Glass Souls

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  A closed case, an investigation without leads; the impossibility of surveying any of the evidence with his own eyes, no chance of picking up clues that might have eluded others, and, most important of all, of hearing the dead man’s last scrap of thought, by means of that terrible, deranged faculty that the Deed endowed him with.

  It was like looking for something in an empty dresser drawer.

  And yet, he somehow felt that he had come back to life, as he focused on something other than his own anguish, this new loneliness. That was already a considerable step forward, he was forced to admit.

  After gulping down the last bite and rewarding the vendor with an added tip, prompting the man to ask, with ill-concealed professional pride, whether that wasn’t the best fried pizza in town, Ricciardi decided that he would spend his last remaining hour of daylight by visiting the home of the Contessa of Roccaspina. He remembered the place, and he had read the address in De Blasio’s crime report.

  Was it plausible that the count could have gone out and returned home without his wife’s noticing? He wanted to look into that question and he also wanted to speak to the woman again to agree with her on their ensuing lines of attack. He knew that he would need to move cautiously, otherwise his superior officers would be sure to cut him off. Reopening a closed case was a mortal sin: in practical terms it amounted to an admission that the police had put an innocent man in jail, and while he might have confessed to the crime, it still constituted an error. The results would be to trigger an immediate reaction from Rome and an ensuing earthquake at police headquarters.

  What’s more, though it wasn’t easy to admit it to himself, he wanted to see Bianca again. He wanted to understand why she was so adamant in her belief that the count was innocent. He sensed that neither love, conjugal loyalty, nor the bonds of marriage were what drove the woman’s determination. Then what was behind it?

  The street door was open, but there was no one guarding the entrance, and Ricciardi ventured into the courtyard. At the center of the courtyard, a large flowerbed displayed an untended tangle of vegetation surrounding a dizzyingly tall palm tree. There was no sign of carriages or automobiles: the garage was empty, save for a few crates stacked up in the shadows. The general impression was of a long-ago splendor that had now faded, a depressing abandonment.

  He climbed the broad staircase to the second floor, where there was a single, large door made of dark hardwood.

  A fairly elderly woman came to the door; she wore a stained apron and looked up at him with unmistakable mistrust. He asked to see the contessa and the old woman vanished into the interior without a word, leaving him to wait in the spacious, unadorned front hall.

  Bianca arrived almost immediately. She wore no ornaments of any kind, and yet she somehow conveyed an impression of extreme elegance and refinement. She wore a navy blue dress with a small white pattern, simply cut, and her hair, with its coppery highlights, was pulled up in a bun and fastened with a brooch.

  She gave Ricciardi a calm, level gaze.

  “Commissario, what a surprise. I wasn’t expecting visitors, forgive me if I’m less than presentable. Has something happened?”

  He nodded his head ever so slightly.

  “I hope you’ll excuse me, Signora. I’ve been over to the hospital to see the doctor who performed the autopsy at the time of the murder, and I had a little chat with the colleague who opened and closed the investigation. I wanted to talk about the case with you, too, for a moment, if you can spare the time.”

  Bianca nodded.

  “Why, of course. In fact, if anything, I should be thanking you for your prompt activity. Frankly, I was hardly expecting this much. Please, come this way and make yourself comfortable,” she said as she led the way into a small sitting room near the front door.

  Ricciardi recognized the same room where he’d been received at the time of the investigation into the murder of the self-proclaimed seer. The room emanated a general sensation of decrepitude, something that he had already noticed the last time, and which reminded him of a brief quarrel between the count and the contessa. The man, he remembered, had the wild-eyed expression of a wounded, cornered beast, while she had given him a vague sense of disquiet, the same feeling he was now experiencing in the presence of those calm, chilly eyes that somehow, at the same time, conveyed impassioned suffering; they displayed a fire that burned behind a thick slab of ice that was at once immobile and translucent.

  Bianca pointed him to a small armchair facing a settee.

  “Can I offer you a glass of rosolio liqueur? I’m afraid I don’t have much else. As you may have noticed, we’re a little short on domestic help and on provisions.”

  Ricciardi pretended not to understand the bitter irony.

  “Nothing, thanks. I’ve just eaten.”

  “Then tell me, Commissario. Have you learned anything from these first contacts?”

  Ricciardi pushed the hair off his forehead with a distracted sweep of his hand.

  “I confess that I’m having a hard time getting a clear idea of what happened after the murder for which your husband was arrested. And in fact, the investigation might very well have been wound up in something of a hurry: reading between the lines of the police reports, there’s no mistaking an evident sense of relief at his confession.”

  The shadow of a smile flashed rapidly across Bianca’s lovely face.

  “I have to say I am of the same opinion, Commissario. All the same, I can hardly blame your colleagues. Stumbling upon someone who conveniently ties it all up with a neat bow, and especially when it’s a murder that brings a certain whiff of scandal with it, is too big a piece of luck to turn up your nose at.”

  Ricciardi agreed.

  “You show a very balanced point of view, Signora. For my part, I have to admit that this case might bear a little more looking into. Luckily, the autopsy was performed by the finest medical professional we have in this city, which means we have some very solid information in that regard. Now, we just have to figure out . . . ”

  The last rays from the setting sun angled in through the window and played over the contessa’s hair, extracting a reddish gleam. She suddenly looked like a girl pleased to have been given an unexpected gift, and the commissario felt a surge of tenderness caress his soul.

  “Then you’ve decided to take on the case!” the woman exclaimed. “I sensed it, you know, when we first met, that you were a perceptive soul. Even then, it would have been easy to accuse Romualdo. It was the most obvious solution, and yet you didn’t do it.”

  Ricciardi displayed caution.

  “Let’s be perfectly clear on this. I can dig into this case and try to find a little evidence that might have been overlooked due to the haste we were just talking about. But that doesn’t mean that the larger picture, as it’s currently configured, can be completely overturned.”

  “Of course not. But you see, Commissario, I know for sure that Romualdo never left home that night. And if Piro was murdered that same night, then I am completely certain it wasn’t Romualdo who did it.”

  Ricciardi remained silent for a few seconds. Then he decided that the time had come to ask his question.

  “Would you care to tell me how you can be so sure of that? Couldn’t he have gotten out of bed while you were asleep, for instance? Couldn’t he had returned home before you awakened?”

  Bianca blushed violently and compressed her lips. Ricciardi noticed the sudden change of expression and was baffled. The woman got to her feet.

  “All right then. After all, you could hardly form a worse impression. Please, come with me.”

  The commissario followed her through a long procession of rooms immersed in the partial darkness of closed shutters and curtains pulled tight. Barren rooms, with flaking walls and faded frescoes on the high ceilings, only infrequent pieces of furniture, and a layer of dust over everything, accentuating the
image of dreary abandonment of a great home that had once enjoyed luxury but now maintained only the faintest of memories of it.

  Bianca walked briskly, said not a word, and kept her eyes fixed straight ahead of her. It was a seething humiliation for her to have to display the squalor in which she lived to that man, and yet at the same time she felt an angry pride surging inside her. Conflicting sensations that she puzzled over. She’d never displayed so much of herself, and now she was doing it to save the man who had put her in that condition in the first place. Ironic, if you stopped to think.

  She stopped when she came to a pair of doors, side by side. She heaved a deep breath, then turned to stare at Ricciardi.

  “Listen carefully to what I have to say, Commissario. Romualdo and I have been married for ten years. We haven’t had children, and our relationship has been deteriorating over the years. I imagine that’s something that happens frequently in marriages, and usually people just conceal the fact behind a façade of respectability and fake affection. Unfortunately, I’m no good at pretending. And that is a very grave defect for someone born into my social world.”

  Ricciardi said nothing and, in his embarrassment, wondered to himself why she was confiding such things to him.

  As if she had read his mind, Bianca added: “You must be wondering why I’m telling you all this. It gives me no pleasure, but I think it’s necessary that you have a complete understanding of the situation if you are going to realize why I’m so sure of what I’m saying.”

  Ricciardi, for no good reason at all, thought of Enrica and Livia, but also of Rosa and Nelide. The warm, noisy, chaotic home of a large family, which he was able to intuit based only on two windows across the way and a smile; the rich and fashionable apartment with a hint of loneliness, a small household run by two housekeepers and a scrubwoman, a place that was scented with lavender and redolent of cleanliness; the comfortable, safe, muffled and silent apartment that first an aunt and later her niece kept for him as if it were a temple. Each of those homes had taken on the personality of the women who lived in it, each of them resembled those who moved inside them. But this house remained completely unmarked. It was impossible, as he looked at the rooms, to sense the personality of whoever lived there.

  “Signora, I’m not here to pay a call on you or to judge you or the life you lead. You contacted me for a reason, and that reason is why we’re talking right now.”

  He had uttered those words to reassure the contessa, but he immediately realized how harsh and cold it had sounded, the way it had come out.

  The woman seemed to ponder Ricciardi’s words.

  “I understand. And in fact the things that I’ve told you are crucial, in my opinion, to a fuller understanding of what actually happened. My confidences concerning the state of my relationship with my husband were a necessary premise upon which to explain to you, Commissario, that my husband and I haven’t slept in the same room for years now.”

  Ricciardi was surprised.

  “Then . . . how can you possibly be sure that he was home that night? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “That’s why I’ve brought you here. You see?” Bianca waved a hand toward one of the doors. “This is my bedroom, and this room next door is where my husband slept. They share a wall. A very thin wall. It was originally a single large bedroom. But that was long ago.”

  Bianca’s voice betrayed no regrets. She was simply stating facts.

  “And it’s precisely because of how thin that wall is that I can, or rather, I could know with absolute precision both when he came home and when he left. I’m a very light sleeper, and before falling asleep I always read for hours. That night he came home at nine and the next morning, he left at seven thirty.”

  Ricciardi was angry at himself. That woman was wasting his time.

  “Signora, I frankly believe that it’s quite impossible for you to be certain that your husband never left, if you were in a different room from him. You’re basing your certainty on a mere impression, and I’m afraid that such a claim is far too vague to justify opening a case that has already been closed. Now I hope you’ll excuse me, but I have to go.”

  Unexpectedly, Bianca smiled at him.

  “That’s what I expected. It’s too convenient to have someone who simply confesses to a murder to just toss out the solution. Much less if the person calling this convenient solution into question is a woman, and a woman who no longer shares her husband’s bed.”

  Continuing to hold Ricciardi with her gaze, Bianca reached out her hand to one of the two doors and opened it. The heavy door squealed pitiably, and when she shut it again, it echoed with a dull thud. Both of the sounds, even during the daytime, against the noises that came in from outside, were perfectly and irritatingly audible.

  “Believe me, Commissario: I can tell you with absolute precision when this door is opened and when it is shut again. I told you that I’m a very light sleeper and that I wake up quite often during the night.”

  Ricciardi thought it over.

  “Let’s admit, for argument’s sake, that you heard clearly and that your husband never left that night. Let’s admit that he had some mysterious motive for confessing to a murder he didn’t commit. Let’s also admit that the autopsy is correct and that Piro actually was killed between midnight and two in the morning. How would your husband have known that there had been a murder? And why would a man so dedicated to living a life of pleasure have left home at such an early hour?”

  Bianca never once took her eyes off of Ricciardi’s.

  “My husband was a gambler, Commissario. For the sake of this cursed vice, because of this disease, he ruined his life and mine. But that doesn’t mean that he was a social butterfly or that he was out till all hours attending the theater and living the rake’s life. When he ran out of money, and if no one would extend him credit, he came home and shut himself in this room. It was a common occurrence for him to come home early, and there were times when he didn’t even go out at all. As for leaving home early in the morning, that had become a habit with him for the past few months. I have no idea where he went.”

  “And you never asked him?”

  The contessa smiled sadly.

  “Commissario, Romualdo and I never talked much. In fact, we almost never did. There were times when I couldn’t believe I ever married him, and I can’t even remember the last time we had a laugh together. He has . . . had his life and I did whatever I could to hold together the last few pieces of my own. We had nothing in common, and we hadn’t in years.”

  Ricciardi recalled that, when he had come to the palazzo to interview the count, she had immediately told him that, if he was a creditor, she had no idea where her husband might be. In a flash he understood what kind of hell that woman’s marriage had condemned her to.

  “Signora, could I see your husband’s bedroom?”

  Bianca once again opened the door, and it produced the same unpleasant screech as before.

  In the room, disorder reigned. Stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines gathered dust. An old oversized armoire displayed, through a half-opened cabinet door, a few suits and an overcoat that had clearly been patched and mended. A ramshackle vanity table with a mirror dulled by the passage of the years, with a shaving bowl and all the attendant paraphernalia. A dresser drawer pulled open, with linen inside. A couple of down-at-the-heel pairs of shoes, an unmade bed.

  Bianca had remained just beyond the threshold. Her eyes were avoiding the sight of that display.

  “He never let us come in to clean the room, the housekeeper and me. It’s all exactly as he left it, when he went to . . . That morning, in other words.”

  Ricciardi reviewed those ordinary everyday objects, trying to form an idea of the person who had inhabited that room. A man who had simply given up, abandoning all dignity: it looked like a stall or a garage inhabited by a vagabond. There was a smell of dust
and a pungent whiff of something rancid, covered up by cheap perfume. He went over to the vanity table, hoping to find a few letters, some personal documents. There was nothing.

  He looked up.

  “Signora, there’s something I need to ask you, a favor, and I apologize in advance for the intrusion. Would you mind very much if I entered your bedroom and asked you to open and shut your husband’s door?”

  Bianca’s eyes delved into his soul, but Ricciardi withstood her piercing gaze.

  In the end she stepped forward, opened the adjoining door, and gestured for the commissario to enter.

  Ricciardi kept his eyes downcast, to make perfectly clear that he had not the slightest intention of breaking in on the contessa’s personal privacy. All the same, he could not help but notice, out of the corner of his eye, a clean, tidy, sweet-smelling bedroom, with two adorable curtains and a book lying open on the side table.

  Turning his back to the bed, he shut the door behind him. A moment later, he heard Bianca opening and then shutting the door in the adjoining room. The woman had been right, that noise was more than enough to awaken anyone, unless they were an extremely heavy sleeper.

  He walked out of the room with determination and spoke to the contessa.

  “All right. All right. I’ll go forward with this. But I’ll need to meet your husband, and that will require me first to meet his lawyer. Could you arrange a meeting with him for me?”

  “Why, certainly, Commissario. He’s a dear friend of my family. Hopefully by tomorrow, if you like. Would you want me to go with you?”

  “No, there’s no need for that. In fact, without you there he may speak more freely. I’ll wait for you to let me know the time and place of the appointment.”

  The woman nodded her head again.

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll send my housekeeper to police headquarters. And, commissario . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Grazie. You are the first person who has listened to me since . . . since this thing happened. And I need to know. Absolutely need to.”