Blood Curse

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Maione listened to him. And he understood that Ricciardi was no longer talking about Calise, Garzo, Iodice, or Serra di Arpaja. He was talking about himself.

  Even though the brigadier lacked a well-developed sensibility, he did realize that the mood of the commissario, who was already melancholy by nature, had taken a plunge after that interview two days earlier with a witness, a certain Enrica Colombo. And now that he thought about it, this witness resided on Via Santa Teresa, right where Ricciardi lived. Perhaps they knew each other, which would certainly go a long way toward explaining the bizarre direction the interview had taken, the interview that he himself had been forced to conduct because the man who ought by rights to have asked the questions sat in silence. He sat silently and watched.

  The brigadier had grown up on the street, and he knew when it was a good idea to keep quiet. There was nothing he could say; he could only sympathize with his superior officer and friend from a distance.

  LIV

  At the usual small café table at the Gran Caffè Gambrinus, Ricciardi sat waiting.

  Garzo hadn’t given him much time, far too little in fact, forcing him to gamble somewhat recklessly. Ricciardi liked to plan things out, leaving as little as possible to chance. He know how important strategy was in his line of work. But the time he had now was terribly short.

  And so he’d telephoned the Serra di Arpaja residence. It was a desperate, flailing move, a long shot.

  But however rarely it happens, even long shots hit their targets every now and then: Teresa herself had answered, and she had told him that yes, the signora was at home, she’d see if the signora was available. He could be sure that the girl wouldn’t mention the phone call to Ruggero. And Emma had agreed to meet with him. Luck favors the bold.

  Ricciardi, sitting at the café table, looked out through the plate glass window at the wheeled, hooved, and foot-borne traffic that marched over the cobblestones of Via Chiaia; springtime had staged a morning in which the light seemed to surge up from below, the sky was so blue that it hurt your eyes, and the women seemed to be dancing in time to a music that only they could hear. Men smiled and tipped their hats, soldiers walked two-by-two and blew kisses to girls who accelerated their gait, giggling under the brims of their little hats. Near a beggar stretched out on the sidewalk, Ricciardi glimpsed a child badly injured around his pelvis, the unmistakable mark of a carriage wheel: blood was gushing out of his mouth and the upper half of his body was curiously out of alignment with the lower half, as if he were reflected in a fun-house mirror or seen through wet glass. Outside the large plate glass window, Ricciardi could hear his voice, calling, Il mio canillo, è fuiuto. My little dog got away. Wearily, he wondered where the puppy had run off to and whether it had found a new master.

  “Commissario Ricciardi, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The purring voice of Emma Serra di Arpaja summoned him back from the dark pit of his soul. He rose from his seat and pulled the other chair out from the table, turning it slightly in a courteous gesture.

  He instantly saw the difference between the mousy, reserved person he had interviewed and the confident and brazen woman who was looking at him with amused curiosity. Ricciardi wondered whether it had been her husband’s influence that had chastened Emma’s personality, or whether she had just been playing a part for the benefit of the two policeman; in any case, he mused, the real Emma was the one standing before him.

  He asked what she was having, and she told him a glass of white wine. In the morning, he thought. For himself he ordered the usual: an espresso and a sfogliatella pastry.

  The woman laughed. A short, silvery laugh.

  “Not worried about your weight, are you, Commissario? A mid-morning sfogliatella. Mio Dio!”

  “And you’re not worried about getting drunk, first thing in the morning?”

  He said it with the full awareness of how rude and provocative he was being. He wanted to let her know in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t be intimidated and to verify that the signora liked to tie one on, as Teresa had told him.

  Emma reeled from the direct hit: she turned pale, then blushed and started to her feet. Ricciardi didn’t reach out to stop her.

  “If you leave now, I’ll feel free to disregard your pain.”

  The woman sat back down in her chair, wide-eyed.

  “What pain? I’m in no pain.”

  Ricciardi shook his head.

  “Signora, we both know that what you said yesterday was far from the truth; no one returns obsessively to the same place without a powerful motive. Powerful enough to give you the courage to take on the world; and yet yesterday you didn’t take on anyone. You didn’t fight; you parroted the lesson you’d been taught, and nothing more. I didn’t fall for it, not even for a second. Even before I ask you for the truth, I’m going to ask you why you lied.”

  Emma looked at Ricciardi, shaking her head. Her hands were gripping the arms of her chair so hard that the skin on her knuckles turned white as wax.

  “I . . . I wanted to understand why you’d come to see me. Me in particular. Dozens and dozens of people went to see Calise. I alone must have recommended her to twenty of my girlfriends. So why me, out of all of them?”

  Ricciardi didn’t want to tip his hand by telling her that hers was just one of the names marked down in the fortune-teller’s notebook for that last day. Instead, he decided to go all in.

  “Why are you covering for your husband, if you no longer love him?”

  Emma opened her eyes wide; then she began to laugh. At first quietly, under her breath, with a look of surprise, and then louder and louder until she threw her head back, tears running down her cheeks. Ricciardi sat waiting, watching her, not saying a word. People sitting at other tables turned to look at them, wondering what on earth that gloomy-looking man had said to that lovely, elegant lady to make her laugh so hard. At last Emma regained her composure.

  “Forgive me, Commissario. It’s just too funny! My husband? Covering for my husband? That’s the last thing I would do. My husband covers for himself; that’s how he spends his life, covering for himself. And another thing: what would I be covering for? It’s true, he told me what to say yesterday, how to dress, even what tone of voice to use. And what of that? He’s a lawyer, one of the best there is. If I was covering anyone, it was myself, to ward off ridiculous suspicions. Not him.”

  Ricciardi decided that the time had come to spring his trap, and he lied without hesitation.

  “All the same, Signora, we have every reason to believe that your husband was in Calise’s apartment the night she died. Someone saw him there. Moreover, there were traces of blood on the soles of the shoes he was wearing.”

  Emma was dumbfounded.

  “But wasn’t it that pizzaiolo that the newspapers have been writing about? The one who killed himself? Why would my husband . . . no, Commissario . . . it’s impossible. My husband lacks the courage; he’s a very fearful man. He’d never be able to pull off anything of the sort, under any circumstances. He doesn’t act. He thinks. He didn’t even react when . . . He just doesn’t take action, let me assure you.”

  This was no time to overlook her hesitations, Ricciardi decided.

  “He didn’t even react when . . . what? This is no time to be less than forthcoming, Signora. Don’t make me think that you’re concealing something serious, or I’ll have no consideration for your well-being. Believe me.”

  Emma chewed on her lower lip. There was something in Ricciardi’s tone of voice that scared her. She thought it over a while. Then she spoke.

  “Even when I left him. For good. I wanted to run away, leave our home.”

  “And you told him this?”

  “Yes, I told him. I spewed every ounce of disgust I feel for him right in his face. I told him how I loathed him and how I hated our loveless life together. He begged me not to leave him, and he was crying, an old man with tears in his eyes . . .”

  Ricciardi studied the expression on the woman’s fac
e; she had flung open the door to her innermost thoughts. This was the moment to push.

  “Did he try to change your mind? Did he threaten you? Did he threaten anyone else, say, Calise?”

  Emma smiled sadly.

  “No. Like I said, he lacks the courage. So when I saw him on his knees at my feet, sobbing convulsively, I just told him.”

  “Told him what?”

  “The truth. That I’m pregnant.”

  LV

  He’d found himself a spot in the shadows. Over time, and with experience, Maione had learned how to blend in. Not like Teresa Scognamiglio, who had a natural gift for escaping notice. He didn’t have the build to pull it off, being big, tall, and hairy. Throw the uniform into the mix, and who would be capable of vanishing from sight entirely? Still, over the years, what with the stakeouts, the tailing and pursuit of suspects, he’d learned a thing or two in the way of technique.

  The important thing was never to lose sight of the person, so you could stay out of their sight. Filomena walked with her eyes on the ground and never glanced at her reflection. He knew where she worked; she’d told him herself. Now he needed to determine whether Don Matteo De Rosa—the well-known fabric merchant who had inherited the shop from his father-in-law after marrying a woman widely considered to be the richest and ugliest in all of Naples—had really lost his head over Filomena like Bambinella had told him.

  Taking refuge in the large entrance hall of an austere palazzo in Via Toledo, he waited for her to finish her shift and to be alone with that man; he wanted to see how he behaved. To get an idea. Just to get an idea. He wasn’t obsessed with her, of course. But he didn’t like gray areas.

  He’d ruled out the guappo, Costanzo, immediately. In that city, policemen and camorristi—the Mafiosi of Naples—had learned each other’s languages by dint of doing battle with one another. Maione knew that the face-slash carried a specific meaning; it was a mark of betrayal, adultery. No camorrista would hesitate to slash the face of his beloved if he learned that she had been unfaithful to him, but that certainly didn’t apply to Don Luigi, who was happily married, and married, moreover, to the daughter of the local capo of the Spanish Quarter. If he’d done anything of the sort, it would have been tantamount to slitting his own throat.

  Not him, then. So, who?

  The shopkeeper, perhaps. From the limbo of the entrance hall, Maione watched him in the brightly lit store; he was diminutive, pudgy, and effeminate, leaping from one bolt of cloth to another, smiling at the women he served like a halfwit. That man didn’t have the strength of body and mind to shave himself, much less slash a woman’s face.

  Maione waited patiently for the shop to close for lunchtime. Filomena said good-bye to De Rosa, who didn’t even bother to look up from the cash register. The brigadier had the distinct impression, even from that distance, that her disfigurement made him uneasy.

  Not the shopkeeper.

  Then who?

  Emma looked out the plate glass window, as if enchanted by the stream of pedestrians, automobiles, and horse-drawn carriages. Once again, the dead child informed Ricciardi that his puppy had run away. In the café, a buzz filled the air around them, while from the next room came the sound of a piano, evoking a May gone by, red roses and cherries.

  The news of her pregnancy had opened new vistas to the commissario’s eye. It was an irrevocable fact, the kind of thing that could drive men and women to commit unspeakable acts.

  “Who else have you told?”

  Emma smiled a melancholy smile.

  “Just him. And Calise, of course, the second to last time I went to see her. For a change, I told her what fate had in store.”

  “Why did you tell her?”

  “Because I needed her to tell me what to do. I . . . couldn’t make any decisions, unless she gave me permission. It was a curse, pure madness. You’re welcome to laugh all you like, Commissario, but she had become an obsession for me. I tried to resist the impulse; I told myself that I could do without her. Then an invisible hand would push me out of the house and I’d find myself there, in that foul-smelling waterfront, begging for her to tell me what to do, invoking her command over me. I no longer knew how to live for myself. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve never lived: first my mother, then my husband, and now the fortune-teller.”

  Ricciardi listened to her every word, his attention riveted.

  “And what did she say, when you told her you were pregnant?”

  Emma ran her fingers nervously through her hair.

  “She asked me who the father was. I was baffled: how could she not know? She, who knew everything about everyone? She knew that I haven’t let my husband lay a finger on me for a long time. That there’s only one man on earth I love. The man that she denied me.”

  The commissario leaned forward.

  “Denied you?”

  Emma began crying as she spoke.

  “I met this man at the same time I met Calise. And even though she’d never even laid eyes on him, she urged me day after day to get to know him, to appreciate him, to fall in love with him. And our love grew until it had filled up my whole life. Have you ever been in love, Commissario?”

  In his mind, Ricciardi glimpsed a pair of closed shutters, and he felt a fist clutch at his heart with a stab of pain. He blinked, just once.

  “Go on.”

  “I was going to run away with him. Everything was ready: money, a life together, everything. I’m a wealthy woman, Commissario. Independently of my husband. I’d made the arrangements, and then I got the news that I was pregnant. What joy! A child! And I’d stopped hoping for anything like that. A love child, bound to be as beautiful as the father. I rushed to see Calise, I wanted her to be the first to know. But instead . . .”

  “But instead?”

  “But instead the cards were unequivocal: I’d never see him again. As always, in keeping with her fundamental rule, I couldn’t breathe a word of what she told me to another soul, ever, as long as I lived. If I did, terrible misfortunes would rain down on me, him, and the baby. I had her read my cards twice, a third time, ten times. I begged her, I cursed her, I threatened her. It was no good. She said that the cards couldn’t be controlled; it was fate, a decision that came from the souls of the dead.”

  Instinctively, Ricciardi looked out the window for the child who was stubbornly searching for his runaway puppy. He would have liked to tell her that the souls of the dead don’t decide a blessed thing. All they do is suffer through every minute they outlive their bodies.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not afraid for myself, Commissario. I’d rather die than go back to live that empty life. And a single instant with him would have been worth all the suffering. He could have made his own decision. And after all, he had always told me that he doesn’t believe in fate. But the child didn’t ask me to be born. I’d never thought about having a child; I thought I just wasn’t born to be a mother. But now that I have it inside me,” and she held her belly tight with one hand, briefly, as if to make contact, “it becomes more important every day. It’s mine, Commissario. Nothing has ever been mine in quite this way.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “So then, what did you do?”

  “I did what I had to, Commissario. I did what Calise told me to do.”

  LVI

  When Ricciardi got back to police headquarters, he was still confused.

  Emma’s revelations had settled some questions, but they’d stirred up others. A new figure had appeared on the scene: her lover. Now it was easier to explain the involvement of the distinguished professor, seeing as his reputation ultimately depended on what Calise told his wife.

  Even Emma had earned herself a place on the list of possible murderers: her absolute dependency, the limitations placed on her freedom could both be excellent motives for murder, even if the brutality and the violence both seemed to point to a man rather than a woman. But he’d seen them before, too many of them in fact: merciless killings at the hands
of a woman.

  He continued to be of the opinion that the professor was the most likely intended recipient of Calise’s proverb, that obscure malediction concerning the recompense that fate would surely visit upon her killer. In his view, Iodice was innocent; but that didn’t mean he could prove it. What’s more, he’d learned at his own expense how the Deed tended to steer one away from the truth far more often than it led one to the solution. On the verge of death, people dig up a surprising array of emotions.

  Maione joined him, a little short of breath, begging his pardon in a fluster for not having been in the office when he returned. Ricciardi was worried about him, as he had been increasingly as of late. But if Maione didn’t ask him for advice, he certainly couldn’t barge into his affairs. And so he limited himself to reporting on his meeting with Emma.

  “Yes, Commissa’, I can see what the professor’s problem was,” and he made the sign of the cuckold’s horns with extended pinky and forefinger, “losing his wife and his reputation in a single blow. But if Calise had forced Emma Serra to break things off with her lover, then why would the professor kill her? After all, they both wanted the same thing, didn’t they?”

  Ricciardi swept his rebellious bangs out of his eyes.

  “Not necessarily. Maybe Ruggero Serra paid Calise to give that response, but when it came time to pay up, they quarreled and he murdered her. It could also be that he didn’t learn of Emma’s intention not to leave him until after he’d already killed Calise. Or that he simply wanted to take revenge on the old woman for having pushed his wife into her lover’s arms. Or perhaps it was Emma who did it, because she wanted to free herself from her state of subjugation to the fortune-teller. It could be anything. Or the opposite of anything.”

  Maione swung his arms open wide in bafflement.

  “So what do we do now, Commissa’? We can’t just let the blame be laid on poor Iodice, can we? And we don’t have much time, not even a whole day. What’s the next step?”