by Jan Weiss
“Amazing, yes. Wardrobe and personality both. She loved Naples, but she was not like Neapolitans—she was sunny, happy. About a month ago, she said she needed my help. She had to go home to take care of her mother. You know about her mother?”
“Yes.”
“That’s when she told me she was working for Mr. Gambini, that he had given her a small territory to supervise, meaning the collection of donations left at the shrines. She was making some extra money from it. Not a lot, but something. She wanted me to take over her territory for a few days. She confided in me. I knew everything—even about her affair with her professor. I worried for her, but she said she could take care of herself, and she could. I mean, she did until.…”
Elsa started to cry again.
Natalia handed her a tissue. “This can’t be easy for you.”
“Her professor was in love with her. But Teresa was tired of his power plays. She wanted out of the relationship. When she told him, he got very angry.”
“Did he threaten her?”
“Yes. That’s when I told her.…”
“Told her what, Elsa?”
“That I was gay and knew she wasn’t, but that I loved her anyway and would stand by her.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She laughed. Hugged me and laughed. ‘You’ll get over it,’ she said. And then we spent the night together.” Elsa wiped at a tear streaking her cheek.
“Was she gay?”
Elsa smiled. “No. Just curious. I won’t. Get over it, I mean.”
She might well not … not for a long time, Natalia thought. Whatever else she was, Teresa Steiner had been a powerful personality.
“After she was killed,” Elsa said, “Professor Lattanza asked me to stay after class—I have one course with him. He warned me that if I told anyone about him and Teresa, he’d make sure I didn’t get my degree. As if anyone in the department didn’t already know.”
“How did she meet Gambini?”
“She went for a weekend to a resort with Professor Lattanza. They had a fight and he stormed off. Gambini picked her up while she was eating dinner in a restaurant by the waterfront. She thought he was a harmless old man.” Elsa shook her head. “Even I knew better. The next day he took her out on his yacht, said he had a nephew her age in Naples. A nice boy she should meet. She thought that was sweet of him. A ‘gentleman,’ she said. She told him about her mother and her cancer. He offered her work collecting from the shrines. She said it was a great opportunity not only to help her mother, but to see how it all worked with the shrines.”
“I noticed she had some designer clothes. Odd, on a student budget.”
“Hand-me-downs. Whatever she wore looked stylish, even things she had bought on the streets. She insisted that I keep something when I covered for her, but I wanted her to send it to her mother. She went and bought me a beautiful poster for my room and sent home almost all the rest of the money she took from the boxes. My poor Teresa.”
“A dutiful daughter,” Natalia said.
Elsa smiled sadly and nodded.
“Yeah. Except … Teresa Steiner’s mother?” Natalia added softly. “She died when Teresa was a child.”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Giulio interrupted. “You have an urgent call from Sergeant Loriano.”
While Natalia took the call, Elsa scribbled something on a piece of paper, then slipped out.
“Pino. What do you have?”
“What kind of money did we find in Teresa Steiner’s room? Anything?” Pino asked.
“Thirty euros in a drawer. A few in her purse.”
“She had an account. I’m at the bank now.”
“Which one?”
“Banco di Napoli. A month before she died, Teresa Steiner opened a bank account with a cash deposit of 21,000 euros.”
* * *
7
* * *
Pino headed for the Zen Center. He bumped over the black cobblestones past the markets setting up on Vico Nuovo ai Librai. Grapes and oranges beckoned, jewel-like, despite the fact that the morning air already stank with garbage.
The newsstand on his corner was still shuttered: a death in the family. Workers standing at high tables just outside coffee kiosks hurriedly gulped espresso and tossed the paper cups onto the ground. At the other end of the chasm, between the two-hundred-year-old residential buildings, Vesuvius rose in the distance. Pino’s mother had been a girl the last time it erupted.
Walking briskly, he soon reached his destination. Inside the Zendo’s meditation room, Pino took off his jacket and sat on the floor. All three Buddhist monks in Naples lived in the rooms on the floor above. Rarely did Pino see them. Rarer still to find them floating through town in their cherry robes.
But this morning proved the exception. One of the monks beat on the mokugyo, a drum that looked like a blowfish. An offering of oranges sat on a porcelain plate before the shrine. It was only when Pino looped his legs into the crosslegged Lotus position that he realized there was someone else sitting closer to the enshrined golden Buddha.
The diamond sutra. Pino recognized the chant and joined in the Sanskrit, familiar from years of practice. The diamond sutra was a favorite: Subhito asks Buddha about the nature of reality. “Reality is change,” says the Buddha.
It was definitely a girl, judging from her voice. Unfamiliar with the chant, she was trying to make sounds that fit in. The sound of her small sobs broke the silence when the drumming and chanting stopped. Pino stood and walked to her.
It was Tina, the beautiful waitress from El Nilo. Her short blond-and-green hair was done up in small batches banded together in stalks all over her head. Even with the bizarre hairdo, she was stunning.
“I’m okay,” she sniffled. “Just a romantic problem.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No.” Tina shook her head.
Then she was standing and running, her unhappiness swirling after her. It was quiet in the room. The monk had slipped out. The incense, a pile of ash, smoked sweetly. Pino inhaled, imagining the sea and a seagull’s melancholy song.
When he came out, the sun was bearing down through the rusted leaves of the lone tree on the avenue. He looked for the girl. Silly to imagine she would have stayed around, but he looked anyway. Nowhere. He retrieved his bicycle from behind Tommaso’s newsstand and set off.
Lola’s head was already a crown of shiny foil when Natalia was let into Fionetta’s beauty parlor. Natalia greeted the proprietress and bent to kiss her childhood friend before taking the chair next to her. The tall window shades remained discreetly closed, as usual, when Lola got together with her old friends for an early-morning appointment before the salon actually opened. Mariel had yet to arrive.
Mariel, Lola, and Natalia had attended elementary school together and survived adolescence sharing the same classes. They got their first brassieres together and gossiped incessantly about their rivals and first beaus. As they grew older, Lola’s family proved a problem. The Nuovolettas were Camorra. Her grandfather was sent away during the Maxi trials, after which her father tried to go straight, but the temptations and the pressures proved too great. He got into contraband-cigarette smuggling and expanded into hard drugs. Lola was twelve when he was gunned down. Her mother took over the smuggling.
Signora Nuovoletta was a country girl from a mountain village in Abruzzo. Her parents moved the family to Naples, where she met and wed Lola’s dad. A real love match. When Natalia visited, she remembered being embarrassed by their lingering kisses and the gentle slap her father gave her mother’s ample behind. Nothing like the physical expressions her parents allowed themselves.
Natalia loved Lola’s birthday parties, which grew even more lavish after her father was killed. However, Natalia’s and Mariel’s parents forbade them to attend any more, and that was the end of pony rides and elegant cakes and presents. Nonetheless, the three of them continued the tradition, meeting secretly to celebrate. They were, after all, distant cousins, Nonna in
sisted. Family.
At fourteen, Lola—a fat kid with sagging knee socks—turned svelte and augmented her school uniform with a bustier. The nuns sent her home. Within a week, she’d quit school and was serving drinks in her uncle’s bar. At eighteen, she married her second cousin, Frankie. As a wedding present, Frankie was given the carting business in the district. Lola and Frankie built a luxurious home in Posillipo but preferred the simple rooms above the bar and remained there to this day, using the other as a vacation house.
By the time Natalia and Mariel started at university, Frankie was the head of the local gang, the capo paranza, and Lola was a glamorous young matron holding court at the latest hot café with the other wives and sisters of Camorra captains. But whenever possible, or when the occasion demanded it, the three of them got together quietly to gossip and celebrate.
“What is Madam having done today?” Fionetta said, frowning and holding up Natalia’s gray curls. “Some color?”
“A trim,” Natalia said.
Fionetta hadn’t changed her beehive hairstyle since the three friends first came to her at sixteen, hoping to find the secret to looking older. “Onetta” was fragrant with Chanel and the holding spray that lacquered her hairdo.
“Can you believe the garbage?” she said, peeking out around the drawn blinds.
“What’s this?” Natalia said, holding up Lola’s wrist.
Lola beamed. “My new bracelet.”
“Nice.”
“Nice? It’s gorgeous, is what it is. Twenty-two-carat diamonds set in gold.”
“From Frankie?”
“Yeah.”
“Special occasion?”
“I don’t know.” Lola looked pensive. “I think he’s whoring around on me.”
“Frankie?”
“Yeah. Frankie.”
“I don’t think so, Lola. The guy worships the ground you walk on. Maybe he just had a success … in business.”
“Maybe.” Lola laughed. “Look, I love the man, but he isn’t the brightest star in the sky.”
“How are the kids?” Natalia asked.
“Weeds. Nico is this tall.” She held out a hand, a meter high. “He’s a head taller than the other two. They all pester me about when Aunt Natalie and Aunt Mariel are coming over and bringing more presents.”
Besides being discreet, Fionetta was also nearly deaf. Nonetheless, Lola beckoned Natalia to sit in the chair next to hers, and leaned over to whisper. “I had a visit from Aldo Gambini the other day. When Frankie was out.”
“No kidding.”
“At first I thought maybe he was sniffing around.”
“That old man?”
“Old men indulge in sex, too, Natalia. Remember sex?”
“But with one of his captains’ wives?”
“It’s been known to happen. But that wasn’t it: he has babes all over and a serious amorat on the side, named Bridget. He wanted advice.” Lola leaned even closer. “Gambini is recruiting women.”
“Great,” Natalia said. “Feminism lives. But he’s a little late. Rosetta ‘Ice Eyes’ Cutolo ran her brother’s operation for thirty years while he was in prison. Ermina Giuliano ruled the Forcella section around the train station forever. And Maria Licciardi controlled the Secondigliano district and waged a drug war with rivals. Shot it out with other Camorra women in the streets. A dozen people died, I think.”
Lola turned serious. “He was also trying to find out about you. I couldn’t tell whether he was expecting me to tell you or not. I’m sure he knows we still see one another from time to time. So I think maybe his asking after you was a message.” She screwed up her face. “Don’t know for sure.”
“Probably.”
“Yeah.”
Natalia didn’t have to ask what the unspoken message might be: stay out of Gambini business. She shrugged. “I have to do my job.”
Lola gave her an exasperated look. “Think about yourself for once. You don’t see your boss out on the street, do you? He travels with three bodyguards in two cars. Three. Who’s looking out for you?”
A knock at the front announced the arrival of Mariel, splendid-looking as always in a matching silk blouse and linen skirt, hair a sleek gold cap, perfectly groomed.
“Sorry I’m late. I was trying to cope with the garbage out in front of the bookstore. I had exactly one customer all day yesterday. The stench is horrible. The whole street is strewn with uncollected garbage, from the Porta Alba to Piazza Dante.”
“Here too,” said Fionetta, and helped her into a salon frock.
“What did I miss?” said Mariel.
“Lola wants to know how many dates I’ve had in the last half year.” Natalia touched a curl descending over her eye. “I had to confess: none.”
“Men are overrated,” Mariel said. “I prefer my cat.”
“Em, you could date anyone you wanted,” Lola said.
Natalia agreed. Mariel was smart as well as gorgeous. Natalia was less thrilled with the image of herself in the mirror, however.
“Look at Nat,” Lola said. “She needs a makeover. Cara, do you ever consider wearing lipstick? Here. Take mine. You look white as a sheet.”
“I can’t wear that shade of red.” Natalia pushed back the shiny tube.
“Don’t be stubborn. Try it, at least.” Lola swiveled the tube open as she rose from her chair and applied a swath to Natalia’s lips. “There.” She stood back to admire her quick work. “You look terrific. Doesn’t she?”
“Not bad,” Fionetta said, already mixing the chemicals for Mariel’s touchup.
Mariel always encouraged Natalia to indulge herself with beauty treatments. “Maintenance” is how Mariel put it. She had been largely unsuccessful. Mariel treated herself to a salon visit once a month. There she got a manicure, a pedicure, a massage, and a dye job that kept her lustrous hair as shiny as it had been since her youth. But the salon was well beyond Natalia’s budget, and even if it hadn’t been, she had zero tolerance for marking time as a prisoner in so-called beauty parlors. So gray my hair will be, she mused, taking up the hand mirror and studying her unruly curls.
“Get these off me,” Lola said, pointing to the foils covering her hair. “I’m done and I have to get going.” She dug in her bag for her cell phone.
“Don’t forget,” Mariel said. “We’re meeting in the usual place at seven on Natalia’s birthday.”
Fionetta removed the foils and brushed out Lola’s long hair with a few deft strokes. “Perfetto,” Lola said. “Ciao. Ciao.”
She kissed them each good-bye and clicked across to the door in her red heels.
“A force of nature, that girl,” said Fionetta, scissors clicking as she started on Natalia.
Natalia nodded and pondered the mute warning delivered by her friend. As a child, she had fallen asleep to stories of Peppe “Long Nose” Misso and learned young about pizzo, the tax imposed on shopkeepers. When she stopped at Anatolia’s candy store for her weekly chocolate, Enzo Spina was invariably there in the back. After witnessing him take a wad of bills from Anatolia, Natalia, with the innocence of a seven-year-old, asked “What’s that for?”
“Children shouldn’t be nosy,” Enzo had said, tapping his large nose to illustrate.
“Why not?” Natalia asked.
“To protect the store,” Anatolia said.
“From what?”
“From bad people,” Enzo said, winking at Anatolia. “Now get over here and give us a kiss.”
“No,” Natalia said. She moved away.
“Do as he says,” Anatolia said.
Natalia did. Enzo’s beard was rough and scratchy and he smelled like cigarettes and wine. He must have kept his word about protecting Anatolia’s store, though. She remained a fixture in the neighborhood for many years, often dragging her chair onto the sidewalk to hold court with the other widows. Her hair was lacquered black, well into her nineties. That she was low-level Camorra herself, and might have laundered money and sold tax-free cigarettes, didn’t occur to
Natalia until she was on the force.
As Fionetta finished the styling, Natalia’s pager and phone both went off. Never a good sign. Murder—Sorrento, read the message.
The Friday traffic was heavy all the way out of the city. The sun was fierce, the car’s air conditioning dicey at best. Natalia turned it off and rolled down the windows. Better hot air than none at all. A few Neapolitans were bathing in the fetid harbor. Many others were attempting to escape the unwelcome aromas wafting through Naples. Those lucky enough to possess a vehicle or rusty motorbike strapped on their luggage and set off. Traffic eased before she had to resort to the siren, much good as it would have done in moving her through the still-crowded streets.
The call had come in from the police in Sorrento. Neapolitan Carabinieri normally wouldn’t be called to an investigation in Sorrento. But as a member of the RAS elite within the Carabinieri mandated to investigate anything involving the Camorra, she had been summoned. The victim was reported to be a Naples resident, and the murder had the earmarks of a criminal syndicate hit.
Reaching the outskirts of town, she thought she’d finally escape the stink of the Waste Management Crisis, as it was called by the politicians and press. But the outside shoulder of the road was strewn with garbage dumped by desperate Neapolitans. Outraged by the incompetence and corruption, they’d refused to recycle anything whatsoever and were separating nothing. Everything got tossed out together to bake on the roadways and streets. Could anarchy be far behind? She was some distance south of the city before the heaps of roadside garbage finally diminished.
As Natalia approached the intersection where the victim’s van stood pushed across the road, traffic came to a stop. The road had no shoulder, so she maneuvered onto the painted median and stuck her siren on the hood of the unmarked Fiat. Blue light and siren screaming, she put her foot to the floor and reached the scene in minutes, grateful that no one on a motorcycle had had the same idea about getting around its four-wheeled neighbors.