The boy started, then, in a low voice, he said: “He was . . . contented. Contented. He smiled. He never smiled, but for the past few days he’d been smiling a lot. He even whistled a little tune, and when had he ever done that before? It almost scared me.”
Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a baffled glance. A man planning suicide who whistles a tune and smiles.
“And he didn’t say anything to you? Not even, I don’t know, something about work, or . . .”
The young man shrugged: “Work, I guess that was the one strange thing: he was turning down jobs.”
Maione mopped his brow: “What do you mean?”
“That people would come to have jewelry made, or shopkeepers from Via Toledo, and he wouldn’t even let them in the door. If they insisted, he’d say: no, I can’t right now, I’m busy, come back next month. He’d never done that before; he was capable of staying all night to get more work. But now he was turning people away.”
Ricciardi grew alert: “But what was he doing, instead of working? Did he receive visitors, or go out on calls, or . . .”
“No, no. He kept working, and how. He was making something. Something . . . something for himself. I wasn’t even allowed to see it, he made me stand in the doorway, with my back to him. He paid me just the same, to stand there not doing anything, and to tell people not to come in.”
The photographer arrived, almost at a run, dripping with sweat: “Excuse me . . . Is this the place? Mamma mia, it’s so hot this morning, Brigadie’.”
Maione pointed to the corpse, and the photographer, out of breath, arranged his equipment and set up the tripod.
“I’d like to know where people find the energy in this heat to murder each other.”
Maione hushed him with a brusque gesture, and asked the young man: “And you, this thing he was working on, you have no idea what it was?”
“He kept it wrapped in a piece of dark cloth, in the safe. Only once I was safely standing at the door to keep people out, would he go get it. I . . . I’ve never seen it.”
Ricciardi picked up on the hesitation and swooped in: “And I think you have seen it. Be careful, this is a murder investigation: if you leave anything out you could wind up in some very hot water.”
Sergio was a good boy trying to learn a trade; he was eager, and he’d succeeded in landing a berth with the best craftsman of them all, even if Mastro Nicola had a very particular personality. He didn’t want to get in trouble, and that commissario with the strange eyes made him uneasy.
The photographer’s flashes lit up the workshop at intervals.
The boy made up his mind to answer.
“Once, Donna Concetta, the lady who stays with Mastro Nicola’s mamma . . . you know that the mamma isn’t well, that she’s not right in the head . . . came here to say that there were problems at home. Maestro Nicola was gone for five minutes. He told me: stay here and don’t move, don’t let anyone in. He wrapped his work in the cloth and placed it in the safe, but he was in such a hurry he forgot to lock it, Donna Concetta was yelling, the whole vicolo came out to see what has happening . . . and I . . .”
Maione finished his sentence: “And you went and took a look. Is that right?”
The boy looked at him with a guilty expression: “Yes, Brigadie’. I couldn’t resist. I was too curious, he’d never hidden his work from me before. Never.”
Ricciardi waited; then he asked: “Well? What was it?”
Sergio said, as if speaking to himself: “He was skillful, my old master. The most skillful man around. Sometimes goldsmiths who were more famous than him, late at night, when there was no one around to see, would come here and give him their commissions, and they’d pay him extra not to tell anyone. If you only knew how much of the jewelry now being worn by the finest ladies of the city—women convinced that they’re wearing the handiwork of the grand jewelers of Via Toledo—was actually made right here, in this little workshop, by my master.”
The photographer murmured that he was done, gathered up his equipment, and left. From the Incurabili Hospital a young physician and two morgue attendants arrived. Maione pointed to the corpse and told them to go ahead.
Ricciardi gestured for Sergio to go on.
“But the thing he was best at was traditional objects. They’re done less nowadays, because people don’t have the money, but there was a time, Commissa’, when the borgo made its living from them. And that’s when he learned the profession, when these things were still being made.”
Ricciardi asked: “What do you mean by traditional objects? What sort of things was Coviello best at?”
The young man looked up and met Ricciardi’s gaze; to his surprise, the commissario realized that the apprentice was weeping.
“At ex-votos, Commissa’. Mastro Nicola was making an ex-voto.”
LVIII
Dear Papà,
the festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is drawing near. I can just imagine how busy it’s getting in the streets of the city, how everyone is preparing for the festival, both the strolling vendors and the men and women who have to see to the various installations. Do you remember, dear papà, when I was just a little girl and you took me to the festival? You’d let me ride on your shoulders, and I felt like a queen being carried in triumph!
In the island’s tranquility, where I can listen to the birds singing during the day and the crickets chirping at night, there are times when I miss the hubbub of the city; but I know that once I return, once I’m back amidst the constant noise that comes in from the street even with the windows closed, the cries of the vendors, the screaming fights in neighboring apartments, the singing, I’ll look back on this silence with nostalgia. We’re never satisfied are we, dear papà? We’re always yearning for something else.
My heart is the same way. How can it be, dear papà, that sorrow and suffering, in the end, keep us company? How can it be that I even miss suffering, tears in my pillow at night, loneliness and the fear of the future?
And how can it be, on the other hand, that the prospect of a serene, ordinary life, with a home, children of my own, and a loving man at my side can somehow frighten me so?
Manfred, the German officer I was telling you about, has asked for a date. He wants to see me alone, at night, on Friday. He says that he knows a place, here on the island, where when the weather is fine you can see the fireworks as well as if you’re sitting on a balcony on the piazza. And he says that he wants to show me the picture he’s painting, because by Friday it will be done.
He says that he wants to talk to me. That there’s something he must say.
You know, dear papà, this date fills me with anxiety. Manfred is a lovely person, sensitive, and I know that he’d never hurt me. He has told me many things about his homeland and his family; and he’s told me that in the past few days, during the wonderful summer he’s spent on this island, he has realized that life is too important, you can’t let it flow past like this, empty and sad, you need to fill it with wonderful things, first and foremost, love. And family. And children.
He was talking about himself. But to my ears he was talking about me.
I’m afraid that I know exactly what he’ll say to me, dear papà, and I’m terrified at the thought. Because I don’t know what my poor heart will want to answer him. I want to live, dear papà; and I want to be happy. But I know what I have in my heart.
Yours,
Enrica
Giulio Colombo took off his eyeglasses and placed them on the café table in Gambrinus, next to his empty demitasse. He massaged his forehead with his fingers, in a gesture that came to him when he was concentrating or confused. Right now, he was both.
Enrica was a strong-minded girl. She always had been, since she was a child. Kind, quiet, she never raised her voice, she never objected, she stayed calm and never allowed herself to venture into drawn-out, fruitless arguments, but she
never showed indecision. And yet what emerged from this last letter were worry and uncertainty.
Even though it was hard for a father to admit, by now his daughter was a grown woman and no longer a little girl, and he ought to rejoice in the fact that she was being courted; all the more so since the man courting her, as she made clear in her own descriptions, had every quality essential to capturing her interest: he was handsome, mature but not old, and had an important position. And, most of all, he showed genuine feelings for her, to the point that he spoke to her of an emptiness in his life to be filled, of family. What more could he ask for?
Instead—and this was the point, the reason for the headache that Giulio felt coming on—Enrica was worried and unhappy. As if she were being marched to her death.
He tried to put himself in his daughter’s place. The similarity, the profound resemblance that had always tied them together allowed them to understand each other at a glance. He need only read between the lines.
He picked up Enrica’s letter. What was really written in it? What had his daughter been trying to tell him, when she wrote him about that appointment?
Giulio knew that he belonged to another generation, and that he could not entirely understand the things that young people were experiencing these days. Politics and society were changing faster than he could imagine. He wasn’t even sixty years old, and already he felt like an old man.
He worried about his children, his young grandchild, for the times he was afraid they were going to have to live in; he could hear once again the rattling of sabers, less than twenty years after the end of a war that had taken hundreds of thousands of lives and had brought an entire continent to its knees. It seemed as if all that had been forgotten, and once again he heard talk of grandeur and destiny, of a brilliant future and the coming struggle. Much of the happiness that young people would manage to win for themselves and, more importantly, much of the unhappiness that would befall them, was entirely out of their control; nor was it within the control of the generation that preceded them. It wouldn’t, other words, be controlled by men like him.
He tried to imagine his Enrica married to a German; in a foreign land, perhaps safe from the terrible winds of war that he was reading about in the evening newspaper, or hearing about in the proclamations on the radio. Far from a place where all it took was the whisper of an informant, or an anonymous note, to send someone into internal exile or get them beaten bloody and thrown into prison. Far away, married to a well respected, beloved officer of the German army. Far away, and safe.
Or maybe not. Maybe in the elections that, he had read, would be held at the end of that sweltering July, Germany too would become an unsafe place. And Enrica would be trapped there, unable even to take refuge in the arms of her papà.
But he was certain, knowing her as he did, that Enrica didn’t even consider the problem. He was certain that his little girl was strong enough to take on any challenge, once she’d made up her mind. And that was exactly the point: making up her mind. Choosing between love, the kind that grabs you by the guts whether or not it has a future, and reason, the faculty that helps you to distinguish between what’s better and what’s worse.
He had no doubts as to what his wife would say if he confided the question to her: she’d celebrate, delighted that finally her greatest source of concern, her eldest daughter, still unmarried at the age of twenty-five or close to it, had found an opportunity to settle down. That was why Enrica had said nothing about it in her official letters, those playful, cheerful letters that she sent home. That was why the tone of the letters that she sent to him at the shop was so very different.
Giulio Colombo ordered another espresso, even though he was well aware that this was his third and that he ought to be heading back to the shop, at that hour probably packed with customers asking for him. He looked at the letter, a sheet of paper, harmless enough in appearance, on the café table in Gambrinus. What were you really trying to tell me, my darling? What’s written between the lines of your letter?
Suddenly it was painfully clear to him what Enrica had been asking, when she wrote about that Friday appointment with Manfred.
It was a plea for help.
LIX
Ricciardi stared at Nicola Coviello’s apprentice in surprise: “Ex-voto? What do you mean, an ex-voto?
“Yes, Commissa’. What do you call them? Those objects that you donate to the church, dedicated to saints, for a grace received or in order to ask for one.”
Maione broke in: “The commissario knows perfectly well what ex-votos are. He wants to know what kind of ex-voto.”
Sergio lowered his voice, tense, as if anxious not to let his boss overhear him. The morgue attendants had untied the corpse from the rafter and laid it on the floor, where the physician was performing a rapid examination. The noises made the boy jump, though he continued to obstinately face the wall, so he wouldn’t have to look.
“I saw that he’d just started working on the engravings, Commissa’. But it was very beautiful. He . . . he had a kind of magic in his hands. There was no one else like him.”
Ricciardi was starting to run out of patience: “Yes, but what was it? What did it depict, what was it shaped like?”
“A heart, Commissa’. It was a heart with a flame over it, big, and all in solid gold. It must have been worth a lot of money.”
An object of great value, and a man in a great mood who had killed himself after being the last person to see a murder victim alive. The picture was getting complicated.
Maione asked: “Who has the key to the safe now?”
“I don’t know, now. He . . . he kept the keys to everything, to the shop, the safe, and his apartment, in his pocket, hooked with a fob chain to his waistcoat pocket. They were always on him. I didn’t check to see if . . . if he still has them.”
Maione and Ricciardi turned to look at the corpse, which the young physician was still examining. The brigadier went over to him: “Dotto’, forgive me: can I ask if you’re almost done?”
The young man got to his feet, adjusted the gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and cleared his throat. He was thin, looked younger than thirty, and the center part in his hair was so perfect it seemed it had been drawn with a ruler.
“It’s certainly a suicide, Brigadie’. There are no signs of a fight, nor are there contusions of any kind. The rope seems to be the kind used to moor boats, it was neither greased nor soaped, so it jammed, and the poor man died of suffocation. Not a nice death. He hauled himself up by himself, using his own bare hands, which show marks from his grip on the rope: he must have had exceptionally powerful arms. Sure, he was light, skinny as he was, but still, it took considerable strength. In any case, based on the stiffness of the corpse and the hypostatic stains, I would say that death took place three or four hours ago, at most.”
Ricciardi asked: “Doctor, do you see any signs of disease or illness? Anything that might have led him to . . .”
“. . . to actually kill himself? No, Commissa’, I really don’t think so. Certainly a quick glance at these deformities, his kyphosis, suggests his life can’t have been easy, but I don’t think he was suffering from any extreme pain. He was healthy. I’ll be able to tell you more after the autopsy, of course.”
Maione had gone over to take a look at the clothing: “Ah, here they are, the keys. Just like the boy told us.”
He picked them up and shook them so they jangled. The apprentice jumped and put both hands on his face. Ricciardi nodded, and Maione headed over to the heavy safe in the corner of the room. He opened the massive door and bent over to peer inside. Then he turned around: “Nothing, Commissa’. There are just a couple of empty boxes, some notes with columns of numbers, and that’s all.”
Ricciardi looked at the boy: “When did you last see him working on that object?”
“Last night, when I left. I think he must have been putting the finis
hing touches on it: there were certain noises he made, clucking noises, whenever he was putting the finishing touches on something, Commissa’.”
“And he was cheerful, you said.”
“And how. I’d never seen him like that.”
There was just no figuring it out. Who had ordered the object from Coviello? And when had Coviello delivered it? Was there a connection to Iovine’s death? And most important of all, why did the goldsmith kill himself, taking all the answers with him to the grave?
The corpse was loaded into a wooden casket and then into the morgue’s van, under the curious eyes of the many windows overlooking the vicolo, as well as of Donna Enza and Donna Amalia, those watchful sentinels. Ricciardi touched the apprentice’s shoulder: “He’s gone. You can turn around now. I’d like you to examine the workshop carefully and tell me if there’s anything there now that wasn’t there before, or if anything that should be there is missing, aside from the ex-voto we were discussing.”
The young man slowly turned around. His eyes went immediately to the rafter at the center of the ceiling, from which his employer had hanged himself. Perhaps at that moment, thought Ricciardi, the boy was able to picture the man as, in the dim light, he grabbed the rope, hoisted himself up, and slipped his head through the noose, only to let himself drop; and perhaps he felt pity for that deformed body, those powerful, sensitive hands, that silent, grieving soul.
The apprentice began to cry. Maione coughed, touched. Ricciardi, saddened, allowed himself a glance at the shadow in the corner that kept repeating, from the mouth with its bulging black tongue and the rivulet of red drool: the bottom of your heart.
But whose heart?
After blowing his nose on his sleeve, the boy began exploring the workshop. He moved objects aside, lifted benches and stools, checked racks on the wall.
Then he came to a stop behind the workbench, in the exact spot where Coviello sat when he was working, in the cone of light from the oil lamp. He reached out a hand, then drew it back. Then, he pointed with a trembling finger: “Right here, Commissa’. Here. This wasn’t here, I’m sure of it.”
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