Everyone in Their Place

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  He was a construction worker who’d fallen off the roof of a palazzo, where he’d been repairing a rain gutter. With a back curved right round like an umbrella handle and with blood gushing from his mouth, he kept saying:

  “It’ll hold me, the cornice will hold me.”

  Famous last words, thought Ricciardi, as he did every time he passed by him, averting his gaze. Maione misinterpreted his superior officer’s expression.

  “What is it, Commissa’, do you have a headache, too? My head’s been spinning like a top for the past few days.”

  Ricciardi replied:

  “In fact, you’ve been looking a little peaked, for a few days now. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Sure, sure, I’m feeling fine, but I’m eating less. And in this heat . . .”

  “I understand, and right you are to do so. But I’m just as hungry as ever, hot or cold. And Modo, as you can see, feels the same way. There he is, waiting for us.”

  The doctor was already sitting at one of the small outdoor tables on the sidewalk, beneath the awning that provided shade from the last rays of the setting sun.

  “Oh, here comes my dinner now. My dear Brigadier, are you joining us tonight? That must mean the coffee’ll be your treat: I wouldn’t want to do you wrong.”

  Maione smiled.

  “Buona sera, Dotto’. Sorry, I’m sitting this one out, strictly a spectator. I’ll listen to you talk and watch you eat. No one said anything about paying.”

  Ricciardi took a seat; to the proprietor hovering nearby he pointed to the bowl of baked pasta that towered in front of Modo.

  “The same for me, if you please. Now then, Bruno; can you talk to me about the duchess or would that ruin your appetite?”

  Modo chewed with his mouth full. He shook his head.

  “There’s nothing on earth that could ruin my appetite. On the Carso front, I ate under a hail of Austrian shells: it’s a simple matter of survival. So let’s talk about your client: a very lovely woman, who was in excellent shape despite her age, which I’d place at roughly forty or so. Am I right?”

  “Forty-two, to be exact. She was born in 1889, on January 15th.”

  “She had the body of a young girl, believe me. From what they tell me, she was a woman who drove men crazy. All right then, first let’s talk about the bullet. You saw it, someone shot her through the cushion: there are fragments of cloth and even feathers in her brain, along the trajectory that ends in the sofa’s backrest. Fracture of the frontal bone, occipital bone, etc. And there’s no doubt that her heart was still beating, when she was shot.”

  Ricciardi leaned forward, having caught the careful phrasing.

  “What do you mean, her heart was still beating?”

  Modo snickered, his mouth still full.

  “How nice, to have an attentive audience. What I mean to say is that clinically speaking, the lovely duchess was still alive. But only clinically.”

  “Which means? What are you saying, clinically?”

  “Well then: your murderer, perhaps to keep her from screaming, had pressed a cushion good and hard over her mouth and nose. So the Signora was already dying of suffocation. Practically speaking, she was in her death throes when she was shot.”

  Maione was impressed.

  “Excuse me, Dotto’, and just how can you tell? I don’t know, from the lungs, the throat . . .”

  Modo shook his head.

  “No, no, Brigadie’, nothing that internal. You can see from the face. The red patches around the mouth and neck, for instance. And certain little spots on the inside of the eyelids, which are known as ‘petechiae.’ Those are veins and capillaries that rupture as the victim struggles to breathe. It’s a typical mark of suffocation.”

  It occurred to Ricciardi that the image of the duchess, which kept uttering its phrase about the ring, had a nice round bullet hole in its forehead, so that when she was shot, she must have still been alive. He asked:

  “But if she was suffocated, how could it be that she was still clinically alive when the murderer shot her?”

  Modo shrugged, without breaking pace as he ingurgitated the baked macaroni.

  “Evidently, the murderer wanted to make sure he’d done the job. You can’t always be sure, when you kill someone, that what you’ve done is really irreversible. Perhaps he thought he’d been recognized. Or as long as he was at it, he wanted to make sure the gun worked. In any case, they had quite a struggle.”

  Maione was again surprised; struggling to tear his eyes away from the spaghetti sauce that the doctor was mopping off his bowl with a chunk of bread, he said:

  “What are you saying, Dotto’? She looked like she was just sleeping, the duchess.”

  Modo, who had wiped his bowl completely clean, leaned back in his chair with a broad smile.

  “You weren’t expecting that, were you? The duchess was rearranged, nice and comfortable, so that the bullet hole in her forehead lined up. The autopsy was quite informative, this time. In any case, it all must have happened in quick succession. The woman died between midnight and two in the morning, on the night between Saturday and Sunday. There’s no question about that.”

  *

  You shouldn’t have laughed. If you hadn’t laughed, I wouldn’t have done it. I loved you, desperately. I’d never have hurt you.

  You never understood my pain, my despair. Perhaps I never possessed you; but I always felt that you belonged to me, since the very first time I met you. And I’ll never see anything as beautiful as your smile, your face cradled in my hands; I’ll never feel anything as marvelous as you, breathing in my arms.

  I wish I could explain to you how horrible it was to see you catch another man’s eye, trigger his smile. To feel you turning your charm elsewhere to chain one man to you, and then another, and another still. Without respect, without any consideration for me. But I would have put up with anything, as long as I could keep you close to me. Because I loved you.

  But you laughed. You laughed right in my face. And I couldn’t take it.

  Ricciardi asked:

  “Well then, what else have you discovered?”

  Modo raised his hand, counting on his fingers.

  “One: two broken ribs, not from trauma but from pressure. Someone placed a curved object on her chest, possibly to hold her still. A knee, for instance. Or something else, who can say? Two: four broken fingernails, on both hands. And no trace of skin, which means that she tried to grab a fully dressed body or something else, again, who can say? Three: her left hand, truly in very strange condition. The ring finger with a nice deep cut, bleeding: evidently, someone tore a ring off. Middle finger, sprained, without hematoma. Someone pulled on her finger after she was dead, perhaps trying to take another ring. Or perhaps . . .”

  Ricciardi concluded, sarcastically:

  “. . . something else, who knows what. So what else do you have in store for us? I can see from your face that you still have a surprise.”

  Modo smiled like a little boy.

  “Your client, my dear sad Ricciardi, had a tear on the inside of her left cheek. Someone had beaten her, before killing her.”

  XIII

  Standing in front of the mirror and knotting his tie, Giulio Colombo was definitely angry. And to make matters worse, he couldn’t really be angry with anyone other than himself.

  Upon his return home that evening, when his Enrica, as always, had come to take his hat, his cane, and the usual kiss on her forehead, he hadn’t had the courage to look her in the eye. The whole way home he’d done his best to talk himself into believing that what he’d done had actually been for his daughter’s own good, but instead he couldn’t shake the deeply unpleasant sensation that he’d played a nasty trick on her.

  This is the way matters stood: that morning, when his wife had confronted him with grim determination, setting forth the urgent necessity of doing something to protect Enrica from a terrible fate of loneliness and poverty, even though he knew the woman was exaggerating, he’d lacke
d the strength to push back, and he’d allowed her to talk him into it.

  Just a short distance from his shop there was another large establishment, which sold fabrics; the manager of the place was an old friend of his, Luciano Fiore, who worked with his wife Rosanna. The couple, decidedly well-to-do, had an only son, Sebastiano, who at age twenty-eight was still a bachelor. This was due to the fact that to his parents, and especially to his mother, every girl out there seemed inadequate in terms of beauty, health, or property. Actually, Giulio suspected that none of the girls were interested in the young man, who was fatuous and superficial, and who lived far too well at his parents’ expense to have any interest in starting a family of his own. He had confided his suspicions to his wife, who had roundly accused him of lacking the courage to face up to the matter. And so he had given in, and had gone over to Fiore’s store to invite him to dinner, with wife and son, that very night. His friend’s wife had appropriated the situation and had informed him of her enthusiastic approval: actually, she had long thought just how adroit a solution it would be, and was already dreaming of a single, immense shop specializing in hats and fabrics, and run by her son.

  Giulio found Rosanna Fiore to be deeply unlikable, and felt the same way about her son, whom he had only met once or twice. Poor Luciano, he thought, was the constant victim of his wife’s personality. Then it occurred to him that he himself might be in the same situation, and that thought only further blackened his already dark mood. It was hot out, very hot, and the idea of putting on jacket and tie even at night, even at home, certainly did nothing to improve the situation.

  Once again he asked himself why he’d allowed himself to be talked into organizing this ambush for his poor sweet Enrica.

  Maione was walking uphill, following the vicolo that led him home. It had been a long, difficult day, made worse by the terrible heat that persisted, even now, in the dark. He was thinking about what Bambinella had told him about Capece, and about how love leads to passion, and passion to rage, and rage to bloodshed. What Modo had said, concerning the fact that the duchess had been beaten before dying, fit in neatly with the account of what had happened at the theater.

  In a certain sense, even the clumsy effort to arrange the duchess as if she were sleeping was an act of posthumous respect; the brigadier had gotten used to accepting the contradictions implicit in crimes of passion, where the murderers first killed without pity and then performed acts of tenderness toward their victims.

  As he was mulling over these thoughts, he heard his name being called, and his heart suddenly raced; he remembered all too well that deep, musical voice. He replied: “Buona sera to you, Filomena. How are you?”

  The woman was standing at the entrance to the little alley known as Vicolo del Fico, beneath a votive shrine with an ancient image of the Madonna painted on the wall.

  “I’m just as the Madonna wishes me to be, Brigadie’. You see, I’m in charge of the flowers and candles; every so often I light one myself, and say a prayer for the well-being of the people who are dear to me. I include you in their number: I haven’t forgotten the help that you gave me.”

  She underlined those words with a brief caress of the scarred side of her face, which was turned to the shadows. The other profile, faintly illuminated by the streetlamp, was as Maione remembered it: heartbreakingly beautiful.

  “Don’t think twice, Filomena; after all, it’s my duty to help people. And with you it was a pleasure, as you know. In fact, I only wish I could’ve done more. Your son Gaetano, how’s he doing?”

  “Fine, thanks. He’s no longer an apprentice, the master mason has hired him, he says he’s good at what he does. He took the place of Rituccia’s father, do you remember her? That little girl who lived nearby, now she lives with us.”

  Maione remembered her perfectly: a serious little girl, with a sorrowful, unsettling look in her eyes. One of those encounters that punctuated the events in which he had been embroiled a few months earlier; when, one fine spring morning, he found himself stanching the bloody wound that had forever altered that woman’s face. In a single dizzying instant, the brigadier relived the new and profound emotions that spending time with Filomena had stirred in him.

  “Would you care to stay for dinner? I could make you something cool, maybe macaroni with tomato and basil. As I recall, you liked that dish, or am I mistaken?”

  Maione could hear his stomach rumble, like distant thunder.

  “No, thanks, Filome’, I’m having some digestive problems; I’m going to just skip dinner, tonight.”

  In the partial darkness, the woman stepped closer, scrutinizing his face.

  “Are you all right, Raffae’? You strike me as pale, hollowed out. And you’ve lost weight. Don’t you worry me now, you know that I care about you.”

  Maione couldn’t have hoped for a more flattering compliment. He’d lost weight. As if someone had told him he’d grown wings and a halo.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, no, no, it’s just that I’ve had a long day, a very long day. Maybe I’m just a little tired.”

  Filomena was eyeing him with concern, her head tilted over on her shoulder. She was beautiful. Without warning, she reached out her hand and caressed Maione’s face. The hand felt light and cool as a breeze to him. He barely touched the visor of his cap, then turned and fled, feeling like a coward the way he did every time he saw her.

  Rosa Vaglio was one of those women of bygone times who expressed her love by making food. And since she’d been born dirt poor, the greater the love, she thought, the more the food, condiments added. And since she loved Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi more than anything else on earth, she cooked for him a succession of terrible dishes that would have easily killed a full grown bull, if that bull had ventured to eat her eggplant parmigiana.

  The first time she had seen him, he was covered with blood, cradled in the midwife’s hands, with his beautiful green eyes still shut. She’d held him in her arms even before his poor mamma, the sweet Baroness Marta, who had died so many years ago. And she had watched him at play a thousand times, while she knit or washed clothing with one eye out to make sure he was in no danger, silent and reckless as he always was.

  She had sat up, watching over his restless sleep, wondering what terrible things he might be dreaming when she saw him jerk and murmur in his sleep. She’d kissed his forehead a thousand times, trying to detect the slightest warmth of fever that she was infallibly able to discern. When his mother died, and even before that, she had become the inflexible administrator of the family’s substantial assets, which Ricciardi ignored entirely; it was she who maintained the correspondence, in her unlovely, oversized handwriting, with the overseers and sharecroppers: she never overlooked a cent, and she set everything by so that it would be fully accounted for when Luigi Alfredo finally woke up from his obsession with being a policeman and made up his mind to take his rightful place as the Baron of Malomonte, and started a family of his own.

  This matter of the family was Tata Rosa’s one great obsession and regret. Her simple mind had few bedrock certainties, and one of those was that without children, no life could be considered complete. She had devoted her own life to Ricciardi, and he had repaid her with more worries and concerns than ten children could have given her, with his stubborn solitude; what she could not accept was the idea that he was willing to let his family’s name die out. All too often, even though she was aware that she was becoming obsessive and intrusive, she had tried to push him to socialize more, to get to know girls, and all she got in return was a shrug and a pat on the cheek. She’d even wondered whether her boy was one of those who just didn’t like girls: but her heart told her that that wasn’t the case, his only problem was that he was not yet ready. He was waiting for the right moment.

  And now, after all these years, as Rosa set a mound of baked macaroni, spiced up with every condiment imaginable, before him, she finally thought that the time had come. She had noticed some time ago that, when he looked out his bedroom window at
the young woman who lived across the way, Ricciardi had begun to wave a hasty greeting with one hand. Of course, he had no idea that she could look through a crack in his doorjamb to see what was happening in his bedroom; for that matter, how else could she be sure that he was all right, when he shut himself in at night?

  And the girl, she had seen from her own window, responded with a slight nod of her head. The ice was beginning to melt. As far as that went, in this heat wave the ice had never really had a chance, thought Rosa. And she smiled.

  As usual, Ricciardi had first begun to smell the odor of Rosa’s cooking from at least two hundred yards away. He was well aware that he had a highly developed sense of smell, but still he wondered how it could be that the entire neighborhood failed to rise in open mutiny against the toxic fumes that filled the air, fumes that clearly originated in his tata’s kitchen. Still, he had to admit that the smells that came from his apartment were no worse than the varieties of rot that wafted out of the surrounding vicoli. In other words, there was just no getting away from it.

  Along the way home from his meeting with Modo, he had continued to mull over what the doctor had told him. There was no mistaking the fact that the duchess knew her murderer: the padlock hadn’t been forced, the keys were in their place in the drawer, nothing had been broken among the countless items in the anteroom. Still, there had been a struggle, and it was demonstrated by the marks on the victim’s body; as well as the cushion pressed down on her face, forcefully, clearly to make sure that the duchess was unable to scream. Perhaps Maione was right: before heading home, he had said that in his opinion it was the murderer himself who had arranged the dead body, out of respect, out of love.