Vipers

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Ricciardi thought of the blond hairs on the pillow that had smothered Viper, identical to the hair of the man before him.

  “What were you waiting for, Coppola?”

  “I had found the love of my life again, Commissa’. The only woman I wanted by my side, the companion I’d chosen when I was still just a child. In your opinion, what else could I have wanted? I’d asked her to marry me. To leave that job, that despicable place, and to come live with me and be the queen of my home, to take the place that was waiting for her.”

  “When did you ask her to marry you? And what was her answer?”

  Coppola ran a hand through his hair, the color of ripe wheat.

  “I asked her many times, over the past few months. We talked it over, we talked it about it a lot. She was always vague, she said that by now everyone knew what work she’d been doing these past few years, that she would have brought me shame, thrown it in my face, that everyone would laugh at us. I told her that for her I’d be willing to move to a new city, that we could move somewhere no one knew us; I’d have taken her son with me, and I’d have raised him as my own. I’d talked her into it, I know that she’d made up her mind to marry me. Just yesterday, she’d asked me for a few more hours before making a definitive decision.”

  Ricciardi was listening carefully, attentive to every last detail.

  “So you’re saying that she had not yet given her answer. And what was your last conversation like? Did you argue?”

  Giuseppe replied with great vehemence:

  “No, absolutely not! She kissed me tenderly and told me: don’t you worry. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you what I’ve decided. But she was smiling, and I knew her very well: she’d decided to say yes, I’m telling you. She was going to marry me. That’s why they killed her, don’t you see? Precisely because she had decided to marry me and to leave that vile place!”

  He slumped back in his chair, overwrought, sobbing uncontrollably, both hands pressed to his face. His brother, wrapping his arms around his shoulders, turned to Ricciardi:

  “My brother is innocent, Commissa’. He’d never have lifted a finger against Rosaria. When she died, he died too; he’ll never have a wife now, never have a son or a future. It’s up to us, up to his family, to stand by him now.”

  Ricciardi rose to his feet.

  “All the same, I have to ask that you remain at our disposal and that you not leave the city without our authorization. For my part, I can only promise you that we will do our utmost, let me reiterate, our utmost, to make sure that the person murdered this young woman doesn’t get away with it.”

  Giuseppe stood up, still sobbing. His brother accompanied him to the door, his arms wrapped around him. Ricciardi was touched by that immense and desperate affection.

  “One last thing, Coppola: you said that you’ve had a nickname, ever since you were a boy. What nickname?”

  Giuseppe seemed incapable of answering for himself, and so it was his brother who stopped at the door and, half-turning to speak to Ricciardi, said:

  “We’re a family that has always relied on horses, Commissa’. Everyone calls my brother Peppe’ a Frusta—Joey the Whip.”

  XI

  The sudden rain caught Livia off guard. The night before she’d asked her housekeeper to put out a light flower-patterned dress, the skirt and jacket a color that contrasted nicely with her hair, bobbed short as was the fashion; but now that the weather smacked more of autumn than spring, it struck her as totally inappropriate.

  Not that she really felt much like going out at all, to tell the truth. Perhaps it would be better just to stay home and read a good book, to seek distraction without going in search of company or noise in a smoky café.

  She walked past the mirror and looked at herself: the silk dressing gown wrapped around her ample breasts and shapely hips. The food was just too good in that city: she wasn’t worried, at least not yet, but she’d have to be careful; otherwise she’d become fat and ugly, and she’d no longer have any real chance.

  Actually, she thought, running her hand through the hair whose cut she was still having a hard time getting used to, that was a fairly remote danger, at least to judge from the bouquets of flowers that arrived every day: men were as interested as they had always been in her. Married or single, soldiers or noblemen, government functionaries or Fascist gerarchi, men continued to proffer their chivalrous service to a woman who was certainly the most alluring of all the women who traveled in the best circles. But that mattered little to her. Very little.

  Why are you here, Livia Lucani, widow of the tenor Vezzi? she asked herself as she looked into the mirror. Shouldn’t you really be in Rome, the center of the world, cultivating important friendships and possibly landing a man of enormous prestige, to whom you can hitch your fortunes? Shouldn’t you, like every other woman in your condition, be thinking about your future in these difficult times?

  For that matter, the increasingly infrequent phone conversations with her girlfriends in the capital gave her a picture of things that struck her, from a distance, as intolerable. The race to get close to the new potentates, vulgar self-important individuals who shamelessly ventured into the realm of the ridiculous, was one that took no prisoners. To join the competition with dozens of silly geese to win her way into the bed of some drooling Fascist was certainly not the most appealing of prospects.

  In that case, what is it you want? How do you picture your life, Livia Lucani, the widow Vezzi, in a few years, when your charms are no longer quite so commanding, when men stop hanging on your every single word?

  She picked up a silver hairbrush and lazily began brushing her hair.

  The answer to her question materialized in the image of a pair of green eyes, clear as glass, watching her feverishly from the shadows.

  Ricciardi.

  He was the reason she’d come to this city; he was the objective she was aiming at, the goal she aimed to achieve, the summit she had to scale, the harbor at which she hoped to arrive.

  She couldn’t say why that man—not nearly as good-looking as so many others, less powerful, less wealthy than the men she could have had with a snap of her fingers—had captured her heart. But the thought of him caused her stomach to twist in a way it never had before, and would certainly never again. And she’d never be able to accept the idea that she couldn’t have him.

  The last few months hadn’t been easy. Since Christmas he had been trying to avoid any situation in which he was likely to run into her, and when they did come face to face, he looked at the floor. Obviously, something had happened.

  Still, she thought, looking at herself again in the mirror, it was hardly like her to lay down her arms. It wasn’t like her to give up. Why, just a few days ago her girlfriend Edda, the Duce’s daughter, had told her over the phone that, even though she did miss her, she had to confess that she could hear in her voice a new and captivating determination. And if Edda said so, then it must certainly be true.

  She observed her own face more closely, in search of wrinkles she did not find. She opened her jewel box and went in search of something lovely to put on: nothing made of yellow gold, her friends in Rome had told her; the color white is all the rage now: platinum and diamonds. In Paris no one’s wearing anything else.

  Once again, she leveled her dark eyes at the mirror and smiled, accentuating the dimple in her chin. Look out, Ricciardi: Livia Lucani, the widow Vezzi, isn’t giving up. No staying at home today, no reading books.

  Today, lunch at Gambrinus.

  XII

  Ricciardi headed for the little side room where by now the brigadier had arrived with Vincenzo Ventrone, the merchant of sacred art Lily had covered for.

  The conversation with Coppola and the sorrowful tale the man told had left him baffled. Other times in the past he’d questioned brutal murderers who had so successfully buried their own guilt that they had convinc
ed themselves that they hadn’t committed the crime, even when confronted with unmistakable evidence. And the younger brother’s declaration of innocence, when no one had accused Giuseppe of the murder, had sounded like an unasked-for justification dictated by a worried mind. And after all, this was a man who, by his own admission, had a certain familiarity with violence, and so the extent of his emotional involvement made it easy to imagine a disproportionate reaction if the woman had turned down his proposal of marriage.

  Then again, the man’s despair, his huge and overwhelming grief, could not have been concocted out of whole cloth. Giuseppe Coppola really had been madly in love with Maria Rosaria Cennamo, aka Viper.

  Maione was standing by the door: in his sleepy expression and his relaxed features, Ricciardi recognized the brigadier’s very particular way of disguising his anger.

  “Commissa’, buongiorno. The gentleman, here, is . . .”

  The gentleman shot to his feet as if he were spring-loaded. His rain-drenched jacket, his dripping hair, his sopping hat, and his sagging mustache all gave a touch of the ridiculous to the man’s angry expression, as he ground his teeth and bugged out his eyes.

  “At last a sentient being, at least I hope so: Signore, you owe me not one but a great many explanations. A brute of a uniformed policeman knocks at dawn on the door of a more than respectable family, a family with friends, let me make this perfectly clear, in very high places, and this oversized gorilla practically yanks me out of my bed where, incidentally, I lie quite unwell, and he conveys me by force, I insist: by force! and where? Where? No less than to police headquarters! Like some common two-bit street criminal, like some robber or pickpocket, like a burglar, like an . . .”

  Ricciardi, who stood, arms folded across his chest, waiting for the tirade to run out of steam, chose this moment of indecisiveness to intervene.

  “. . . like an individual who is about to be indicted for gross insult of an officer of the law and taken to a cell.”

  The phrase, uttered in a soft, almost inaudible voice, had the effect of a further spray of cold water on Vincenzo Ventrone, proprietor of the award-winning company of the same name.

  The man—short, smartly dressed, and in his early fifties—lost his swagger.

  “I, I . . . but how . . . I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect to anyone, but surely you understand that . . . in other words, a poor citizen is asleep in his bed on a rainy morning, getting over the flu . . . and all of a sudden he’s in police headquarters, talking to . . . with whom do I have the honor of speaking, Signore?”

  In the face of this hasty about-face, Ricciardi showed a smidgen of mercy.

  “Commissario Ricciardi, of the mobile squad. The gentleman who, at my orders, came to ask you this morning if you’d be willing to come to this office for a conversation is Brigadier Maione, and you owe it to his delicacy of feeling and his professional courtesy that the matter was conducted with such discretion: if it had been up to me and in accordance with the dictates of ordinary procedure, we’d have come to your residence by car and with an escort of two additional police officers. That’s standard practice, when the crime in question is homicide.”

  Maione adored it when Ricciardi talked that way.

  Ventrone blinked and turned pale as a sheet. Then he said:

  “I beg your pardon. I had no idea. May I sit down? I don’t feel at all well.”

  Ricciardi gestured and sat down himself.

  “As you well know, yesterday at the brothel known as Il Paradiso, in Via Chiaia, one of the working girls was murdered. The name of the murdered girl is Maria Rosaria Cennamo.”

  Ventrone murmured:

  “As I well know, did you say? I don’t know anything. And I certainly don’t know this woman, what did you say her name was? Cennamo? In fact, I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  Ricciardi didn’t budge by so much as an inch.

  “Ventrone, let’s not play hide-and-seek. I would not advise you to follow this line, because it won’t take you anywhere good, but rather directly to a criminal trial for withholding evidence, during the course of which a great deal of information would come out, information which, I’m sure, would be quite damaging both to your reputation and that of your family; that is, if we don’t decide to bring other, far more serious charges. The stage name, shall we say, of this young lady was Viper. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The man’s head dropped as if the commissario had clubbed him. He muttered an incomprehensible word or two, coughed, ran a handkerchief over his face and then, finally, replied in a low voice:

  “Viper. Yes, I know her. And I appeal to your discretion, to the fact that we’re all men of the world here today, and beg you to promise me that what we say here in this room will remain confidential.”

  Ricciardi wasn’t in the business of offering discounts.

  “That’s not a promise I’m able to make. If the things you tell us have any direct bearing on the investigation, they’ll have to be made public. But I can certainly assure you of our utmost personal discretion.”

  Ventrone nodded. That was already something.

  “I patronize the place, yes. A man, after a lifetime of work, has the right to a little enjoyment. And I, sadly, became a widower at far too young an age. And I met this woman, Viper, in fact, who showed . . . initiative, and plenty of it. And we had a lot of fun together. And as far as that goes, I paid, and generously. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything wrong with that, no?”

  Maione broke in:

  “No, there’s nothing wrong with going to whores. But murdering people is quite another matter.”

  The man protested loudly:

  “I haven’t murdered anyone, why, how dare you?”

  Ricciardi gave him a level look.

  “According to our information, you were the woman’s last client. Another prostitute, Bianca Palumbo aka Lily, did her best to cover for you by claiming to have found the corpse herself, but we forced her to admit she was lying. Why would she have covered for you?”

  Ventrone seemed stunned by what Ricciardi had just told him. He hesitated, then made up his mind to speak.

  “Really? I certainly couldn’t say. Lily is . . . sometimes I go to her, when Viper is otherwise engaged. I imagine that she was just looking out for me. But I wasn’t Viper’s last client: whoever killed her was. I paid for my time, I walked into the room, and I found the door ajar: inside, Viper was sprawled on her back on the bed, with a pillow over her face. I assumed that she was playing some sort of prank, you understand, sometimes we play games. I moved the pillow and I saw . . . I saw that she wasn’t playing, anyway.”

  Maione drove in:

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Then I ran out of the room without touching anything else, and I called for help.”

  “Who was the first to respond?”

  “The first was Lily, who came out of her bedroom with a man who’d been with her and was just leaving. She came over to me and took me to see Madame Yvonne. Then they both urged me to leave in a hurry, to avoid gossip and scandal.”

  Ricciardi shook his head.

  “That wasn’t a good decision, as you can see for yourself. Tell me exactly what you saw in Viper’s room.”

  Ventrone concentrated, and described a setting that substantially matched what Ricciardi had found in his inspection.

  “Were you aware of the fact that Viper had received an offer to leave that line of work? That another man had asked her to marry him?”

  Maione looked at the commissario in surprise. Ventrone heaved a loud sigh and shrugged.

  “Yes, I’d heard. The other girls and Madame were talking of nothing else, and had been for the past few days. But she would never have accepted.”

  “And why are you so sure of that?”

  “Simple: she liked the life she led there. The m
oney, the luxury, and even the fun, the cheerful surroundings. And the men, of course, she liked them a lot. Believe me, I knew her well.”

  Disgusting though he might be, Ventrone seemed quite certain of what he was saying.

  The commissario asked another question:

  “One more thing. What do you mean when you say: ‘sometimes we play games’?”

  The merchant blushed to the roots of his hair.

  “Commissario, everyone has his own personal tastes. I just enjoy . . . let me say this, I try to spice up my pastimes, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with it, that’s why men go to certain places, no? Sometimes, with Viper, we’d play innocently, she’d be the schoolmistress and punish me. As a joke, of course. And I’d react, also in play, and spank her. She had a . . . well, she was beautiful, as you know.”

  Maione and Ricciardi would have been very happy to throw that man in prison, but they realized they lacked the grounds.

  The commissario stood up.

  “You’re free to go. You are not to leave town and you are to remain available for further questioning. And for the time being, you are forbidden to patronize Il Paradiso.”

  XIII

  How beautiful you are. I only feel good when I’m with you.

  How I love to caress your neck, watch your eyes half close at the touch of my hand. I’d spend hours doing it.

  She would have taken everything away from us. Little by little, her nature would have emerged. He was already her slave, and it would have just have gotten worse and worse.

  Your warm breath, how wonderful it is to feel it on my face.

  She knew how to make everything good disappear. Where she was, no one else existed, all that remained was her, with her desires, her moods.

  He was no longer himself, you saw that. He no longer understood a thing. She had become the sole proprietor of his smile; the rest of the time he was distracted, confused, he didn’t care about anything anymore. His life was just time spent waiting between helpings of her, an ugly parenthesis to be shortened, something without purpose.