“I’m delighted to hear you have such faith in the criminal justice system.”
“Of course I do! I know that you came by the house and that my sister played emissary. A tiny heart threw out her hands without permission; the other parts of the organism flew into a rage, look out. Around here, the independent masters can’t decide which steps to take on their own; the brain has to tell them where to go. Otherwise, the machine shuts down because of an unwanted malfunction.”
“What is this, have you been talking to Santina?”
“What?”
“No, nothing, I was just thinking.”
“Captain, I only have one thing to tell you: I had nothing to do with it. Let’s take Malanò’s answer, it’s best for everyone.”
“Funice’, this does me no good. And even if it did, it wouldn’t even occur to me in the slightest to call it something that it’s not. Are we clear on this? By all means, tell Sconciglio too.”
“As you like, I had a debt and now I’ve paid it off. Do as you see best. Buona sera.” Funicella Corta cut off the call, pulled the SIM card out of his phone, and tossed it into the waves off Marseilles.
Martusciello caught up with Santina in the bathroom; she’d just finished cleaning up the kitchen and now she was about to smear her hands with lotion in a gesture that she repeated every night.
She set down the container and embraced her husband, who smiled at her.
“I’m just intolerable when I’m being a wife.”
“You’re lovely, Santina. In your presence, I turn into an imbecile and I enjoy it all the same.”
“I’m . . . ”
Martusciello stopped her from talking with one hand, and then the prohibition turned into a caress.
41.
Rosina Mastriani had developed the habit of not spending her day in Pianura. Every morning she got dressed and went into the quarters of town where her husband trafficked. She wanted to see, one by one, all his rotten apples. Rosina Mastriani needed convincing arguments. She was no innocent, but she wanted to redeem with her ruins the shortcomings of others.
Her husband told her that he knew she had murdered her boyfriend. What the children had lost was a mother with her picture on the front pages of all the newspapers and luckily what he had lost was an ugly cow.
By revisiting the well known streets, Rosina managed to overcome the stunned daze of her first return.
Almost every day, she tried to walk past his apartment building, no longer his. She’d been going to look at it for as long as she could remember. The old building had a narrow side that gave the structure a v shape: in the girl’s imagination, under her short cropped hair, it was the throne of the sun. The opening toward the exterior of the outside walls formed wings, jammed into the earth that belonged to him.
I suffocated the violence, enormous and cast iron, I managed the rage within a narrow body. I should have expected that Vialdi would understand immediately. Her husband amused the singer. He took him into his business dealings, which Rosina hadn’t understood all that clearly. She knew only that there was money and there were possessions. An enormous quantity of possessions: televisions, blenders, stoves, clothing, toys, motorcycles, jewelry.
For Vialdi, his friendship with Rosina’s husband meant a chance to go back to the places he’d started out from, and when he came back he wanted to be dressed in his best gala wear. It was hardly necessary, his fame had taken him for strolls in far more magnificent venues, but he want to be acknowledged as king in those places where he had once been nothing more than the son of Concetta Mangiavento, aka Sette Carceri.
At first, Vialdi just looked at her and nothing more. By the time he started talking to her secretly, his eyes had already told the whole story. A fever grew inside Rosina, whispering incessantly you of all people, you of all people.
Her heart was stirring, even though she had no longer had any idea of how to love, even that tiniest bit that could distract her from her troubles.
She felt pretty. The color that she’d once had in the mornings as she set off for school, on her way to meet progress, returned to her face.
The Sanità district shed its destiny and became the beautiful center of every city in the world. That was where this unexpected story of the heart was taking place.
Love changed her eyes.
She began only to see lovely streets, narrow and cheerful. She drew close to the people who had wedded the traditional cult of the remains of the Fontanelle Ossuary with the desire for the new. She got to know the ordinary people who prepared meals for the homeless, ordinary just like her. She went to pay a call on a priest who had organized a magnificent revolution, with the local kids in tow, and he explained to her the history of art, with warm words of the kind that she’d long ago forgotten.
The story of the heart had infected all the places of her birth: now Rosina could not recognize anything that wasn’t beautiful.
Her children had the benefit of a brand-new mother, just learning to love. Then came Vialdi’s transformation, his loss of interest, the disappointment that brought her thudding back to earth. Her eyes closed. When they opened again, Rosina realized that she’d also lost her obedience, her children, and her home. All that remained to her were the cuts on her arms.
Her affair with the singer went on until it withered and died. During one of their last encounters, the chemical that he’d taken before the appointment led Vialdi to confide in Rosina about her husband. If he’d been straight, he’d never have done it.
“He helps out the bosses of certain gambling rings. He’s a two-bit crook, don’t be fooled, he makes his little bit of cash and invests it in small-time loan-sharking, they pay him in trinkets and knickknacks. These days the local craftsmen have all been outsourced, they’re part of a larger business cycle. He just picks up the crumbs left over from the network.” At the time, the information hadn’t been of any interest to her: it was just a length of rope that was already too taut leading toward the end of her love affair.
Then knowing became important.
Persisting in her visits to the Sanità neighborhood, Rosina finally hit pay dirt. Vialdi had told the truth, at least when he told her what he did about her husband’s business activities: he had something like a subcontract on collecting gambling debts, shaking down shopkeepers, money from bets of all kinds that just didn’t seem to want to come to papa. In the comings and goings of relatively small sums, he had a license to subtract a 5 percent commission. Frequently retailers paid off what they owed in kind, and therefore: televisions, blenders, stoves, clothing, toys, motorcycles, jewelry. Her husband invested the cash by loaning out small sums at exorbitant rates.
The last service announcement, as unwelcome as all the others, took her to Santa Lucia. The address had been given to her by a seamstress in the Sanità neighborhood. But Rosina decided, as she looked out over the waves, that what she knew already was enough, and so she went to the Borgo Marinari.
The morning’s beauty, the bridge to cross on foot to fetch up beneath the magnificence of Castel dell’Ovo, the boats, the sea—it all restored a bit of her strength.
She drank in the ancient beauty of the gold that, before experiencing the love of the sun, had been nothing but stone. A single solitary cloud was casting its shadow on a single solitary tower, darkness too wanted to get a taste of the glittering yellow. She felt hungry. She greeted the need in her saliva.
“Dear singer of mine, though mine you never were, if you’ve learned how to die, maybe my husband can learn the same lesson. I’d be glad to offer him a little tutoring. Then I could follow him down.” She went in search of her spouse and sure enough she found him.
She poured over his head the whole bucket of things she’d discovered, covered his feet with the whole barrel of bad apples. He seized her by the neck and told her how sorry he was, but now she had become the villain of the story. That she s
hould have thought carefully before becoming a vigilante out for justice. When she was still a saintly, weary mother, when someone might still have listened to a thing she said.
On her way back home, Rosina passed the castle again, and the desire to go to some discarded king and ask for help surged within her. The temptation inebriated her, but in her drunkenness she realized that she lacked the strength for a new term of imprisonment.
All the same, she needed to find a place to hide, she wouldn’t be able to make it on her own. Or else she needed to get her hands on a gun.
42.
Marialuigia Moreno drew marks in the dust with her fingernail. She hadn’t used the piano again since. She felt a twinge of regret for having neglected it. She grabbed her wrist in the fist of her other hand and ran her forearm over the fall covering the keyboard.
She opened it.
Without sitting down, she tried out the keys. They responded well, the piano was still in tune. She pulled up the bench, felt for the pedals with her feet, and started to play.
She picked the chords she loved least, the ones that made up the song that had bought Vialdi his double-decker penthouse. She played a blues arrangement of the song, the music and the intentional off-key notes violated the silence of the melancholy become sound.
Every twelve beats, she let the words drop from her mouth, in a sung sigh, Tu sei tu. Only those words, no more. The other words were all ugly, they’d have fogged the black and white of the keys, as well as the sentiment that was driving her voice.
She tried to stop but she couldn’t do it.
She sat there keeping company with her memories for a period of time she was unable to reckon with any accuracy, then she tore herself away from the piano and went off once again to break the seals on an apartment that did not belong to her.
Captain Malanò was enjoying the sound of the waves from his studio apartment with its galley kitchen. Stretched out on his couch, he listed the fruit of his imminent happiness.
He was going to have, he was going to be able to, he was going to say, he was going to defeat, he was going to exult in triumph.
The prophecy of all things good had been undermined, if only slightly, by his memory of the phone call with Adami: after meeting with Liguori and Occhiuzzi he’d felt obliged to tell him what he thought about the serial killer. Adami told him that he’d already laid out the facts that didn’t convince him to Occhiuzzi and Liguori.
“Oh, that’s no big thing,” Malanò told himself, deeply hooked, “a serial killer could certainly fixate on a family, with people who have something to do with the same line of work, or who knows what all else. What do I care about what does or doesn’t happen in statistical terms? Who gives a damn about statistics! Even the murder of the drunk night watchman might very well be connected to something entirely different. This Adami is such a nitpicker. He thinks everything’s neat and settled. Easy to say! I’m feeling my way here, looking for logic where there might not even be any. And that’s that.”
Martusciello heard the breathing of his wife, fast asleep by his side. He didn’t want to awaken her, but his thoughts refused to leave him alone in sleep, and his feet followed his thoughts in their restlessness, in spite of him.
I’d like to know what relationship there is in my body between noggin and my dogs! he thought to himself. What a bad habit I have: I can’t seem to think clearly if my feet aren’t moving.
The captain gave in to the restlessness of his feet. He got out of bed, groped for his clothing in the dark, got dressed and spruced up in the bathroom, and a short while later was out in the street.
He stopped a taxi and asked to be taken to a gambling hall near the stadium.
“I hear you, friend. I always come to this part of town to do my betting, too. The betting sheet has an entirely different kind of poetry, in the shadow of the San Paolo stadium. If you want a sure thing I suggest that you go play Series B at Zivi’s. Tell them that I sent you. My taxi number is Modena 19.”
“Now that I have a recommendation I feel more confident.”
“I’m just telling you things that anyone could tell you: it’s just because Zivi’s is open round the clock, and after all, I wouldn’t want you to have come all this way for nothing, right?”
The streets around the stadium were empty and the neon streetlights made them look uglier than they were. The captain kept walking until he was able to calm down feet and head. He saw his theories collapse, like oil on water. They took unexpected shapes, and were in any case insubstantial, changeable.
The slight uphill climbs toward the stadium made his thoughts move laboriously. For some time now, the captain had lost the benefit of his confidence in the facts. A good mood might change his outlook on decline and turn it into a fun slide, but that didn’t happen often, and certainly never when he was sensing the presence of some preordained confusion.
While Liguori and Blanca were on their way back from Verona she had called him from the highway to tell him how it had gone. She also told him about the conversation with Adami.
His northern colleague’s misgivings weren’t far from his own. Martusciello could smell a nicely crafted farce, put together with an abundance of resources. He’d recognized a beautifully prepared banqueting table, even before he accepted a case he didn’t really want: the presence of just one night watchman on the night of the murder, found murdered, note the coincidence, with an unorthodox caliber; the corpses of the Singing Maestro and Julia Marin both tricked out in a manner designed to scream scandal, passion, and insanity; Vialdi’s personality and fame and sins spotlighted in every statement, practically with the same identical words. Every element seemed to have been buffed and polished and put right in its place. Too shiny, too perfect.
“Maybe it’s because the village donkeys have no time to waste,” thought Martusciello. “They don’t look only at the hand that makes the rabbit pop into view, and if someone forces them with the right lights, they’ll get up on all fours, after all they have something to do with their heads, trot around, and place themselves behind the stage. And they take a stab.”
After coming to an acceptable conclusion, which as we need hardly point out, was radically different from the one that Malanò was trying so hard to find, he walked into the betting parlor.
He spoke to a man who had the air of an habitué.
“Vialdi told me to come, I’m looking for the lawyer.”
“Vialdi’s dead and the lawyer wouldn’t be here at this time of night.”
The man lifted his shoulders into a shrug and he was gone before they dropped back down.
43.
The drive home from Verona had been slow. On the highway, Liguori had kept the car in the right lane and motored along at a moderate speed.
“And this time, I get to choose the soundtrack: Sarah Vaughan. With all due respect to Mozart. Okay with you?”
“Sure, but lower the volume.”
“But she’s whispering.”
“Not to my ears.”
Blanca decided that he actually had spoken softly the night before, when he asked her: Let me see you. Just for a few seconds. For a moment.
She needed to tidy up that confusion, she needed to reestablish a provisional before that she could never regain.
“Liguori, nobody’d better find out about this at the office. Or anywhere else.”
“You’re forgetting that I’m a knight and a gentleman. I may lack a horse, but with me chivalry isn’t dead, as our boss likes to say.” The detective was mortified, a tad, by the relief her request had brought him.
“Well, what do you think, was the trip useful?” asked Blanca.
“Extremely.”
“In terms of work, I mean.”
“I’ll lie to Martusciello, but the trip to Verona didn’t do us a bit of good, and I knew it wouldn’t before we left. The place that most of my quest
ions lead to isn’t Verona, but Naples. Why can’t we find the recording of Vialdi’s last show? I’ve looked for it everywhere. It hasn’t done any good. And yet the singer wanted to use the recording for a live album.”
“Live.”
“Live, yeah. How could he have known that he was going to be dead in just a few hours?”
Not even Blanca knew. Liguori thought of her “yes”: she’d covered her face with her hands and had given him a moment in which to indulge in the pleasure of watching her. He couldn’t know that he’d lit a central beam of light, powerful and pitiless, and had laid eyes everywhere. Everyone has their own way of dealing with confusion.
Despite the harshness of the spotlight, a bit of harmony still survived, the motionless white body preserved shreds of grace, even after the haste and sweat of the gestures.
“...but you’re not getting it from me and no one needs to say you’re on again.” Blanca out of tune singing Sarah Vaughan. “Have you been to the Auditorium too?”
“Yep, and it’s not in the archives. They told me that the recording technicians weren’t staff. Whether they were outside professionals or staff, I can’t understand why there isn’t the slightest trace of the concert.”
“Maybe it wasn’t much to write home about.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Martusciello.”
“Maybe they were planning other shows and the technicians, who might not have been on staff, decided for some reason to postpone the recording to another night. What do I know, too much applause, too much external noise, some malfunction.”
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