Waiting for him at his door, eyes darting to and fro, was none other than Ponte.
Deputy Chief of Police Garzo was beside himself. There was no mistaking his shortness of breath and the red spots on his face. On top of that, he didn’t come over to greet Ricciardi when he walked into his office.
“Now then, Ricciardi. As usual, you’ve ignored my instructions. But this time, I haven’t the slightest intention of tolerating this attitude of yours, unless you have a reasonable explanation.”
Ricciardi cocked his head to one side, quizzically.
“I don’t understand, Dottore. Hadn’t we agreed that I would interview Signora Serra di Arpaja? That we were to take the car and drive to their palazzo? That’s precisely what we did.”
Garzo was snorting like a bull.
“I received a phone call from the professor himself, lodging a complaint about your attitude, which he found anything but deferential; he told me that you treated him like little more than a common criminal. Is it true what he says?”
Ricciardi shrugged.
“Not all of us are at home in the higher spheres of society, Dottore. I’ve envied you your diplomatic skills more than once. I was careful to stick to the standard questions, not wanting to imply anything. But if I were sitting at your desk, I’d be concerned about this excessively defensive posture: normally, as you surely know from your own vast depth of experience, it’s an approach that’s used to hide something.”
Garzo looked away. Ricciardi felt certain that if he got close to him, he’d hear the whirr and buzz of his brain testing its limits. The bureaucrat in Garzo instinctively shunned arguments with the wealthy and powerful, but the last thing he’d want was to have a murderer on his hands who’d been caught not through careful policework, but rather by chance, knowing that the press would crucify him for his protective attitude toward the professor. It had happened before. And Ricciardi knew it.
“Of course, you have a point. Ricciardi, I don’t want to direct the course of your investigation; perish the thought. But, for the second and I hope the last time, I must advise that you proceed with the utmost caution. If you need to speak with someone in the Serra di Arpaja family, you are to consult with me first. Agreed?”
“Yes, Dottore. Agreed.”
Maione was finally doing the work that he loved best: legwork. Collecting information, names, events, insignificant stories that were just fragments of a larger one. The kind of work that allowed him to immerse himself, that took him around the city, into offices and shops, from dark alleyways to grand, tree-lined boulevards. The kind of work that let him get to know new people and see old, familiar faces, and hear the voices of Naples. The kind of work that kept him from other thoughts; that was something he felt the need for, now more than ever. Two nights earlier, he’d filled his lungs with a different kind of air, an air he’d almost forgotten existed: that of a home. He’d felt the caring tenderness of a woman, the smell of food cooked just for him. He even thought he might have detected heartfelt concern in Filomena’s eyes for his weariness.
And yet his heart was filled with melancholy. He felt as if he’d been a spectator to someone else’s life, the usurper of a throne. He’d felt uneasy and depressed. He’d returned home in silence and had gotten into bed. Only then had he felt he was where he belonged, even though Lucia had doubtless been sleeping for hours, shut off in her world of memories.
These were the thoughts that were running through his mind when he finally saw the doorman leaving the Serra di Arpaja palazzo, changed out of his uniform and on his way home. Maione stepped out of the shadow of the doorway across the street and caught up with the man.
Pretending he’d run into him by chance, he suggested they go get an after-work beer together.
L
While Maione followed his trail made of voices, words, and facial expressions, Ricciardi was working on a different track. He had to find the missing piece that he could no longer hope to acquire through ordinary channels: Antonio Iodice, pizzaiolo, suicide.
Walking briskly through the teeming vicoli of the evening, he headed straight for the pizzeria that had been the root of both that poor man’s dreams and his destruction. He was unwilling to close the books on the case and brand as guilty a man who hadn’t even had a chance to confess, though appearances certainly seemed to suggest that he was responsible for the crime. He wanted to live in his world for a little while, listen to his last thoughts, fully comprehend his dying sorrow. Unless the man was still partially conscious when he arrived at the hospital; in that case, he wouldn’t find anything other than the smell of death.
It was rare for Ricciardi to go willingly in search of the Deed. Every time he encountered it, he was left with a shard of despair inside him: a fragment of the immense suffering involved in letting go, a sort of infection. He accepted the burden silently, as he always had, shutting himself up in a dark, thorny, internal cell.
But he had no choice: Iodice’s wife and mother had talked to him about the man, but the stories they told were distorted by love. He would have to perform his own objective analysis of the expressions of pain and grief. Whether he liked it or not, he alone had this opportunity, and he had to take it.
He found himself standing in front of the usual notice, nailed to the door: the premises had been placed under sequestration by order of the magistrate. He walked into the darkness of the dining room. Overturned chairs, shattered dishes and bowls on the floor, half-eaten food. Flies that had gotten in by way of a slit over the door, through which penetrated a narrow shaft of light.
Everything was arranged just as it had been the moment that Camarda and Cesarano walked through the door, just before the pizzaiolo committed his demented final act. As Ricciardi looked around, he thought he could sense the pandemonium, the shouts, the noise. Against the far wall, beyond the tables and chairs, was the counter where the pizzas were made, right in front of the now cold oven. On the other side of the counter, the hearth, with a few saucepans. There were smells in the air: frying, smoke, sweat. Spoiled food. And blood.
Ricciardi’s footsteps echoed in the silence and the shadows. He’d closed the door behind him; he didn’t need light to see what he’d come here to find. He walked over to the counter; he stopped and stood there, hands in his pants pockets, breathing gently. Then he drew a deeper breath, and walked forward.
Iodice’s specter was seated on the floor, its back leaning against the wall, head lolling on its right shoulder. One leg stretched out, the other folded, the shoe kicked off. Spasming muscles prefer to be rid of all constrictions. One arm lying along the side of the body, the palm of its hand flat on the floor, as if his last impulse had been to get up. Vest unbuttoned, shirt wide open, sleeves rolled up. A white apron covered his trousers. The other hand still gripped the handle of the knife, which jutted from his chest like a fractured bone. Gushing from the wound was the black river of blood which the heart had gone on blindly pumping.
As was often the case, the dead man had one eye open and the other shut, and the expression on his face was twisted by pain. His snarling lips revealed his yellowed, bloodstained teeth. The bottom lip was split open by one last furious bite. A reddish froth dripped from his mouth: his lung, thought Ricciardi. You weren’t even granted one last deep breath.
Ricciardi had been told that Iodice had called out to his children as he died. But the man’s last thought before dissolving into the shadows wasn’t for them; Ricciardi could hear it clearly. From his ravaged mouth, Iodice was saying: You know; you know you were already lying dead on the floor.
They looked at each other for a long time, in the darkness, surrounded by broken dishware and stale odors, the dead man and the live one. Then Ricciardi turned on his heel and went back out into the perfume of springtime and all its false promises.
This time, Maione let his feet do the work.
The beers with the Serra di Arpajas’ doorman had turned into three: the first to loosen the man up, the second to go with the us
ual resentful servant’s story about his arrogant and oppressive employers, and the third as a token of sympathy and to thank him for the venomous information sprung from his malevolence.
And so by now it was dinnertime, and his conscience had been temporarily silenced. Showing up at Filomena’s house at this time of night, again, would clearly push their moments together beyond the bounds of some hypocritical coincidence and establish a routine that he wasn’t yet willing to consolidate. Not yet. And so he set off for home with an uncertain step, knowing he’d come to a fork in the road where his feet, of their own accord, without bothering to consult his mind, would decide.
As it turned out, he’d never know which way his feet would turn: the crowd of people that he glimpsed at the mouth of Vico del Fico made his heart start racing and his breath catch in his throat. He thought that the mysterious author of her disfigurement might have returned to finish the horrible job he’d begun five days earlier, taking advantage, like a coward, of the absence of anyone who could protect Filomena: someone like him, for instance.
As he was hurrying toward the basso, making his way through the small crowd, he felt as if he were moving the way you do in those dreams where you’re swimming through a mist that makes everything slow down, even your thoughts. And as he ran, he regretted his own hesitancy and the third beer with the Serras’ doorman. It wasn’t until he came even with the little front door of Filomena’s basso that he realized that that wasn’t the destination of the people of the vicolo; rather, it was the basso next door. He saw the open front door and the empty room inside, and he mechanically followed the stream of people.
There was a knot of people crowded tightly around the entrance, but as always his uniform opened up a path for him. Inside, surrounded by four or five black-clad weeping professional mourners, sat an ashen-faced little girl, expressionless, carefully dressed, hair neatly combed. Next to her sat Filomena, her shawl pulled up to shield her bandaged wound from sight, the other side of her face streaked with tears.
In the middle of the room, stretched out on the bed, lay a corpse dressed in work clothes, filthy with mortar and dust: a bricklayer, thought Maione. Standing near the bed were a dozen or so men dressed the same way: in their midst, the brigadier recognized Gaetano, Filomena’s son.
Even though the body had been arranged as neatly as possible, it was immediately clear to Maione that the man had died from a fall: his spine was bent unnaturally, there were traces of caked blood on his mouth, and the back of his neck didn’t leave the impression on the pillow that it should have.
When Filomena saw him, she hurried over to him.
“It’s a tragedy, Raffaele! Poor little Rituccia! Her father was the only parent she had left. Her mamma died when she was little; she was a friend of mine. And now her father’s dead. What a tragedy. She and Gaetano grew up together. And as fate would have it, Gaetano worked with Salvatore, on the same construction site on Via Toledo. My poor boy actually saw him fall; oh, the horror of it, right before his eyes . . .”
Maione looked at Gaetano, standing off in the shadows, not far from the bed. He heard a few comments, muttered under the breath and behind his back: “Now she’s got herself a cop for a friend,” “Did you hear that? She called him by name. They’re on a first-name basis.” For no good reason, he felt a faint flush of shame. And then he felt ashamed of feeling ashamed.
He turned to look at the little girl, who was the target of the noisy wave of compassion emitted by the women of the vicolo, and he was hardly surprised to see that her eyes were dry of tears. He knew how common it was for true grief to lack any outward signs. And, as he watched her, he picked up on a glance exchanged between the girl and Gaetano, the boy she’d grown up with. It was over in an instant: just a hint of a smile. It went completely unnoticed by all, save for Maione. It wasn’t the smile of a little girl. Gaetano remained expressionless, his faced carved out of some dark hardwood.
The brigadier felt a long shiver run down his spine.
LI
The next morning, on his way to headquarters, Ricciardi carried on his shoulders a heavier burden of sadness than usual. Another day had gone by since Calise’s ferocious murder, and bitter experience had taught him that time was his worst adversary.
Just like his own accursed visions, the murderer’s footprints were fading away, gradually being erased by the overlay of new ideas, of different emotions. Moreover, the investigators’ movements put the guilty parties on notice, allowing them to make counter-moves of their own.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, last night, once again, the shutters across the way had remained shut up tight. Perhaps Enrica had suffered from a relapse of her mysterious illness; that’s what his imagination had suggested. Or worse, she was so deeply offended that she no longer even wanted to see his shadow at the window.
He was groping in the dark, and that stirred up a thunderstorm in his thoughts and in his heart, one that he couldn’t put to rest.
As usual, he had arrived early, much earlier than the others. The officer at the entrance wasn’t catnapping this time, and with a military-style salute, he strode out to meet him.
“Buongiorno, Commissa’. There’s a young lady upstairs who wants to talk to you. I let her go up; she’s waiting for you in the hall outside your office.”
Ricciardi’s heart jumped up in his throat at the thought that this could be Enrica. With a nod to the officer, who stared at him, taken aback by the look of fright on the commissario’s face, Ricciardi headed toward the broad staircase with his eyes on the floor. Then he looked up, terrified and hopeful at the same time.
It wasn’t her.
The girl who sat waiting for him on the small bench in the hallway was very young. She looked vaguely familiar somehow; Ricciardi decided he must have seen her recently, though he couldn’t remember where. She was modestly dressed, with a dark overcoat that was too heavy for the now mild temperature, a nondescript hat perched on her upswept hair. In her hand was a bundle wrapped in newspaper pages. When she spotted him coming, she rose to her feet but didn’t walk over to meet him. He gave her a quizzical look. She was the first to speak.
“Buongiorno, Commissa’. I have something I wanted to tell you, about the . . . the misfortune that befell Carmela Calise.”
That morning, Maione came in early, too. His alcohol-fueled chat with the Serra di Arpajas’ doorman had yielded some new pieces of information that he wanted to discuss as soon as possible with the commissario. And besides, lately, work was the only place where he felt relaxed.
He’d stayed by the bedside of the little girl’s father for a while the night before, without managing to shake the unpleasant sensation that something there required further explanation, though he couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Perhaps it was Rituccia’s composed resignation; she hadn’t shed a single tear, and was sitting far away from the bed, probably because she was repelled by the corpse. Or it might be the relative indifference of the dead man’s fellow workers, who stood cap in hand, awkwardly shuffling their feet, clearly eager to leave. Or possibly the genuine sympathy that Filomena displayed as she reassured the girl, telling her that from that moment on she would be like a second child to her. Or maybe it was the fact that everyone was staring at him with morbid curiosity, as if he were coming to take on a role of social significance comparable to Filomena’s disfigured beauty.
Whatever the reason, the minute he was able to, he’d left to head home, promising the little girl, Gaetano, and Filomena that he’d take care of things, dealing with the contractor that employed the victim to make sure that his daughter was paid the indemnity that was due to her.
When he turned his key in the lock of his apartment door, for once arriving at a reasonable time for dinner, Maione was greeted by the wall of ice erected by Lucia. This wasn’t the usual silence made of memories; that much he’d realized immediately. It contained a new kind of fury, reminiscent of the quarrels they’d had during the first few years of marriage. Plates
slammed down on the table, no tablecloth, no napkins, cold soup left over from the children’s lunch. In response to his one tentatively offered conjecture—whether by chance his wife might not be feeling well—he received a flashing glare and a dry “I’m feeling just fine.” Hissing, conclusive. Neither of them had spoken another word, and she’d spent the rest of the evening in the company of her repressed fury, he accompanied by a vague sense of guilt.
When morning rolled around, bringing with it a persistent headache inherited from the night before, he had walked out onto the street with a sense of relief, without realizing that a gaze made of two parts rage to one part affection was following him from the window.
Once he had arrived at headquarters, he went straight to the commissario’s office and was shocked to find sitting before him, with a newspaper-wrapped bundle in her hands, the very same person who constituted his principal piece of news.
Both Ricciardi and Maione had seen Teresa the day before; she had opened the door, shown them inside, and served them tea. With her fine housekeeper’s smock and her starched headpiece, she hadn’t struck the trained eyes of the two investigators as any more remarkable than the furnishings and ornaments in the front hall. But now, even though she was dressed in a nondescript fashion, she took on a certain personality.
After saluting, Maione signaled to the commissario that he wanted to speak to him. Ricciardi excused himself and left the room with the brigadier.
“Commissa’, yesterday I had a long chat with the doorman of the palazzo, and after a beer or two—which I paid for out of my own pocket, of course—he coughed up a lot of interesting information. First of all,” he began, counting off the points on his fingers, taking hold of the fingertips one by one with his other hand, “the good signora, so simple and modest, is having herself a nice little affair with a stage actor. Everyone knows about it, and according to the doorman, so does the professor, but he pretends to look the other way.” At this point, the limber fingers of his right hand released their grip to make the twin horns of the cuckold, Italian shorthand for a man whose wife is cheating on him. “Next, he told me that he’d heard from the cook that the signora wouldn’t do a thing, not a single blessed thing, without the permission of the old fortune-teller—that is, Calise. The chauffeur would have to drive her there as many as three times a day, until she started taking her own vehicle, a red sports car, a brand new Alfa Romeo Brianza, bright and beautiful as the sun. It seems that in the last few days before the Calise was murdered, there was even a fight between them; nobody could understand what they were saying, but they were shouting, and people could hear them out in the street. Last of all, the most interesting piece of news, is what I heard about the signorina sitting in the other room, who’s been their maid for the past two years. You want to know what it is?”
Blood Curse Page 23
