By My Hand

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  There were just a few dozen families, and over the centuries they’d inevitably all become interrelated, deprived of the best and most ambitious of their young, who’d chosen to book passage on the big three-stacked ocean liners that steamed to America, or else opted for the easier money to be found in the soft underbelly of the city. The ones who stayed behind were those who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, do anything else.

  Ricciardi and Maione had walked along the road in silence; the wind was howling, it was hard to hear, and they were both caught up in their own thoughts.

  There was a storm of confusion in the brigadier’s heart. He was thinking about revenge, justice and the law, life and death. In his simple mind, made up of right and wrong, he couldn’t allow a murderer—one responsible for the immense pain and sorrow that he carried within him and that for three years had reduced his wife to little more than a vegetable—to escape punishment for the crime he’d committed. That was one thing he was sure of, more than sure of.

  But he thought: What, was he the judge? He was a policeman, accustomed to following principles established by others, in laws crafted by men more learned and intelligent than he was, and he wanted only to apply those laws. He apprehended the criminals, and then he handed them over. From that moment onward, and this was a rule to which he’d adhered all his life, it was no longer his place to concern himself with what became of those who had committed the crimes. Nor did he much want to be a judge; he’d always known that his conscience was a tender thing. He’d never be able to sleep at night.

  But even he knew perfectly well that, by law, Biagio would get off scot-free. There’d already been a trial, followed by a conviction and a sentence; the dying brother’s confession had been obtained fraudulently by Massa, who’d pretended to be a priest. In any case, there was no evidence, no proof.

  Maione wondered what Lucia would have wanted. His instincts told him to talk to her, to share that terrible news with her, to ask her advice about what he should do, and how he should do it. Thoughts of his wife consumed him: her terrible suffering, the shadow he could still glimpse in the depths of those sky-blue eyes, her anguish in the days after it first happened. What pity could Lucia take on the one who’d caused her that pain? No, he couldn’t revive those feelings in his wife. The responsibility for what he had to do rested on his shoulders alone. In the end, he’d become a judge after all, under circumstances he would never have wished for: in the most important trial of his life, with his own conscience sitting as jury.

  Ricciardi walked at Maione’s side, likewise caught up in a surging tide of thoughts.

  Livia’s visit had upset him, far more than he’d expected. He’d seen her more than once since the accident: she’d been the first to hurry to the hospital; he’d received visits from her several times at police headquarters, to the delight of the staff gossips and of Garzo, who was always ready to present his fat, smiling face to anyone who he thought could put in a good word for him in Rome. But he’d taken care to make sure he was never alone with her.

  This time, however, he hadn’t been able to get away. Not out of cowardice; he just couldn’t bring himself to hurt her feelings. He knew very well—and things had turned out pretty much as he’d expected—that he’d end up saying exactly what he felt, word for word and letter for letter. He was incapable of verbal acrobatics; diplomacy was not one of his admittedly few virtues.

  He doubted he loved Livia, but then he wondered if that was really true. His general disinclination for sentiment, not to mention his want of experience and the lack of any precedents for all this situation, made him dubious. He was gratified by the admiration everyone else seemed to feel for that exotic, feline woman; he liked her scent, a mixture of spices and something slightly wild; and he’d instinctively gone in search of her when his loneliness, fever, and suffering had become intolerable on that rainy November night. But was that love, Ricciardi wondered?

  And then, of course, there was Enrica. Her calm gestures, the spark of good humor behind her tortoiseshell eyeglass frames. The strong feelings that the sight of her stirred in him, the sense of peace he felt when he spotted her through the window at night, his despair at seeing that same window shuttered in the past few days. But was that love, on the other hand?

  But the question that most obsessed him was this: did he really want love to be part of his life?

  After having recognized it as one of mankind’s two chief enemies, even more treacherous and incomprehensible than hunger itself; having witnessed on an ongoing, daily basis its baleful effects, the blood, the pain, the sorrow, and the suffering; knowing the weaknesses that it brought in its wake, along with the pain of separation and the melancholy of loss; did he actually want this dangerous thing, love, in his life?

  He’d always avoided it, sedulously. He’d always regarded it with mistrust, maintaining a safe distance, handling its effects with gloved hands to avoid potential contamination. And now he was actually trying to parse the distinction between the two emotions that he was feeling—not one, but two—in an attempt to understand their nature.

  What the hell is happening to you, Ricciardi? he asked himself. Have you decided to jump out into the void, into the abyss along the rim of which you’ve always walked? Aren’t you afraid anymore?

  He tried to focus on the investigation. In a flash, the blood, the corpses, the stab wounds all appeared before his eyes; he heard the words of the Deed, what the dead said to him in their last breath before loosening their grip on life; the awkward caution of the militiamen, caught between the desire to cooperate and the fear that someone, in some secret room either in Rome or here in Naples, might not want them to air their dirty laundry; Lomunno’s grief and despair, the misery of a man killed and not yet resuscitated, the sorrow of his children. The serious face of the little girl standing on tiptoe, barefoot, stirring that foul-smelling cookpot, and the grim determination that she’d shown when she picked her little brother up from the floor and carried him off, when rage had begun to seethe into her father’s words. Something she was used to, evidently.

  Ricciardi couldn’t say whether Garofalo’s former colleague was guilty of the double homicide. Experience told him that a killer generally chose not to express his regret at not having committed a murder. Lomunno seemed genuinely distraught at not having carried out an act of revenge that might very well have brought him a liberatory relief, and he openly said that it was only his love for his children that had kept him from doing it. And he had no solid alibi: a condition that would typically have led to his arrest, for lack of a better candidate, and probably in the end to a guilty verdict. Lomunno had so yearned to commit that murder that perhaps, in the end, he’d even come to believe that he really was the guilty party.

  The lines of investigation that they were pursuing, then, had to produce some other—any other—hypothesis, otherwise they’d be forced to deprive Lomunno’s children of the only parent left to them. Still, the commissario mused, he was clearly an aggressive man, filled with boundless rage and bottomless sorrow. He remembered the knife driven violently into the tabletop. Maybe he really was the killer, after all, he thought.

  They reached the borgo almost without realizing it. Neither of the two, each lost in his own thoughts, noticed that they’d just walked for twenty minutes without exchanging a word.

  The sea was howling in the wind.

  XXXVII

  They realized they’d been seen coming, as they always were. As soon as they rounded the curve in Via Partenope they realized that a messenger had broken off from the crowd of children loitering in front of the hotel in the hopes of receiving alms from the foreign tourists, and had rushed off down into the borgo.

  Maione wasn’t happy. It was like having a trumpeter going ahead and playing fanfares to announce their coming. Not that they really needed their anonymity; they weren’t conducting a raid, nor were they planning to arrest anyone, unless it proved necess
ary. But it would have been at least a minor advantage to catch people off guard, so as to see their instinctive reaction to the visit from the police. But then they had become accustomed to losing that advantage by now.

  The spectacle that greeted their eyes surprised them. At the center of a deserted, windswept piazzetta there was no one but a woman wrapped in a black shawl. Behind her stood two children, a little girl clinging to the signora’s skirts and a slightly older boy, presumably the woman’s daughter and son.

  The figures remained motionless; if it weren’t for the billowing of their clothing, they could have been a sculptural group, a statue dedicated to modern motherhood. They stood perfectly still, their faces turned in the policemen’s direction. Ricciardi looked around, guessing at the eyes staring at him from behind the closed shutters of the surrounding buildings.

  Maione sighed and stepped forward.

  “Buonasera, Signo’. We are Brigadier Maione and Commis­sario Ricciardi of the mobile squad. We’re here to talk to Signor Aristide Boccia. Do you know him?”

  The woman stood still, in silence. Maione looked at Ricciardi for instructions. Had she heard him? Did she understand what he was saying? As he was trying to decide whether to repeat the question, the woman said:

  “He’s my husband. He’s out on the water right now. Come with me.”

  She turned and headed for the front door of a basso, or ground-floor apartment, followed by the two children, Maione and Ricciardi, and many pairs of eyes, watching from behind the shutters.

  The room they entered reminded them both of Lomunno and his shack. These people seemed to be living in even more dire poverty, but it was evident that there was a woman here at least. On the table lay a tattered piece of embroidered cloth; a curtain, patched but clean, hung at the hovel’s only window; a hand-tinted photograph of a couple from the turn of the century, the woman sitting and the man standing, with a votive candle lit in front of them on a little shelf; and the aroma of fish chowder wafted through the air.

  The little boy went running over to a cradle, in the corner of the room that was best sheltered from drafts and winds.

  “This is my brother, Vincenzino. He’s dying!”

  He said it with pride, as if the infant in the cradle were about to perform a memorable deed of some kind. Maione looked down at his fingernails.

  “Alfo’,” the mother said to the boy, “go wait for Papa and tell him to come right away. Be careful not to get too close to the water. The seas are high tonight.”

  Then she turned to Maione.

  “I’m sorry, I have nothing to offer you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Signo’. We’re just here to ask a few questions. Maybe we’ll wait for your husband.”

  The woman nodded. Ricciardi decided that she seemed much younger up close than he’d thought she was at first.

  “Signora, one question: how did you know that we were coming to see your husband?”

  The woman met and held the gaze of those strange, transparent eyes.

  “Commissa’, word travels fast. Policemen hear things, and so you come to talk to my husband. Well, we hear things, too.”

  Logical, thought Ricciardi. Logical, but she didn’t actually tell me anything.

  The door opened and Alfonso, the eldest son, came in, along with a man.

  “I’m Aristide Boccia,” the man said. “Were you looking for me?”

  They looked at him. He was dressed like any other fisherman, with an oilskin raincoat and a large, shapless hat made of the same material. He was carrying an unlit lantern, and he was dripping water.

  “Yes, we’re here to talk to you. I’m Brigadier Maione and this is Commissario Ricciardi, from police headquarters. We have a few questions we’d like to ask you.”

  Boccia made a face that could have been a tired sneer. His face was square and sunburnt. It was impossible to assign it an age.

  “Well, here we are, as you can see. We haven’t run off.”

  “Why were you expecting us?” Ricciardi inquired. “How did you know that we would come?”

  Boccia stared back at him, expressionless.

  “Because we went to see the Garofalos, my wife and I. We went two days before someone killed them.”

  A whistling sound came from the cradle, and the mother went over, moving something around inside it. The man continued, with an almost apologetic tone of voice.

  “My youngest son, Vincenzino. There’s something wrong with his chest; for the past few months he hasn’t been breathing right, but now he’s gotten worse, he has a constant fever. He’s only four. I’m carving this manger scene for him. Who knows if he’ll live long enough to see it finished.”

  Somewhere outside, the sea dramatically underscored what the man had just said with a roar.

  There wasn’t a hint of drama in Boccia’s voice, no self-pity. It was as if he were talking about the conditions out on the water. He went on.

  “It was on his account that we went to see Centurion Garofalo last week. If Vincenzino had been well, we’d have kept quiet and just muddled through.”

  “I don’t understand,” Maione said. “What do you mean?”

  Boccia had taken off his oilskin rain poncho and placed it, with the rain hat, on a stool by the door. The boy moved quickly, grabbing the raincoat and depositing it in a cabinet next to the hearth. The well-established routines of an ordinary family.

  “What do you know about the work we do? Do you know any fishermen, either of you?”

  Maione shook his head no, Ricciardi said nothing.

  “You can’t make any money. You’d think that in a gulf like this there must be lots and lots of fish, but there aren’t. There are times when you spend the whole day on the water and don’t catch a thing. We move from place to place, we try different spots, we work together with others. But whatever we do, we barely make a living.”

  His wife placed a chair at the table near her husband, and he dropped into it, exhausted.

  “I’ve been out since four. That’s more than twelve hours. In heavy seas it’s harder still, we shouldn’t even go out at all, but then what would I feed my children? In this weather, we run the risk that the waves will carry off our nets. We don’t even hoist our sails; we go out with oars. There’s four of us, with a single boat.”

  Ricciardi listened attentively.

  “You haven’t told us why you went to see Garofalo the other day.”

  The man ran his hand over his face. Maione noticed that there were cuts on his hand, with thin, bloody strips of fabric wrapped around them. Boccia followed his gaze and said, dismissively:

  “These are nothing, Brigadie’. They’re just the little marks we get from handling the nets, cables, and oars. The worst damage is there, in that cradle.”

  The woman walked over and stood by her husband, her eyes leveled on the policemen. The man continued.

  “As you know, there are laws for fishing. They’re strange laws, and they don’t really make all that much sense; still, we have to live with them. On a good day, we bring in four to seven hundred pounds of fish with our boat. On bad days, sometimes we come back completely empty-handed. We can’t fish after the first hatching, so that means we can’t even go to the areas where the fish lay their eggs in the sea. We can’t go into private waters, as if the sea had fences and gates. We can’t use explosives, and that’s fair, I understand it. We have to have certificates and licenses, and we have to have receipts for all the taxes we pay.”

  The man was exhausted, and he spoke almost in a whisper. The room, along with its old, broken-down window and door frame, was illuminated by two lanterns, swaying in the drafts.

  “Overseeing all those things is the militia’s job. Even if you have everything in perfect order, there’s always a little something extra to pay. It’s what we’ve always done, none of us complain about it. As if
it were just another tax. But then Garofalo showed up.”

  Maione nodded. This information matched what he’d been told by Bambinella.

  “And what changed?”

  “At first, he seemed better than the others, much better. He called all us boat owners together and told us, ‘From now on, you don’t have to give anybody anything. Nothing to no one. You can imagine how happy we were, it was a huge cost off our backs. That lasted almost a year.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then one day he comes here, to the borgo. It was summer, we were out on the piazza, playing a little music and dancing. Sometimes we do that when it’s been a good day; they can even hear us from the hotels, they lean out the windows and clap along. So he shows up here, alone, in uniform. He calls a few of us aside and says to us, ‘Did you know that you’ve been fishing in the waters of Duke Thus-and-Such, off Posillipo?’ We all look at one another, and we say, ‘Centurio’, when on earth? We’re always careful where we fish, and we’d never fish there anyway, you can’t catch anything.’ And he said, ‘You see? How do you know that you can’t catch anything there, if you don’t fish there?’ And he fined us.”

  Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance.

  “A fine? What’s so serious about that?”

  Boccia laughed sardonically.

  “The fine is nothing. The serious part is that if you get a second fine of the same kind in a single year, then your fishing license is suspended for up to six months. They call it recidivism.”

  Maione nodded.

  “Which meant you were at his mercy.”

  “Exactly, Brigadie’. If you deprive someone like me of his fishing license, then you might as well just take the whole family, put them in a boat, take the boat out to the middle of the sea, and sink it. Better a quick death than to starve.”