Day of the Dead

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Tettè is dragged out of the room, out into the cold rain. Everyone follows him and the priest, like a procession on its way to witness an execution. At the far corner of the courtyard, there’s a door that leads into the broom closet, a dark little space no more than three by three feet. Still holding the boy by the ear, Don Antonio reaches into his tunic pocket and pulls out a key. He opens the door, throws Tettè inside, and shuts the door behind him, locking it.

  First he feels relief that his ear has been released, then waves of terrible, lacerating pain. Tettè massages the ear hard. He can’t hear a thing on that side, just a deafening ringing hum. He drags himself into a corner, grabs a rag, and brings it to his head. He can hear the feet of little animals scurrying in the dark, but he can’t see them. He kicks at them to keep them away. He wants to sob and shout, but his throat is locked tight.

  He sees his angel, standing right before him. He hears the angel’s voice: when something bad happens, think of me, think of my smile. Think of it, Tettè. Think of it as hard as you can, and you’ll see, everything will be all right.

  He thinks as hard as he can, his eyes squeezed shut under the filthy rag, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, he shouts in the silence inside him. Please, I beg you, tell me that you love me. Just tell me once that you love me, my angel.

  The thunder shakes the door of the broom closet. The rain beats on the door and drips inside. Tettè kicks out when he feels the icy little snouts touching him. He knows that if he falls asleep, the snouts and the quick little feet will become bolder, and he’ll wake up to bites and stings.

  He hears something scratch at the door, once, twice. He drags himself over, and finds a gap between boards; he breathes through it. He sees something close to the crack, and after a moment he realizes that it’s a dog’s nose.

  He manages to poke out a finger and strokes the dog’s muzzle.

  All he can do now is wait.

  In the big room, Amedeo and Saverio sit on the cots and pull out an apple apiece from under their mattresses. Exchanging a sly glance, they bite into them and laugh.

  Cristiano clenches his hands into fists but then tells himself: mind your own business.

  XXI

  Ricciardi approached Tettè’s straw pallet, his hands in his pockets, eyes focused on the faint imprint that showed where the little boy had slept. Here you are, he thought. Here’s where you dreamed your dreams; here you thought your thoughts, just small matters, no big ideas, no great hopes. Perhaps you thought about food. Or else you tried to imagine your father’s face, your mother’s caress. But probably not even that, since you’d never experienced the touch of a loving hand.

  He extended his foot and touched the pallet with the tip of his shoe; a cockroach bolted out at a run, zigzagging. The commissario and Cristiano watched it run along the wall, until it slipped away into a crack.

  Ricciardi addressed the boy:

  “Was Matteo a friend of yours?”

  No answer. Cristiano shrugged indifferently and continued staring straight ahead.

  Ricciardi walked over to a little nightstand made out of wood from fruit crates, next to the bed. He opened it, crouching down to see what was inside.

  Not much. A few articles of clothing. Carefully folded. Nicer stuff than what he’d had on when they found him, perhaps to be worn on a special occasion: a sailor’s jacket, a little cap, a pair of shorts. Worn but very clean. Even a pair of sandals with pressed cardboard soles.

  An old book, held together by a few cotton threads, with pictures of automobiles. The countless marks where the pages had been touched by grubby fingers. Who knows how many times you leafed through it in search of your dreams, thought Ricciardi. A little wooden car, broken in multiple places and inexpertly reassembled, with metal washers in place of the four wheels. Colored with a pencil: behind the wheel, a woman with blonde hair.

  A woman’s handkerchief, white, folded into a triangle, finely embroidered with a monogram that he had a hard time identifying, perhaps two letters intertwined.

  Ricciardi sighed, putting everything back in its place and getting to his feet. He looked Cristiano in the face, a long searching look, and then said:

  “Where are the other boys? What are they doing now?”

  Once again, the boy shrugged and looked over at the corner where the cockroach had disappeared. They stood there in silence for a while, until Ricciardi decided that it was time to change his tone.

  “Now listen to me and listen good. I’m a police detective. I can take you in on any charge I like, I just have to pick one. And I can have you sent to jail and make sure you never get out. And that’s exactly what I’ll do if I think you’re trying to hide something from me. So, to my mind, it’s in your interest to talk.”

  Threatening a kid: no question, he’d sunk pretty low. But he intuited that this was probably the only language Cristiano understood, unfortunately; and in fact, after a few seconds, the boy spoke.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you start by anwering the question you were asked: where are the other boys, and what are they doing?”

  “Everyone serves as someone’s apprentice. There are six of us . . . five, now. They’re all out working, except me, because that bastard of a cobbler fired me.”

  He’d spoken in an undertone, with something that sounded like an edge of anger. He kept his thumbs tucked into his belt, standing with his legs wide, his feet braced solidly. On the whole, he looked like he was ready to flee, or attack.

  “Were you a friend of Matteo’s?”

  He shrugged again. Then he thought it over and replied:

  “Tettè didn’t have friends, and neither do I. But I felt sorry for him. He was little and he was a cacaglio, it took him an hour to say anything, so he mostly shut up and didn’t talk. The less you talk, the better, in here.”

  Ricciardi wanted to know more.

  “And what kinds of things do you do together, when you see each other?”

  “At night, after we’re done working, if no one goes out and about on their own business. But since we get dinner in the evening, and it’s cold out, we all come back here. When the weather’s better, some of the kids like to sleep out on the streets, instead of in here. It gets really hot in here.”

  “And you don’t do anything else?”

  Cristiano thought it over, then said:

  “There’s school, twice a week. On Tuesday and Thursday. The two ladies come, the old one and the young one, and they tell us stories, try and get us to read and write. I get sick of it pretty fast, I stick around for a minute or two, then I leave, unless they bring something to eat as a prize, even though I never win.”

  “And how was Tettè doing?”

  “I told you before, he was a cacaglio, he couldn’t talk, especially when he got worked up. But he was good at writing, and even better at drawing. Sometimes he’d get the prize, but even when he did, the bigger boys would take it away from him, and the rest of us would eat it. That’s the way it works in here.”

  Interesting, thought Ricciardi. All this loving harmony the priest had described, in the end, was a fairy tale. Not that he’d ever believed it.

  What remained to be determined, aside from what Don Antonio and others had told him, was just where Tettè had died.

  “Do you know how Matteo died?”

  Cristiano shook his head, in a very grown-up gesture.

  “He was just a fool, the cacaglio. A little runt and a fool.”

  “Why do you say that? And how do you mean, he was a fool?”

  The boy smiled sadly.

  “Why, what else would you call someone who eats rat poison?”

  Ricciardi took a look around: no sign of Matteo’s phantom. Wherever he might have died, it hadn’t been in here. Nor in the church or the sacristy, for that matter.

  “Do you have any
idea where he might have found the poisoned bait?”

  Cristiano shrugged. Then he suddenly said: “Maybe. And I can take you there. But what’ll you give me, if I do?”

  “What I’ll give you is I won’t haul you off to jail, that’s what I’ll give you. And that strikes me as generous.”

  Cristiano sighed, gestured with a nod of the head, and set off. Ricciardi followed behind, passing through the courtyard with the locked door of the dark, cramped broom closet.

  Since he was unaware of its existence, it didn’t occur to Ricciardi to look inside.

  From the writing desk she’d installed in her bedroom, Livia looked out at the city through the rain. The trolleys passed each other with cheerful toots of their horns, the handcarts pushed or pulled by strolling vendors continued in spite of the downpour, as their proprietors called out to potential buyers to look at their wares, even though those wares were kept hidden under tarpaulins.

  Through the half-open door came the sound of the maid singing in the kitchen, on the far side of the apartment:

  Saccio ca t’aggia perdere

  Sento ca t’alluntane,

  Ca tu te ne può gghi’ primma ’e dimane

  Pe’ nun turna’ cchiù a mme. . .

  Livia loved that Neapolitan propensity for sound and song. In other cities, silence reigned: if you heard anything, it was the sounds of motors, the neighing and whinnying of horses, but not real sounds. Not music.

  She tried to turn her thoughts back to the guest list she was drawing up. It was no easy undertaking: she had to keep the invitees down to a limited number, but she didn’t want to make too many people unhappy. At the same time, she wanted to ensure that at least the people she liked would be there.

  She sighed when she caught sight of the stack of letters that her girlfriends still hadn’t gotten tired of sending her, letters that criticized her decision while trying to wheedle information about her new love. Love. What an absurd word that was.

  Had she fallen in love? She really wouldn’t know how to answer that question. No doubt, this was an unprecedented situation she found herself in: she was courting Ricciardi, without a thought for who might notice. She wondered whether she would have acted this way back in Rome. Would she have shown up at police headquarters to say hello to him, the way she had done the evening of the day before? Would she have dared—in the potential presence of everyone she knew, and at the risk of running into a dozen of her dear tongue-wagging girlfriends—to stride brazenly into the place he worked, without a blush?

  She decided she was in love. She wasn’t the kind of hypocritical woman who was afraid to look her own emotions in the face.

  Not that he gave her much cause for hope: this time once again he’d been more embarrassed and surprised than elated. But this made the man that much more alluring, not less. Plus, she’d noticed when she sat down that he’d glanced at her legs, blinking rapidly before hastily averting his gaze. He liked her, she was sure of it; but in that case, why did he keep concealing the fact?

  With an effort she refocused her mind on the guest list, writing Garzo’s name, with a note that his invitation would include his wife. She didn’t like him much, but that had been a small price to pay to rope in Ricciardi.

  The guest list would have to be ready by seven o’clock that evening. She remembered what Edda Mussolini’s secretary had told her over the phone that morning: a man would come by to pick up the guest list, and it would then be submitted for the approval of an agency responsible for security, the name of which she had not told.

  This whole matter of security, Livia thought to herself, was becoming a genuine collective fixation. Now the secret police actually wanted to check over the guest list to a private party, a party that would be attended not by the Duce, but his daughter, probably not even accompanied by her husband.

  A trolley went by beneath her window, honking its horn in counterpoint to the housemaid, who was singing a song called “Presentimento”:

  Dimme, e si ’e ffronne tornano

  Ca uttombre fa cade’,

  Si tutto torna a nascere,

  Qua’ primmavera ce pò sta’ pe’ mme?

  Cchiù ’o core è stracco ’e chiagnere

  Cchiù ’nnammurato ’o sento . . .

  Si mo’ ce sparte ’stu presentimento,

  Pecché m’attacco a tte?

  Livia abandoned herself to the song, thinking how hard it was to concentrate on anything, in that city.

  Even when the sun wasn’t out.

  XXII

  Ricciardi followed Cristiano as the boy made his way up Via Nuova Capodimonte. It had started raining again.

  As they walked down the street he realized that in that part of town the boy was as much of a public figure as any member of parliament: the shopkeepers, the concierges busy mopping the front halls of the apartment buildings, the children leaning over the railings of the balconies all called to him loudly as he went past, greeting him fondly, though their expressions changed when they realized that the commissario was tagging along a short distance behind him. One thuggish young man even asked Cristiano in heavy Neapolitan dialect if he was having any problems, making it clear that if so, he’d be willing to help out.

  When it was raining, the geography of urban business shifted. This was a city accustomed to working in the shadows, but always outdoors. The broad openings of the apartment building entrances leading out into the street, the stone arches through which passersby could glimpse courtyards full of plants, hosted the carts of strolling vendors with the tacit and well-remunerated tolerance of uniformed doormen.

  Counterfeit monks, little match girls and women selling bouquets of flowers, men operating tiny floating casinos that consisted of nothing more than a wooden counter perched on a tripod—they all did their best to carry on their work even in the rain, competing for the best spots under the broad overhangs of stone cornices.

  The uncovered street and the sidewalks, on the other hand, enjoyed the temporary expansion of available space; they were now open to speeding automobiles and gleaming wet horses pulling carts and carriages. As these conveyances went past, they sprayed jets of water into the air behind them, to the delight of swarms of scugnizzi who reveled in the unexpected cascades of water. The infrequent pedestrians stepped gingerly between the puddles and small ponds that were forming in the streets, doing their best to keep shoes and trouser legs dry and to cover themselves with cloth umbrellas that they’d lovingly waxed the night before with drippings from their candles at home.

  Cristiano, like Ricciardi himself for that matter, seemed indifferent to the rain, clopping along in his wooden clogs through puddles of all sizes and depths, triggering the occasional imprecations of those he inundated as he passed. The commissario kept his eyes trained straight ahead, and he accepted the greetings of the dead in much the same way the boy took the greetings of the living: he saw the pair of adolescents and the despairing debtor, the familiar bridge-jumping suicides on the Ponte della Sanità, and he made a new acquaintance, a decorous, elderly woman dressed in black who had been crushed by the poorly secured load of a horse-drawn cart. The broad cavity in her crushed chest and her mangled left arm, still clutching her handbag, left no doubts as to how she had died and why. As Ricciardi walked past, she said: my grandson hasn’t come around for two months now. I wonder if he came to your funeral, Ricciardi thought as Cristiano was benevolently and jocularly threatened by a strolling fruit and vegetable vendor. Everybody has the friends they deserve, the commissario mused bitterly.

  They came even with a heavy wooden door, closed and locked. Cristiano stopped and waited for Ricciardi. They weren’t far from the Tondo di Capodimonte, the piazza at the foot of the monumental staircase where Tettè had been found.

  Without looking at the commissario, Cristiano said: “We come here to get a little something, now and then. It’s a warehouse of good
things to eat. We don’t come all that often because the owner hides and stands guard; one time he caught one of the twins and pounded him within an inch of his life. He was in bed for the longest time, throwing up blood; we were pretty sure he was going to die.”

  Ricciardi observed the heavy bolt and padlock that secured the heavy door.

  “But how do you get in here? It looks to me like it’s pretty well locked up.”

  Cristiano smiled with a superior air and waved for Ricciardi to follow him. He turned the corner and slipped in through a doorway, vanishing from the commissario’s view. Ricciardi stood motionless and disoriented in the dim dank half-light, until he heard a hiss and understood that the boy had slipped into a gap in the wall that had escaped his notice. He squeezed in after him and found himself standing in a narrow space between the two buildings, a sort of corridor where one person walking sideways could just barely get through. About ten feet farther in, the space widened into a large room stacked high with sacks and crates. They were inside the warehouse.

  Ricciardi looked around in the grayish light that filtered down from the high windows: for the most part, the place was filled with grains and beans, as was clearly marked on the sacks; in one corner, though, he saw metal containers, slabs of dried fish and meat, wheels of cheese, and other foodstuffs. Cristiano seemed frightened: he stood there motionless, ears trained like an animal on the hunt, or a wary creature, potential prey to other larger beasts.

  He silently pointed out to Ricciardi a series of small objects arranged in a semicircle on the floor near the goods; to the untrained eye, these were a number of tiny bread rolls. The boy picked one up and handed it to the commissario: a rolled-up ball of bread crumb and bits of cheese, odorless. Cristiano touched the commissario’s arm and nodded his head in the direction of a large dead rat in the far corner of the storeroom. Ricciardi felt the weight of the edible ball in his hand: poison. This was what had killed Tettè.