“No, they provide support as an allied police agency to the coast guard when it comes to fishing and freight, with identical jurisdiction and responsibilities, even if they don’t possess their own watercraft. In any case, the point is this: like any other agency under the command of the national volunteer militia, the port militia is a branch of the fascio, the national Fascist party. They report to the Blackshirts, and the Blackshirts report to Rome.”
Ricciardi smirked.
“I’m beginning to understand. This means that our dead centurion, Emanuele Garofalo, is quite the excellent cadaver.”
Garzo stiffened his jaw: a gesture that worked especially well since he’d grown his mustache, and one that he’d practiced repeatedly in the mirror.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say with that tone: but yes, it’s true, this is an important murder. The man was spoken of as a likely future consul, I’m told. He’d been promoted for special merits, and he was widely respected for his integrity and sense of duty.”
There was a moment of silence, during which Ricciardi scratched his chin.
“I’m sorry, Dottore. Are you trying to offer me some unofficial advice?”
Garzo began to lose his patience.
“I have no unofficial advice for you. I just wanted to tell you that . . . well, to make a long story short, we’ve just received a dispatch from Rome that unofficially advises”—Garzo faltered as he realized that he’d used the same phrase twice in two completely contradictory sentences—“that is, that suggests that we conduct the investigation with great care and caution.”
Ricciardi hadn’t moved a muscle, but Maione knew that he was enjoying himself immensely.
“I’ll devote great care to the investigation, Dottore, as I’m sure you know. The same amount of care that we devote to every investigation. But caution? What exactly do we need to be cautious about?”
Garzo felt as if he had his back to the wall. He stroked his mustache with his forefinger, but that offered scarce comfort.
“Caution, caution. Using caution to avoid stepping on certain toes, as you have the unfortunate habit of doing; to avoid being arrogant, to keep from annoying prominent citizens. For once in your life, Ricciardi, caution!”
The commissario bowed his head.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Dottore. We’ll use all our . . . caution. May we go?”
With the unpleasant sensation that he’d been beaten once again, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what game they’d been playing, Garzo waved his hand in annoyance and dismissed them.
On his way out, ostensibly by accident, Maione stepped on Ponte’s foot, who took it without so much as a whimper.
XI
I’ve decided: this year I’m going to make another hill.
I’ll put it right over here, to the side, like Posillipo with the Vomero. That way I can make the countryside, the flock of sheep, a few houses lit up from within. The children like that—lambs and shepherds.
Maybe it won’t be as densely populated as what’s already there, but that doesn’t matter. It’s like the city, after all: there are some parts with more people and other places with less.
I don’t even have to rebuild the structure with wooden sticks; all it takes is a slightly larger piece of cork, the moss for the grass, and a few wire trees. Here’s the cork. I’ll have to cut it, to make a rectangle to nail down.
The knife is in my hand. And I think of flesh.
Flesh isn’t like cork: it’s so easy to cut, so very easy. All it takes is one quick clean slash. The problem is making up your mind to cut it.
But now I know how it works. You lay the blade down, and then you press.
The flesh takes in the blade, it’s elastic; it gives a little.
But then the blade cuts through the surface.
And that’s when you can no longer turn back.
XII
Maione was frothing with fury.
“That idiotic buffoon. He wants to tell us how to do our jobs! How dare he? Him and that incompetent Ponte, as God is my witness, one of these days I’ll slam my fist into his head so hard I’ll make him forget his address! And another thing, does he think that those scraps of whore-bush he’s grown on his upper lip have somehow made him any less of a moron?”
Ricciardi, sunk comfortably in his old leather office chair behind his desk, was fiddling pensively with his paperweight, made from a fragment of mortar shell.
“On the contrary, this time more than ever before, good old Garzo has been a great help to us. He’s given us an important lead, you know.”
Maione wasn’t ready to calm down.
“Commissa’, that guy’s never going to give us any useful information, because he himself is a completely useless individual. Did I tell you that Antonelli, who was temporarily assigned to switchboard duty, told me that he overheard him telling his wife on the phone: ‘Ricciardi, he knows how to catch criminals because he understands the way they think. Which means that he’s a criminal himself.’ To justify the fact that he doesn’t understand criminals, or anything else!”
“Think about it, Raffae’. The bodies are still warm, and the party apparatus has already sprung into action. Garzo does nothing on his own initiative, ever, unless somebody tells him to. So why did the militia intervene immediately? I have a feeling that the stroll we need to take over to the barracks where Garofalo worked is going to provide us with some interesting pieces of information.”
Maione scratched his head.
“You think? Then we’d better get strolling, sooner rather than later. That’s what you always say, isn’t it, that the first few hours are the most important, no?”
Livia Lucani, the widow Vezzi, was thoroughly enjoying the Christmas atmosphere in her new city.
All of the qualities and details that made Naples so unique and interesting multiplied a hundredfold this time of year. Waking up to the calls of the strolling vendors, the noise rising from the streets, the songs. And the smells, the thousands of pots bubbling busily away, the thousands of frying pans sizzling, the pastry shops competing to present their masterpieces. Everyone had dreamed up a calling, a profession; every one of them was trying to eke out a living.
Livia’s impression was one of generalized good cheer, but with a strain of sadness running through it. It was as if the citizens of that special place were constantly telling one another, It’s hard, terribly terribly hard. But we’ll make it all the same.
Just the day before she’d spotted a strange individual from the window of the car, a man wearing a bicorne hat à la Napoléon Bonaparte, a long, loose coat, a thousand chains of all sizes as well as fake medals, and a brightly colored walking stick with bells on the end of it. He was walking along with an eccentric gait, hopping and leaping, followed by the usual procession of barefoot urchins. He was shouting something that Livia couldn’t make out.
When she’d asked her driver just who that character might be, he’d replied with a wry laugh:
“Signo’, that’s the Pazzariello. He’s a sort of walking newspaper, a town crier. He goes through every street in the quarter to announce that a new shop has just opened, or maybe that someone’s lost their dog and is looking for it, or that a young couple is finally getting married. He announces his news singing and dancing, and dressed the way you see him, so that he’s sure to attract attention.”
Livia saw four women dressed in black emerge from a basso, one of the dark, dank street-level apartments of the poor; they listened attentively to what the Pazzariello had to say, burst out laughing, and went back inside. Over the door of the basso hung a black cloth. The driver didn’t miss his passenger’s observation.
“Ah, Signora, no one can resist the Pazzariello; even if they’re holding a wake for the dead, they come out and listen to what he has to say.”
Livia was falling in love wi
th that city a little more with every day that passed. It was the city where, a little at a time, she’d rediscovered her will to live.
She still received very long phone calls, during which her Roman girlfriends tried to persuade her to return to the capital. When she had she left, four months ago now, she’d told them that she was just going to spend a few days at the seaside; and then she’d never gone back.
These days the idea of the social life she’d led for years in Rome was intolerable to her: false smiles, backbiting, gossip. An endless footrace to earn the favor of the newly powerful, a performance that was alien to her very nature. Precisely because of her indifference to that game, and her basic sincerity, she had become a close friend of Il Duce’s rebellious daughter, a young woman who concealed her great emotional fragility behind an exterior of apparent aggressivity and masculine ways.
She was always delighted to receive Edda’s phone calls, but not even she had been able to change Livia’s mind: she had no intention of moving back to Rome. And since it amused Livia to watch everyone she knew rack their brains to figure out the real reason the Italian capital had lost its most enchanting dinner guest, the life and soul of Roman social life, she was careful to keep it to herself.
Making its way through the armies of strolling vendors and beggars, blasting its horn, Livia’s car pulled into the courtyard of police headquarters. The guard at the door saluted deferentially, and the woman nodded. By now she was a habitual guest.
Without signaling to her chauffeur that she wished to get out of the car, she started counting under her breath. When she got to eight, Garzo appeared, panting, having burst through the main door that led to the offices without even an overcoat.
“Signora, why, what an honor, what a pleasure! You’re a ray of sunlight in our day. We’re certainly very lucky to have you as our visitor.”
Livia took the deputy chief of police’s proffered arm.
“Caro Dottore, believe me, the pleasure is all mine. And to be welcomed by such a gallant gentleman really is a delight. But do my eyes deceive me? You’ve grown a mustache! It looks just wonderful on you.”
Garzo seemed embarrassed.
“Well, you know, Signora, as one gets older it’s sometimes a good idea to try to look a little more authoritative, don’t you think?”
Livia laughed.
“And authority’s what you care about most, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely right. Those juvenile delinquents who report to me, it’s no easy matter to keep them in line. I was just saying so to your friend Ricciardi and his brigadier.”
Livia immediately turned serious.
“Why, is there some problem? He was determined to return to the job such a short time after the accident; he won’t listen to anybody but himself.”
“Yes, he’s one hard-headed individual, una bella capa tosta, as we like to say here in Naples. And in every sense of the phrase, if you follow me. In any case, you won’t find him here, he just stepped out with Maione a few minutes ago. He’s working on a fairly sensitive investigation. As you may certainly have the opportunity to inform your friends in Rome, if the topic happens to come up, we always pay the closest and most careful attention to anything that concerns Fascist Party members.”
Livia’s disappointment at having missed Ricciardi had ruined her mood so suddenly and completely that she hadn’t heard a word that Garzo had said.
“Ah, I understand. Well, perhaps you’ll do me the courtesy of telling him . . . no, don’t tell him a thing. Perhaps I’ll come back later.”
Garzo put on his most dazzling smile.
“Why, of course, Signora. He’ll no doubt be very happy to see you.”
As she found herself in her car again moving slowly through the crowd, Livia felt her good mood returning. And she decided that the real reason she’d moved down here had to be that man with the sea-green eyes, those eyes so full of despair; that man she’d finally succeeded in holding in her arms just two months earlier.
What would her girlfriends back in Rome say, if they ever found out?
XIII
While out on the streets the chaos that preceded Christmas was suffocating and anarchic, inside the port the picture was quite the opposite. The freight traffic and the passenger traffic were kept neatly separated, and thousands of people worked efficiently, moving as if guided by a shrewdly conceived choreography.
The port was the nation’s largest and it seemed to be aware of its unrivaled standing. Crews of longshoremen crossed paths with the crews of freighters newly landed or about to ship out, dozens of stevedores were continuously at work loading or unloading immense cargo holds, huge trucks and horse-drawn carts lined up at the exit, the draft horses snorting vapor into the wind as their drivers waited for their loads to be checked. Passengers debarking from the huge ocean liners were greeted by lovely uniformed auxiliaries stationed at the pedestrian exits. Maione thought of the shock they’d have once they left the port and found themselves in the terrifying disorder and noise of the city itself.
Ricciardi walked quickly, hands in his pockets and hair tousled, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him. Aside from the human bustle and activity all around him, other beings appeared to the eyes of his soul.
A young man stood on the wharf, his arm shorn clean off by a whipping cable, the blood pumping out powerfully through the open artery with each heartbeat, murmuring: Mamma, Mamma, help me, Mamma. A man sitting on the ground next to a freight-unloading site, currently occupied by a team of stevedores cheerfully singing a popular ditty, had been crushed by a falling crate or something of the like: there was a vast depression in his chest and it was clear from the angle of his head that his spinal cord had been severed. He was muttering: This last one, I’ll just do this last one and then I’ll head home. What a shame, mused the commissario. If the one before had been your last for the day, maybe now you’d be with your children. You just wanted too much. Too bad for you. And maybe too bad for me, too, he thought to himself.
Among the many uniformed men supervising the harbor’s operations, it was easy to identify the members of the port militia: the gray-green felt hat, the jacket of the same color with a half-belt in back. Active, precise, energetic. As Ricciardi made his way to the barracks with Maione, he thought that a military organization parallel to the administration of the state but answerable to a political party was potentially dangerous. But then it was also true that the party in question had won the most recent elections with more than ninety percent of the votes, and so it was hard to tell the Fascist party apart from the state itself.
As far as he was concerned, and as he tried to make Dr. Modo understand whenever he tried to pull Ricciardi into one of his angry anti-Fascist tirades, politics was entirely uninteresting. He believed that, when all was said and done, the root of all problems was human nature: and for that there was no remedy.
The militia barracks was not centrally located, but it was located strategically, not far from the tracks along which the freight trains ran from the docked ships up to the station. The civilian personnel tended to steer clear of the place, perhaps instinctively. They seemd to prefer to take the long way around rather than walk along the barracks walls, which only added to the sense of its extraneousness from the colorful world of the Naples harbor.
The two policemen walked around the building’s perimeter, in search of the main entrance. It was a three-story building, spartan and solid, in keeping with the architecture of the regime. Over the entrance, between the second and third floors, was a large sign: MUSSOLINI BARRACKS. Ricciardi remembered the inauguration, years earlier: Il Duce had come to Naples in person, and Garzo had been so anxious that he had almost tipped over into hysteria, as was typical of him on such high-pressure occasions.
The militiaman at the front door asked them to identify themselves, then muttered something into a modern-looking intercom; Maione thought sadly of the mi
les of stairs and hallways that the officers were forced to walk at police headquarters just to deliver routine messages. A minute later, a junior officer appeared and, raising his arm in a rigid Roman salute, welcomed them and introduced himself.
“First squad leader Catello Precchia. Please, come this way.”
The militiaman headed up the staircase at a run. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance of sympathetic amusement, and followed him at as quick a pace as they could manage; the commissario thought he could hear the brigadier inwardly cursing as he struggled to make it up the steps. On their way up they crossed paths with a large number of soldiers running at the same enthusiastic clip, each of them snapping a sharp Roman salute. Ricciardi spitefully wished that one of them would trip in his eagerness and tumble all the way down to the ground floor. He’d have gladly pulled out his wallet and put cash on the barrelhead to see such a sight.
The first squad leader came to a sudden halt in front of a tall dark hardwood door, where an usher stood at attention next to a desk. The man didn’t even have a chair. The militiaman knocked just once at the door and then showed them in.
The office they’d just entered was enormous. The marble floor had no other decoration apart from small tiles of various colors. On one wall hung an outsized painting of the Port of Naples during the Middle Ages and, on the opposite wall, there was a large-format print of a photograph of Il Duce inaugurating the barracks. Behind a massive desk made out of the most magnificent wood hung the two regulation portraits: the head of government and the king. In one corner, next to a large French window that led out to a balcony, stood a gilt flagstaff with an elaborate spear tip, and from it hung the Italian tricolor with the Savoy shield.
No cross in sight; around here, Ricciardi mused, they worship only one god. But he noticed with surprise, and with a hint of disquiet, that partly concealed behind the open curtain there was a painting of Saint Sebastian much like the one at his boarding school, and which he’d been reminded of just the day before, as he stood looking at Garofalo’s corpse.
By My Hand Page 6