Ricciardi looked pensively out the window at the piazza that was slowly beginning to fill up with people. The pane of glass, fogged over from the temperature differential between interior and exterior, shook with every gust of wind.
“You said it: everything would seem to fit together. That doesn’t mean it’s all true, though. First of all, we’ve got to figure out what this Lomunno, the militiaman who Garofalo got fired, is up to. And the fact that a couple who smelled of fish went and had an argument with Garofalo doesn’t mean that they went back later and killed him and his wife.”
Maione nodded.
“Ah, of course. All these hypotheses need to be checked out, as always. But Commissa’—and this is a solid fact—now there are at least two suspects: Lomunno and the fisherman, Aristide Boccia; and there could be others still, if the victim was extorting more than one fisherman. We can certainly say that our dearly departed pillar of honesty wasn’t so honest after all.”
Ricciardi went on looking out the window.
“The hardest thing, Raffae’, is understanding such strong emotions. What drives a person, or more than one person—people who might have children, family, friends, a difficult, demanding job—to think: now I’m going to get a good sharp knife, go to Garofalo’s apartment, and kill him, and his wife, too.”
Maione said nothing, his eyes downcast. Ricciardi went on.
“It takes tremendous anger, I believe. Or a state of extreme desperation. In any case, pain, grief, sorrow. To decide to murder someone in cold blood, without the burst of madness that comes from an argument or a fight, you must be certain that you have no alternative.”
Maione looked up.
“That’s exactly right, Commissa’. It’s one thing to kill someone who’s standing right in front of you, and quite another to make the decision and then go kill him. You’d have to be truly desperate, without any alternative.”
From the window came a prolonged blast of car horns: something was blocking traffic. Ricciardi sighed and stood up.
“Let’s go look this desperation in the face and see what we see.”
XXIX
They’ll come, I know that they’ll come. So what?
I’ve been waiting for them for years, now that I think about it. Ever since that day.
I should have done it then. I should have done it so that the sun would never set on my shame, the sun of that same day. I should have extinguished that false voice, cut the throat that produced all that wickedness.
They’ll come, and they’ll ask me why. And I’ll tell them that there’s no difference between doing something and dreaming of doing it.
And if there’s no difference, then I’ve done that same thing a thousand times. A thousand times I’ve spilled that blood, a thousand times I’ve seen it spurt from the hundred wounds, a thousand times I’ve driven the knife in deep.
They’ll come, and they’ll want to know why. I’ll tell them that my mind has never moved from there, from where I saw my life rush headlong into the void. And that I died, too, when my angel took flight.
They’ll come, and I’ll have to hide the thousands of times that I’ve dreamed of it happening.
By my hand.
XXX
Enrica blinked as she stepped out through the street door. The wind was gusting cold and strong.
Her eyeglasses had fogged over; she had to take them off to wipe the lenses. When she put them back on, emerging from the blurry outlines of her nearsighted world, she found herself face-to-face with Rosa, who held her hat clapped to her head with her right hand while with her left hand she gripped a half-empty shopping bag.
The old woman’s expression was determined: lips compressed, eyes narrowed, jaw jutting. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Signori’, would you be so good as to come with me to buy a few things for Christmas dinner? I’m an old woman, I need a little help.”
The girl didn’t even have the time to look around before a powerful arm hooked itself through hers and she was dragged out into the street.
Ricciardi and Maione reached the alley behind San Giovanni a Mare which corresponded to the address they’d been given at the barracks. Maione reread the little scrap of paper for what seemed like the thousandth time.
“This is it, Commissa’. It seems strange to me, but this is definitely it.”
In more ways than one, the place was unsettling. Once they turned the corner, the two policeman left the world of Christmas and entered a no-man’s-land of squalor and misery.
The symbols of the holiday, even the cheapest and most miserable, had all vanished. Before Ricciardi and Maione stretched a dirt road lined by hovels tacked together with scraps of wood and rusted sheet metal. A few ragged children were playing, sitting on the ground in the muddy rivulets fed by the lack of a sewer system. The only sound, aside from the wind, came from a shutter banging against a window jamb at regular intervals.
They went up to the oldest child in the group.
“Guaglio’, do you happen to know where a certain Lomunno lives around here?”
The boy stood up, walked a short distance, and pointed to the door of one of the shacks. He stood there, motionless, one arm raised like a mannequin.
Maione knocked on the door. After a few moments, a man opened it. With a carving knife in one hand.
The brigadier instinctively took a step back, one hand jumping to his holster. Ricciardi grabbed his arm.
“Easy there, take it easy. He had no way of knowing who was at the door. You there, are you Antonio Lomunno?”
The man looked at them both, then he looked down at the knife he was holding in his hand, as if he’d never seen it before.
“Yes, that’s me. Excuse me, I was doing some work at home. You are . . .”
Maione had recovered his self-control, but he kept looking down at the blade.
“Brigadier Maione and Commissario Ricciardi, from the mobile squad. We have a few questions we need to ask you. May we come in?”
Rosa stared back at Enrica with a look of resolve from the other side of the small round table in the café near home, where she’d steered her, practically by main force.
After a long, awkward silence, during which the girl had sat looking down at her hands folded in her lap, the tata said:
“Well, Signori’: if you don’t mind my asking, what’s happened?”
Enrica blinked her eyes, looking up at the woman.
“What do you mean, Signora? Nothing’s happened. I . . .”
Rosa had no intention of being put off that easily.
“Excuse me, but something’s happened, and I know it. The last time you came to my home, we spoke, and it seemed to me that you were interested in my young master; there was certainly interest on his part. Then the accident happened. You even came to the hospital, and I remember the fear, the terror in your eyes. And then, when we found out that he was going to be all right, thanks be to God Almighty, instead of coming to see him, you vanished.”
Enrica tried to mount a halfhearted defense.
“No, it’s not so much that I vanished; it’s more that I’ve just had so many things to do, Christmas is coming, my little nephew . . .”
Rosa swept away these excuses with an impatient wave of her hand.
“Signori’, please, don’t come tell this nonsense to me. You may be able to pull the wool over a man’s eyes, but not another woman’s. You even keep your shutters closed at night; that poor man looks out the window and he’s denied even the pleasure of a nod in his direction. He’s suffering, and I have to watch him suffer. So now I want to know: if you’ve simply gotten tired of him, if you’re no longer interested, just tell me, and we’ll be friends like before.”
The young woman leapt up as if spring-loaded.
“What on earth are you saying? How could you even think such a thin
g? Do you take me for one of those fickle women who change direction with the wind, like a weather vane?”
Rosa leaned back in her chair, finally satisfied.
“No, I don’t think you are. That’s why I was so baffled. All right, then: tell me what really happened.”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know why you’re here.”
The interior of the hovel mirrored the exterior and spoke to a terrible poverty. A little girl who might have been a little more than ten years old greeted them with a curtsy, and then went back to stirring a pot that was boiling over the fire. A heavy stench of cauliflower left no doubt as to what she was cooking.
Seated on the floor next to the table was a smaller child, a boy, bundled up in a sweater several sizes too large for him. The crystallized mucus on his upper lip told a heartbreaking tale of neglect.
The man had sat down at the table, without inviting the two policemen to take a seat, and so they remained standing. Lomunno had gone back to carving a piece of wood, from which he was extracting with a certain expertise what seemed to be a horse. Behind him, on a rough-hewn table, a handmade manger scene was taking form; it included several shepherds of superior quality. The man followed the commissario’s gaze.
“The manger scene. I don’t know why the creditors haven’t laid their damned mitts on the shepherds in the manger scene. A few of them were lost, and I’m recarving them, making them myself, as you can see. This is the horse of Melchior, one of the three kings. The manger scene is what Christmas is all about, if you have children. You can have Christmas without a mother, but not without the manger scene.”
He laughed a grim laugh, and the smell of soured wine on his breath reached all the way to Maione. The brigadier noticed that the little girl turned her eyes on her father, without the slightest expression.
“If you know why we’re here, Lomunno, then tell us what we want to know,” Ricciardi said.
The man gave Ricciardi a long stare. Then he looked down at the wooden horse that was taking shape under his knife blade.
“One day, I went into the office; I was highly regarded, esteemed. A party faithful, among the first to enlist. I was doing work that I loved, everyone respected me; or rather, I should say, that’s how I thought things were. And in my office I found my boss, with two policemen and a man in civilian clothes. The man steps forward and says to me, ‘You’re a bribe-taking crook.’ Then he puts his hand in my jacket and takes my money. The money I’d saved over a lifetime, little by little, squirreling away every raise, every bonus, and hiding it all under the mattress so that someday I’d be able to give my wife what she’d always dreamed of: a home of our own.”
Outside they heard a seagull shriek, flying low, just over the shack.
“There was just one person I’d told this small, useless secret. Just one person who knew that that day I’d be going to get the money from my uncle and aunt, who I’d been giving my savings to every so often for safekeeping, and who were leaving for America. I tried to explain, but they wouldn’t even let me talk. Coffee, they said. Coffee and cigarettes. You took money in exchange for letting smugglers bring in contraband merchandise. We have witnesses.”
“What about these witnesses?” Ricciardi asked. “Were you allowed to confront them yourself?”
Lomunno tossed his head back and laughed a doleful laugh. The daughter shot her father another expressionless glance, then went back to stirring the pot.
“Then you don’t know how it works, do you? The militia, the political police, the secret police—they don’t hold trials; they promise immunity to those who’ll testify, and then it’s so long, nice knowing you. Lomunno goes to prison, the traitor gets a promotion. One loses, the other wins. Until the next round; but then there is no next round.”
Ricciardi had never taken his eyes off him. The man’s eyes glittered in the partial darkness. The stench of cauliflower and filth was intolerable.
“Really? It seems to me that there was a next round, and that Garofalo, in the present moment, is worse off than you.”
Lomunno drove the knife violently into the tabletop, with a dull thunk. Maione took a step forward, his hand on the butt of his pistol. The little girl didn’t stop stirring.
“You think so? You really think so, Commissa’? Just take a look around you; what do you see? A poor man, a useless man, dishonored, forced to live off the charity of his onetime friends, friends who are ashamed that they didn’t rise to his defense when he needed defending. Two children who’ve grown old before their time, passed from one neighbor to the next until their father was released from prison, because their mother one fine day decided that she’d rather be dead than wait any longer. And you really think you can say who’s better off and who’s worse off?”
Ricciardi’s tone of voice remained unchanged.
“A little girl has lost her parents. An innocent woman was murdered in her home, and a man—innocent or not—was butchered in his bed. We’re the police, and it’s our job to find out who did it. So let’s return to the reason we’re here: Did you do it?”
Silence fell. The girl stopped stirring, picked up her little brother, and hurried outside. Lomunno put his hands over his face and stayed that way. After a few long moments, he lowered them and replied:
“Sure, I did it. A hundred times a day, in my prison cell, in the most atrocious ways imaginable; but it was only him, never his wife, never his daughter, whom I’d seen as a baby and who had nothing to do with any of it. Then I did it a hundred times more, when I heard that my wife had killed herself, and I still had six months to serve and I had no idea what would become of my children. And then another hundred times when I was forced to bring them here to live in this shack, sleeping practically on top of them to ward off bronchitis, staying up all night to protect them from the rats. Sure, I did it. But if you want to know whether I did it outside of my mind, in reality, then the answer is no, I didn’t. If my wife were still alive, if I had someone to leave the children to, maybe I’d have climbed those stairs and I’d have used this very knife. But things being the way they are, I might as well have killed them first, and then gone off to Mergellina.”
The seagulls shrieked again. Maione shook himself back into the present.
“Excuse me, Lomunno, I have a question: How do you make a living now?”
“Day by day, Brigadie’. I don’t have any skills, I’ve only ever worked as an official at the port, and after that, as a militiaman. Like I told you, I get a little help from my old comrades, each of them concealing what they do from the others. They come here at night, in civilian clothing, they look around furtively when they get here and when they leave. They’re afraid, and I can hardly blame them; it wouldn’t take much for them to be arrested as accomplices. In the past few days I’ve also started reviewing some ledgers for certain offices at the port: working under someone else’s name, of course. And I’ve earned a little money, and for once I’ve decided not to drink it away at the tavern, but to use it to give my children a little taste of the Christmases they once had.”
“Lomu’, this is something we have to ask you: Where were you on the morning of the eighteenth, from seven in the morning until one in the afternoon?”
The man looked up at Maione.
“Out looking for work, Brigadie’. Searching desperately for work, pounding the sidewalks of this city. In the morning, I was down at the port, and I got a few doors slammed in my face, a few others closed more politely, and a few more left open just a crack. I can give you a few addresses, but each of them would only tell you what I was doing for five minutes: nothing that wouldn’t have allowed me, in theory—I’ll tell you so you don’t have to tell me—plenty of time to go murder Garofalo and his wife. I used to be a cop myself, in a certain sense. I know how you have to think.”
Then he took a step forward and laid his hand on Maione’s arm.
“Brigadie’
, listen to me: it wasn’t me. I’d have been happy to do it, and maybe I even should have. I’m sorry about the wife and the daughter, but the only thing I’m sorry about when it comes to that bastard is that when he died, it wasn’t by my hand. If you have children, though, revenge comes at a price: a very great price. I couldn’t possibly afford it.”
XXXI
When she finally found herself recounting the promise that she’d made to the Madonna of Pompeii, Enrica assumed that she was putting an end to any worth she may have had in Rosa’s eyes. A woman of her age, the girl thought, couldn’t help but consider a sacred promise like hers to be final and unbreakable. But once again, Rosa surprised her.
“As far as I’m concerned, that promise is invalid,” she decreed.
“What do you mean, it’s invalid?”
Rosa counted the reasons off on her fingers.
“First of all, you had no idea what the young master’s medical condition really was, and in fact you even said, ‘If you save him, I’ll never see him again.’ But what was the Madonna supposed to have saved him from, if all he had was a bump on his head? Second, a vow to the Virgin Mary has to be made in a certain way, not the way you made yours, sitting in a chair in a hospital waiting room. You have to go to church, kneel down in front of a sacred painting, and you didn’t do that. Third, a person can only renounce something they possess, not something that belongs to someone else. And with this vow, you’ve deprived him of something very important, too, and he never made any promises.”
Enrica shook her head, again and again.
“But I did, I know that I made that promise. And I can hardly go back on a promise I made to the Madonna. And then . . . then there’s that lady, the pretty one from out of town. I’ve already seen her with him, more than once even, enough times that I guessed that they were . . . that they were seeing each other, practically engaged, in other words. If he didn’t like her, he’d tell her to leave him alone, wouldn’t he? I just don’t know what to do . . .”
By My Hand Page 16