Criscuolo grabbed him by the arm, whispering with a hiss:
“Don’t say that, even as a joke. You wouldn’t be the man you are, if you’d done it. And we helped Maria, not enough, but we did help her, while you were locked up. We couldn’t have done more than what we did; you know the way it works. If they’d seen us—and they were watching her all the time—they’d have taken us for accomplices, and we would have wound up like you. We had families, too, and we still do.”
Lomunno looked at him, grinding his teeth, his eyes brimming over with tears.
“And you still have your families . . . And look at what I have, a poor little twelve-year-old girl who has to be a mother to her eight-year-old brother, because her father’s out on the water trying to earn two pennies’ worth of stale flour and a scrap of pilfered fish. That’s my family.”
“Yes, that’s your family. And you need to care for your family, support them, because that’s what they deserve, instead of going to the tavern to fry your brains and your liver with cheap wine. Most of all, you have to stay out of jail, because if you wind up behind bars again what’s going to happen to these kids?”
Lomunno let himself drop back into his chair.
“All right. Tell me what you think I ought to do.”
Criscuolo told him.
When he was done, Lomunno put his hands over his face.
“Do you realize what you’re asking me to do? It’s the same thing that he did to me.”
Criscuolo, sitting next to him, took his hand.
“No, Anto’, no. It’s not the same thing at all. He was lying and you won’t be. And you might not have to do it. Or maybe it wasn’t even them, and they can prove it, and no one will be the worse for it. But in the meantime, you’ll get them off your back.”
“I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. I just don’t know.”
“You’re going to have to, Antonio. You have to bring yourself to do this for them, for your children. And for Maria, who was fragile and couldn’t take it.”
As he was getting ready to leave, Criscuolo looked at the piece of wood that Lomunno was carving and realized that he was building a nativity scene.
“You’re making a manger, eh? Good for you, that way the children know it’s Christmas. In a few days I’ll come back with something good for you to eat on Christmas Eve. Ciao, bambini, give me a kiss goodbye.”
As he left, he heard Lomunno’s voice calling him.
“Pasqua’ . . .”
“What is it, Anto’? Tell me.”
His friend’s eyes were glistening in the half-light of his shack. He opened his mouth, and shut it again. It’s hard to say thank you to someone when you can’t admit to yourself that you care about them.
At last, Lomunno spoke:
“Shave that mustache off. You look ridiculous.”
Criscuolo smiled, intentionally making his mustache quiver.
“You’re wrong; it’s magnificent.”
And he turned and left.
By the time Ricciardi and Maione found themselves outside the barracks it was nightfall. It was no longer raining, but the wind was blowing hard again, hurting their ears. They raised the lapels and collars of their overcoats.
The brigadier put on his gloves and clapped his hands together.
“Mammama’, there’s a cold wind tonight. But then again, if it weren’t cold what kind of Christmas would it be, eh, Commissa’? Well, all told, we learned a few things today about this Garofalo.”
Ricciardi, his hair tossing in the wind, replied pensively:
“And about ourselves, as far as I can tell.”
Maione nodded.
“And to think that there are some people who say that the secret police don’t exist. Unbelievable.”
“And it was because of the secret police that Lomunno was ruined so easily. The militia is the party, and they can’t afford for there to be even the suspicion of a scandal. No question, Garofalo was putting it all on a single roll of the dice; if his claims hadn’t checked out, he would have been in a world of pain.”
Ricciardi had set off toward police headquarters, walking at a fast clip.
“That must mean he felt he was making a safe bet. In any case, he ruined his colleague’s life, not just his career. Just think of that man’s wife, jumping out the window in her despair over losing her home, her husband, and her dignity.”
Maione was puffing out clouds of steam as he walked behind Ricciardi, like a small locomotive.
“You’re quite right, Commissa’. It’s possible to steal someone’s life, their dreams and hopes. That’s the worst crime of all: the theft of hope.”
Ricciardi shot a sidelong glance at the longshoreman who’d been crushed under the last load of the day, now standing alone on the wharf: abandoned by the living, who’d all gone home.
“Hope may even be the last thing to die, but it does die sometimes. At any rate we, at the end of our first day on the case, have more than just the name of Antonio Lomunno, ex-militiaman and ex-convict, in hand.”
“Oh, we do, Commissa’? What else do we have?”
Ricciardi was looking straight ahead, walking fast because of the wind blowing against his back.
“We have Saint Joseph, and Saint Sebastian.”
“We have San Gennaro, too, if we’re counting our saints . . . But what are you talking about?”
“The broken Saint Joseph: if it was broken on purpose, there must have been a reason. We need to figure out what that reason might have been. As for Saint Sebastian, that’s just an idea I have, and I want to check it out. But we’ll need to talk to a couple of experts, because you and I don’t know much about saints.”
Maione thought it over for minute, then said:
“As far as I can remember, Commissa’, the only expert on saints that we have is Don Pierino, from the Parish Church of San Ferdinando.”
“Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll swing by and see him, but only for Saint Joseph. For Saint Sebastian, on the other hand, I’ll need to talk to another expert: Dr. Modo.”
Maione burst out laughing into the wind.
“Commissa’, that Dr. Modo knows even less about saints than we do; that is, if we leave aside his cursing and oaths, when I’d say he knows quite a few of them, considering how many of their names he calls out. Anyway, I’m always delighted to see him.”
“No,” replied Ricciardi as they were entering the courtyard of police headquarters, finally sheltered from the cutting northern wind. “I’ll go, both to see Don Pierino and to see Modo. But what I’d appreciate is if you’d do me the favor of going to call on your informer, the famous Bambinella, and ask her to nose around and find out what she can about both Lomunno and Garofalo. Maybe all that integrity was nothing but a front.”
Maione stopped to think, then said:
“At your orders, Commissa’. If I want to see Bambinella I have to catch her early in the morning or late at night, otherwise she’ll be out going about her business, making her rounds in the city’s vicoli and vicarielli. But if you want, I’ll go by her place tonight.”
“No, it’s late and we’ve had a hard day. Come on up for a moment to sign the reports, then you head home. After all, in a few days it’ll be Christmas.”
“And I still have to finish my nativity scene. What can I do, I have to do it, it’s a tradition, but I never have the time. It makes me think of Luca, when he was little; he always wanted to work on it with me. Sometimes I still think I can see him, you know that? Ah well, let’s not get blue about it. Grazie, Commissa’. Tomorrow’s another day.”
XVIII
Christmas is an emotion.
It can last for a whole year, in the anticipation of a gift, a kiss from a new love, a pastry to be eaten by the light of red candles.
It has the flavor of
almonds and cinnamon, silver sugar dragées and chicken broth.
Christmas is an emotion.
It runs on the light of a thousand tiny bulbs, along electric wires painted black to make them look like so many stars falling from the sky, tossing in the wind.
It’s reflected in the countless voices exchanging false affection, forgotten embraces, and season’s wishes for all good things.
Christmas is an emotion.
Anticipation, finally, of something new.
Or perhaps simply of a return home, with cardboard suitcases tied up with twine in overcrowded, stinking passenger cars, from the places we work to the places of our age-old loves, which become new again when viewed from so great a distance.
Christmas is an emotion.
It’s strong, like the yearning for home in the cold and the wind, and yet faint, like the sound of an accordion in a tavern to someone hurrying past, without any clear destination in mind.
Christmas is an emotion.
You can wait for it day after day, from when the sirocco dies down under the blows of the cold northern wind, but it catches you unprepared all the same, like a runaway horse covered with plumes and bells.
Christmas is an emotion.
It’s as strong as a pounding heart, as light as a fluttering eyelash.
But it can be swept away by a gust of wind, and never come at all.
Maione, having finished writing his reports, was hurrying down the big staircase of police headquarters, finally heading home. Why hide it? He was a happy man.
Those three years hadn’t been easy. In fact, to tell the truth, they’d been the three most painful years of his life.
First of all, losing Luca. The terrible way it all happened, a phone call, a desperate race through the vicoli, a thousand eyes watching him pass from the shadows of the doorways, the crevices and alcoves, the lobbies and atriums, and no one on the streets. The usual little knot of people gathered around the entrance to the cellar, where he’d insisted on venturing in alone, poor little stupid beloved son of mine, I wasn’t even able to teach you the basic caution that every good policeman needs to have. And the dozens, the hundreds of hands reaching out to restrain Maione, to keep him from going in: Brigadie’, let it be, remember him the way he was, alive.
It seemed like just the other day, but it had been more than three years. The clear green eyes of Deputy Officer Ricciardi, whom he’d always avoided because he didn’t like his long silences, chatterbox that he was. Deputy Officer Ricciardi, the Jonah, the albatross, the jinx, as everyone said at police headquarters. But that day Ricciardi had come later, at the same time as Maione: Luca had brought his own bad luck. Ricciardi had gone down into the cellar, stayed a few minutes, and then emerged, taking Maione aside and saying: He loved you. He loved his big-belly papa, his papà panzone.
Even tonight, as he walked out the front entrance with a wave to the sentinel standing guard, Maione wondered how Ricciardi could have known that Luca, inside the four walls of their apartment and with that off-kilter, loopy laugh of his, always called him that, papà panzone, with irreverent affection. And why he’d believed him immediately, why he’d sensed that Luca had chosen Ricciardi to convey the farewell that he hadn’t had time to whisper to him with his last breath.
The snow-scented wind slapped at him, but Maione was still reliving the days after the murder in his head, when the only one at his side had been the tireless, unstoppable Ricciardi; their strange friendship, the affection that bound them together, cemented then during the long stakeouts, the interviews, the trail that had gone cold and then heated up again, finally leading them to the murderer. And to send him where he belonged: behind bars.
What Brigadier Maione hadn’t known at the time was that the worst was still to come, that it was beginning at that very moment, when his energy and his rage could no longer be channeled into his search for his son’s murderer; when he would find himself in an apartment submerged in a new silence, without hope, with a wife on the verge of madness, and he himself, with Luca’s five younger brothers and sisters, teetering on the brink of the abyss, staring wide-eyed into the void.
How many times had the slender thread that bound them together been on the verge of snapping. How many times had the ghost of their love been about to dissolve into the dark fog that surrounded his lovely wife, reduced to a phantom, sitting in an armchair and staring out the window at the sky.
Then, that spring, something had happened. The spark of almost forgotten feelings had rekindled a new and wonderful passion, and in the warmth of that revitalized love, their home had reawakened, like a flower buried in the snow. And now, for the first time in ages, Maione could look forward to the coming Christmas as a time of joy and good cheer, instead of as yet another exhumation of his grief and pain.
As he was remembering that he needed to order the fish for Christmas Eve—or else his supplier wouldn’t be able to set aside the finest cuts—his heart suddenly lurched.
At first he thought he must be mistaken; his eyes, squinting in the wind, must have mistaken the silhouette, a trick of the light from the wildly swinging streetlamp. But when the man waiting for him at the corner of Vicolo della Tofa, seeing him approach, discarded his cigarette butt and crushed it underfoot, Maione knew it was him.
Franco Massa and Raffaele Maione had been inseparable ever since they were boys. They tormented everyone in Piazzetta Concordia and the surrounding area with pranks and hijinks, but they were lovable and all the shopkeepers of the neighborhood were always happy to see the odd pair, one of them as skinny as a rail, with an enormous schnozzola in the middle of his gaunt face, the other a big strapping boy, always ready to burst out laughing, with a noise like a cartful of pots and pans crashing down a staircase. It was hard not to love those two, even though they never got tired of dreaming up mischief.
And inseparable they had remained. Long after they’d stopped running around barefoot, chasing after the Pazzariello or clinging precariously to the outside of the trolley as it rattled over the tracks, on their way out to the seaside, where they would dive off the rocks of Via Caracciolo. They were together as adolescents, waiting for the girls to come out of the Catholic school in Piazza Dante; and as young men, sharing the same ticket to the Salone Margherita, where the dancers hiked their skirts, one of them distracting the usher at the door while the other would crouch down and sneak in among the legs of all the well-to-do boys dressed in tailcoats.
Raffaele Maione, known as Orso, the Bear, for his size, and Franco Massa, known as Cicogna, the Stork, for his long, skinny legs and a nose that made him tip forward slightly as he walked. One of those friendships that know no bounds, that expand to fill an entire lifetime, with one imitating the other without realizing it, until no one can remember which is the original and which is the copy.
When Lucia came along, the blonde angel who would become the mother of Maione’s six children, Franco didn’t disappear, as too often happens. He just became Uncle Franco, and the children grew to love him as a second father. Most of all Luca, for whom Franco naturally acted as godfather. The Stork kept a photo from the day of Luca’s baptism on his bedside table, with him proudly and awkwardly holding that bundle in his arms, and Raffaele and Lucia, smiling and overcome with emotion, at his side.
He’d been a conscientious and caring godfather. He’d watched Luca closely, sternly monitoring his friendships and activities. Often the boy even asked his father to intercede with Uncle Franco, in order to obtain his permission to stay out late or skip school.
Both friends had chosen to wear the uniform, the Bear as a policeman and the Stork as a prison guard. It was only natural that Luca should make the same choice. Natural and tragic.
Luca’s death had been devastating for Raffaele, of course, but it had been every bit as painful for Franco. He had no family of his own, no special love in his life: his desire to be a father had been satisfi
ed by that loudmouthed handsome blond boy, with his eyes the color of the sea and that hee-hawing laugh like his father’s. Luca’s death had shattered something inside him; it had extinguished a flame that would never be reignited.
After the first few months, it became harder and harder for the two old friends to meet. After a moment of silence, Franco inevitably broke down in tears. He wept silently, without changing expression; big hot tears would streak down his face, as if from some sudden rain.
Little by little, they’d stopped seeing each other. Sometimes they’d meet by chance, exchanging a nod of the head from a distance, but it was a rare occurrence. These days Massa almost never left Poggioreale, where he’d become the head of the guards at the prison there, with special responsibility for security. When Maione thought of him, he felt that vague pain one feels when an important feeling is allowed to wither away through neglect.
And so, when he encountered him on his way home that night, happiness clashed with guilt in Maione’s heart, in a strange undertow of emotions. He was preparing for a joyful Christmas, but one without his son and without his best friend in the world.
Franco gave him a hug, full of the same love he’d always felt for him, and let the Bear wrap him in his arms, with Franco patting Maione’s broad back, just as they’d embraced when they were little. But then Franco pushed him away and looked him straight in the eye. God, how he’s aged, thought Maione. Franco looked at him for a long while, then he said:
“I have to talk to you, Raffae’. It’s important. I need you to give me half an hour.”
Maione was pleased and bewildered.
“Of course, Franco. When can we get together? Why don’t you come over to our place, Lucia and the children would be happy to see you. I wanted to call you for Christmas; would you come eat with us on Christmas Eve? Lucia is making clams, you know what a cook she is.”
Massa seemed to be thinking about something else.
By My Hand Page 9