These Dark Things

by Jan Weiss

  “He’s not my boss,” Natalia said. “Actually, I’m his.”

  The dog jumped up and stretched out between them.

  “I seen her with Gambini.”

  “Zazu, the mob boss?”

  “Yeah. Aldo Gambini. Twice. Signor Rocco, he called himself—like I was stupid! So I got suspicious and followed her. Guess what? I watched her open a collection box at a shrine and stuff money into her fancy bag. She had a key. Right in the alley where she was killed. It figures. But still, it did surprise me. She was a nice girl. Brought me treats.”

  “Are you sure? Taking money?”

  “Sure I’m sure. That hair. You couldn’t miss it. One night she came home late. Said she wanted to talk. Did I mind? Of course I didn’t. I thought she was gonna confess to a broken heart. Instead, she says she’s working for Gambini, collecting shrine money. Told me her mother had cancer.” Usually even the Camorra hesitated to commit crimes near the shrines under the eyes of the saints or the Madonna and Jesus. In the old days, thieves had strung ropes across the dark alleys to trip people at night and rob them. A Dominican friar had persuaded the Bourbon king to sponsor oil lamps, but the thieves destroyed them. So the king installed votive candles before statues of the saints. People loved the shrines. But the Camorra took over and the shrines became one more business, like bingo or festival games: a cooperative venture between the Camorra and the Vatican.

  A small man with black hair walked into the living room carrying a bucket. Without a greeting, he set it down by the television and set to his task. The TV occupied a place of honor on a metal rolling cart surrounded by artificial plants and silk flowers. He dipped the rag into the bucket, squeezed it, then proceeded to wash the screen in smooth strokes.

  “Armando,” Lucia offered finally. He looked at Natalia but didn’t say anything. A tidy man, obviously, but today he’d missed a wedge of shaving cream crusted on his ear. “From Chile,” Lucia added, as Armando turned back to his chore. Lucia set down her cup and continued the discussion.

  “‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Teresa said. And the next day, she brings me a bottle of Giorgio perfume. Must have cost fifty euros!”

  “What is the boyfriend’s name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What did he look like—the professor?”

  “A peacock. Old and vain. You know—fancy.”

  “Did Teresa Steiner seem frightened recently?” Natalia noticed Armando watching them now.

  “She should have been frightened,” Lucia said, lowering her voice. “Gambini isn’t some puppy you tease,” she whispered close to Natalia, a scent of garlic on her breath.

  Lucia Santini and her dog walked Natalia to the door.

  “Thank you for your help,” Natalia said. Signora Santini turned, stoop shouldered, and the door groaned shut, leaving Natalia alone on the landing.

  On the street, Natalia dialed Pino. “You still in range?”

  “Certo.”

  “See if you can get an ID on the man in the photo we found with his arms around the victim. Try the University. According to Signora Santini, she had an admirer, a professore.”

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  Once on the street, she showed Teresa Steiner’s photo around the neighborhood. Maybe someone had seen something or someone with her. A man next to his motorcycle was on the pay phone at the corner, hand cupped over the mouthpiece. His black jeans and shirt were unbuttoned to show off his thick gold cross and hairy chest. He had a diamond stud in his right ear. He smoked and talked, ogled women as they walked by. He didn’t believe in shaving or haircuts. Mama’s favorite boy.

  Call finished, he winked at Natalia even though she was in uniform. He swaggered by, jumped on his bike, and sped off. Exhaust burned Natalia’s ankles.

  She tried to read the license plate. Low on the totem pole, no doubt, hardly worth pursuing, but you never know. Natalia walked into the alley whose stairs led to the policlinico. A woman was sweeping the passage, a fat little boy huddled beside her on the cobblestones.

  “’Scusi,” Natalia said to her, holding out the photo of the late Teresa Steiner. “Do you know this young woman?”

  The woman was sorry, but no, she didn’t. Natalia thanked her and climbed the stairs to the street above. It was nearly lunchtime. A cluster of doctors in white strolled across the courtyard of the Hospital for the Insane. A woman screamed behind them and pounded on the iron gate. Ignoring her, a straggler unlocked the gate and slipped out to jog after his colleagues.

  The usual crones were gathered on a bench beneath the statue of Saint Francis. The saint was surrounded by his angels, stone features worn away, wings cracked. A vendor sprayed his lettuces, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Workmen took seats on the ground under their scaffolding, opened lunch pails, and pulled out enormous sandwiches wrapped in paper. The madwoman screamed again; the workmen smoked, even as they ate and drank, and commented on the beautiful women passing in review.

  Two nuns in full gray habits took each other’s arms as they crossed the street. Once, Natalia had wanted nothing more than to become a nun. Lots of her schoolmates did. On the cusp of adolescence, afraid of their sexuality, the girls had adored and worshipped the nuns. Marriage to God seemed preferable to the prospect of union with a hairy man.

  The wind gusted. Clouds rushed past the roofs and church spires looming over the orange and lemon trees. The clouds were blowing out to sea. As a kid, Natalia had imagined mermaids flipping their tails in the harbor, as they were reputed to have done in ancient days. A decrepit old woman sat on a wooden chair on the sidewalk. Natalia had never known her name. She’d been known as a strega, a witch, since Natalia was a child.

  Just then, a young mother wheeled her baby carriage up to the old woman, who pulled two sewing needles from her jacket and inserted one needle into the eye of the other, chanting, “Vacchi e contro e perticell agli vocchi, crepa l’invidia e schiatton gli ochi.” Eyes against eyes and the holes of the eyes, envy cracks and eyes burst.

  Protection against the evil eye.

  The next corner brought Natalia onto a market street. The vendors signaled to one another in case one was doing something that would arouse the law.

  “I have lovely peaches. No charge for the carabiniere.” The woman was not five feet tall—a muscular nonna in torn sneakers. She was missing her front teeth. Probably dealing numbers from her “office”—the folding table behind the cantaloupes and tomatoes. An orange-and-white cat dotted with black peeked out from below a sawhorse table heaped with fish. Of particular interest were the sardines, silver and sleek, their tiny bead-eyes open and shiny.

  All around, sellers hawked their wares—cherries and oranges, sausages and cheeses, pinwheels, underwear, shoes. Natalia sensed items being covered, boxes hidden, but she didn’t look.

  The hungry—mainly gypsies—lurked all day, waiting for vendors to be distracted or to step away for a moment so they could vanish a melon or a plum. Failing that, they would even salvage discarded spoils or the odd onion that rolled into the gutter.

  “Look at those.” The nonna pointed to a mound of purple blossoms fallen from the trees still flowering all over Naples.

  “Every week I sweep and every week they come back. What are you gonna do? They say they cure mental problems. I don’t need the blossoms, but I should. You’re young. You don’t know. When I was growing up, after the War, life was terrible. People were hungry. They broke into the aquarium for food. My father brought home a bag of goldfish. And now we got this garbage.” She pinched her nose. “Speaking of garbage, you heard? Last night. They got Franco Tozzi. He was a piece of shit, but a little boy was playing next to the car when the bomb went off. Burned so bad, his mother didn’t recognize him.” She made the sign of the cross.

  Natalia paid for the grapes and peach and strolled on, glad to move away from that particular stretch of street. Patches of gold stained the buildings. Sheets of laundry lines billowed like synchroniz
ed swimmers.

  Natalia recognized Pino’s curly head bent over a display of figs.

  “Have you ever seen any as beautiful as these? Try one,” he said when he saw her.

  “Delicious,” Natalia said.

  The vendor was filling two bags. “I got some for you,” Pino said.

  Not everyone could work with Pino. He had a reputation as an eccentric, refusing a car, even a motor scooter, attached to his old bicycle. He was a Buddhist, which intrigued her. He looked at things from unusual angles. “Lou Scarpetto,” Pino said, introducing the fruit man. Pino didn’t mention Natalia by name.

  “Delighted,” Scarpetto said. “Your boyfriend and I went to school together. Way back.”

  “Boyfriend”? What was her partner thinking?

  “Smartest in the class,” Lou said. “A real brain.”

  “Lou—” Pino protested.

  “Nah. It’s true. And it figures. Pino Loriano is a carabiniere, and I end up selling fruit!”

  Scarpetto. Natalia put the name through her mental file. The Scarpettos ran all the produce in this part of town. This pudgy, unshaven man with a ratty apron was more than a millionaire. And, in spite of his genial face, he had killed or ordered killed more than one unfortunate soul.

  “We played football together,” Scarpetto continued, handing them the figs. “I used to weigh the same as him, can you believe? Married life!” He slapped his belly.

  Pino reached for his wallet.

  “No.” Lou held up a hand.

  “Lou, we have to pay. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise what? Your bosses give you a hard time? Anyone bothers you, you let me know. No disrespect, Miss,” he addressed Natalia.

  “So,” he said, hands on ample hips, “the hermit finally got himself a girlfriend. When’s the happy day?”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” Pino said. He took Natalia’s arm and pulled her away.

  “Nice meeting you!” Scarpetto managed before they were swept into the stream of shoppers.

  “What was that about?” Natalia asked. Pino was still holding her arm.

  “The less Scarpetto knows, the better.”

  “Have you used him as an informant?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Okay. I get it. Now can I have my arm back?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Natalia pulled away, acting as if he were teasing.

  The two partners lingered on Via Toledo, looking in the windows of an antiques emporium, and next door the bridal shop, unchanged since Natalia and her best friend had haunted it as young girls. The same mannequins displayed two gowns—one of lace covered in pearls, the other a heavy cream-colored silk.

  A juggler performed in the street out front. A marginale—one on the margins. A few robbed for a living too, but most contributed their varied talents to society. Some were circus performers, or barkers. A few were hatmakers. The knife grinder pushed his sharpening wheel through neighborhoods, announcing his services with a singsong cry. When she was a child, her mother had hired one-eyed Pietro to repair her copper pots. Amazingly, Pietro could read and write, while many of his clients couldn’t.

  Pino rifled through a bin of tarnished knives, banded with twine, and boxes of beaded flowers outside the antique shop. In the doorway, the proprietor held up a ripe pear and a fresh pastry, displaying them to a woman leaning out her window across the street.

  Although she was only two years older than Pino, she felt as if she’d lived decades longer. They walked out of their district and passed a group of palm trees near the harbor. Gulls circled the docks, scouting for a meal.

  The commander of the 10th Carabinieri Battalion, Colonel Donati, leaned back in his chair. Natalia was afraid that one day he would lean too far and tip over. A miracle it’s never happened, she thought. He reached into a green glass bowl to grab a lemon drop.

  “I’m trying to stop smoking. These are Elisabetta’s idea. Try one?” He pushed the bowl across the desk. Donati’s wife must have chosen the bowl. Its modern design was unlike anything else in the room.

  “No, thanks,” Natalia and Pino said at the same time.

  “Any progress in the case?”

  “Some,” Natalia said. “The victim was a German citizen, born in Ulm. Her maternal grandparents were from Palermo. She’s going to be buried there whenever Dr. Francesca releases the body.”

  “Beautiful girl, judging from the photo in the paper.” He handed his copy to Natalia. “What do you know so far? What are your concerns about the case?”

  Luca had outdone himself: the dead girl looked mythic, a character in a fairy tale in deep slumber.

  “The murderer killed her in the street near a shrine,” Natalia said. “Carried her through a locked door into the church and down a narrow passage into the crypt beneath. Yet forensics hasn’t found so much as a drop of blood along the route, none in the tunnel descending to the crypts. Not a drop, not a smudge, although at least the killer’s hands must have been bloody, his clothes stained. And no one saw the assailant come or go.”

  “Perhaps he came prepared,” Donati said, “and wore gloves and one of those suits Dr. Francesca’s people wear. Though that wouldn’t explain the absence of a blood trail.” His eyebrows arched. “Perhaps she bled out before he carted her off.”

  “Perhaps,” Natalia said, without much conviction.

  “Tell me what you need.”

  “Help. Support here.”

  “We’re strapped for manpower, but I’ll give you Corporal Giulio to assist. He’s still on light duty, but he can anchor the investigation desk for you.” Donati touched the side of his nose. “Be prudent,” he said. “There is the possibility of the Camorra in this.” He glanced at his Omega. “Get some lunch.”

  In the hallway, Natalia said, “Camorra? Hell, no wonder the day shift vanished and we caught this killing. What have they got for local manpower? A couple of hundred thousand to our thirteen hundred?”

  Pino only nodded, not meeting her eyes. If they annoyed the criminal clans, trouble was almost guaranteed. Carabinieri died or disappeared as easily as anyone else—prosecutors, witnesses, judges. Colonels, even. No wonder Donati was nervous at the possibility of Camorra involvement.

  “Lunch where?” she asked.

  “El Nilo. The waitress there recognized Teresa’s picture. Said she came in almost every morning. Sometimes again at the end of the day. Recently with a young man. The waitress recognized him too.”

  The jukebox was going when they walked in: a local instrumental with lots of accordion and mandolin. The girl behind the counter wore purple lipstick. Punk-looking, but pretty, her eyebrows plucked thin. She carried trays of creamy sfogliatelle with her tongue sticking out, concentrating hard on not dropping them. She shook powdered sugar over them and laid each in the case, next to the biscotti lined up in neat rows. Pino and Natalia sat on the banquette. The proprietor polished the espresso machine. He nodded at them.

  A man in kitchen whites came out from the back, his hair as white as his uniform.

  “Tina!” He wiped his hands on his apron as the waitress scurried over. He asked if an order was ready and retreated through the swinging doors. He looked so familiar, Natalia thought. Could that old man have been Turrido, once the proprietor of Vesuvio’s Bakery?

  When she was young, Natalia had stopped there on her way home from school almost every day to pick up a loaf of pane nero, the black bread her mother had sworn by. Not just her mother, in fact: most of the neighborhood bypassed the rival fancy shop, even after it invested in chrome tables and chairs. Their bread didn’t hold a candle to shabby Turrido’s. Turrido, with white hair? He’d never been thin, but he’d been fit, his hair bottle-black. He lived above the store with his mother, a beautiful sweet-natured old lady dressed always in black. She cooked for her son in the kitchen behind the shop, the smell of her meatballs tantalizing.

  An old woman squeezed past their table and plunked down her
shopping in a wide arc around her table. Her gold earrings swung like tiny chandeliers. The proprietor hurried over with her coffee, to which she added sugar.

  Natalia and Pino grimaced. They both liked it the traditional way—not so sweet. How coffee is prepared is a local obsession. The sugar went in first, then the inky coffee oozed from the nozzle of the espresso machine. If you didn’t like your coffee too sweet, you’d have to catch the bartender early. If he respected you, you got the coffee you ordered.

  The owner’s grandfather was Don Calo Gero Vizzini, the Capo di tutti Capi, a gangster so powerful that he’d greeted the American troops in 1943 wearing an apricot silk foulard Lucky Luciano had taken from his own neck and given him because he had admired it. Vizzini’s son was a smalltime hood, but as far as Natalia and Pino knew, the grandson who owned El Nilo had never been involved in anything remotely illegal.

  The baker came out with a tray of pastries. Natalia tapped Pino’s arm.

  “That’s Turrido, isn’t it? Anthony Turrido, the baker?”

  “It looks like him,” Pino said. “I remember his picture on the front page of La Repubblica after he refused to pay protection and they burned the bakery down.”

  Natalia nodded. “They didn’t want to kill him. Watched his shop for weeks, waited until he was out on deliveries. But the mother was in the back, cooking. Turrido’s father took off when he was five. I don’t think Turrido ever had a girlfriend. Mamma and the bakery were his world. I went to her funeral. One of Gambini’s captains came in. Gambini hadn’t intended killing the mother. He wouldn’t come himself, but his man tried to press an envelope on Turrido. Turrido ripped it to pieces, torn lira spilling all over the floor.

  “Afterward, Turrido wandered the streets, lost. I always wondered what happened to him. I was a teenager the last time I saw him.”