These Dark Things

by Jan Weiss

  He got on his bicycle and pedaled down the broad, empty lanes of Via dei Tribunali toward the crime scene. Widows and clerics navigated the dark streets past high stone walls that encased narrow alleys. A vendor was putting sunflowers out on the flagstones. Slivers of blue water gleamed between the aged buildings; ferries and freighters eased from the Bay of Naples out into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  A standard four-door blue Alfa blocked the alley en route to the crime scene. One uniformed carabiniere stood on the cobblestones, arms folded. The other lay across the hood, half asleep. Pino didn’t recognize either. He flashed his sergeant’s identification, and the conscious one moved out of the way to let him through with his bike. The carabiniere punched his snoring partner, then directed Pino down the alley, toward the Capuchin monastery.

  Most nights, drug addicts congregated in the alley. At the moment, it was empty.

  Pino squeezed his bicycle through the narrow space between car and wall and entered the worn cobblestone lane. It curved away from Via dei Tribunale. He shouldered the frame and carried the bike down a small flight of stairs. A sleepy resident leaned over her balcony, smoking.

  A crowd milled around a street shrine outside the Capuchin monastery. Several votive candles surrounded a large pool of blood. The candles blazed. Catching their flickering light, the pool glistened. The shrine was a crude box nailed together from scrap wood. The collection box was missing.

  Pino leaned closer to its cracked glass cover. Inside the box, before a carved figure of the Savior, lay an offering of a cigarette pack and a wrinkled apricot, a prayer card depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the small porcelain figurine of a female saint too weathered to identify. Pressed to the glass, a yellowed photograph of someone’s relative. Left long ago, back when there was still hope. Behind it, a page torn from a magazine. Pino slipped the clipping out. A model’s face scratched over with black marker, THIEVING BITCH scrawled beneath it in red. Meaning the dead girl? Pino dropped it into an evidence bag. More police arrived.

  Just then, Monsignor Cirillo came out of the church, followed by Captain Monte, Pino’s supervising partner. Her hair was even wilder than usual and her blouse untucked, jacket open, her smoky eyes wide with adrenaline.

  “There was a note in the shrine,” Pino announced, holding up the plastic bag. “It may refer to the dead girl.”

  “Give it to Dr. Francesca when she gets here. Maybe it has prints.” She turned to the bystanders crowding in. “Who lit all these candles?” she said.

  No response.

  “This is an investigation area,” she announced. “If you have no information, you need to keep back. Except you,” she said, indicating the elderly bone cleaner, Gina Falcone. Roof lights whirling, Dr. Francesca Agari, Naples’s leading forensic pathologist, made her entrance in one of the department’s vintage Fiats. She was halfway out of the vehicle before it stopped rolling. Despite the hour, her two-toned blond highlights were perfectly smooth, like the mauve-and-gold powder glistening above her eyes.

  “Christ,” Francesca Agari said as she took in the scene. “Hey!” she called to her waiting photographer halfway down the alley. “We need you here!”

  An aspiring fashion photographer. His worn leather jacket hung open. His thick hair grew to his shoulders.

  “The victim,” Natalia informed them, “is in the crypt of Santa Maria del Purgatorio.”

  Dr. Francesca nodded and dispatched three forensic criminalists into the church. They looked like spacemen in their puffy suits. Pino accompanied Dr. Francesca and the photographer into the church while Natalia ordered the attending carabinieri to canvass the neighborhood.

  A fragment of Chopin drifted from the music school nearby. Natalia turned toward it. Someone practicing this early?

  There was more light in the sky now, and swallows.

  “If you don’t need me.…” Father Cirillo kicked at broken bottles and syringes not a foot from the pool of blood.

  “No, that’s fine,” Natalia said. “You can go. Thank you for your help.”

  The monsignor paused to pray over the reservoir of blood and made the sign of the cross, recorded by Luca with one of his three cameras. Natalia approached the bystanders, neighbors who might have overheard the killing if not actually seen it. No one would speak. She circled the puddle of blood, hoping to find a footprint. Nothing. Pino returned from the crypt, slightly flushed from the climb. Natalia took her partner by the arm, turning him away from the onlookers. They conferred for a moment, agreeing to question the bone cleaner together. The elderly woman was consoling a monachello, a novice, encouraging him to go back inside the monastery. He was blind, Natalia realized.

  Pino and she walked over to them.

  “What were you doing in the crypt this morning?” Natalia asked.

  “I bring the bones. From the cemetery, like always. Every week, I come. I have a key to the church.” She pointed to Father Cirillo at the end of the alley. “From him. Can I get my cart?”

  “Was anyone with you, inside the church? Were you alone in the crypt?” Pino asked.

  “Only the angel and me.”

  “We found a bowl of oil by the shrine here. For the evil eye. Did you put it there, Signora Falcone?” The bone cleaner reminded him of his Aunt Zia Annunziata, a witch who dispensed amulets and planted such bowls to ward off evil.

  “Yes,” Gina said. “I put the bowl there.”

  “What do you know about the dead girl?”

  “I’m a bone cleaner, not a detective.”

  “You put the bowl there to protect her,” Pino said. “What did the water tell you?”

  “The girl was dead. Dead. I didn’t do anything wrong.” “What shape did it take?”

  “The jettatori, so I said a prayer.”

  “What witch did she need protection from? Who wished her ill?”

  Pino’s Aunt Annunziata had famously spat when an envious neighbor told her that Pino was a dear little boy. Thereafter his zia had insisted that he wear his undershirt inside out to block the woman’s evil intent.

  “Maybe you saw something that could help us.”

  “I saw nothing.”

  “If you did, and you’re withholding information, we can take you in.”

  “Me, an old woman? I’m over eighty.” Gina Falcone looked away. “She was a good girl.”

  “Did you know the deceased?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. No one that young deserves such a death.”

  “We need to find her killer.”

  “Here.” She dug in her pocket and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. It was an amulet, a twin of the one Zia Annunziata had insisted Pino wear as a boy; his mother had hidden it in her underwear drawer instead.

  “You think I need this charm?”

  “I am not a fortune teller. I look after souls. You young people think everything is yes or no. Right or wrong.”

  “We are sworn to uphold the law,” Pino said.

  “The Law!” Gina spat. “Yesterday the Law was Mussolini. Today you want to put an old woman in jail.”

  “You may leave,” Natalia said, “but we will talk again.”

  The bone cleaner retrieved her cart and clanked away.

  “The men found the victim’s purse,” Pino said, holding up a bright red handbag. “It was by the shrine. And these were next to it.”

  He handed her several photographs—the dead girl mugging for the camera, and then one with a man, his arms around her, face turned away. Posed on a dock, the sun in the girl’s eyes.

  “She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;” Pino quoted from memory. “And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.”

  Natalia looked at him. “Why do you know that?”

  “Keats? We had to memorize it because Keats loved Italy so and died in his little room by the Spanish Steps. If we missed even a word, beautiful Sister Mary Frances rapped us with her stick.”

  They divided the photographs, lingered for a mome
nt on the steps of the church. The beginning of March. Not yet spring. But the sun was already warm. A lovely morning, with birds singing.

  Natalia emptied the girl’s purse into her lap, and they took inventory. A large zip-lock plastic bag. A lipstick and cell phone, a wallet with identification: Teresa Steiner, twenty-three. From Ulm. German. Studying at the University.

  Natalia scanned the faces of the onlookers, who were waiting for any crumb of information, which they’d convert to gossip and transmit across the old city in minutes.

  She recognized a few of them—Falcone Gaetano, the caretaker of the government offices around the block on Vico San Paolo. And Falcone’s retarded brother, Paolo, with his amazing cauliflower ears.

  “If you have no information regarding the crime, we’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “Public street,” a shopkeeper hissed as she passed.

  “I’d like to know how the killer got into the locked church with a body and got it down there,” Natalia said when the crowd had gone.

  “It’s not much of a lock. It’s ancient, easily picked.” Pino stared at the shrine, the light of the massed candles steadily surrendering to the dawn. “You think the killer lit all those candles?”

  The palazzo where Teresa Steiner lived was only two blocks from where she had been murdered. Natalia and Pino decided to walk. Something scurried nearby as they set out, a rat edging past the wall.

  Pino said, “A politician from the North once called Naples a sewer inhabited by rats.”

  “There are no rats up north?” Natalia asked.

  Laundry hung like banners from lines strung across the alley between the residential buildings. Giant brassieres beside tiny skirts. Underpants of varying sizes; trousers and shirts. To clean what is dirty—to purify. A major preoccupation of her city. On the sidewalk in front of an open doorway: a tiny rack with the clothes of an infant lovingly laid out to dry. Innocent. As if the wearer could escape growing up into the hard life of Naples.

  A prostitute stood her post in front of the seedy Hotel Internazionale, across from the railroad terminal, waiting for the next surge of travelers off the Rome train. Checking her watch, the woman took a drag on her cigarette, then threw it down, adjusted her cleavage, and nodded at Natalia and Pino as they passed. Her red wool skirt stopped just below her ass. She wore gold heels. They had to be nearly four inches high—a hazard on the uneven cobblestones. A hazardous profession. Not to mention AIDS and kinky johns, both on the rise. Where were the Jesuits now? Today only a few Carmelite nuns reached out. A few years earlier, Natalia remembered, she had given this same woman a card with the name of their clinic. “Grazie,” the streetwalker had managed in a tone that conveyed: You’ve got to be kidding! Sad, a prostitute of fifty. But somehow she had stayed alive.

  Natalia admired the bold choice of shoe. No doubt she had a closet full. Natalia’s mother had owned only three pairs at any one time. Two were sensible—flats with laces. The pair with low heels she wore once or twice a year for special occasions. Natalia’s grandmother, who had worked in a sardine cannery, never wore heels in her life.

  How has she avoided breaking a leg? Natalia wondered.

  A block later, they found Teresa Steiner’s former residence. The building wore decades of grime and diesel fumes. By the door, written childlike under the name Lucia Santini, was the word pensione. Natalia pressed the caretaker’s buzzer and they waited. She was about to ring again when the intercom crackled.

  “Pronto?”

  “Carabinieri.”

  The door clicked and Natalia pushed open the small door cut into the massive one. Climbing three flights, they arrived out of breath. The landing was dark, one door open—a woman with a dog beside her. The dog was a husky, one eye green and the other blue. She stepped aside to let them in.

  In the hallway, a table and a chest of drawers. On top of the drawers, magazines and a vase of dusty-looking plastic flowers. Lucia Santini wiped her hands on her apron. Her eyes were swollen, the flesh around them red.

  “They came. They told me already. She’s dead.”

  “Sorry to disturb you again,” Natalia said, “but we’d like to ask you some questions. Can we come in?”

  The dog sniffed Natalia.

  “Basta!” Lucia Santini grabbed his ratty collar and pulled him away.

  “No, it’s okay,” Natalia said, “I like dogs.” Lucia, however, was already dragging the creature down the corridor, soothing him as they went. “Everything is all right, my sweet baby.” She bent down and kissed the dog on his large woolly head.

  Lucia Santini was a big woman, arms puddled with fat. Close to seventy, yet her hair was blue-black, pinned up on her head like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A few hairs of a moustache stuck out above her upper lip. The living room looked to be where Lucia spent most of her time. A cigarette burned in an ashtray by the couch, and the TV droned. Lucia trundled over and turned it off.

  “Was Teresa Steiner here last night?” Natalia asked.

  “She was in her room, studying. Armando—he rents a room in the back—Armando had gone to bed. He works on the freighters and gets up early. My sister was here. We stayed up watching television. I knocked on Teresa’s door and asked if she’d like to watch with us. Sometimes she would. But she said she had to finish a paper for the next day. She seemed tired, not her usual self.”

  “What was her usual self?” Pino asked.

  “Cheerful. And with energy, like young people. Not like us—eh, Osky?” she said to the dog, creeping toward her. “Teresa wanted to know everything about Naples. She wanted to try new things. She loved to go dancing. Can you imagine: she wanted me to go tango dancing with her. But she was a serious student. Sometimes her light would be on till two or three in the morning. I’d look in and she’d have her nose in a book.”

  The dog wandered back to its mistress’s side. She patted him on the flank, starting up his tail. Natalia took out her notebook.

  “Do you remember what she was wearing when she went out last night?”

  “Nah, but I can tell you she was dressed up in something pink. And high heels. I thought she might have been going dancing.” She pulled her housedress closer. It was missing buttons. A pocket hung limp.

  “How late were you up?” Pino asked.

  “My sister left at ten, or just after, when the TV show finished. I cleaned up and went to bed.”

  “Did the girl receive any phone calls?” Natalia’s pen was poised.

  “No. Not on my telephone. But she has one of those mobiles they all carry. My room is at the other end of the apartment, so if she did go out, I wouldn’t have heard her. You want to see her room?”

  They followed her across the dim corridor. The door was open, towels and sheets folded on the bed.

  “Excuse the mess. I was just taking them in from the line.”

  “Don’t worry,” Natalia said, looking around. A sadlooking room. Maybe the walls had been white once. The bed was like the one Natalia’s nonna slept in after her husband died. It was barely big enough for one. The mattress sagged and it had an iron frame. As if she were doing penance for still being alive.

  Teresa Steiner must have used the small table to study. The overhead bulb didn’t look like it provided much light. Natalia imagined the TV or radio going constantly in the adjoining living room. She wondered how the girl could concentrate enough to study here anyway. Probably she spent some time at the library. Natalia remembered how she had adored the library’s quiet when she was a student.

  Lucia sighed. “I was born here.” She crossed to the unmade bed and smoothed the sheets.

  Natalia sifted through a drawer crammed with colorful silk scarves.

  “My mother didn’t like hospitals,” Lucia added. “She had a friend who died in one, giving birth. I was her only child, the only one who survived.”

  “I’m sorry.” Natalia closed the drawer. Pino was down on his knees, looking under the bed.

  “It was God’s will that she live
with me her last year,” Lucia said. “Hot in here, isn’t it?” She opened the louvered doors to the balcony. The men working on the church across the way shouted to one another.

  “Would you like coffee?” Lucia offered. “I was just going to make myself a pot.”

  Pino looked at Natalia. “I have to get going.”

  “I’d like some. That would be great,” Natalia said.

  “I’ll see you out,” Signora Santini said to Pino. “I can tell you about the dog.”

  “The dog?” Natalia asked.

  “Not a big deal,” she said. “He’ll give you the report.”

  Pino winked at his partner. She frowned and proceeded to explore Teresa Steiner’s room.

  In a plywood cabinet against one wall hung Teresa’s expensive designer clothes. Gucci and Prada. Apparently Teresa could have afforded a better room, even an apartment in an elegant palazzo. Why did she rent a seedy room here?

  Natalia closed Teresa’s door and walked back into the living room. She sat down at the end of the couch. Lucia put their coffee on the table and sat herself, tugging her raveled sweater into place. Natalia was reminded of crazy Maria, who sold the only bad-tasting tomatoes in Italy at a table on the corner of Via Capozzi. She sheltered three or four dogs under it. Her hair never combed, face dirty, clothes scavenged from the garbage—but her dogs were always bathed and groomed.

  Petting Osky, who had settled at her feet, Natalia could imagine coming home to a soft friendly creature rather than to empty rooms. A dog would generally be glad to see its owner. Men were another story.

  Lucia pushed a plate of biscotti to Natalia. The coffee was surprisingly good.

  “Did Teresa Steiner have gentlemen coming to her room?” Natalia asked as she reached for a cookie.

  Lucia bit into hers, scattering crumbs. Whiskers spiked from her chin.

  “She had a lot of boyfriends, but the professor was the one she saw most. Said he was her thesis adviser, and they were going to her room to work. I’m making coffee in the morning when he slinks past without even a buongiorno. I can always tell when they’re married. They bring me sweets the first time and then they don’t want to have anything to do with me. Far be it for me to speak ill of the dead,” Signora Santini added, “but your boss is gone and you’re a woman. You understand.”