Once she was sure that Ricciardi had left the building, Enrica put on her overcoat and hurried downstairs, precariously balancing her umbrella in one hand and a baking pan wrapped in a cloth napkin in the other. She slipped through the street entrance of the building across the way and, her heart racing, she rushed up the stairs to the third floor landing and knocked on the same apartment door to which she’d accompanied Rosa the previous morning.
The elderly woman peered out through the narrow opening afforded by the door chain, and then opened up with a broad, welcoming smile, planting two loud kisses on the young woman’s cheeks, which were now flaming red.
“Signorì, what a pleasure! How are you today? Come in, come in, don’t stand out there in the cold. Can you believe the chill in the air this morning? Winter arrived overnight! It’s like they say: “Come All Saint’s Day, put summer clothes away.’ Prego, come right in.”
Enrica was pleased with this warm welcome; the two women had taken to each other right away, that much was clear to her, but she hadn’t expected such expansiveness.
“Signora, I took the liberty . . . Since my father is very fond of this pastry I make for him, yesterday while I was preparing it I made some extra. That is to say, I didn’t make more than I meant to, I made this special, but it was certainly no trouble. But please, I’d like you to sample it first, and then, only if you like it, you could give some to . . . you know, to him.”
Rosa had pulled open the cloth and peeked in at the pastry with a smile.
“Don’t be silly! That one eats like a wolf, he’ll gobble down anything you set before him, I’m sure he’ll like this. It’s a migliaccio, isn’t it? Ricotta and semolina . . . hold on, I’ll cut us a slice and we can taste it. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right in, you know the way, don’t you?”
As she was waiting for Rosa to come back with the pastry, she noticed that the door to Ricciardi’s bedroom had been left ajar. She glimpsed part of his bed, his writing desk, the window frame. She imagined him standing there, looking across the street at her; or bent over the desk, writing her a letter. The thought of the letter set her heart racing again.
Rosa brought in two generous portions of her pastry.
“I tasted it, Signori’. You’re a good cook, truly: most of the time people use too much ricotta, to add to the flavor, but this is the real migliaccio. Very well done.”
And they started chatting, like a couple of old friends. It didn’t hurt that they happened to share the same favorite topic of conversation.
Without knowing it, Enrica learned from Rosa’s lips the exact same things that Livia had read in the chilly bureaucratic language of the detailed secret police report; but the information she learned about Ricciardi’s life, family, and past history was tinged with the immense tenderness and love that the tata felt for her signorino.
Enrica took a long and emotional journey through the childhood of the little boy with large green eyes, condemned to loneliness and solitude first by his noble birth and later by his personality. She was introduced to the two baronesses of Malomonte, the mother, who had taken Rosa from her peasant family, and the daughter-in-law, as slender as a little girl, her eyes filled with sadness. The boy went off to boarding school, years and years of studying without a friend, and then he was standing in the hospital room, holding the thin hand of that white-haired woman who left this life at such a young age. She saw Rosa herself, entrusted with the future of a man she couldn’t understand but whom she loved wholeheartedly. She learned of a name as venerable as it was long, and of faraway wealth that would have allowed him to live his life comfortably, with a prominent place in society: all things he had contemptuously turned his back on.
From the folds of this long and heartfelt account emerged a man at once close to and yet so far from the one she had grown accustomed to dreaming of; and her heart swelled with tenderness and the desire to take him by the hand and lead him through life: she, of all people, who knew so little about life herself.
When she looked at the clock and saw that it was late enough that he might be home at any minute, she got up and kissed Rosa good-bye, realizing that she had tears in her own eyes and on her face, and finding several more among the tata’s wrinkles. She promised to come back, and before leaving, gave the old woman an envelope for him.
XXVII
Ricciardi came to a halt, face-to-face with Maione, who looked like a weeping willow, even though he was big as an oak. The brigadier looked away, scraped one foot on the ground as if he were trying to draw a picture, then heaved a sigh, raised his eyes to meet Ricciardi’s, and said:
“Buon giorno, Commissa’. How is your vacation going?”
Ricciardi took the question under serious consideration.
“I’m sorry, Raffaele, but you come all the way up here from police headquarters, you’re drenched and dripping with gallons of rainwater and you’re probably catching pneumonia as we stand here, just so you can ask me how my vacation’s going, in the middle of the street, not a full day after we said good-bye for the week? Why don’t you come up to my apartment, first of all, and dry off a bit. Then you can tell me what’s happened, because you have a look on your face like you were at your own funeral.”
Maione started to object, saying that he didn’t want to intrude, but then he sneezed and gave in. Once they got upstairs, he was immediately handed off to Rosa, who seemed to be in a particularly chatty mood. She made him take off his uniform jacket and shirt; since Maione’s measurements were closer to the tata’s than to Ricciardi’s, the brigadier, while he was waiting for his clothes to dry at least partially on the cast-iron stove, was forced to suffer the humiliation of wearing a dusty pink dressing gown.
To see him like that, gloomy and sopping wet, with his heavy boots poking out from underneath the hem of the lady’s dressing gown decorated with large tone-on-tone flowers, and with a steaming mug in his hands, worried Ricciardi.
“Now then, you want to tell me what happened?”
The brigadier’s eyes flashed with anger.
“Commissa’, I’m going to strangle him with my own two hands!”
“Who are you going to strangle?”
“Garzo, Commissa’. Him and that infamous lickspittle spy of his, that damned Ponte.”
“Listen, Raffae’: if you want me to understand what you’re talking about, then you’re going to have to start from the beginning. Otherwise I’m lost.”
Maione heaved a long sigh.
“All right then, Commissa’. So this morning I came in to headquarters, so sleepy and dazed that I even forgot you wouldn’t be there; I’m not used to you missing work. I even brought a cup of ersatz coffee to your office.”
Ricciardi sighed.
“Well, that’s the only piece of good news I’ve had today, that I was spared a cup of that slop. Go on.”
Maione put on an offended look.
“What do you mean, a cup of that slop? I make the best coffee of anyone at headquarters! So anyway, at a certain point I hear him, Garzo, squawking my name like a brood hen: Maione, Maione! I pretend I don’t hear him, I know the way things work in that building, and sure enough not two minutes go by before Ponte shows up at the door, out of breath. Didn’t you hear Signor Garzo calling your name, Brigadie’? No, I said. I didn’t hear him; why, do you have something to tell me?”
Ricciardi did his best to steer the conversation back to the main point:
“Raffaele, please: I don’t care about Ponte when he’s standing right in front of me, much less when he’s a mile and a half away. Let’s get to the point: What did Garzo want from you?”
“Commissa’, you have to let me tell the story my way, otherwise I’m going to lose the thread and leave out something important. So anyhow, Ponte takes me to see Garzo. And let me tell you, I’ve never seen him in such a state: he was covered with so many red patches that it looked li
ke he had scarlet fever, and the man couldn’t speak. I thought to myself, let’s leave this in the hands of God: now he’ll die of a stroke and we’ll all finally get him out from underfoot. Instead, he says: Maione, Maione. What am I going to do with the two of you?”
Ricciardi had lost the thread.
“Was he seeing double?”
Maione looked at him.
“Commissa’, you’re talking nonsense. But he wasn’t. ‘The two of you’ meant you and me: the two of us, is what he meant. I said to him, I don’t understand, Dotto’. And he starts waving an envelope under my nose. I thought to myself: if he gets any closer and slaps me in the face with that thing, I’ll make him swallow it in a single gulp.”
“And what was in the envelope?”
“He opens it up and reads it to me. To the attention of the esteemed Dottore Angelo Garzo, deputy chief of police et cetera. This letter is to respectfully request that you et cetera. We understand that on the date of et cetera . . . ”
Ricciardi was starting to run out of patience.
“Raffaele, listen to me and listen closely: you’re starting to make me anxious, and that’s never a good thing. Could you possibly get to the point, please? I’m begging you.”
Maione heaved a long, weary sigh.
“Oh, all right, Commissa’. If that’s how you want it, that’s how I’ll tell it. To make a long story short, it was a letter from the archiepiscopal curia, signed by, if I’m getting this right, a monsignor, the personal secretary of Bishop Ascalesi. They were asking for information regarding an investigation that may or may not have been undertaken into the circumstances of the death of a young guest, that’s what they called him, a guest of the parish church of Santa Maria del Soccorso at Santa Teresa. They pointed out that, to the best of their knowledge, the pastor of the parish in question, Don Antonio Mansi, had been questioned repeatedly. And that, if this had actually taken place, it constituted a gross violation of articles thus and such of the Lateran Accords between the Italian state and the Holy See, on some date or other. In other words, an official complaint about our behavior.”
Ricciardi scratched his chin.
“So that’s why the priest was surprised to see me this morning: he’d calculated that the letter would already have reached police headquarters and that I’d have been immediately prohibited from going back to see him again. Go on.”
“What am I supposed to go on with, Commissa’? He went nuts. He said that he told you loud and clear that the investigation shouldn’t have been started in the first place. He said that he’d never authorized anything, and that this was a clear case of insubordination, and that he’d fix our wagons, the both of us.”
“The both of us? What do you have to do with any of this?”
Maione put on a truculent expression.
“Why, wasn’t I there, too, at the first examination of the crime scene? Didn’t I go to see the doctor, at the hospital? And when we interviewed the priest, at headquarters? In fact I told him that we didn’t do anything other than ask the standard administrative questions, the ones you’d have asked in any case of the kind.”
Ricciardi was worried.
“You don’t have anything to do with this matter, and you should have told him so then and there. This is something that doesn’t concern you; you stopped when you were told to stop, period.”
Maione regained some of his dignity, though it was partially undercut by the pink nightgown he was wearing.
“Commissa’, I came here to tell you something else: I’m willing to call in sick, if you want me to help you in the investigation. The truth is, I’ve been thinking, and I think that the reason that poor child died is because he was wandering the streets by himself, left to his own devices to find something to eat, and what he found, he ate; but at the same time I’ve worked with you for too many years now not to know that when something doesn’t sound right to you, then you’re probably onto something. So even if that idiot Garzo sent me to tell you that if you dare to do anything that results in another word of complaint from the curia, he’ll toss you out on your ear, I’m here to give you a hand.”
Rosa, standing in the kitchen doorway, said, “Bravo!”
Ricciardi looked at her.
“Excuse me, aren’t you supposed to be going deaf? Into the kitchen with you, go on, and mind your own business. No, Raffaele, I already told you: you’re more useful to me if you’re at headquarters, ready to allay suspicions.”
“Commissa’, then let me do something! Just sitting around unable to help you—all it does is make me worry. And besides, lately everyone is busy polishing brass doorknobs for the Duce’s visit, and I don’t have anything to do. And when I have nothing to do, I put on weight, and that’s no good.”
Ricciardi pretended to be overwrought.
“No, that’s no good. All right then, maybe you could try to gather a couple of pieces of information that the priest didn’t want to give me. First: they say that Tettè worked as an apprentice to someone, an artisan or a strolling vendor. I need to find out who that was, and what he does. Then I’d like to learn a little more about this parish priest of ours; he strikes me as just a little too uncooperative, and I’d like to know if there’s something behind it. But be careful: use outside channels, nothing that could get you in hot water back at headquarters.”
Maione smiled broadly.
“That’s it, Commissa’, now you’re talking. I’ll take care of it, don’t you worry: you’ll have all the information by nightfall. We can meet at Gambrinus in Piazza San Ferdinando, at the end of my shift, let’s say 8:30, is that all right? Be careful, though: if that Garzo sees us talking, he’ll put two and two together. I mean, he’s a cretin, but not that much of a cretin. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m intruding, and I should be on my way. My clothes must be dry by now; it’s got to be a hundred degrees in here with that enormous stove.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“In the meantime, I’m going to take a walk and pay a call on an old friend of ours. Let’s see if I can wheedle a little interesting information out of him.”
Maione slapped his forehead.
“That reminds me, Commissa’; I almost forgot. This morning Signora Vezzi—you know, the widow—came by looking for you. She wanted you to go with her to pick out a dress for that soiree. She’d forgotten that you weren’t at headquarters. I didn’t say a thing, naturally.”
Ricciardi shot a worried glance toward the kitchen.
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing, nothing. She said that she’d take care of it on her own, that it might actually work out better that way, so that she could surprise you. To be sure, if you don’t mind my saying so, Commissa’, that’s one beautiful woman. Whenever she comes around everyone from the sentry at the door to the last custodian and janitor seems to find some excuse or other to come by and take a look at her. Some of them more than once. And then she’s the only one who seems to be able to get Garzo out of our hair. If you ask me, you ought to give her some thought; she seems to have a real crush on you.”
Ricciardi cut in brusquely:
“All right, all right, you stop worrying about it. The important thing is that you didn’t give her my address.”
“No, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it!”
“Good work. Now get dressed and go do what I told you to do. Tell Garzo that I wasn’t home, that I’ve gone back south to Fortino to take care of some family matters. Ah, and Raffae’: grazie. Thanks for everything.”
Maione took a bow, which, along with the dressing gown, made him look remarkably like a sumo wrestler.
“Don’t give it another thought, Commissa’. Always at your service! But you should tread lightly, especially with that priest.”
Just ten feet away the tata, who on some occasions proved to be anything but hard of hearing, was processing the information she’d jus
t learned with a very worried expression.
XXVIII
He ran through the streets and vicoli. He ran barefoot, dodging cars and carriages, trolleys and handcarts. He ran through the market, leaping over obstacles and bumping up against fat women selecting apples. He ran on the sidewalks, splashing puddle water onto office workers trying to keep their pants dry on their walk to work, thus setting off curses and angry cries in his direction.
Cristiano ran, not caring who or what he slammed into along the way, indifferent to the icy drizzle he was dashing through; running warmed him up, and he liked to breathe in the rain.
He ran because he was looking for someone, and he went from one place to another where he thought he might find that person. And then he found him.
Cosimo Capone was a saponaro, a soap seller. It was a trade that encompassed many others, as he always liked to say. In theory it consisted primarily of barter, swapping junk for junk, with the difference in value paid in irregularly shaped chunks of brown soap, as difficult to handle as they were slow to dissolve. In theory. But in practice, Cosimo did more chatting than anything else.
He chatted with everyone, but especially women. He knew that he was charming, with his handsome smile and his gift of gab, and that a couple of nicely phrased compliments did wonders to soften the hearts of housewives and washerwomen; and with the softening of their hearts invariably came the opening of their coin purses. If you added a pretty song to the reassuring handcart piled high with raggedy old clothes and copper pots, the items practically sold themselves.
According to Cosimo, going around with a little kid in tattered clothing was a great idea for someone in his line of work; and the skinnier and hungrier he looked, the better. Women are mothers, or else they’d like to become mothers: an ill-fed, ill-clothed child is an irresistible appeal to their pity, and therefore to their generosity. And then if the child looks much younger than he really is, has such a bad stammer that he can’t even speak, and is accompanied by a stray mutt in worse shape than he is, then you’ve hit the jackpot.
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