Glass Souls

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  He had thought about himself, Ricciardi had. About the punishment that he inflicted upon himself every day, and the love that he felt for Enrica. About the certainty that he, too, would be nothing but a witness to the future of the woman he loved, a future in which he played no part.

  On his way out of the building, he had crossed paths with Livia. On the far side of a large plate-glass window, illuminated by the bright sunshine on the terrace of the yacht club, she was laughing in the midst of a court of six men, all of them doing their best to get her to notice them, all of them captivated by her beauty. The two of them had exchanged a brief, fleeting glance, and the woman’s laughter had died in her throat, betraying clear evidence of suffering and lack of sleep beneath the cunning little red hat and the hair done up in the latest fashion, under the rouge and the lipstick. Her eyes had filled with pain and sorrow, but only for an instant: she had immediately started laughing again, flirting with her suitors, defying the unfriendly glares from the other women confined to her shadow.

  He had hurried out of the club, feeling a sensation of malaise rise in his chest that was a form of nausea with himself, and an awareness that he belonged to neither the world of Livia nor that of Enrica.

  Livia and Enrica on the other side of a window, and he always on the wrong side of that glass.

  Then, out in the street, while he was trying to concentrate on the Roccaspina case, a woman, the only other human being who was passing at that moment on that stretch of street, had turned around and looked at him.

  And she was Enrica.

  They stood there looking at each other, both of them overwhelmed by the way that their thoughts had coincided with reality, both of them aware that there was no escape route, no way to avoid an encounter for which neither was prepared, for which they would never be prepared, both of them with their heads full of wind and sand and neither in the slightest degree capable of formulating a thought, much less articulating a word.

  Both of them with their hearts in their throats.

  Ricciardi walked toward her. He wished that, for once, he was wearing a hat, so that he could doff it in greeting, but as usual he was without one.

  “Buongiorno. I . . . beg your pardon. I didn’t expect to find you here and . . . I beg your pardon.”

  Enrica wanted to smile amiably. She would have liked to say nothing more than buongiorno to you, and then go her way cursing the moment that she had decided she needed to fill her eyes with the sea.

  Instead her heart took possession of her mouth.

  “My pardon? You beg my pardon? And for what, would you be begging my pardon? For having written me, for having . . . looked for so long and then turned and left? For not having reached out to me again? For having made me believe that you . . . that you and I . . . ”

  Her eyes filled with tears, fogging over her lenses. She bit her lower lip and took a deep breath. Don’t cry, stupid girl. Don’t cry, confound you.

  Behind her, a seagull stared out to sea in boredom.

  His eyes were wide open, as if he were afraid, as if he were in some nightmare from which he was unable to awaken.

  Behind him, the two dead children had their arms wrapped around each other.

  “ . . . another man.”

  He had barely murmured. He didn’t even know what he wanted to say.

  “What did you say? What about another man?”

  He let all the air out of his lungs in a single breath.

  “Another man?! There’s another woman, another person in your life. Or am I mistaken? I, I . . . ” and here she tapped her forefinger on her chest, “I saw you. I saw you when you were . . . I saw you.”

  Enrica thought about the brightly lit window that she had noticed the night before, when she was going to put away the cookware, the warm shiver that she had felt in her chest. And she felt a bottomless rage swell within her, the reaction to her pride, so brutally trodden underfoot.

  That man, who had deceived her and abandoned her; that man whom she had seen many times with the woman from out of town; that man who had made her believe that he was in love with her, and now was upbraiding her for having invited a person to dinner. For all he knew, the guest could have been a friend of her brother-in-law’s, or a distant relative: how dare he accuse her?

  She clenched her jaw and hissed.

  “Why, how dare you, you, how dare you talk to me about how there’s another man? What right do you have? Have you ever told me, or written to me, that you care for me? I, I would have waited for you for who knows how long, don’t you understand that? All I wanted was a gesture, a single gesture and I . . . But what good would it do? What good is all this . . . ” She waved her hand in the air, incoherently. The tears were rolling down her cheeks in an unstoppable flood. “What is all this sea any good for, can you tell me that? What purpose does it serve, the sea?”

  With that last, absurd question, she turned on her heel to leave.

  After a few steps, she stopped and said: “Please forgive me. Allow me to offer my condolences for the death of Signora Rosa. As you may know, I cared for her very much.”

  Ricciardi remained with a hand half-lifted, his eyes staring into nothingness. He just couldn’t understand what all that sea was good for.

  XXXVII

  Maione was seething with the urge to tell Ricciardi all about Laprece, the chauffeur who had been fired much too summarily, and he was just as curious to hear how the meeting with the famous Duke Marangolo had gone, the man who had been in the Roccaspina home the evening before the murder. And so, the instant they informed him that his superior officer had returned, he galloped down the main staircase.

  By now it was evening and the brigadier was beginning to feel anxious; the commissario had left the building at a little past ten that morning and he had been forced to cover for his absence in one of the useless meetings called by that idiot Garzo. He’d made up an urgent phone call from Dr. Modo at the hospital for a suspicious wounding, and he had put in a call to his friend the physician just in case anyone had had the unfortunate idea of checking the situation out. The doctor had stifled a laugh: there were all the suspicious woundings anyone could think to ask for, so really as far as that went there was an embarrassment of riches, and at the very least, there was always the pounding headache he was suffering from, about which, he informed the brigadier with sibylline archness, Ricciardi knew a little something.

  Maione had hung up without delving into that statement. He was left with a feeling of uneasiness: the commissario continued to behave strangely, he was no longer the man he thought he knew so well.

  His worry rose to the highest levels when, after knocking and pointlessly waiting for permission to enter the office, he had made up his mind to simply open the door himself without it. Ricciardi was sitting at his desk, his head bowed over the desktop as if he were reading something. But there was no document in front of him.

  Maione picked up his superior officer’s jacket from the floor, where it lay at the foot of the coatrack, and hung it up.

  “Commissario . . . Commissa’ . . . you’re all right, aren’t you? Let me get you something, a little water, a cup of ersatz coffee . . . no, maybe not ersatz coffee. Please, Commissa’, answer me, you’re worrying me.”

  Ricciardi slowly turned his face up to him. He was ashen, his eyes were sunken, his hair matted to his forehead in messy clumps as if he’d been out in the rain for a long time. The brigadier felt his heart surge in his chest.

  “Commissa’, what’s the matter? Should I go summon the doctor, maybe you have a little bit of a temperature, or maybe . . . ”

  Ricciardi lifted his hand to stop him.

  “No. No. Don’t worry, Raffaele. I took . . . I took a long walk, I needed to clear my head. It’s hot out, it’s very hot, and I sweated a little. Don’t worry.”

  Maione scrutinized him.

  “Commissa
’, forgive me, but I just can’t keep from worrying. I know that losing Signora Rosa was a hard blow, I understand that. But you need to recover and find some sort of peace, this habit of not speaking isn’t good for you. Let’s do this: tonight you come and eat with my family, and you’ll see, you’ll feel better immediately.”

  Ricciardi stared at the brigadier as if he were speaking to him in a foreign tongue. Then he smiled sweetly, which was something that, if possible, frightened his underling even more.

  “It’s not necessary, trust me. I just wanted to enjoy a lovely September day. So tell me, is there news?”

  After a moment of perplexed silence, Maione decided to comply with the commissario’s suggestion and simply discuss the case they were working on.

  He was finally able to tell him about Laprece’s visit, with an abundance of details and doing his best to recount the chauffeur’s words verbatim. When he was done Ricciardi nodded. Maione couldn’t seem to shake the unpleasant impression that he was sick, or drunk, or possibly both.

  “Is that what he said? That, since the father was dead, they no longer had any need of him? And did it sound to you as if he was telling the truth? I mean, did he sound sincere?”

  The brigadier shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, yes, Commissa’, I think so. And how about you, how did it go? What did the duke have to tell you?”

  Ricciardi told Maione all about his conversation with Marangolo, leaving out nothing. The tone of his voice was flat, expressionless; his green eyes looked out into the void. The brigadier was increasingly uneasy. In the end he said: “In other words, Commissa’, we’re gathering plenty of important information but we still can’t get away from the likeliest hypothesis, which is that Piro was murdered by the Count of Roccaspina. Even the duke is convinced of it, and the chauffeur didn’t say anything particularly interesting.”

  Ricciardi murmured:

  “You’re wrong there, Raffaele. The chauffeur did tell us something: Piro went to the Convent of the Madonna Incoronata on two consecutive days, and that wasn’t something he usually did. As you know, I don’t believe in coincidences. We need to talk with the widow again. We need to figure out if she left something out.”

  Maione pulled his pocket watch out and looked at it.

  “But isn’t it a little late, now, Commissa’? Maybe tomorrow . . . ”

  Ricciardi stood up abruptly from his desk.

  “No, we’d better do it right away. Otherwise, she might find out that we spoke to the chauffeur and arrange for him not to answer our questions. Remember, we’re moving through unofficial channels and they can block us whenever they like. But don’t you worry, you go on home, I’ll take care of it on my own.”

  Maione was already at the door; he was holding Ricciardi’s jacket open for him.

  “Just think if I’m about to let you go on your own, Commissa’. It’s already clear that it was a mistake to let you go on your own this morning. Come on.”

  They ran into Piro’s widow a short distance from her front door, as she was returning home. Her face looked strained and her eyes were red. It looked as if she’d just finished crying.

  Ricciardi, faintly embarrassed, said to her: “Buonasera, Signora. We wanted to speak with you, but perhaps it would be better if we came by some other time.”

  “No. No, absolutely no problem; after all, by now I’m used to my troubles. Would you care to come upstairs?”

  The commissario shook his head.

  “That’s not necessary, it’s just a quick thing. We only need a minute.”

  The woman pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and blew her nose.

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “The business relationship that your husband had with Count Roccaspina, would you have any idea of its nature?”

  The woman made a face.

  “That damned murderer must have owed my husband a great deal of money, that’s something I know. I told you, I helped Ludovico keep the ledger books.”

  “And what did your husband say about this large line of credit? Was he not afraid that it might not be repaid?”

  “No. He never had that fear. Every time that the sum increased, I would ask him whether it might not be wiser to stop, but he’d laugh and say: this is the surest money we’ll ever see. I never knew why. My husband, you see, never liked to talk about certain matters. But he was very messy, and he needed me to take care of accounts.”

  “And is that how it was up to the very end?” asked Maione. “Right up to the quarrel the day before the murder?”

  “Certainly. Until that argument, and I repeat that I have no idea what it was about, Roccaspina was my husband’s best client, at least, that’s what Ludovico said.”

  Ricciardi tried to insist.

  “And you don’t know where your husband got the money that he was lending to Roccaspina, is that right?”

  Costanza Piro furrowed her brow.

  “What are you trying to say, Commissario? My husband invested the money of the institutions that he administered, paying interest and living off the difference. A risky, dangerous line of work, but Ludovico was a man of great courage and intelligence. He deserved every lira that he earned; his only thought was his family. And now I’m all alone and I don’t know where to turn.”

  She began to cry, sobbing into her handkerchief. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance. Then the commissario said his farewells.

  “Grazie, Signora. We won’t disturb you any further. Have a good evening.”

  The woman bowed her head briefly and turned toward the street door, but before she could go back inside, Ricciardi called out to her.

  “One last thing, Signora. Could you tell me why your husband, the day he died and the day before that, as well, should have asked his driver to take him up to the Convent of the Madonna Incoronata?”

  Signora Piro froze in place, with one hand holding the door, as if she’d just been turned into a pillar of salt. She turned her head a few degrees and, without even bothering to look at the two policemen, hissed, flatly: “Now that I think about it, gentlemen, yes, you are disturbing me. You’re disturbing me a great deal. And now I’ll have to beg you not to come back again, because we already have enough pain and sorrow without you coming around to stir it up and make it worse. I hope I never see you again, otherwise I would be forced to reach out to some of the highly placed acquaintances of my husband, and believe me, there are quite a few, and ask them to help us defend our family’s peace. Have a good evening.”

  And she disappeared into the atrium.

  SECOND INTERLUDE

  The old man stops playing at the end of the refrain. The young man observes his hands.

  It’s incredible the metamorphosis they undergo when they’re not moving across the face of his little instrument. On the strings they flutter like butterflies, every single touch is firm and precise, the pressure of his fingers never knows uncertainty. As soon as the last echo of the music dissolves into the air, leaving a legacy of the heartbreaking yearning of the notes, those hands go back to being a pair of gnarly claws run through with tremors.

  The young man realizes that once again he’s been holding his breath, and he lets out the air in a subdued puff. Pe’ te ne vulè caccià, he thinks. The man burns his own hand, in order to shoo her away.

  During the second verse something happened to him. He stopped thinking about the execution, the succession of chords, the musical solutions. He stopped following the song with his hands, imitating the path of the fingers across the neck of the instrument, as if he himself were playing or even as if he were accompanying the old man on the guitar.

  He stopped.

  And he followed the story. The story of the forty-five-year-old man who, in the first verse, was watching the moth flying in circles in the night, irresistibly attracted by its own ruin; and that attraction was the letter
that she, the beautiful young woman, had written to him. I love you, don’t you understand that? I love you. The man, who believes that love was impossible, tries to protect her, in the first verse; he says to her: moth, this is a candle, not a flower. It may attract you with its luminosity, but it can’t feed you. It can only kill you. And you would only die in atrocious torment.

  That’s how the first verse was, and now the young man thinks that this second part means something quite different.

  The old man places the instrument in the case and gets up from the armchair. The young man half stands up from the stool, to help him, but the old man gestures to him not to. He drags his steps toward the window, he pulls back the shutter and throws the window wide open. All the blue in the world explodes out of that rectangle, in contrast with the dusty gray shadows that fill the room. From where he sits, the young man looks at the old man’s razor-sharp, crooked profile, the intensly fine network of wrinkles, the eye squinting against the light. The trembling hands, gripping the windowsill, as if he were perching, in every way like the pigeons that coo on the nearby rain gutter.

  In a soft voice he asks: what’s it good for, all this sea?

  The young man is still thinking about the verse that has just ended. He’s sung it every night for years, but this is the first time he’s heard it.

  Maestro, he says, the man is afraid. Is that right? He’s afraid. He’s defending himself, not the girl. At least, not her alone.

  The old man doesn’t take his eyes off the sea, but he answers him: yes, very good. You’re starting to understand the story. The second verse doesn’t explain the first one, it doesn’t carry the metaphor of the moth into the real world. The girl and the moth are two distinct, separate things. Both of them flutter, the moth from flower to flower, the girl from man to man. Because really, the girl isn’t all that naïve and fragile after all, or at least she doesn’t know that she is. And so he, yes, is every bit as afraid for himself as he is for her. But do you know what he’s saying?