They turned around and found themselves face-to-face with a very tall man, with an athletic physique, dressed in a white shirt, a waistcoat, and a pair of dark trousers. On his arm he wore a black band, a mark of mourning. His hair was tousled and he hadn’t shaved, he had bags under his eyes and his face wore a harsh expression that made him look old: but he couldn’t have been even thirty.
Maione touched his fingertips to the brim of his hat and, without changing his tone of voice, asked: “You’re Giuseppe Graziani, isn’t that right?”
The man, leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed on his chest, nodded. He really was huge, his powerful forearms made muscular by hard work. He seemed indifferent to the presence of the two policemen in his home. He told the woman: “Don’t worry yourself, Mammà. Go see if the baby has woken up. Earlier I thought she sounded a little restless.”
The old woman reluctantly moved away.
Graziani gestured with his head, inviting them to follow him into a room that was furnished with a table and chairs; against one wall hung a mirror covered by a black cloth. On a low credenza there was a framed photograph of the same man, standing, clearly ill at ease, in a jacket and tie; sitting in front of him was a beautiful girl in a wedding dress. Both of them had solemn expressions, as was customary when people posed for a portrait; but she was holding his hand, their fingers intertwined in a gesture of great tenderness.
Maione said: “I’m Brigadier Maione, and he is . . .”
The man interrupted him: “Yeah, yeah. I know who you are, and you know who I am. And I know why you’re here, too. The answer is: no, I didn’t kill that piece of shit, Professor Iovine. I didn’t get to him fast enough, because someone else took care of it before I could.”
Maione laughed: “Congratulations, Signor Peppino the Wolf. That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Bravo. Since you’re so clever and you’re willing to tell us what we need to know, excuse us for barging in on you like this, we’ll be on our way. If you’d just sent us a note, informing us that you hadn’t committed the murder, we could have even spared ourselves the walk over in this heat.”
“I’m telling it to you straight. But if you want to waste your time and shoe leather, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Maione roared: “Grazia’, you’re just a little too much of a comedian. You make me want to take you into police headquarters and start asking you questions there. What do you say, do you feel like taking a walk? That way, you can stroll in the midst of your own people and show off a nice pair of steel bracelets.”
Ricciardi knew that this wasn’t going to get them anywhere. He decided it was time to intervene: “Listen here, Graziani: I’m sorry about your loss. We heard how it went, and I understand the kind of grief that . . .”
Peppino hissed back: “You don’t understand a thing, Commissa’. You don’t know how it went, you don’t understand the grief. You don’t know anything and you can’t know anything.”
Maione said: “Now, Grazia’, I’m warning you: unless you start speaking respectfully to the commissario, I’ll . . .”
“What are you doing, Brigadie’? What are you doing? You do understand, don’t you, that if I’d wanted to make sure you never got this far, you never would have? That you could have disappeared a hundred times along the way here, you and your commissario, and no one would ever have known what had become of you? So do me a favor and do yourself a favor while you’re at it: don’t threaten me. Not here, not in my home. All right? Are we understood?” Then he turned to Ricciardi: “Commissa’, I wasn’t trying to get a rise out of you. I was telling the truth. You can’t possibly know, because no one’s told you the way things really went.”
Ricciardi said: “Well then, why don’t you tell me yourself how they really went?”
“Then who would you believe, Commissa’?”
“Graziani, you strike me as an intelligent young man. If we’d already decided not to believe you, would we have come down here into your lair to talk to you? Wouldn’t it have been much easer to have you come down to police headquarters for a deposition or, easier still, simply put you on trial straightaway?”
Peppino looked amused: “The Wolf’s lair. Very nice, Commissa’. You’ve convinced me. What do you want to know?”
“Everything, that’s what we want to know. Your relations with Professor Iovine. Why and where you swore to kill him. And why you say you weren’t fast enough to do it yourself.”
XLV
I wonder if you love anyone, Commissa’. If you can only be happy when a certain person is close to you and you breathe the same air that she breathes. I wonder if you’ve ever felt your heart bursting in your chest with joy, and whether you know the color of despair, the misery that makes you think you’re already dead and cast down into hell, but all the while you’re still here on earth.
I lost my father when I was still just a little boy, you know. My father was taken by the sea. So then it was just me and my mammà, you saw her, she’s a tigress who defends her cub, even though now I’m three times her size. She was no different when I was a child, she raised me with her claws and her teeth. Our streets around here are like the jungle, Commissa’. The weak don’t survive, only the strong. Mammà and I were strong, and we survived.
If you have nothing to eat, if you don’t have clothes to wear, and you have to fight the dogs for a crust of stale bread, you sure don’t have time for happiness. You don’t even know that happiness exists. Until I was twelve, the only thing I thought about was making it to tomorrow. That’s when I met my little Rosinella.
Are you married, Commissa’? No? What about you, Brigadie’? Then you, yes, you must know what I’m talking about. Everything changes. When I met my Rosinella, I realized that I wanted to live. Not survive: live. I wanted a home, children, a future. My little Rosinella changed my soul. I met her and I understood what sunshine was, what it meant to laugh, and why it was worth opening your eyes in the morning.
She was my woman, Commissa’. Even when we were just children, she was my woman. We were born together, so it made sense for us to die together, don’t you think?
I know that it’s not possible to decide how many years a life should last, I’m not crazy. I know that. And I understand that you can die before your time. I live on the street, I’m a businessman: a stabbing, a gunshot, a wagon wheel—any one of them could come around the corner any second. So I get myself organized. That’s the whole story, Brigadie’, I get myself organized. The only difference between me and these kids you see outside, or the ones you met on your way over here, is that I’ve gotten myself organized. I think about the things that can happen, and I prepare myself. I examine the hypotheses, the possibilities. And I get myself organized.
That’s why they call me the Wolf. Because I do fine on my own, I don’t need to hang out on a street corner and play cards, waste time and get drunk with my friends. I’m a man who thinks and thinks. That’s the way I was when I was little, too. I was a kid who thought.
The Wolf, you know, remains alone until he finds a companion. And Rosinella was the companion of my life. Someone like me can only have one companion, and if he loses her then he won’t go looking for another.
When she started to suffer strange pains I thought through all the various possibilities. Mammà, her mother, and the other women in the neighborhood all told me not to worry, that this was normal, that it happens with the first baby. But I get myself organized, like I told you. So I asked around for the name of the very best doctor there was for women who are going to give birth. The very best one.
Take a look at me, I’m a big man. I’ve always been big: my father was too. People think that big men are stupid, who knows why. But I made good use of the fact that I’m big, at the beginning. Then I started using my head. I help people, Commissa’; hurting people is pointless. If people only respect you out of fear, sooner or later you’re bound to run
into someone who’s not afraid, and the next thing you know there’s a knife in your back. On the other hand, if people respect you because you’re fair, and if you help others without asking anything in exchange, then people will stick by you.
In the past few years, since the day Rosinella and I decided to get married and have children, I got things ready, I put together a business. We got rich and everyone who worked with me got rich too. Certainly, every now and then, we ran into an obstacle or two and we had to take care of it; as the saying goes, these are the risks that go with the territory. But now we could afford a good doctor, the very best one.
At first he didn’t want any part of it, he said that he didn’t have time. Maybe he thought that we couldn’t pay him. So I showed him my cash, I gave him a nice fat retainer, and he immediately changed his tune. He said that my little Rosinella had some health problem; he used long words that we couldn’t really understand. But I paid him and he put on a smile and told me: don’t you worry about a thing, Grazia’, everything will be fine.
Everything will be fine.
It’s just a matter of money, you know that, Commissa’? The difference, when it comes right down to it, is money. I’m a young man, but I figured it out early. I asked around before I put my Rosinella in that doctor’s hands. He’s good, they assured me; for that matter, if someone teaches at the university, he has to be good, right? The professor who teaches other doctors. The most educated one, the best one. Only he was expensive, very expensive. It was a matter of money, and I was willing to give him as much as he wanted.
He’d told his colleagues, he’d said it in our presence: Signora Graziani is one of my patients. I’m to see her, and no one else. Because I was giving him the money, and he couldn’t let me think that it would be the same if some other doctor, an ordinary doctor, tended to her. So if he wasn’t there when we came in, and this happened once or twice, they’d ask us to wait: the professor gave instructions that your wife is to be examined by him and nobody else.
The night that Rosinella began to bleed even though she hadn’t yet reached her due date, we rushed to the hospital. The nurses exchanged glances and kept silent. He was on duty but he wasn’t there, and no one knew where he might be. The custodian told us that his car wasn’t there, either. I asked the other doctor, a kid who knew nothing, and he told me: only the professor can examine his patients. That’s when I grabbed him by the lapels, lifted him into the air until we were eye to eye, and explained to him: well, right now, you’re the professor. And you’re going to examine my wife.
Meanwhile I’d sent my men all over the city, to find out where that piece of shit was hiding out. They went to his apartment, they woke up his wife who was fast asleep, but he wasn’t there. They went looking everywhere for him, but he was nowhere to be found. And the minutes were passing, and the minutes turned into hours. At last, word came down from Vomero that his car was parked outside one of the new apartment buildings. He had an unusual car, beautiful and expensive. Like I said, it’s a matter of money.
By the time they brought him in, with his shirt buttoned all wrong, his tie undone, two of my men holding him by the arm, Rosinella was white as a sheet and no longer answered when I called her. The young doctor didn’t know what he was doing, he was crying; Professor, Professor, the hemorrhage was just too vast, he kept saying. The man went and closed the door behind him, shutting himself up with Rosinella. Then we heard a noise.
It was the baby girl, and she was crying.
He came out with a nurse: she was holding the baby in her arms, hiding behind her as if she were a shield. He didn’t have the courage to look me in the eye. He was trembling.
My mother took the baby. It took seven people, between hospital staff and my own men, to pull me off him. Seven.
I swore an oath, that’s right. I swore an oath that I’d see the color of his blood, that I’d kill him with these hands of mine, the way he’d killed me, because instead of being where he was supposed to be, he’d been up in Vomero with his whore. While Rosinella was dying.
I swore it on Mamma Schiavona, our Madonna. You know her, Commissa’? She’s the patron saint of souls in purgatory, the souls that have to try to save themselves from damnation. And just as it’s true that Saturday is her feast day, it’s true that my soul was the most damned of them all.
For two days, I didn’t want to even look at the little girl. I thought that in the end she was the one who’d killed my Rosinella. And I locked myself in my room. That’s what a Wolf does, you know, when it’s fatally wounded, it hides. It stays out of sight, when it’s dying.
Then I came out of my room, and she was in my mother’s arms and she was crying and crying. She wouldn’t stop crying. I went over to her, I touched her, and she didn’t cry again. Since that moment, whenever I come near her, she stops crying.
And she’s the spitting image of her mamma, you know, Commissa’. The absolute spitting image.
But I’d sworn an oath. And when someone like me swears an oath, Commissa’, he has to keep it.
I thought to myself: I’ll wait a few days. Better not to go out, otherwise the baby girl will start crying again, and then she’ll never stop.
Then, a week or two later, one of my men came to see me. Peppi’, he said, have you heard the news? That piece of shit fell and was killed, he fell out his own window. You need to run, everyone will assume it was you, because of that oath you swore.
Maybe, Commissa’, maybe I should have been happy to hear he was dead. Or maybe I really should have run away: no one believes people like us, the souls in purgatory. We alone believe each other. But there was the baby girl, Commissa’. You know, the minute I move away from her, she starts crying again.
No, it wasn’t me. Men like me, if they’re going to do something like that, they do it in broad daylight, not by night, not in secret.
And I wouldn’t have thrown him out of a window down onto the pavement. No, I wanted to look him in the eyes while I gutted him like a fish, making sure that it took him an hour to die, drop after drop of blood, just as my little Rosinella died at his hands. I wouldn’t have killed him like that, with one quick shove.
Someone killed him, no doubt about it. Men like him don’t kill themselves, because they possess neither honor nor conscience. To kill yourself takes pride, or despair. And he had neither.
That’s right, Commissa’, I should have killed him myself. I’d sworn an oath. And maybe I would have done it, as soon as I was done with this baby girl who starts crying as soon as I step away. Or maybe I wouldn’t, because in the past few days I’ve started to wonder if it’s Rosinella making her do it, just to keep me at home. And I was at home, that night, with my mother and the baby girl. All the family that’s left to me.
I should have killed him myself.
But I didn’t.
XLVI
Maione glared grimly at the young man leaning against the wall at the mouth of the vicolo.
“It’s like an army, just think about it, Commissa’. Look over there, a sentinel standing guard on the road that leads to headquarters. I’d arrest them for that fact alone.”
“Yes, but the fact that they’re criminals doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to assume they’re guilty of everything. Graziani struck me as a young man in the throes of an enormous personal loss.”
“Sure, Commissa’, whatever you say, but he had sworn in front of a crowd of eyewitnesses to murder the professor. And a few weeks later, the professor was murdered, and he has no alibi.”
Ricciardi corrected him: “He was home with his family. The same alibi as the professor’s son and hundreds of thousands of other people who live in this city, including you and me. And it was nighttime. We can’t base things merely on the existence or absence of an alibi.”
Maione defended his thesis: “Commissa’, if a criminal swears that he’s going to murder someone and that someone is murder
ed, I’m inclined to believe that the criminal kept his vow, and that’s that. And don’t let’s forget that I can always have one of my men do the deed while I stay at home, nice and comfortable, don’t you think?”
“No, in that case, I’d go out and mingle with the crowds, make sure everybody saw me, and then I’d have a real alibi, don’t you think?”
Maione shook his head: “Well, this isn’t getting us anywhere. How are we going to proceed now?”
“The way we always do: we’ll keep asking questions and hope either that we can figure something out, or that someone says something unintentionally revealing. We just have to grope in the dark, Raffaele, and wait for something we don’t know to stick in our minds.”
They’d reached the apartment house where Iovine had lived. Ines, the concierge, was delivering a speech to a smaller crowd than she’d had the first time: two housekeepers and a tradesman who were listening to her, mouths agape: “. . . and that means someone pushed him for sure, he didn’t jump the way they thought at first. I hear that the police . . .”
Maione came up behind her and coughed. The woman started and her audience scattered, only to stop to peer from behind the corner at the epic unfolding of events, an appropriately exaggerated account of which would later be spread around the neighborhood.
“Oh, Brigadie’, you gave me a fright. Buongiorno.”
“So tell us, Signo’, now you’re certain someone pushed him? And just what are the police doing now? Tell us about it too, maybe we’ll learn something.”
“No, Brigadie’, what are you trying to say? I’d never dare to say such a thing! It’s just that the general hospital’s charge nurse, who I’ve known for many years, came to see the poor widow, and the charge nurse confided in me that she had learned from the assistant the same thing that you found out from the doctor at Pellegrini Hospital, namely that maybe, and I repeat, just maybe, someone threw the professor out the window. And this was confirmed by the custodian of the general hospital, who saw one of you—now, I couldn’t say which because he didn’t tell me—even go to the scene of the crime late at night, at the same hour it happened, to see, and . . .”
The Bottom of Your Heart Page 25