and familiarity.

  Even in this day and age, few locals would consider marrying someone they hadn’t known all their lives. Certainly no one outside their rione, their region.

  Life beyond had little impact. Now and then a check arrived from a relative in America. It was duly deposited in the bank or taken to their local money dealer and cashed. Now and then there was a trip to a government office or a specialist: major expeditions, carefully planned. They did not rest easy until they’d returned. Most never yearned for distant shores. They were content. And for diversion there was always a christening, a wedding, or a funeral to attend and friendships to revisit.

  On a far corner, Natalia could just see the edge of the Capellino Funeral Home. The current Capellino’s grandfather had been one of the most successful coffin makers in Naples, and she remembered vividly one particular casket that he had made for show, carved and painted with gold angels and silver cupids. Natalia and her parents had accompanied her aunt window-shopping for her own among garish, factory-made boxes. When her mother suggested simpler ones, Antonietta bristled.

  Antonietta’s house was almost as familiar to Natalia as her own. The whitewashed walls. The plaster saints that crammed the shelves. The long table that took pride of place in the center of one of the three rooms.

  On more than one occasion, Antonietta had lectured Natalia about how much better life was when the gangster Di Laura was running things. “You had a problem, he took care of it. There weren’t all these troubles, like now. Man was a gentleman.”

  Antonietta had grown up in the notorious Secondigliano district and ridden the infamous R5 bus, which had obviously colored her view. The drivers on the route often stopped to let drug dealers off to make a deal then get back on the bus. The passengers waited patiently; no one dared complain. That the crime boss held a tight fist over the neighborhood—well, without him, they rationalized things would be a lot worse.

  Natalia wondered if there were places of evil, where evil deeds were called forth. Places with bad karma as Pino would say. Places cursed. Some days she believed Naples qualified, a city under the Camorra thumb, Mount Vesuvius in the distance, ready to blow again.

  Certainly Secondigliano qualified, its grinding poverty rivaling any in the south. Pozzuoli, too. And the village of Baia where Nero had murdered his mother, Agrippina, then invited his familiars to view the body. He pulled at her lifeless limbs, wanting them to judge her physical merits. They knew better than to offer compliments if they wanted to live.

  Natalia had long ago given up trying to explain to Antonietta why a city operating under the thumb of a Di Lauro was not, in fact, a good thing. She made a point to emphasize it wasn’t “God’s will,” as her aunt put it, that the mayor was beholden to a don, that even her husband had paid a pezzo to a local thug. That didn’t sway her aunt. Antonietta’s counterargument was that the money went for a good cause. Their neighborhood had the best floats when it came to festival days, times she loved. Who else would pay for that?

  Her husband had been one of the last of the pazzoriellos. Natalia remembered him wearing his cocked hat and, accompanied by two drummers and a piper, entering shops, waving his stick about to banish evil spirits for which the shopkeeper would give them a few lire. People still believed life was better when they could depend on the pazzariellos’ powers, just as they were nostalgic for the old Camorra.

  It was only when she informed her zia that she was going to be one of those Carabinieri who fight the clans that Antonietta backed off. Natalia even convinced her to remove the photograph of Lucky Luciano and his pal Genovese from their pride of place beside the Pope.

  Family loyalty trumped Antonietta’s convictions about how the city should be run … for about a week.

  Natalia’s choice was foreign to her. That a woman would pursue a career was strange enough. “Why don’t you get married? There’s nothing wrong with you!” she exclaimed on more than one occasion.

  Antonietta had never worked outside the home, though she was an excellent seamstress and sometimes took in mending, as Natalia’s mother had done, keeping her family fed during the war by taking apart Allied uniforms and turning them into serviceable clothes. That these uniforms were delivered to her by Domenico Lupo’s bandits hadn’t fazed her. Lupo was the most notorious of the many that thrived in the wake of the war. No friend to the Camorra, he went on his own, for which the Allies liked him, even though they were well aware he was robbing them blind.

  He was a saint in the eyes of the people because he would turn up now and then at a poor home with a sack of food and a thousand lire notes. That he had stolen the food and made the money on goods he expropriated from the armed forces that had liberated their city did not pose a moral dilemma. One did what one had to. The black market was the least of it.

  And sometimes Natalia wondered who she was to judge. Her mother once confided that Antonietta’s sister had been forced into prostitution during the war. She’d been among the thousands afflicted with VD. Periodically the city officials, goaded by the Allies, were forced to do a sweep—the girls hauled off to a hospital to be tested. For ten thousand lire a sciaquapalle, a ball cleaner, went to the hospital director and arranged for a bill of good health. In the case of her zia’s sister, the result of continued employment was sterility and an early death.

  Natalia’s zia was no doubt among those who mourned when Lupo was finally taken down by a jealous girlfriend who had been shown expertly doctored pictures of him with a prostitute’s naked legs encircling him. Arrested, he was transported to Poggio Reale, then to the special prison on the island of Procida and left there to rot.

  The day he left their shore, a goodly number of the population joined Antonietta in wearing black.

  Up until the day of Natalia’s induction, her zia tried to talk her niece out of her chosen career. She was making a mistake, she argued. There were certain things one didn’t question. You went about your business and averted your eyes from everything else. To do otherwise was dangerous. Life with the Camorra was life as she knew it. Natalia realized that for Antonietta, the Camorra was no worse than any other authority and sometimes better. She trusted none of them. Even her priest at San Carlo all’Arena, where she’d been married, where her husband had been laid out. To her zia, there was no difference between the clerics or the mayor or the madrina. They were all corrupt. And the ordinary person was therefore freed to survive through disobedience and even crime.

  “Lo stesso,” she said. The same.

  And then she threw in her trump card: Lola. Antonietta had always been fondest of Lola. She was the friend her zia was most comfortable with. Unlike Mariel, who seemed strange to her, almost exotic. A sophisticated little girl, polite and too quiet.

  Natalia would never forget the moment of her aunt’s ultimate argument against enlisting: “What about Lola? What’re you gonna do, put your girlfriend in jail?”

  Back then Natalia thought it was just her aunt being dramatic. But as time went on, she wondered if she hadn’t been prescient.

  Antonietta opened the door. She kissed her niece then made the sign of the cross and kissed her fingertips. Natalia couldn’t remember seeing her aunt in anything but widow’s black, which today included a saggy black sweater over her black dress.

  “Zia, it’s a hundred degrees! Forty centigrade!” Natalia exclaimed as she kissed her.

  “I’m just out of the shower. You want me to catch cold? Come in, child. Come in.”

  Chapter 17

  The day after Natalia’s confab with the major, Suzanna answered the door, a white poodle snuggled in her arms. Her onyx and diamond hairband matched the dog’s collar.

  “Look at you,” Suzanna said. “Don’t you look cute in your uniform. Come in. Meet Shasha.”

  She held up the dog for Natalia to admire: a miniature white poodle. Natalia patted Shasha’s head and followed her owner’s gardenia scent down a long hallway into the living room.

&
nbsp; Flanking the entry were a pair of onyx and white marble end tables. Across the room two green brocade couches mirrored one another, between them a Persian rug saturated with purples and splashes of ochers and greens. A baroque lamp with red butterflies gamboling on the creamy silk shade stood in the middle. Several white orchids were displayed in small gold pots on the ebony coffee table. Against the back wall a mahogany bar held every kind of liquor imaginable.

  “Just abandoned my mother’s place. You were there, no?”

  “Once, I think. Your communion party.”

  “That sounds right. Marzipan angels?” Suzanna laughed.

  “And almond candy,” Natalia said, “coated in white sugar.”

  “Mama still has my dress. I was just going to treat myself to prosecco. Can I get you one?”

  “Sounds great.”

  Suzanna had made a big deal out of the visit—drinks, a platter of fancy cakes on a low table between them. The dog skittered over to Natalia.

  “He bother you? I can put him in my bedroom.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  While the dog sniffed her ankles, Natalia surveyed the rest of the room. Not her style, but impressive.

  “Like it?” Suzanna handed Natalia a glass of pale green liquid.

  “Amazing.”

  “First thing I did: got a feng shui expert. Rid the place of bad vibes. Helped me arrange everything. Feels harmonious right? To Auld Lang Syne.”

  “Cheers.” Natalia and her old classmate clinked glasses.

  Suzanna sat down. “You should see my mother’s place. Nothing has changed, except it’s all gotten dingier.”

  “I remember it was very large.”

  “Seriously, the wire’s been sticking out of her cushions for the past two years. Like it would kill her to get a couple of new cushions.”