By My Hand

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  The girl thought carefully, then shook her head.

  “No, Signore. Papa and Mamma are fine, grazie. Whenever Papa comes home, Mamma and I kiss him and we sit down at the dinner table straightaway; then he listens to the radio and reads the paper, while Mamma does needlepoint and I draw. Then we all go to bed.”

  Ricciardi went along.

  “Certainly, of course. Well, by any chance do you happen to remember whether anyone came to visit your parents? Someone unusual, someone you’d never seen before?”

  The little girl furrowed her brow, struggling to remember. Ricciardi was reminded of the image of Signora Costanza Garofalo, smiling with her throat cut, and he felt a twinge of sorrow for that mother who would never see her daughter grow up.

  “A while ago, though I couldn’t tell you just when, a gentleman and a lady dressed in black came to see us. It was when Papa was reading his paper, after we’d finished eating. I didn’t like them. They talked loudly, and Papa was talking loudly back to them; my aunt doesn’t like it when you talk loudly. Isn’t that right, Aunt Veronica?”

  Sister Veronica nodded, caressing her niece’s head. Ricciardi, who wondered in passing just how Sister Veronica supported her argument in favor of whispering with the voice that God had given her, decided that he should drill in on this new piece of information.

  “Do you remember anything about those two people? How they were dressed, or anything that caught your eye? Why didn’t you like them?”

  “The lady wore a black shawl over her head,” the girl said. “And the reason I didn’t like them was they smelled bad. They smelled like fish.”

  XXVII

  There are some people who are very different from what you might expect judging them based solely on their appearances. Slender, timid young ladies who, once they’re onstage, produce voices and aggressive demeanors befitting a lioness; corpulent gentlemen who spin and float as light as gossamer to the notes of waltzes and tangos; coarse, bad-mannered young men who, with a paintbrush in hand, are capable of creating the most delicate arabesques and the most refined landscapes.

  Maione, for instance, was a master at stakeouts.

  You’d never have thought it to look at him, big strapping man that he was, clumsy and loud, with his deep voice that reverberated indoors and his harsh, powerful laugh, metallic as an empty tin drum rolling down the stairs. And yet he had this talent, and he made constant and discreet use of it.

  Perhaps it was because he knew and understood the city; perhaps in any other city he would have been incapable of literally vanishing from sight, merging into the ever-changing backdrop of Naples, endlessly diverse and in perennial movement. But here he could do it, and how.

  He had his methods, of course. He showed up early, buzzed around the target location; he took in his surroundings, scouted nooks, vestibules, spots swathed in darkness and others that were bright or well lit. He ran his gaze over the walls, taking in their structure and texture. He’d sniff the air, identifying the lay of the wind, the directions of the drafts and breezes.

  He’d pick his target, the things he wanted to see, and he’d look for the best angle, the ideal viewpoint. He’d take in the essence of the place. It was as if he were determining a note and then matching the frequency so he could fade into it and vanish.

  It wasn’t something you could explain in words; it was something more on the order of an instinct, a little like having an ear for music, that which allows someone who can neither read nor write music to play a complicated melody on an instrument they’ve never even held in their hands before. He was a born prodigy, the brigadier was, and he’d further honed his gift with professional technique, along with an innate bent for close observation and years and years of experience.

  Thus he’d learned to tail a suspect for miles on end in the city, even in neighborhoods that were virtually deserted, without that suspect ever noticing or sensing a thing. Because he knew every dogleg and alley, and made use of shortcuts unknown to most, he could, on foot, tail even people in vehicles and never be left behind. Once, instead of chasing a robber fleeing aboard a horse-drawn carriage, he’d sensed from the man’s accent where he was headed and had simply shown up there and waited for him to arrive, without even breaking a sweat.

  But what he was best at was stakeouts. He could merge into the shadows of an atrium, the crowd in a café, the darkness of a movie house, becoming to all intents and purposes invisible; and he’d spend hours watching everything that happened in a house or an apartment, in a club or a bar, including the thoughts that swept over the face and through the heart of the person he was spying on.

  And that was why Maione had shown up very early that morning on Vico Santi Filippo e Giacomo, in the neighborhood of San Gregorio Armeno.

  He’d told Lucia that he had some important work to do; his wife was accustomed to Maione working the predawn hours when he was in the throes of an investigation, and he had already told her about the couple who had been murdered in Mergellina. Still, Lucia had caught a hint of a false note in his voice. It was nothing in particular—a slight hesitation, an unusual word—but it was something. Nothing that she couldn’t easily put out of her thoughts, like a bothersome fly, with all the things she had to do to get ready for Christmas with a family of five children. Soon enough, she’d stopped thinking about it entirely, limiting herself to preparing the best ersatz coffee she could whip up an hour earlier than usual, so that her husband could step out into the streets while it was still pitch-black out.

  There wasn’t a place in all of Naples that was more Christmassy than San Gregorio Armeno. It was the street of the figurari, those artisans whose work came close to full-fledged artistry, making the terra-cotta figurines and statuettes that were used in nativity scenes. They fit into every category imaginable, from those who took months to craft a single head and a pair of hands—which, once they had been placed on a wire and cotton batting body and dressed up advantageously with an outfit made by the city’s finest tailors, would complete the oldest manger scenes, to the point that the addition was indistinguishable from the original—to those who used molds to produce dozens of terra-cotta shepherds every day, all identical in shape, differing only in the hastily painted colors, sold for a penny apiece, to the delight of the city’s poorest children.

  Those artisans couldn’t know it—and in fact they never would—but the tradition of that street had roots that reached down deep into the mists of time. This was the place where, when the world was so much younger, terra-cotta statuettes were made in honor of Ceres, the goddess of plenty, for whom a celebrated temple had been built; and those statuettes were the souvenirs, treasured and beloved, of long pilgrimages, and they departed for every corner of the earth in the sacks of the faithful as they returned to their fields.

  More than a thousand years ago, a church had been built on top of that temple, followed by another. Naples had always been a sedimentary city, a city that laid one stratum on top of another, one for each era, all of them with the same spirit of place. The pre-Christmas industriousness of this street, in any case, was very convenient for Maione, with the steady stream of workers and suppliers coming and going, in the full hum of activity before the sun had even had a chance to rise, along with the occasional underhanded antiquarian waiting for the finest workshops to open in order to purchase beautifully made pieces, which he would then resell as genuine antiques in his exclusive shop back in Chiaia. The more people there were moving around, the better the chances of passing unobserved.

  The street numbers went past: 12, 16, 20. He reached number 22 just as the heavy wooden door was swinging open to let someone out of the building.

  Maione pulled back into the shadows, quickly and soundlessly. The wall of the building across the way was providentially furnished with a nook, which created a dark corner from which he could watch the street without being seen.

  The person who emerged from the st
reet door was a young man, little more than an overgrown boy. A few stray locks of fair hair peeked out from under the cap pressed down on his head, the undersized overcoat barely covered his legs. The young man took a few steps, then stopped and looked up: a dark-haired young woman looked out from a small balcony on the second floor; she was wrapped in a blanket and had something in her arms. The young man waved, and the young woman nodded back. A small arm darted out of the bundle, and a voice said:

  “Papà, papà!”

  The mother, smiling, carefully tucked the baby under the warm blanket, as the young man in the street below laughed and blew a kiss into the air.

  That hand, thought Maione, murdered my son.

  Rosa Vaglio was looking at her left hand. It was shaking.

  She’d noticed it a while ago, but not that long, to tell the truth: a matter of months. And as soon as she had, she’d remembered that her father had suffered from the same malady. She’d gone home to see her birth family, after she’d been in service with the baron and baroness of Malomonte for a few years; she’d asked for a little time off, and it had taken a day to walk to the village where she’d been born. The baroness wanted the foreman to take her in his cart, but she’d said no. She was young, back then. She felt like she could walk to the far corners of the earth. Now she got tired walking to the fruit and vegetable stands in the Piazza di Capodimonte.

  She found her parents very different from the way she remembered them; the damage inflicted by the passage of time clearly outweighed the advantages afforded by the money she sent them, month after month. Out of her eleven siblings, only three were left—the rest had gone off in search of greener pastures, or were dead.

  Her father had that tremor in his hand, as if he were perennially gesturing to say: mamma mia, how astounding. In his eyes, however, she read confusion, like a mute cry for help.

  When she left she had felt a flood of relief. She promised to come back soon, but she’d never gone back at all. She heard that her father had died a few years later.

  And now she sat looking at the tremor in her own hand: slight, barely visible. It didn’t resemble her father’s yet, at least not the way she remembered it; but it was there, and it was getting worse, little by little, like a spreading weed.

  It was a signal, like so many others: her backaches, the struggle involved in sitting down and standing up, the need for her spectacles whenever she needed to do fine handiwork.

  I’ve become an old woman, she told herself. A drab, useless old woman. My body’s falling apart, and I can no longer do the things I used to be able to.

  But her memory still worked, at least; and her thoughts were clear, crystal clear.

  One thought was clearer than all the others: her young master needed to settle down and start a family. She couldn’t stand the idea of leaving him alone, a victim of his own ghosts, his incomprehensible sadness, that abyss of solitude from which he seemed unwilling to emerge. Rosa knew that the right woman would bring a smile to that face. She could feel it. All it would take was the warmth of a home, the responsibilities of a family, and Luigi Alfredo would regain control of his life, his standing in society, and the administration of his property: all things he’d always turned his back on.

  She’d identified the right woman, too, although she had the shortcoming of being even more shy and prickly than he was. Certainly she couldn’t give that simpering out-of-towner with her chauffeur a clear shot at him.

  Rosa took one hand in the other and held it still. Not yet, she thought. I’ve still got things to do. I have to give fate a push; if something isn’t going to happen of its own accord, then I’m going to have to make it happen myself.

  By my hand.

  XXVIII

  Christmas is warm.

  From the windows of the apartments overlooking Via Toledo and Via Chiaia come candlelight and the sound of laughter. If you look inside those windows, you see cheerful faces, cheeks bright-red with wine and spumante, even though the actual holiday is still a few days away. There is a general sense of expectation, a swell of suspense. A holiday is coming, and everyone is going to be happy.

  Christmas is cold.

  The wind howls through the streets of the new quarters, where the poor in their hovels huddle together for comfort and warmth. If you listen carefully, you can just make out the sound of a child crying, but the cries grow ever fainter as the cold and the hunger grow stronger. Who can say which of them will make it through the winter. Who can say which of them will still be breathing, come January.

  Christmas is warm.

  Mothers smile as they tousle their children’s hair, deciding whether to dress them in sailors’ costumes like they did last year, or whether they’re big enough now to be in the family photograph with everyone else on Christmas Eve, dressed in their first jacket and tie, sober-faced, hair neatly parted.

  Christmas is cold.

  The man comes home with a chunk of bread, the only food he’s been able to find after a day spent looking for work at construction sites. He stole it from a delivery cart, then he ran himself breathless for an hour. There are six mouths to feed, waiting for him at home, and he’s hungry, too. He stops, lowers himself to the ground, and eats a piece of it. He weeps in the wind.

  Christmas is warm.

  Grandpa turns eighty years old, right on Christmas Day. Sitting in front of the ceramic stove, sipping his after-dinner brandy, while his children listen to dance music on the radio and wonder what they can get him, since he already has everything he needs, with all the money he’s earned in his career as a respected physician. So they laugh, and decide to buy him a new smoking jacket, just like they did last year. But Grandpa will die, unexpectedly, on December 23, and his smoking jacket will never be taken out of the box.

  Christmas is cold.

  Under the scaffolding at a construction site down near the waterfront, the old beggar woman draws labored breaths; she’s dead to the world. Bronchitis, the cold, and hunger have won out in the end. She dreams she’s singing a lullaby. She had sixteen children and they took them away from her, one by one. She doesn’t even know if they’re alive or dead; she only remembers that she sang a lullaby, once, to one of her children, or to someone else’s child. She had sixteen children, and now she’s dying alone under the scaffolding at a construction yard. Tomorrow they’ll toss her, with her tattered rags, into a ditch in potter’s field, full of others like her.

  Christmas, warm or cold, brings a shiver.

  Ricciardi was waiting for Maione, who was late: an unusual thing for him, especially given their unspoken understanding that when they were on a case, they always met very early in the commissario’s office to bring each other up-to-date on the general situation and to plan out their day. Still, Ricciardi wasn’t overly concerned; Maione had finally regained his emotional equilibrium, and it couldn’t have been easy to drag himself away from his warm, welcoming home and go out into the cold and the dark.

  Ricciardi was very fond of the brigadier, and Maione’s wellbeing mattered deeply to him. In the past three years, the whole time they’d been working together, Riccardi had learned to read Maione’s thoughts and emotions. The brigadier was a fair, strong, stubborn man; he wasn’t afraid to work hard; and he was still moved at the sight of pain, grief, and suffering, and that gift of empathy was a gift that Ricciardi valued above any other.

  He could remember all too clearly the afternoon that the two men had first become fast friends: it was the day Maione’s son Luca was murdered.

  He’d seen the young man a few times, a recruit who stood out for his energy and his desire to prove himself: fair-haired, blue-eyed, physically imposing. As he’d later see at the funeral, the boy resembled his mother closely.

  Ricciardi had responded to the emergency call, getting there even before Maione, who was on duty elsewhere. He’d walked down alone into the cellar where the body had been found.
He saw the young man standing there, next to the corpse curled up on the ground. He was leaning against the wall as if trying to hide from sight, even though Ricciardi was the only one who could still see him. A reddish foam oozed from the mouth, the bubbles of his last breath; the knife plunged deep into his back had punctured his lung.

  I love you, you big-bellied old man. I love you.

  That’s all Luca’s image was saying. Ricciardi understood immediately whom the specter was talking about. When Maione got there, he took him aside and, violating for the first and only time in his life a principle to which he’d always adhered, he told him. He told him the dead boy’s words.

  The brigadier never asked him how he’d known them, not then, not ever. But he became Ricciardi’s human shadow.

  The Deed, as Ricciardi called his curse to perceive the last sorrow and pain of the dead, almost never helped him to uncover the way that death took place. It was just an emotion, a simple manifestation of the dying person’s suffering upon being removed from this life: the final separation. Like a scream, or a sigh, or a regret. Or all these things together.

  Maione rushed breathless into the office.

  “Forgive me, Commissa’. I’m a little late this morning.”

  “No problem at all, I just got in myself. Sit down, and let’s go over everything we did yesterday.”

  They exchanged the information they’d gathered on their working Sunday. Ricciardi recounted everything he’d learned from the doctor and Don Pierino concerning the autopsies and the symbolism of the manger scene, as well as what he’d found out from his talk with the Garofalos’ daughter.

  Maione listened attentively, with his characteristic manner of concentration, his eyes half closed as if he were on the verge of nodding off. Then he told Ricciardi everything that he’d learned from Bambinella.

  “So everything would seem to fit together, Commissa’. The visitors that smelled of fish, the broken Saint Joseph that represents the father who works to provide for his family, the two people who stabbed Garofalo.”