The commissario started talking again.
“Capece, I’m going to have to ask you a question again that I already asked you once at the newspaper. I warn you that the document I have in my pocket authorizes me to search this apartment, but I believe that you’ll agree with me that it would be best for everyone if that could be avoided. Searching a home is a violation of a family’s privacy; we don’t want to do it, and I assure you that you wouldn’t enjoy having it done. We’re only looking for one thing, so I’ll ask you: do you possess weapons, in this apartment?”
Maione was watching Sofia’s hand, which lay motionless. Capece seemed to come back to earth from the mists of some recollection, his gaze became sharper, more present. After a long hesitation, he said:
“Commissario, I fought in the war. I was an officer. War is a horrible thing, nothing but pain and grief: but I was a young man and I believed in it, in this fatherland that has now become an excuse for every sort of abuse. To remind myself how useless a thing war is, I kept my pistol. But I keep it under lock and key, in my desk drawer, unloaded and without bullets. There are no other weapons in the apartment.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“All right. Let’s take a look at this relic.”
Capece stood up and led the way. His wife followed behind him, tranquil, with a half-smile on her lips as if she was about to show her guests a nice drawing her daughter had done. They reached the study through a single door that separated it from the drawing room. Capece reached up onto a bookshelf, felt his way along it, and found a key; he went around behind the desk and opened the long central drawer under the desktop. He pulled open a metal box without a lock and opened it.
He looked up, his face white, eyes round with astonishment.
“It’s gone! The pistol’s vanished!”
Ricciardi turned to look at Sofia and he saw on her face the same surprise as on her husband’s. If the two of them were playacting, they were very good. Husband and wife stared at each other: they were clearly aghast. Capece said:
“But who could have taken it?”
The woman had lifted a hand to her mouth and was shaking her head very slightly, as if she wanted to deny an unmistakable fact.
“Why . . . I don’t know. We hadn’t seen it in years. We’ve had four or five different maids over the years. You can sell a pistol, can’t you? They might very well have stolen it, and we’d have never noticed. I can give you the first and last names of all the maids . . . I never touched it, and neither did my husband! And in any case, as my husband told you, it wasn’t loaded. You can’t possibly think . . . that’s absurd!”
Maione and Ricciardi looked at one another, then they focused their attention on the Capeces, who were now clearly in the throes of fear. The commissario said:
“All right. We’re leaving for now. But you need to think hard and try to find that revolver, and keep in touch with us about any and all developments in your search.”
Capece shot them his assent in a glance, his brow furrowed by the thousand thoughts that were taking shape. His wife had lost all her confidence and was casting sidelong looks at the journalist. The disappearance of the pistol seemed to have sown doubts in her mind that her role as public defender might have been, at the very least, overhasty.
As they were leaving, as if it were an afterthought, Ricciardi turned and said to the man:
“Ah, Capece, I’d like to ask you a courtesy: the ring, you know the one. The one from the Salone Margherita. Make sure we can have access to it, it’s a part of the investigation.”
And, glimpsing a flash in Sofia’s eyes as he went, he said goodbye and left.
Ricciardi would have preferred to skip going by the scene of the car crash a second time, but he couldn’t suggest a pointless detour to Maione; in part because now the air was even more scalding hot than before, if that was possible. So he had to listen again to the dissonant chorus of the dead family, with the child anticipating an ice cream he’d never enjoy.
He tried to distract himself by thinking back to the Capece family: certain looks, certain equilibriums, certain tensions that might have escaped him just a month ago, now struck him as obvious; but they altered the picture that he’d been building up until then. Maione, who had not stopped mopping his brow with his handkerchief, broke the silence:
“Commissa’, what do you think of all this playacting about the pistol? Everyone looking at everyone else all surprised: ‘Oh, Jesus, whatever happened to our little toy? It was here until just a few years ago, we all remember clearly, but one of those horrible maids must have stolen and sold it off on the black market’?”
Ricciardi, however, wasn’t certain.
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to say that there was no pistol? We wouldn’t have found it in our search and that would have been the end of it. No, I don’t think so. What I think, instead, is that they hadn’t coordinated their stories. Husband and wife glared at each other indignantly, each of them convinced that the other got rid of it. The family is defending Capece, at least, that’s what I think.”
Maione was trying to stick to the shade to limit the damage inflicted by the intense heat. Two large patches of sweat were rapidly spreading under the sleeves of his light-colored jacket.
“The fact remains, Commissa’, that the pistol didn’t emerge and Capece has no alibi: because we know that the Signora is talking nonsense when she says that her husband slept with her on Saturday night. He hasn’t slept with his wife in years, take it from Raffaele Maione. And after all, he told us himself, no?, that he made the rounds of the dives and taverns, after going to the theater.”
“That’s true; but now it’s up to us to prove that. If Signora Capece will testify to that effect and her husband decides to accept her help, then we’re back at square one. We have to follow all the leads, the clock is ticking. You go home now and get back in uniform, because I don’t even recognize you dressed like that. I’ll see you back at headquarters.”
“And what are you going to do, Commissa’?”
“I need to go and check something out. See you later.”
You watch him leaning out over the balcony railing, smoking. The way he used to do, a hundred years ago, when you were still a family. Every so often, back then, he’d go out on the balcony, and you’d wonder where he was wandering in his thoughts, what ideals and what thoughts he was chasing. He’s a man, you used to think. He needs his little moments of solitude.
Then solitude ended up being yours. Days and nights spent wondering where he was, and what he was doing. And fearing the answers.
He didn’t say a word, after the two policemen left. You’d prepared all your answers, you were ready to give him another chance; you thought that the fact that you’d defended him, that you’d stood by his side, would strip the veil away from his eyes, the enchanted veil that that witch put on him with a spell, years ago. That he still had a family, after all. A wife. You thought that he’d have reacted by embracing you, in tears, thanking you for what you’d done. Maybe even scolding you for the risk you’d run by helping him. Instead he just went out onto the balcony, turning his back on you without even looking you in the eye. You don’t mind, it’s just the way he reacts.
That’s not why you did it: not to earn his gratitude, much less his pity. You did it because you still love him, because he’s the only man you’ve ever had in your life, the father of your children. Because you couldn’t afford to lose him, just because he’d made a silly mistake.
Even if the mistake in question was a murder.
After leaving Maione, Ricciardi walked toward police headquarters: only once he was certain that the brigadier could no longer see him did he change direction and head for Largo della Carità.
He couldn’t have pinpointed his reasons for wanting to keep his friend separate from that part of the investigation. Perhaps, he thought, because it was based more on feelings than on concrete facts; or else because of the danger, or else the situations that it migh
t precipitate. Or else because, after the attempted attack on him and Livia, it had now become a personal question.
The thought of Livia brought the memory of the evening he’d spent with her back into his mind, the evening prior to the incident with the four gorillas. He’d enjoyed it, there was no denying the fact. He’d felt, if only for a few hours, free of the burden of solitude that the Deed had placed so squarely upon him. The woman was beautiful, amusing, and intelligent; the pleasure of her company and the unmistakable envy and admiration that washed over him in waves—both from men and women—had also coddled his ego. He wasn’t in love with her: he understood that from a simple comparison between the memory of those moments and the despairing, heartbreaking emotions that he felt in his chest when he thought about Enrica. But maybe that’s the secret, he thought: perhaps, to be happy, it’s important to limit one’s degree of emotional involvement.
He felt like an emotional apprentice. At his age, when most men have already had wives, children, and countless clandestine or frankly commercial sexual encounters, all he knew about love was the snips of monologues spouted by the various cadavers that he’d met. As he was walking in the shaft of light from the setting sun, he thought to himself that love is an infected root that seeks out the best way to survive: a fatal illness with an incredibly long course that causes addiction, making the victim prefer suffering to well-being, grief to tranquility, uncertainty to stability. He thought by free association of the image of the dead woman and her two rings, the ring that had once belonged to the first duchess and the other one, now in the journalist’s possession: two lovers’ troths, forcefully torn from the victim’s fingers, one when she was still alive and one when she was already dead.
Even the place where he was going, and the nocturnal image that he’d glimpsed there, was evidence of the fact. And it seemed indicative to him that he’d witnessed that scene while he was out wandering around aimlessly, in the throes of incoherent depression after glimpsing Enrica and the man he assumed was her new boyfriend. Love was a mirage that, even in the best of cases, only offered scraps of itself, stolen in the still watches of the night.
Like the passionate kiss that he’d witnessed in the doorway before which he was now standing.
Her lips clamped tight as she stood in front of the mirror and buttoned her dress to the neck, Rosa was getting ready to leave at a time of day that was unusual for her. It was a hot day, and she would certainly have been happier to stay at home than to be out and about: but for once she felt it was her duty.
She couldn’t stand to see Ricciardi suffering. He’d never had a very cheerful appearance, and she’d never once heard him laugh, at least not since he became an adult; he was silent and shy, but at any time of the day or night, she knew, or thought she knew, how he felt and what his mood was. For the past few days, though, her boy, the boy she had promised to protect, a solemn oath sworn to his mother on her deathbed, was suffering terribly. He never ate, he’d go out in the middle of the night and come home just before dawn, he’d sit there at night and listen to the radio in the dark for hours: and all this began the night he’d rushed breathless into her room to peer across the vicolo at the window across the way.
Once she was done with the row of buttons and had firmly fixed her hat in place with two hatpins, Rosa went over to the little window in the broom closet, at the end of the hallway; from there she could just get a narrow glimpse into a small bedroom in the Colombos’ apartment, specifically the room where the oldest daughter slept. She could just make out the headboard of the bed, with a wooden cross hanging on the wall, the nightstand with a water glass and two books, and the pillow upon which the girl’s head rested, facedown. From the movement of her shoulders, clearly visible from a distance of fifteen feet, Rosa saw evidence of what she’d expected: Enrica Colombo was crying.
She nodded with satisfaction and did what all the women in that quarter did whenever they needed to gather some information: she went to the hairdresser.
XXXIV
The street door was open and the doorman, who had pointed out the Fascist Party offices to him, wasn’t there. Ricciardi decided that anyone could go in: after all, it was just an association of citizens.
In fact the four flights of stairs that led up to the top floor were bustling with people, men climbing and descending the steps, in pairs or small groups, chatting and laughing. Ricciardi sensed the usual arrogant excitement, the noisy, slightly forced cheerfulness of the largely male assemblies. On the landing there was a double door, both panels swung wide open, and through it could be seen a large atrium filled with people; their clothing was varied, ranging from the sober elegance of light-colored suits and bowties to mortar-spattered workers’ smocks and overalls. Through the gap of a door swinging ajar, he glimpsed a man polishing a rifle, singing a love song in dialect.
At first no one paid any attention to Ricciardi, and he was forced to walk around a knot of four men, braying with laughter at a dirty joke; as soon as he walked into the room, however, a man with a ferocious expression came up to him and asked him roughly who he was and what he wanted. Silence fell immediately, even though the man hadn’t spoken in an especially loud voice.
Ricciardi clearly sensed the wave of hostility that washed over him from everyone in the room, but he didn’t take his eyes off the face of his questioner: he looked at him fixedly for a long time, until the man finally lowered his eyes. There was a burst of nervous coughing from somewhere out on the landing. In a firm, low voice, he said:
“I’m Commissario Ricciardi, from police headquarters. But I imagine you already know that.”
From a small knot of men at the far end of the room a man broke away; Ricciardi recognized him immediately: it was the guy who had threatened him the night before.
“So what? You are who you are, but you’re still not welcome here so you’d better get out. Just because things went your way once doesn’t mean they will again. Take my advice, leave on your own two feet while you can still walk, it’s good advice.”
The atmosphere had turned grim and tense: silence was absolute, you couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. On the far side of the room the man with the rifle had stopped singing and now he was standing up menacingly from his stool, striding to the doorway with his gun leveled. Everyone was looking at Ricciardi, who hadn’t shifted his gaze away from the man who’d first asked him who he was. He now slowly turned toward his old nocturnal acquaintance and stared at him, expressionless, his eyes empty and transparent; the squadrista stepped back almost imperceptibly and jutted his chin, arms akimbo, hands on hips, in an unconscious imitation of the one figure that made him feel confident.
“Thanks for the advice,” said Ricciardi. “I’ll leave when I’ve been given the information I need.”
“Maybe you didn’t understand: you need to get out of here right away, otherwise we’ll see you out in our own way, which will even spare you the trouble of taking the stairs.”
The threat was accompanied by a nod of the head toward the window. A single nervous laugh was heard, and was immediately stifled; the mocking smile on the man’s face faded. Ricciardi acted as if he hadn’t heard a word.
“I’m here to talk to Ettore Musso di Camparino.”
The other man took a step back, as if he’d just been slapped; a confused muttering arose from all the little knots of men. Many of them exchanged what looked like frightened glances.
The man recovered and took a step forward, lips tight, eyes wide, angry. He laid a hand on Ricciardi’s arm: both of the commissario’s hands were still in his pockets:
“Now that’s enough! I told you that you need to beat it, and . . .”
From behind the group of men, which had formed a menacing circle around the two of them, came a calm voice:
“Mastrogiacomo, cool down. That’s enough now.”
The little crowd parted as if a lion tamer had just snapped his whip. Standing in a doorway, through which a desk piled high with papers could be see
n, was a thin, smartly dressed man who looked to be around forty. The squadrista took his hand off Ricciardi’s arm as if it was red-hot, and suddenly looked very confused.
“Yessir. But, forgive me, Dotto’, I thought that . . .”
The man at the door looked at Ricciardi with curiosity. He gestured vaguely in Mastrogiacomo’s direction, and the man fell suddenly silent. Without taking his eyes off the commissario, he said:
“Bring two coffees to my office, please. Prego, Commissario: come this way.”
And Ricciardi followed him into his room.
The large-bloomed rose is very beautiful: a solitary flower that only blooms in pairs. It requires a great deal of care. I have to make sure it’s exposed to constant humidity, because it’s very delicate; if it’s too dry, it won’t bloom properly. There’s nothing sadder than finding crumpled, heat-scorched leaves and petals on the ground.
Flowers are sensuous. The color and texture seem to be that of flesh, velvety, iridescent. And the care you devote to them should be the same as if you were caring for the flesh of a loved one: devout, impassioned. You must maintain the silent spell of love, sprinkling the flowers with drops of water, watching as they pearl up on the convex shapes of the petals, like beads of sweat on your lips after making love.
Last night I dreamed that I’d been locked up. Without me here to care for them, all the flowers shed their petals and the plants withered and died, only to be replaced by rapacious wild weeds. If they ever did cart me off, no one would tend to you, my exquisite roses; or to the begonias, or the oleanders. It’s quite sufficient to see the cold and indifferent care that is bestowed on the hydrangeas, down in the courtyard, in spite of all the instructions I constantly give that dull-witted doorman with his oversized schnozzola and his tribe of children. What useless people.
Everyone in Their Place Page 24
