The Bottom of Your Heart

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  But this time it was Maione who was seeing guilty parties everywhere. He saw Dr. Ruspo, lying at death’s door, as guilty by proxy, thanks to his gargantuan son. He saw the Wolf as guilty, either directly or thanks to any one of the numerous members of his small criminal army. He even assigned guilt, before ever meeting and questioning him, to the mythical fiancé of Sisinella, the young prostitute whom Iovine had transformed into a wealthy signorina in Vomero. In fact, Maione and Ricciardi had agreed to return to Vomero the following day to learn more about Signor Salvatore Cortese, aka Tore ’o Pianino.

  That case had turned him glum. Or maybe it was him, not the murder. He was transferring his uneasiness into his work.

  Walking along, grim and grumpy, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement, indifferent to all those who called out greetings or doffed their caps and then turned away, puzzled by his failure to reply, Maione thought to himself: it must be the heat. All big men suffer from the heat, right? They sweat, they snort, they pant. And big men who are policemen, men who have to walk the city in uniforms that become as heavy as suits of armor, suffer even worse. That must be what’s putting me in this bad mood, he told himself.

  Or not.

  Perhaps it’s this thought of Lucia that’s poisoning my soul and making me see evil everywhere.

  Maione was torn. One part of his soul rejected the thought that his wife might betray him; after so many years of living together, after so many moments of happiness and terrible despair, after the challenges they’d faced and overcome together, he couldn’t bring himself to imagine her in the arms of another man.

  With a smaller—and more treacherous—part of his soul, though, he had no difficulty imagining it at all. Lucia was so pretty, and still so young in spite of the children, the hard work, the grief, and the worry; no one who met her could help but desire her, he told himself. That same treacherous part of his soul chimed in: now take a look at yourself and compare. You’re fat, old, covered with hair everywhere except where it ought to be, that is, on the top of your head; you’re awkward and never well dressed, not even when you’re wearing your Sunday best; uncouth and a bit of an oaf, constantly worrying about your job, which you can’t seem to forget even when you’re home; and you can never manage to make conversation about anything but your children and how to make ends meet. What’s more, you’re poor, and no matter how hard you work, you can’t seem to come up with enough money for a bigger apartment. Why would a woman like Lucia, who could have any man she wants, whose smile outshines the sun, who has the sky and the sea in her eyes, who seems to dance even when she just walks, why should a woman like that want to stay with you?

  That’s what the smaller, more treacherous part of his soul had been murmuring into Maione’s ear since the day he’d seen Lucia emerge from that damned building on Via Toledo. The same building he was standing in front of right now, concealed in the half-light of an atrium, after silencing and waving away with sharp and imperious gestures the doorman who had approached him to ask what it was he wanted.

  Maione had a gift which had helped him immensely in his profession. He blended in. Like that species of lizard he could never remember the name of and that he’d seen in one of his children’s schoolbooks, he took on the color of his background and turned invisible. He was the first to realize how strange it was: a big strapping man who stood six feet three inches tall and weighed in at over 240 pounds, with hands like spades and enormous feet, to say nothing of the fact he was in police uniform. And yet, whenever the brigadier wanted, people paid no more attention to him than they did to a vendor’s stall, the vendor himself, a beggar, or the statue of a king on horseback. When he followed a person, that person remained unaware of him, even if the two of them were otherwise alone on the street—and this was certainly not the case today, since Via Toledo was bustling.

  Maione boasted proudly of that skill. He attributed it to the fact that he was perfectly in tune with his city, as if the city were a concert and he a note played by a musical instrument. He believed that he was so highly adaptable to his surroundings that he stood out no more than the flaking building fronts or the bollards blocking the sidewalks. And it seemed almost a violation of professional ethics to use such a skill for his own personal ends—on the order of pulling his regulation pistol during a fight in a tavern. But the small, treacherous part of him whispered that this ability could come in handy in eliminating any last lingering doubt, in convincing himself that his eyes, quite simply, had deceived him.

  Lucia stepped out of the entrance of the building across the way. This time, there could be no doubt about it. That was her, just a few yards away from Maione, in her black dress, as beautiful as ever; the brigadier could see her face was lined with weariness, but her eyes sparkled with all the mischievous glee of a little girl who’s stolen the jam jar. The expression she always had right after making love.

  The thought hit him like a carriage pulled by a runaway horse. Where the devil was Lucia going, his Lucia? In what damned apartment in that damned building?

  His masculine instinct tempted him to leap out of the shadows and demand an explanation. But Maione also possessed a policeman’s instincts. He let her walk past him. He could have reached out his hand and grabbed her by the arm, made her turn around and look him in the eye; he could have fleetingly caressed the hair stuck to the sweaty back of her neck, under the scarf covering her head.

  He stayed where he was, gray and motionless as a pillar. He watched her stride past briskly and vanish into the vicolo. Every so often the doorman shot him a worried glance as he swept the courtyard. He was sweating and didn’t bother to wipe away the drops that slowly oozed down from his cap, streaked his face, and leaked into his collar.

  He waited.

  After ten minutes or so, there he was.

  Elegant, fresh as a rose, and intolerably slender, a man emerged from the same front door through which Lucia had just left. He was wearing a bow tie and a white straw hat with a black satin band; his handlebar mustache was impeccably groomed, and he wore an off-white linen suit and a pair of two-tone shoes. He carried a slim walking stick whose golden handgrip reflected the rays of the setting sun.

  Ferdinando Pianese, aka Fefè, thought Maione. And if a thought could ever have blasted anyone off the face of the earth, he was the ideal candidate. A useless dandy with a passion for blondes.

  The man waved a hand nonchalantly in the direction of Fanelli the doorman who, in his new role as a secret police informant, studied him with malevolent interest. Then Pianese lit a cigarette and with a smile strolled off on his walk. Maione had to stifle the savage impulse to lunge at his neck, rip the flesh off him with his teeth, and feast on his innards.

  The appearance of Lucia followed by that damned Pianese gave Maione’s heart an unwished-for confirmation. The small, perfidious part of him that argued for Lucia’s treachery was dancing gleefully, delighted to have been proved right. Still, the remaining rationality imposed upon him by his investigator’s mind—and his desperate desire to be proved wrong—demanded further digging.

  He decided that he would say nothing to his wife. That he’d withstand the temptation to question her, to delve into any contradictions he might uncover. He would wait and let her give herself away. In the meantime, he’d do his best to carry on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary.

  It would take a great effort of will, so he decided to spend the next hour trying to force it upon himself, and headed off for the tavern. A cold glass of white wine would help.

  L

  The second trip up to Vomero, the following morning, took place in silence.

  Ricciardi had just had a sleepless night, half of it spent at Rosa’s bedside, replacing Nelide, whom he’d grimly ordered to go get some rest, and half back home, in a wakeful sleep infested by the phantoms of the future.

  Modo was really outdoing himself. Ricciardi would never be able to t
hank him enough. The doctor was worried about the onset of pulmonary complications and cardiac arrhythmias; he checked on Rosa practically every hour, and the expression on his face was increasingly tense, no matter how hard he tried to conceal it. He’d explained that feeding was being done by enema rather than intravenously, because he wanted to avoid subjecting her circulatory system to undue strain.

  When he arrived at the hospital, the commissario was told that a woman had come to visit Rosa. In his heart, Ricciardi had secretly hoped that it had been Enrica and that she had learned, through some obscure channels, from a tradesman, from the apartment house’s custodian, from anyone, in other words, about what had happened to his tata. It would have warmed his heart to know that the two women were together, and he would have been relieved and happy to see Enrica again.

  But Livia had been the visitor; Ricciardi had figured that out from the description given by Nelide: Bella ’nchiazza e ’ncasa sciazza, beautiful on the street and sloppy at home, she’d murmured with a smirk. Rosa must have had time to express her opinion of the widow Vezzi, who had brought a useless and decorative bouquet of flowers that the young woman, the minute Livia left, had put in a vase at the foot of the statue of the Madonna, out in the corridor.

  Enrica wasn’t there. Enrica had left. He’d never see her again.

  These absences—his mother, Rosa, Enrica—had populated the remainder of Ricciardi’s night; never had dawn been more welcome.

  Maione hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep all night either, though he had put on a passable imitation of a slumbering brigadier. His mind roamed rapidly through images he never would have wanted to entertain, bedrooms and boudoirs of unknown apartment houses, expensive restaurants and deluxe cafés that he could never afford to enter. When he finally did manage to drop off for a few seconds, he immediately jerked back awake, convinced that he’d heard his wife talking in her sleep, and he had lain there in that terrible state of doubt for the rest of the time to which the night condemned him.

  And so a grim-faced brigadier and an introspective commissario were ready to launch themselves with relief into the distraction of their investigation. They reached Vomero early in the morning and went straight to the address they knew well by now. This time the doorman greeted them with proper deference and went on watering the plants in the courtyard, leaving them free to walk up to the second floor and knock on the door.

  Teresa Luongo, aka Sisinella, came to the door in a nightgown, with the face of someone who’d been rousted out of a deep sleep. Ricciardi had to admit that, if it’s true that the one sure way to judge a woman’s beauty is to see her when she’s just woken up, no makeup on, her hair unbrushed, well, then, this was a genuinely pretty girl. She looked even younger than her age, her cheeks reddened from sleep, her lips pouty, one hand holding her nightgown closed over her firm, ample bosom, her black hair crowning her broad forehead and her sleepy blue eyes.

  “But . . . what do you want? What time is it?”

  Maione reacted as if the girl had just personally insulted him: “Girlie, it’s the time of day when people with honest jobs have already been at work for quite a while. Let us in, because we have more questions to ask you.”

  From the outset, the relationship between Sisinella and Maione had been steeped in hostility. The girl had worked in a nonregulation brothel, and she’d learned at her own expense just how cruel policemen could be and how frequently she and her fellow working girls were forced to ply their trade free of charge in order to be left alone. The brigadier, on the other hand, thought that selling one’s body was an immoral shortcut to a prosperity that was otherwise unattainable, and that the dignified thing to do was to work as a housekeeper or scullery maid, doing backbreaking labor for a relative pittance. The two were born enemies, they knew it and they recognized each other at first sight. They displayed their rancor in two different ways: the policeman by using the disrespectful informal form of address, the girl with her insolent defiance.

  The young woman turned and went back inside, leaving the door open behind her but without bothering to ask them in. Ricciardi followed her, ignoring Maione’s guttural muttering. They found her sitting in an armchair, legs crossed and bare, lighting a cigarette.

  The brigadier spoke to her in a sarcastic tone: “Are we done playing the great lady leading the life of leisure, eh? I hope so. But everyone according to his nature.”

  Sisinella insolently blew a column of cigarette smoke in his direction: “Don’t start crowing victory, Brigadie’. I’m not going back to being a whore. If I have to starve to death, I’m not going back to that bordello.”

  Maione wasn’t willing to go easy on her: “Oh, no? So where are you going to go live? In your opinion, when the professor’s widow learns about this little love nest, you think she’s going to let you keep it?”

  “Oh, sure, because a poor girl, if she’s even a bit pretty, can’t be anything but a whore. But that’s not how it is. I have a man, understood? A man. And he loves me, and he’ll support me with the work that he does. I knew that all this wasn’t going to last. I knew that and I put a little something aside for when it ended. I’ll sell all the gifts Tullio gave me. By the way, Commissa’,” she said to Ricciardi, addressing him in a way that made clear she had misgivings about his underling but trusted the commissario, “Tullio mentioned a surprise that was going to leave me breathless. You haven’t found anything, have you? He kept the gifts he had for me in his office, so his wife wouldn’t stumble upon them.”

  Ricciardi nodded: “Maybe so, Signorina, but they’re items that have to do with the investigation, and we can’t dispose of them freely.”

  “But once the investigation is finished, can I have my gift?”

  Maione shook his head decisively: “No, you can’t have it. The victim’s personal effects will all go to the family, as is only fair. Because the family has a right to them, and an illicit lover doesn’t.”

  Ricciardi shot the brigadier a disapproving glare. He couldn’t understand such hostility toward a young woman who, apart from this illicit relationship, had done nothing wrong; what’s worse, that attitude might easily push Sisinella to shut down, which would only undermine their investigation. Maione’s personal issues were starting to affect his work, and that was serious.

  “The brigadier has a point, Signorina. Even if the victim’s intention had been to give you a gift, it’s quite unlikely that you’ll ever lay hands on it. Still, we need to get some other information from you. Are you willing to answer our questions?”

  Sisinella seemed touched by Ricciardi’s courtesy and nodded, though not without giving Maione an angry sidelong glare.

  The commissario went on: “The professor spent his free time with you; as much as he was able, anyway. He was with you, we believe, roughly a month ago, when some men came to get him for . . .”

  “Of course he was, Commissa’, I remember that night. We were . . . we were fast asleep, when we heard a car braking and right after that the sound of shouting in the courtyard. They’d woken up Firmino, the doorman, and were asking him where Tullio was. Not even a minute later, just enough time to throw something on, they started pounding on my door: open up! they were shouting, open up! I unlocked the door and they knocked me aside; two of them, ugly, dirty hooligans, grabbed poor Tullio by the shoulders and marched him off.”

  Maione broke in: “Do you remember if they explained who they were and on whose behalf they had come?”

  “No, no. They kept insulting him, they told him that if anything happened it would go all the worse for him, that kind of thing. He told me over and over to stay calm, not to get upset. Two or three days later he came back, relaxed, as if nothing had happened, and that was the end of that.”

  Ricciardi asked: “And you didn’t ask him what had happened?”

  “Of course I asked him, but he just told me: one of my patients wasn’t well, nothing important. Then, ten d
ays or so later, he wanted to know whether anyone had come around bothering me, but no one had.”

  The details matched up with what the Wolf had told them; and the professor’s display of nonchalance might have just been because he wanted to keep the girl from worrying.

  Ricciardi said: “Signorina, I know that you’re not going to be happy about this, but we also need to talk to your boyfriend: it’s crucial to our investigation.”

  Sisinella looked startled: “But why? What has he done? Commissa’, he has nothing to do with all this. And after all, he never even met Tullio or saw him, I don’t see what . . .”

  Maione took a step forward, menacingly: “Hey, sweetheart, watch out how you talk, understood? We can toss you into jail, you and him both, and keep you there as long as we like. Don’t you dare try to interfere with who we choose to talk to!”

  Ricciardi grabbed his arm gently: “Raffaele, calm down now. Let me do the talking, please.”

  He’d used a gentle tone of voice, but it had the desired effect. Maione quieted down, sighed, and said to him, without once taking his eyes off Sisinella: “Sorry, Commissa’. You’re right. I let my anger get the better of me. But you, girlie, watch your step!”

  The girl hissed defiantly: “You don’t scare me, Brigadie’. You don’t scare me. I’ve known people who would gut you like a fish for the fun of the thing, so just imagine how scared I am of you.”

  Ricciardi felt he needed to intervene again.

  “Signorina, if we have made up our minds to track down a person—whose first and last name we know, by the way—we can look for him by questioning people on the street. That would do your sweetheart far more damage than if you helped us to get in touch with him directly. We only want to talk to him, that’s all. It’s up to you: all you can do is cause us some minor inconvenience and a slight waste of our time.”