Now, years later, and with Maione dressed in his uniform, even if his son’s killer saw him, he’d be unlikely to recognize him. The brigadier just needed to find out where the young man worked. He assumed that it couldn’t be very far from the apartment he’d chosen, but of course he could be wrong about that; maybe Biagio worked at the Bagnoli steel mill, or at some construction site in Vomero, and that would require further investigation, and possibly another call on Bambinella.
Just as he was mulling over these thoughts, he spotted him. Hunched over a countertop, in the arched entrance of one of the largest figurari shops, the young man was intently shaping a wooden face with a palette knife. Maione noticed him because, on a street that seemed like a rushing river of people hurrying to and fro, there was a knot of people standing around him, raptly watching him work.
Maione stopped, hanging back at the rear of the crowd: he was tall enough to peer over the heads of the others. The boy was working with his head low, as if he were alone in the middle of the desert, blithely unaware of the commotion. He was putting the finishing touches on a face, what the figurari called a testina, a little head. It was an old woman, her hair pulled up in a bun, her cheeks hollow, her eyes wide open and slightly bulging.
The young man was really good; his sharp gestures gradually brought out a human expression, a look of wonder and surprise. On the counter lay two hands with curved, clawing fingers, reaching out as if trying to grab something. The hands had yet to be painted, but they already conveyed the impression of something fully alive. In the end, head and hands would be given a wire and cotton-wad body, in the old style, dressed in silk and lace.
He noticed that the young man, the tip of his tongue sticking out and his shoulders hunched, was putting the final touches on the testina with his left hand. With a sharp pang he remembered that the report on Luca’s murder had identified a single mortal wound, under the left shoulder blade. It was a wound inflicted by a left-handed man, and the brother who was sentenced for the crime was right-handed. No one had given the matter any thought. After all, they had a confession; why dig any deeper? Maione himself hadn’t thought twice about it, at the time.
The thought roused him from his state of wonder at seeing a woman’s likeness emerge from a piece of wood, and brusquely reminded him of what he was doing there. He took a few steps back, picked a terra-cotta cow up off the counter, and went over to the proprietor of the shop who was standing, with a satisfied look on his face, behind the cash register.
“Hello. You’re drawing a nice crowd today, eh?”
The man looked at the uniform with some mistrust, but smiled.
“Yes, Brigadie’, at least the week before Christmas a few people come by; but for the most part, they’re just looking, fine things cost money, they like to look but then they go and buy the cheaper shepherds.”
Maione feigned sympathy.
“Certainly, there’s not much money changing hands these days. People would rather buy groceries, no?”
The proprietor launched into a defense of his profession.
“Yes, and I understand that. But what’s Christmas without a nativity scene? We survive, and that’s fine; but it’s a tradition in this city that every home, no matter how poor, should have at least a Holy Family. Of course, the shops that sell cheap items are doing better, with those clumps of terra-cotta colored in haste and hurry. But we, we make works of art.”
Maione led the conversation where he needed it to go.
“Eh, I’ve seen that you have wonderful things. That young man, down there, for instance, who’s working on the old woman: he seems truly talented.”
The proprietor stepped around the cash register and stuck his head out, observing with satisfaction that the crowd around the young man had only grown.
“Yes, he’s good. I’ve been doing this work for forty years, and before me my father did it, and I apprenticed with him; but I’ve never seen anyone so quick to learn. He does more things, and he does them better, than that idiot son of mine who’s been here for fifteen years and still hasn’t laid hands on a piece of wood.”
Maione faked an interest just this side of good manners.
“Ah, and how long has the boy been working for you?”
“Biagio? It must be three and a half years now; this is the fourth Christmas. I remember when he first turned up here, he spent a whole day loitering in the street outside; he kept looking in but never came inside. At a certain point I called to him and said, ‘Guaglio’, what are you looking for?’ ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I was just wondering if you needed someone to sweep the shop and mop up.’ I said, ‘All right, but just during the holidays.’ Then one of the carvers got hurt in a brawl, he broke his fingers, and the boy sat in for him. And he hasn’t left that seat since. He’s a wizard with a knife.”
Maione felt another stab of pain at those words. It’s not an act of wizardry to drive a knife into the back of a poor unsuspecting young man, all the way to the hilt. That’s not magic.
“So he’s a help, and things are going well. And the boy seems to be honest, eh?”
It wasn’t an uncommon question for a policeman to ask; the proprietor didn’t seem suspicious.
“Absolutely, Brigadie’, as good as gold. He’s married, and he has two little children. After he’d been working here for a couple of months, he found an apartment right in the next vicolo. His wife, if you see her, is even better than him: a fine girl, a bravissima guagliona. She does some cleaning in the apartments around here, she leaves her children with a little old woman who looks after them, and she works hard. Everyone loves her here in the neighborhood. Right now she’s doing some work for my wife, across the way. Every so often she looks out the window to watch her husband work. There she is, you see her?”
Following the man’s gaze, Maione saw a dark-haired girl leaning out of the third-floor window of the building across the street, the same girl he’d seen that morning. It was a fleeting apparition, a smile and a blown kiss, to which the boy replied with a nod of the head, without a break in his work.
The proprietor looked Maione in the eye.
“It does your heart good, to see two young people so in love and working so hard. Certainly it must seem strange to you, Brigadie’, accustomed as you are to seeing the worst class of people from morning to night, no?”
Maione shrugged his shoulders.
“I couldn’t say. Sometimes people aren’t what they seem. Not as good, and not as bad. I’m running late, I really have to go now. What do I owe you for the cow?”
Hustling back up the street in a hurry to get back to police headquarters, Maione felt a strong wind rushing through his head. A wife, two small children: it was the life that Luca could have had. There was that girl he liked, what was her name? That’s right, Marianna. The daughter of Rosario, the mechanic who repaired bicycles.
His little brothers used to make fun of him, Luca has a girlfriend, Luca has a girlfriend, and he’d laugh and pretend to chase after them. By now, he might well have been married, I might be a grandfather. The grandfather of a little girl and a little boy. And this one, who’s now showing off his bravura as a wood carver, would be a criminal, following after his no-good brother. He might already have met his unhappy end, killed by some other criminal on a street corner somewhere.
The voice of Franco Massa, Luca’s godfather who had pretended to be a priest, echoed in his ears: we have to track down this Biagio and kill him like the dog he is, the same way he did to Luca. Kill him like a dog. Like a dog. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll do it myself.
In the midst of the sounds of the zampognari and the festive crowd preparing for the coming Christmas, Raffaele Maione was thinking about death.
XXXV
Listening to the sounds of the zampognari rising from the street below, Lucia Maione was thinking about life.
And she was thinking that life is a
strange thing, that no one had ever understood it, neither philosophers nor songwriters, much less her, ignorant as she was, who only knew how to be a mother and a wife.
She thought back on her own life, as it had been until just a few months ago. If you could call it a life. She just lay sprawled on her bed, almost all day long and most of the night, never really sleeping, in a state of waking sleep or sleepy wakefulness, a trance populated with images, broken thoughts, memories. If you take a mother’s son from her without warning, if she still has his shirts to iron, if she can still hear his laughter echoing in her ears, then it’s impossible to say what will become of her.
She went on working busily in the kitchen. Her children were playing in the next room. These are my children too, she’d thought. They have a right to a mamma.
Still, that thought hadn’t been sufficient for almost three years. Nor had her home, or her husband, seemed like sufficient reason to start living again. The only thing that she wanted to do was to stare out at the sliver of sky she could see from her bed, waiting for a blond angel to come down and take her away with him.
Then one day, without warning, she’d gotten up. There was something in the spring air, a new perfume, or an unfamiliar smell. And she’d leaned out the window and looked down. She’d seen the piazzetta, the vicoli running uphill and down. She’d seen life, flowing along as always, and she’d realized she missed it.
And just in the nick of time, she thought to herself, as she lined up her ingredients on the kitchen table. She’d come that close to losing her husband, and the love of her children. She’d run the risk of being left alone in an inferno of endless grief. And she’d realized that her handsome son, that fair-haired boy, his hair the same color as hers, who used to come home and lift her in his arms, spinning her around till she was breathless, who called her “my girlfriend,” would never have wanted to see her in this pitiable state. So she’d brushed her hair and changed her clothing. And she’d tested out a hesitant smile in the mirror of the vanity table in their bedroom.
Since then she’d revived all the family traditions, one by one. And now that Christmas was once again drawing near, she was expected to lay the finest dinner table in the whole quarter, which meant that her husband and her children were the envy of all their friends.
Hands on her hips, her apron damp, she reviewed everything she’d laid out on the table, reciting the names of the items under her breath as if uttering a prayer: rinsed broccoli, with their broad dark-green leaves; broccoletti, with their long narrow leaves; chicory; cabbage; and torzella, a local curly-leafed cabbage. All the vegetables were present and accounted for.
It’s easy to say minestra maritata. Married soup. And yet, for all its simplicity, it was one of the most challenging dishes of the whole year; but without minestra maritata, what kind of Christmas would it be?
Then after the vegetables came the meats: a prosciutto bone, pork rinds, salami, pork ribs, pezzentella sausage, fresh pork. To an inexpert eye, all these were scraps, the kinds of odds and ends one would feed to the family dog, but in fact they were the secret of a perfect soup. And, naturally, lard, fresh sausages to be crumbled into the mix, and dried caciocavallo cheese, a crucial ingredient. Then her own signature touch, a spicy red chili pepper and a glass of red wine.
She smiled as she thought of Raffaele, who loved her minestra maritata in particular. But her smile dimmed.
He’d been odd lately. There was a bass note, just barely detectable, in his expression, as hard as he might try to conceal it: a sadness or perhaps a hint of melancholy. Perhaps the impending holiday, or perhaps the thought of Luca, which kept her constant company, had snuck up unannounced on her husband, with the sound of the zampogne and the memory of Luca as a child, when he asked for gifts that were as expensive and unattainable as the moon.
Still, there was something that, as far as Lucia was concerned, just didn’t add up: that dark shade in Raffaele’s eyes had come on far too suddenly. It had already been there when he’d come home Saturday night.
The new investigation? His compassion for that little girl, suddenly orphaned in that horrible manner, which he’d told her all about? Perhaps. But it still didn’t add up.
As she diced the lard on the cutting board, she thought back to the previous spring, when she’d suspected that Raffaele might be interested in another woman. This had been a wake-up call, the push she needed in order to regain her will and desire to reassume her place in her household. She’d never let anyone cast a shadow over her life again.
Because life is important. If you lose it and you regain it, to lose it again is a pity, but also a sin: a mortal sin.
She focused on Raffaele, singing as she diced the lard into neat, compact cubes.
Angelina took little Vincenzino’s temperature, placing her lips on his forehead. He was burning up. Again.
The sea, crashing just a stone’s throw from their home, went on incessantly roaring into the wind, but there was a different smell in the air: the old people had told her that the north wind was going to subside in the next few hours, and the cold would continue to rule alone.
That wasn’t good news for Vincenzino. His lungs made a whistling sound at night with every breath, and Angelina listened to it as if it were a death chant. She couldn’t sleep anymore.
The doctor had told her what medicines she needed to get, but if he’d asked for gold, myrrh, and frankincense—the gifts carried by the wooden silhouettes with the images of the Three Kings glued onto them—it would have amounted to the same thing.
Medicine is for the rich. Doctors are for the rich. Or else for thieves, like the centurion who had ruined her husband.
She thought about their large, luminous apartment. How warm it was in there, as if the winter were showing respect for those walls, as if the cold were afraid to come inside. All those lights, the glistening silver, the gleaming floors, the soft carpets like sand at the beach in summertime, when you walk on it barefoot and it feels like stepping onto a cloud.
And she thought about Garofalo’s wife, her courteous, sarcastic, false smile. Hat and gloves? she’d asked. She’d asked them, people who’d never worn gloves in their lives; she’d asked her, who had the same black shawl her mother had worn covering her head; she’d asked Aristide, who was wearing a cap that smelled of salt water and of pain, of a thousand nights spent out on his boat praying for fish.
Suddenly, as she sat thinking about the pair of them, as if their black souls were somehow able to pull strings from down in hell like puppeteers, Alfonso, her eldest son, came in. Mammà, he said, excitedly and upset, Mammà, they’re here. They’re here in the piazzetta, asking about us.
Angelina thought about her husband, and about the contemptible dark sea that every night did its best to gobble him down, but which still gave them all enough—just enough!—to eat. She thought about Vincenzino and the way his lungs whistled, and how you could even hear it in the daytime now, and how his forehead was burning up. She thought about her mother and her father, who had taught her to be forthright and honest. She thought about groceries, medicine, carpets, and silver.
For a long moment she thought about doing nothing: about not telling anyone their name, not going out, not opening the door. About pretending that they were all already dead, as they certainly would be if they didn’t do something to remedy their horrible situation. She thought about it for a moment.
Then she sighed and stood up. She took her shawl and wrapped it around herself and over her head. She glanced at herself in the mirror on the wall, perhaps the one luxury they had in the twenty by twenty foot room that was her home, and she was shocked at the sight of the old ashen-faced woman she saw reflected there. She ran her eyes over the cold fireplace, the brazier that she kept dangerously close to Vincenzino’s bed, in the hopes of saving him from the death whose face was drawing ever closer to his, and the sad little manger scene that Aristide had carve
d and decorated with dried seaweed, so that even his children would have a little bit of Christmas.
She looked closely, but she saw no hope.
Then she walked out into the wind, to meet the policemen.
XXXVI
The road to the borgo from police headquarters wasn’t particularly long, but it offered a panoramic view of unparalleled loveliness.
They skirted the Palazzo Reale, the royal palace with the portico of the church of San Francesco that bounded the Piazza del Plebiscito. From there they took Via Cesario Console, which turns downhill toward the sea. On the right were the large, luxurious hotels, with lines of vehicles waiting for fares and drivers standing smoking in the wind, holding their hats in place with one hand and shouting to make themselves heard as they conversed. Straight ahead was the sea, with high plumes of spray that reached the street, so that the cars and horse-drawn carriages leaving the center kept to the middle of the street and the ones traveling in the opposite direction drove right up along the sidewalk.
The massive bulk of the castle rose dark and menacing in the rapidly falling night. In this weather, though, it was less menacing, with its cannons and battlements, than it was protective, forcing the roaring wind away from the little lanes of the borgo.
The last fishermen had been moved from Santa Lucia to the low apartment buildings specially built for them here more than a hundred years ago. Many of them had opened small trattorias on the ground floors, which cooked freshly landed seafood in the summer and had even become popular with tourists, drawn there from their luxurious hotel rooms nearby by the mouth-watering aromas from the wood-burning grills. This seasonal diversification aside, the people of the borgo made a living the same way their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers had.
By My Hand Page 18