By My Hand

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  She needed to prepare for the Christmas Eve supper, of course; even if it was only the two of them, she was determined to see that the traditions of her homeland be respected. Let some memory of their roots survive, at least, in that higgledy-piggledy city that she would never become entirely used to.

  Getting everything taken care of would be no simple matter; the Christmas traditions followed in the Cilento region were fairly strict. On Christmas Eve, the menu was rigorously meatless: scàmmaro, homemade spaghetti served with anchovies, olives, capers, and red chili peppers; cauliflower, potatoes, and broccoli as side dishes; and baccalà alla salernitana, stockfish breaded, fried, and baked under a cascade of white onions, cherry tomatoes that had been hanging on the balcony for months just waiting for the day, and green olives.

  Christmas dinner was quite another matter: for that meal they made fusilli, rolling them out one by one around a square umbrella rod, and then dressed them with a dense meat sauce and covered them with grated aged goat cheese; next, veal flank in broth; and then scauratielli, funnel cakes fried in boiling oil, in the shape of little intertwined snakes, which would then be drizzled with honey and eaten on the spot.

  It was hard but gratifying work. If things went as well as she hoped with the Colombo girl, she’d be able to teach her every last detail, so that the memory of those things wouldn’t be lost in that family.

  Food wasn’t the only thing, though. Christmas was significant for other reasons. The young baroness, Luigi Alfredo’s mother, who’d been dead for many years now, had brought with her from the city a nativity scene; it had once belonged to her family, and included a small set of very old statuettes: the Holy Family, the Three Kings, a few sheep, and a couple of shepherds. Rosa remembered the baroness clearly, the way she would arrange the figurines with her slender, childlike hands on a table a few days before Christmas and then remove them after Epiphany, carefully putting them away in a flowered box. It was an important tradition to her, especially when the young master was small; she used to say that for children certain images represent the holiday, and they carry those images in their hearts for the rest of their lives.

  The box covered with painted flowers had come to the city with them, and Rosa made sure that every year when Christmas came it found the Baroness Marta di Malomonte’s little manger scene waiting for it, on the side table, like a mother’s caress for her son from the afterlife.

  Who would see to these things—the Christmas dinner, the manger scene—when she was no longer around? She looked sadly at her right hand, which was trembling slightly. She felt a need to tell her stories, describe, inculcate events, anecdotes, and traditions; otherwise, once she was dead and forgotten, her young master would find himself celebrating Christmas Eve in some barren trattoria, all alone. With nothing left to remember.

  She wondered whether the Colombo girl had finally decided to take action and decide her own fate; she certainly hoped so, after the conversation they’d had the previous day. There really wasn’t anything more she could do.

  She went to get the flowered box. As long as she was around, the traditions were going to be upheld.

  All of them.

  XLIII

  Maione headed straight for the borgo’s little wharf, where the fishermen tied their boats up. It was a narrow wooden pier, anchored to the seabed by heavy rocks.

  He settled in for a wait, hiding in the shadow of the warehouse of a neighboring yacht club. He wanted to get a look at Boccia’s fellow fishermen, so he could then approach them one by one and compare their stories. Not that he had high hopes: he knew the kind of solidarity he could expect to encounter among fishermen who were trying to protect their friend.

  The fishing boats came in, one by one, furling their sails. The brigadier could tell immediately that the day’s catch had been a good one: the men sounded cheerful and the big baskets they were unloading were filled to overflowing with fish, many of them clearly still alive, a cascade of silver that glistened in the long low shafts of light from the setting sun.

  Boccia’s boat was one of the last to dock; clearly he had taken advantage of the good fishing to the last possible minute. The crew unloaded and unrigged the boat, lowering the sail and shipping the oars, then folding away the nets.

  Maione waited, noting as he looked on that two of the men were clearly a father and his teenaged son, while the third man aside from Boccia was wiry and dark-complected, so much so that Maione wondered if he was African. Waiting on the pier was Alfonso, Boccia’s son, who had come to get his father as he had the previous evening. The man said goodnight to his fellow fishermen and glumly followed the boy; Maione thought that he might be worried about his younger son, but he might just as easily be troubled by the ghosts of his conscience.

  The other three parted ways soon afterward: the father and son walked together toward the door of a small building nearby, while the skinny dark-skinned man strolled off smoking a cigarette toward a tavern not far off. Maione decided to go for the two men.

  He knocked vigorously at the front door, and the boy came to answer. No fear, no uneasiness: just curiosity, then a flash of realization; Boccia must have told them about his visit from the police.

  Maione was invited in; he was offered a glass of wine, which he courteously refused. With the two men was a very old woman, perhaps the younger man’s grandmother. Maione explained the reason for his visit, but got the impression that there had been no need.

  “Yes, Brigadie’, you can be sure of it: Aristide was out with us,” the man told him. “Otherwise we couldn’t have gone out at all.”

  “Why not?” Maione asked.

  The man smoked, holding the cigarette with the tip inside his cupped hand, accustomed as he was to smoking in the wind.

  “We use a trawl net. Do you know what that means?”

  Maione shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’ll explain it for you. Now then, a trawl net has two ends: one is lowered into the sea, secured to an anchor so that the net remains in place; the other end stays in the boat, which sails around in a circle, pulling the net along with it. You need two men on each side, and another to keep an eye on the scraps of colored cloth tied to the cables, to make sure everything is going smoothly, otherwise the net will get all tangled up. We make do without this fifth man, because there’s not enough to divide it five ways, so one of us, usually Aristide, keeps an eye on the cables while he’s holding up his end of the net.”

  “Which tells me what?” Maione asked.

  The men threw their arms open wide.

  “Which tells you that if it’s already hard for four men to do it, it would be impossible for three.”

  “But couldn’t you have found someone to take his place? I’m not saying you did—let me be clear—but I’m asking.”

  The young man laughed and said:

  “You think so? Who would want to come out with us, to work as hard as we do? Besides, all the others have their own boats to look after.”

  The brigadier had no more luck with the other man, who was busy getting drunk in the one tavern in the borgo. The fourth member of the crew, the skinny individual with very dark skin, in fact answered only in monosyllables, confirming that Boccia had been present in the fishing boat on Friday, “as on every other blessed day that the Almighty gives us here on earth.”

  But as Maione was leaving, he said:

  “Brigadie’, Aristide is a truly good man, and that Garofalo was a bastard of the very worst sort. If he’d done the same thing to me, I’d have chewed the heart out of his chest with my teeth.”

  The harshness of that phrase, spoken by that mouth set in a face so browned and weatherbeaten that Maione could hardly distinguish it from the surrounding darkness, made the policeman shiver.

  “There is such a thing as justice, you know,” Maione replied. “It’s not something a man can create with his own two hands.”


  The man nodded and said:

  “Sure, there’s such a thing as justice. But when it’s about someone taking your son away from you, you take justice into your own hands. Take it from me.”

  He was talking about Boccia and his little boy, but Maione felt his stomach lurch at the words.

  The thought of Vincenzino, and the horrible shrill whistle coming from the cradle, made him feel the need to stop by the fisherman’s house before he left the borgo.

  Outside the door that opened onto the piazzetta was Alfonso, the older son, playing with a brown-spotted dog with a familiar appearance. Inside, in his shirtsleeves and leaning over the little bed, was Dr. Modo.

  “Oh, my dear Brigadier. Now it’s come to our making house calls on police orders, can you believe it? Your friend the commissario issues directives and all I can do is take off at a run.”

  “Okay, okay, Dotto’, but at least this time we didn’t call you to look at a dead body, no?”

  Modo ran a hand over his forehead, sweeping back the white hair that hung down in front of his eyes.

  “No, but we’re dangerously close, I’d say. This child is in critical condition; it looks to me like I got here just in the nick of time. He had a raging fever, it’s a good thing he has a robust constitution.”

  Off to one side stood the child’s parents, clinging to each other and clearly terrified. The mother’s face was pale and showed the signs of sleepless nights, and the father had not yet changed out of his work clothes. Maione did his best to bolster their morale.

  “You have nothing to worry about. Doctor Modo, here, like the commissario told you, is the only physician in the city of Naples capable of working miracles.”

  Modo pretended to throw a little fit of annoyance.

  “If you want miracles, ask your God; after all in a few days it’s going to be His birthday. I’m a scientist, and as a scientist I say that it’s a crime to let a child slip into this state, when all that you needed to do was to give him a simple treatment when he first got sick, and he would have been fine.”

  Boccia spoke in a somber tone:

  “You’re right about that, Dotto’. But medicine is expensive, and if you have to make a choice between feeding your children and medicating them, then you just have to pray that the child gets better on his own.”

  Modo felt a surge of irritation.

  “Well, you’re wrong to think that way! At least take him to the hospital, no? Find out how serious it is, get some information!”

  Maione smiled at the Boccias.

  “Don’t worry, this doctor’s always spouting off like that, he shouts and loses his temper, but then he fixes everything. Rest assured.”

  The physician glared at him, then he turned his attention back to the little boy. After a few minutes he stood up, pulling his suspenders back up onto his shoulders and tightening his loosened tie.

  “His fever has broken. We’ll have to wait for the medicine I gave him to take effect. In six hours or so, you’ll need to give him these pills, and in eight hours, these others. If he coughs or you hear that whistling sound again, Signo’, give him a spoonful of this syrup right here. Are you clear on that?”

  Boccia took a step forward and looked at Modo with pride in his eyes.

  “Dotto’, I can’t pay you for these medicines. And I can’t pay for your house call, either.”

  Modo looked at Maione and then replied:

  “Who ever said anything about you having to pay me, or having to pay for the medicine? Haven’t you heard that I’m a physician in the personal service of Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione, here? Don’t worry, you don’t owe me a cent. I’ll come back tomorrow night to see how he’s doing.”

  Maione watched the parents’ eyes as they looked over at Vincenzino, finally sleeping quietly. Outside the window, the sea slapped slowly against the tillers of the moored boats.

  The woman’s expression relaxed; it was the first time that the brigadier had seen her with an unlined face.

  “Dotto’, then at least allow us to bring you a little fish. Tomorrow is the day before Christmas Eve.”

  Modo looked at her contentedly.

  “Ah, now you’ve found the way to my heart. Grazie, Signora, I’ll accept gladly.”

  He whistled softly, and out of the shadows came a silhouette with a wagging tail, which followed him into the cone of light from a streetlamp.

  And he walked off, raising the collar of his coat and pulling his hat down tight on his head.

  XLIV

  Ricciardi felt chilled to the bone and his head was spinning with confusion.

  He had made the rounds of the few import-export companies working in the port area, but he’d come up with nothing: the managers he’d spoken to had had a vague recollection that Lomunno had come by in search of work sometime in the past few days, but none of them could have said exactly what day, let alone what time. Some of them had even refused to see Lomunno entirely: there were no jobs, or else they were afraid of turning the militia against them for having hired someone whom they’d given a dishonorable dismissal. Still, all of them had confirmed that, in the contact they’d had with Lomunno before he was fired, they’d always had a very positive impression of him, and they’d been surprised at the accusations and the arrest. One man, the chief administrative officer of a shipping company, told him that he’d actually had the impression that not all the members of the militia were convinced of Lomunno’s guilt, and that there was a general dislike of the late Garofalo, whose façade of irreprehensibility also failed to convince his colleagues.

  That last conversation drove Ricciardi, on a sudden impulse, to take another stroll over to the Mussolini barracks, perhaps in part just to warm up a little.

  The militiaman at the door was the same as the last time, and in fact he showed that he recognized Ricciardi by saluting him with his usual overly enthusiastic heel-click. He asked for the consul in person this time and, after a brief exchange over the intercom, the soldier who stood at the desk outside the commandant’s office door showed up and led Ricciardi in to see his boss.

  He was given a reasonably cordial welcome; the consul came to meet him, striding across his immense office.

  “Commissario, nice to see you. This time I wasn’t given advance notice of your arrival. I wonder why?”

  Ricciardi smirked in dour amusement.

  “Buonasera, Consul. They would have had to read my mind; I just decided a couple of minutes ago to come by and say hello.”

  Freda laughed heartily.

  “Ah, of course: the one sure way of forestalling informers. What can I do for you? How is your investigation proceeding?”

  “Not all that well. We’ve run down, and are still running down, a couple of leads. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, having an excellent motive to murder someone doesn’t always mean that a person will act on it.”

  The consul dropped into his desk chair.

  “I see. And I’m aware of some of the challenges. Certain situations can be very difficult to decipher.”

  Ricciardi leaned slightly forward.

  “Signor Consul, there’s something I need to ask you. And I need to ask you in a nonofficial capacity, in much the same way that I’m not officially here with you this evening. Why did you point us in Lomunno’s direction? When we came by the other day, you made sure that we knew about the background of what had happened, why Lomunno had been expelled from the militia and Garofalo was promoted. Why?”

  Freda turned to look out the window, despite the fact that it was already dark outside. He seemed to think his answer over for a long time.

  “When we learned about Garofalo’s tragic demise, everyone here thought of Lomunno first thing. He certainly had a strong motive, you have to admit, to . . . to do this thing. And those of us who had, unofficially, met with him after he got out of jail, re
ported that he was a man coarsened by rage and grief, over his dead wife, his lost career, and the conditions in which he is now forced to live with his children. Make no mistake, Commissario: no one here has even the slightest bit of evidence against him; but the idea that Lomunno did it could certainly stand up. But the thing is that when you work with people in here, side by side, you get to know them. And all of us liked Lomunno, but we felt the opposite about Garofalo.”

  Ricciardi waited.

  “And so?

  “And so,” the consul went on, “we preferred to have you learn about the situation from us, rather than from some impersonal judicial report or stray piece of gossip. That’s all.”

  Ricciardi did some quick thinking: It was crucial for him to find out whether the consul, and therefore the militia at large, suspected that Garofalo had other dirty business dealings, that he was shaking down the fishermen. Steering the investigation toward Lomunno might well have been a way of covering up something that was a further source of shame for the corps.

  “From our investigations so far, we haven’t uncovered any other motive that might have led someone to kill Signore and Signora Garofalo. As things now stand, therefore, Lomunno is the sole suspect.”

  What looked to Ricciardi like genuine disappointment appeared on Freda’s face.

  “In that case, please, Commissario: keep looking. Here we’re all pretty certain that poor Lomunno has more than paid for his mistake, which was really just the mistake of trusting a disloyal subordinate. We don’t believe that he did it. I’m not asking you this as the commandant of the legion, nor as a longtime naval officer. I ask you as a man and as a father: make sure that Lomunno is brought up on charges only if you’re absolutely sure that it couldn’t have been anyone other than him.”

  Ricciardi looked Freda straight in the face for a long time and became convinced that this was all he knew about Garofalo’s life. And he also realized that if he accused the Boccias, he’d make a lot of people happy, there in those barracks.