By My Hand

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  The butchers, too, were playing their last cards, laying out all their remaining merchandise, so that the backdrop in their shop windows consisted of sides of beef and pork, carefully trimmed and misted with water from time to time to give the impression of freshness and quality, in front of which would be a vanguard of capons, turkeys, hens, and rabbits, with plumes and fur, or else skinned, to terrify little children with their glassy eyes.

  The shop windows of the confectioners and pastry shops were especially spectacular, and at the center, enjoying pride of place, was a Christ Child made of spun sugar. Surrounding him was an overabundance of cookies and cakes, small hillsides of struffoli, balls of fried dough dripping with honey and colorful candy pellets, cassata, along with the traditional pastries and confectioneries that no Christmas in Naples could do without, from the brightly colored almond pastries arranged on specially cut biscuits to the hard almond-dough taralli also known as roccocò; from the rhomboid-shaped Neapolitan Christmas cookies known as mustacciuoli covered with a chocolate glaze to the spicy, aromatic quaresimali, or Lenten almond biscuits; from the crescent-shaped, pine-nut-encrusted pignolate to the susamielli, the delicate S-shaped cinnamon-flavored holiday cookies. And then there were the raffioli, or mini-cassatas, and the sapienze, covered with whole almonds, and little pastries filled with chestnut and clove cream, all of them desperately seeking one last banqueting table that would be willing to take them in, like their fellow pastries that had been sold by the hundreds of pounds over the last few days.

  December twenty-third is the last chance.

  The verdummari, the fruit and vegetable vendors, know it, sitting with their weary, worried gaze in the center of their elaborate installations. They’ve stood guard for the past week, taking shifts with their wives and children at night, to make sure that the street urchins, the scugnizzi, didn’t pilfer any of the merchandise they kept out on display. They’ve built make-believe Grottoes of the Nativity, weaving together lemon and orange branches from which the fruit still dangles, cunningly mixing the green of the broccoli, the orange of the tangerines, and the yellow of the large Sorrento lemons, flanked by clusters of melons and tomatoes, and crowning the pyramids of pears, prickly pears, and apples.

  The chill is welcome, because it wards off the scourge of insects, but what hasn’t been sold by the twenty-third runs a serious risk of lying there and rotting; that’s why the sales are being called out to the passersby in such pleading tones, in sharp contrast to the triumphant calling of their wares on the past few mornings, when the vendors’ voices resounded cheerful and bright, summoning the housewives to make their purchases.

  Now they’re begging, supplicating: Come buy, come buy. Take pity.

  Because December twenty-third is the last chance.

  Maione and Ricciardi met in the commissario’s office, over cups of the brigadier’s ersatz coffee, well aware that they had come to a decisive crossroads in their investigation into the deaths of the Garofalos. The information that they had gathered, each on his own, one in the borgo, the other in the port, had neither added to nor taken away from the precarious condition of the suspects, just as they’d anticipated.

  Maione was the first to speak.

  “So all things considered, Commissa’, we’re back where we started from, just like we were yesterday, and the day before. Lomunno and the Boccias—that is, unless it was some other fisherman who hasn’t come to our attention yet, because let’s not forget that the only reason we found the Boccias at all is because they went to the Garofalos’ apartment a few days before the murder. If the real murderers staked out the building and waited for the doorman to step across the street to the tavern, then they’d have been able to get in without being seen by anyone. How would we ever know?”

  Ricciardi was in agreement.

  “Quite true. If we were the kind of cops who are determined to throw someone in jail no matter what, just to move a case along, then we could just as easily arrest Lomunno as the Boccias. Lomunno might well have done it in a moment of despair, and the Boccias would have no way to defend themselves because the testimony of the boat crew is not all that credible. But you and I both know that the fact that a person might have committed a murder, and might even have had some excellent motives for doing so, doesn’t mean that they really did it; and we’re not the kind of cops who toss potentially innocent people in jail, are we? Otherwise, we’d have chosen to be judges, not policemen.”

  Otherwise, we’d have chosen to be judges, Maione thought to himself.

  “Well then, Commissa’, what do we do now? We need something to lure them out, to make them give themselves away. Something unexpected.”

  Ricciardi stood there thinking, in his characteristic pose, his hands joined in front of his mouth, his eyes lost on the surface of his desk.

  “Something unexpected. You know, Raffaele, last night I went to the theater: Livia practically dragged me there. I saw this one-act play about Christmas, the one with the two brothers and the sister.”

  “Of course, Commissa’, I know the one you mean, I hear they’re really talented, the whole city’s talking about them.”

  “Well, it’s true, they’re talented, though I don’t know much about theater, as you know. Anyway, at a certain point, they’re all together, and that’s when the issues boil to the surface. Maybe that’s what we need, to bring them together, face-to-face.”

  “We should be able to find them all in one place. Today is December twenty-third, the last day of the fish market on Via Santa Brigida.”

  “Last day? How so?”

  Maione smiled.

  “I always forget that you aren’t really from Naples and so there are a few city traditions you might not understand. In practical terms, during the Christmas season, for the convenience of the customers and the vendors, fish is sold all on a single street, to be specific, Via Santa Brigida, right near here. They all set up there, with their big wooden basins painted light blue to give the impression of seawater, and people go there to get fish for the Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas lunch. It’s a kind of warfare: the vendors want to sell fast and at high prices, while the customers want to wait until the last minute to buy at lower prices, though at the risk of there being nothing left.”

  Ricciardi listened.

  “Well? Why do you think that they’d come face-to-face?”

  “Because everyone who works in the fishing business, including the part-time seasonal workers, will be there. Boccia and his crew will be there, no doubt, to earn extra money by selling their fish directly, and possibly even Lomunno, working for some merchant who needs extra hands.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “In fact, yesterday down at the port I heard one guy say to another that they’d see each other today at the market. So what he meant was this sale on Via Santa Brigida.”

  Maione agreed:

  “He couldn’t be referring to anything else. Let’s stroll down there, Commissa’, maybe in the early afternoon, when we’ll find the most people there; right now we’d run the risk of the fishermen taking advantage of the opportunity to get out on the water one last time. There might even be a squad from the port militia, keeping an eye on the sales.”

  Ricciardi briefly scratched his wound, which had finally closed up.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m still stuck on the symbolism of Saint Joseph. What on earth could they have meant, by breaking that figurine?”

  Maione shook his head.

  “We won’t know that, Commissa’, until someone confesses.”

  Ricciardi made a disconsolate face.

  “If anyone ever confesses.”

  XLVII

  I’m a policeman, Maione thought to himself. A policeman.

  That night, in the agitation of incoherent dreams, he remembered his own hands. He remembered that he found himself in a deserted vicolo, a place he didn’t know; and he
traveled the whole length of that twisting alley, uphill and down, only to find himself back at the exact point he’d started from.

  And so he started walking again, and as he walked he felt a mortal sense of weariness, and especially a numbness in his hands.

  He looked at his hands over and over again in his dream: he couldn’t recognize them. They seemed like extraneous body parts, two animals endowed with a life of their own, completely separate from his arms and his will. Anxiety seized him, and he started walking again, in fact running, and Franco Massa was chasing him, calling him Orso, Bear, the way he had when they were children, and saying to him: You have to kill him, you have to kill him. It has to be you. It has to happen by your hand. By your hand.

  And in the dream, his heart was breaking; he kept seeing the two children and the pretty dark-haired wife, as well as Biagio, but never his face, only his blond hair.

  By my hand, he kept saying. By my hand.

  But I’m a policeman, he told Massa in his dream. A policeman, not a judge, not a hangman. How can I do it?

  And at the far end of the alley, which ended in a downhill slope, he saw the two children, laughing as they came toward him, calling him grandpa. And he ran up to Biagio from behind, and Biagio didn’t turn around, and his hands, independent of his will, reached up and began throttling Biagio by the neck. By my hand, the voice in his head kept saying. And Biagio turned around in his death throes, and Maione realized that it was his son Luca, dying a second time, but this time by his hand.

  He’d woken up with a jerk, drenched in sweat. Luckily, Lucia was sleeping soundly by his side.

  Taking advantage of the fact that he was meeting the commissario in the early afternoon to take a look at the fish market, instead of going home he decided to go once more to San Gregorio Armeno. The shop where the young man worked was closed to the public, but the wooden door stood ajar.

  He stuck his head inside and saw that there was no one there but the proprietor.

  “Brigadie’, prego, please come in. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  Maione took a thorough look around.

  “Excuse me, I wanted to buy a couple of sheep, but I see you’re closed. Why is that? Is something the matter?”

  The man heaved a theatrical sigh.

  “You can’t imagine, we came this close to a genuine tragedy!”

  “Why, what happened?”

  At this point, the proprietor came around the cash register and took up a stance in the middle of the empty shop.

  “Last night, as we were closing up, I was here counting the money from the day’s sales, and it was a lot of money, too, because as you know this is a particular time of year, when we have to bring in enough to keep us going all year long. Well, I was standing here, you see, when four masked individuals burst in, with knives in their hands!”

  Maione feigned horror at the news, smiling inside at the sudden proliferation of bandits, now wearing handkerchiefs as masks, like in a movie with cowboys and Indians.

  “Really, you don’t say? And they robbed you?”

  The man put on a dramatic air.

  “It would have been a tragedy, the receipts of two whole days. I thought it was all over for me. But then Biagio jumped in, you remember him?”

  Maione denied all knowledge, with a baffled look.

  “No, who’s that?”

  “What, the young man you said was such a good carver, don’t you recall?”

  The brigadier pretended he had only just remembered.

  “Ah, right, the fair-haired boy.”

  The man nodded his head.

  “That’s right, him. He ran over, right where I’m standing now, between the bandits and the cash register, with the knife he uses in the mornings to carve, and he fought a duel with those criminals, just like on the stage in a melodrama, you know what I mean, in the final scene? Exactly like that.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “What happened is that the hoodlums, since things weren’t looking as easy as they’d hoped, took off down the vicolo. Chance would have it that at that exact moment Biagio’s wife and children arrived, and if the thieves had decided to run off in the opposite direction, they would have run right smack into them. A huge danger averted.”

  “So it was a close call.”

  “That’s right. We were also helped by the fact that, right when those robbers were all in here, we heard a whistle like the ones the coppers . . . I mean to say, that you all use. But then there weren’t any policemen around after all . . . Odd, don’t you think?”

  Maione put on an uncertain expression.

  “You know, there are kids who can imitate a police whistle so well you’d swear it was real.”

  “Add to that the Fascist squads, which make the rounds in the neighborhood, too. They’re worse than you, no offense, Brigadie’; they tend to beat you up first and ask questions later. But it’s the same thing with them: they’re never around when you need them.”

  Maione looked the man in the face with a slightly grim expression. He’d been there, all right, but he couldn’t have shown himself.

  “So then why are you closed today?”

  The proprietor flashed a broad, magnanimous smile.

  “I decided to give the young man half the day off, partly as a reward for what he did yesterday. He went off to the Villa Nazionale, to take his children out for a little fresh air and a few roasted almonds, I gave him a little cash. Then later today, after lunch, we’ll reopen.”

  The Villa Nazionale, Maione thought. A happy little family, out strolling on the day before Christmas Eve.

  He went over to the counter and picked up a terra-cotta Saint Joseph, very similar to the one they’d found shattered in the Garofalos’ home. He hefted it, feeling its weight.

  “Nice, eh, Brigadie’? Our products, if I do say so myself, are refined, not like the trash they produce around here, where you can’t tell which part is the face and which is the body, they’re painted so badly. Look at the features, the beard, the staff.”

  Maione furrowed his brow.

  “In your opinion, what does Saint Joseph represent?”

  He would have guessed work, carpentry, craftsmanship. Instead, the man replied:

  “The father of children, that’s what he represents, Brigadie’. All the love and all the pain that a father carries with him in life. Because everybody always says: the mother this, the mother that. But what about us? We sweat blood without complaining, all day long, from morning to night, and who do we do it for, if not for our children? But no one ever thinks about the fathers. So that’s what Saint Joseph represents, a father who sits quietly off to one side, working away in the shadows and in silence for a whole lifetime, for the good of his children.”

  Maione listened, surprised. Then he said:

  “We do everything for our children. They’re what matters most, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, Brigadie’. Last night, when I found myself face-to-face with those knives, that’s what I thought to myself: that all a man wants is to be left alone to work in peace, for the good of his children.”

  The policeman was suddenly overcome by an immense anguish. The good of the children, yes. But whose children?

  “Grazie, be well. And take my advice: At night, close up shop when everyone else does. The thieves love an empty street.”

  XLVIII

  One last trip out, onto that ice-cold sea that looks like a slab of black glass, pressed down under a sky as heavy as marble.

  One last trip out, in defiance of the weather, to tear another breath of life from the salt water. In the hours in which the day battles against the night, when the lights quiver in the still air and hands numb from the cold can no longer grip ropes and oars.

  One last trip out, a shorter one, and thus more desperate, with emphatic gestures rendered
frantic by the weather and by necessity.

  Your only choice is to run from one side of the boat to the other, to make sure there are no tangles or knots in the net, so that down beneath the black surface the meshes don’t twist up and catch nothing but themselves, or else all the tugging and hauling on earth will yield nothing but a mass of cords and seaweed, after all that careful planning, all that exhausting work.

  Just one trip, and in half the usual time, to see what we can carry away in our wicker baskets to the market, to display before the eyes of people whose only thought is what to cook for Christmas dinner.

  One last trip out, with our aching bones, sure to confine us to a chair by the time we’re fifty or a little older, paralyzed by pain, watching young men who will wind up the same way. Just one last trip, in this icy dawn the day before Christmas Eve, so different from all the others.

  Dreaming of pulling up a net full of picarels and calamari, meagre and silver-bellied gilthead sea bream, lobsters and saltwater eels, so many that they fill the deck of the boat, and we can feel their tails slapping around at our feet, their lives for our lives and the lives of our children.

  One last trip out, life against life, for a pocketful of change.

  And for another Christmas.

  Ricciardi decided to swing by home, instead of remaining at police headquarters until the afternoon or going to Gambrinus for his usual quick sfogliatella.

  It was a fairly rare occurrence. Normally he wasn’t willing to give up the time that it took to walk to Via Santa Teresa and back, more than an hour all told, time that he didn’t like to take away from his work duties, and the tedious bureaucracy that went along with them.

  But this time he wanted to go home. The crowds filling the street in spite of the cold would have invaded the café, forcing him to stand and wait for a table for God knows how long, so that his lunch hour would be more work than break. But that wasn’t the main reason.