Glass Souls

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Bianca knew very well that’s not how it was. She could feel upon her the eyes of shopkeepers, strolling vendors, the women of the vicolo, and idlers who whiled away the day doing nothing but gossip. She thought she could hear their whispers, their malign satisfaction at the last member of a family that had long been synonymous with greatness and wealth. For this, too, she owed Romualdo a debt of thanks.

  Now she was on the main street, where she could more easily mingle with the busy and variegated humanity that was out doing its various errands. It was strange, but she didn’t really have it in for her husband on account of his bad habit, nor for the devastating effects that it had had on her own life; he had paid and was continuing to pay in person for the many errors he had committed. As for her, once Carlo Maria Marangolo had told her that he considered her to be exceptional precisely because of her ability to distinguish between important matters and trivial details, in the midst of so many people who could see no difference between one and the other. Bianca had replied to him that in this, as in so much else, he was overvaluing her, but her friend’s words had still pleased her.

  Skirting close to the wall, she went past one of those piazzas that had been reduced to little more than an enormous construction site due to the reclamation of the entire area. She often thought about the public works that the regime had undertaken in the city, and if they were as good as everyone claimed, then the result would surely be a small heaven on earth. She didn’t know what to think about that, but she was a bit sorry to lose the little shops and ateliers, the bassi or grim ground-floor apartments, the vicoli or alleyways, the ancient buildings that were being razed to the soil to make way for square buildings and piazzas, white, with austere rectangular windows. They gave her the shivers, those buildings; they looked like gigantic collective caskets.

  A part in this sudden transformation had certainly been played by the earthquake that had struck in the July of two years ago; the city, built of yellow tufa stone, had tolerated the shock rather well, but the fallen cornices had been an excellent excuse to accelerate the project. The desire to destroy, to encourage the desire to rebuild.

  For that matter, wasn’t that exactly what Bianca was doing?

  No, she thought as she fended her way through the vegetable and fruit stalls in a small neighborhood street market. I didn’t want to destroy anything. All I wanted was a normal life.

  She crossed the piazza in front of City Hall, enjoying the pleasant shadow of the trees lining the center of it. The dark silhouette of the castle loomed like a strong and gentle protector. The children played with balls and hoops under the vigilant eyes of mothers and nannies. There, thought Bianca. A normal life. Children, a home: nothing more, nothing less than what these women have, these women who spend their mornings in the public parks, in search of a little cool air, a little shade from the sun. No luxuries, no holidays in the mountains, no receptions and jewelry and carriages and automobiles.

  Maybe, she thought to herself, right then and there an automobile would be useful in getting to Poggioreale prison. The thought made her smile: arriving at the prison with a chauffeur, that way she certainly wouldn’t attract attention.

  The trolley stop that she had chosen was the one on Via Depretis. She could have caught the trolley at the Piazza Dante stop, it was more or less the same distance from home, but she would have been followed by all the eyes in the whole vicolo, feasting on the picture of her, standing in line with the wives and mothers of hardened criminals, murderers and thieves at the entrance to the terrible fortress where Romualdo had chosen to live the next few decades of his life. Because there was no doubt in her mind on the matter: it had been a conscious choice. Her husband was innocent.

  The trolley was very crowded, but no one even vaguely resembled that tall, refined, haughty woman, who looked like a queen, with down-at-the-heels clothing but utterly regal beauty. Students, mothers with their children, men with white hats and fancy bowties. Bianca stood off to one side, resigning herself to a wait that, fortunately, was not long. The trolley car came screeching to a halt and a small river of people climbed aboard, intensifying the struggle for room.

  With some difficulty, the contessa also managed to force her way on board, though she was largely uninclined to indulge in the shoving and elbowing necessary to make space for herself. She paid the fifty cents to the ticket taker, who shot her a glance of idle curiosity. When he saw her, a well dressed middle-aged gentlemen immediately stood to offer her his seat. She thanked him with a smile and a nod of the head, and sat down. Beside her, a fat woman with two children in her arms shot her a hostile glance; from one of the little ones, who’d been ineptly diapered, came a terrible odor. Bianca pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and pressed it to her mouth.

  The woman commented in a loud voice.

  “If the signora has such a sensitive nose, she can just walk instead of ride, or cling to the doors like the others!”

  The trolley, in fact, was operating with a certain number of nonpaying passengers: a sizable number of scugnizzi was hanging on to the back of the car and to the running boards that paying passengers used to climb into the trolley, and they emitted a cheerful chorus of cries at every curve and every time the driver sounded the distinctive trolley horn. The vehicle pushed its way through cars, carriages, and carts drawn variously by donkeys, horses, and men, and which transported all manner of merchandise. As they gradually moved from the center of town out into the less prosperous quarters of the city, the trolley ran along past rows of hovels and shanties that looked as if they were about to collapse in so many clouds of dust, outside of which hordes of children played naked and barefoot amidst chickens and geese.

  Who knows how many cities there are in this city, thought Bianca as she tried to keep her mind off the odor and the glares from her seatmate. Who knows how many emotions boil, sink, resurface, and then plunge down again, leaving traces only in those who are touched by them directly.

  She thought of Ricciardi. Perhaps she’d thought of him, she mused, because she imagined, by the very nature of things, a policeman must deal with the traces of emotions. By begging the commissario to find out the motive that had driven Romualdo to take the blame for a murder he hadn’t committed, she had authorized him to delve with complete impunity into their lives; and therefore, into her own.

  She knew that he had gone to talk with Carlo Maria, and she continued to wonder what the two men had said to each other.

  A good friend, Carlo Maria. An old, dear friend. She was certain that he harbored delicate and powerful emotions toward her, and had done so for some time. A woman can always tell when someone falls in love with her. Still she had never wanted him to make an open and explicit declaration. He was too dear to her to be met with a refusal.

  Now he was sick and she wished she could comfort him, but she was afraid she might be leading him on and therefore wound him. Still, she’d been unable to avoid acquainting Ricciardi with the role that the duke had played in the whole affair. Bianca hadn’t wanted to know too much about it, but she was convinced that he had been acting as her guardian angel and that, after his fashion, he had tried to steer Romualdo away from the brink of even greater ruination.

  At the very least, as her own husband had told her, he would manage to save the palazzo.

  Every morning a number of suppliers brought Assunta various kinds of foodstuffs, and with the beginning of every season, linen for the household. Bianca was certain that it was Carlo Maria who sent all these things, but no one had ever revealed the name of their benefactor.

  My poor friend, she thought, you do all that you can, but there are things that lie beyond the reach even of the power of your money.

  As the trolley screeched and rocked its way closer to the broad street at the end of which sat the prison, Bianca decided that perhaps Ricciardi, that singular, shadowy individual with the exceedingly strange green eyes, might discover what had r
eally happened, and by so doing, give her a way, perhaps the only way, to find a sort of serenity. Or perhaps she herself would be able to achieve that, shortly, when she looked her husband in the eye for the very last time.

  She got in line with the other visitors, keeping her eyes fixed ahead of her; she could feel the eyes of the more curious members of the crowd upon her.

  Everyone, guards and members of the prisoners’ families, belonged to the same class of people.

  Everyone except for her.

  With her gloved hand she presented the authorization signed by the warden and issued at Attilio’s request. Until the very last, the lawyer had discouraged her from going, because Romualdo did not want to see her; Attilio had even offered to take her there himself, but hadn’t insisted when she had firmly rejected the offer.

  Bianca suspected that Moscato wasn’t particularly happy at the idea of meeting Romualdo, and she had wondered why: perhaps because he knew he’d never be paid, that he would be forced to consider the work he did as a tribute to an old friendship.

  They ushered her into the visiting room, which was packed with people as usual. This time, she felt no uncertainty and sat down, well aware of what would be appearing on the far side of the heavy grate of rusted metal.

  Or at least, she thought she was. But when Romualdo came in, her heart leapt into her throat. In the two months that had passed since her last visit, when he had warned her never to come visit him again, he had shrunk to half his former size. He looked like a skeleton exhumed after burial and dressed in the clothing of a healthy man.

  In comparison, Marangolo with his terminal illness looked like a veritable athlete.

  The stubble of his shaven hair covered his cranium, to the exclusion of broad patches of bald scalp. His flesh, taut over his cheekbones, sagged flaccid at his cheeks, and his eyes were lost in the deep sockets. On his chapped lips, there were clots of dried blood.

  The man remained standing in front of his wife. The guard at his side gestured for him to sit, but he refused.

  “The signora won’t be staying, rest assured. It’s a matter of no more than a minute.”

  Bianca had been left openmouthed. She started to cry, grasping futilely for the handkerchief she kept up her sleeve. Romualdo heaved a sigh of annoyance.

  “Spare me your compassion, wife. I have no need of it. What are you doing here? I though I’d made myself clear. I thought that at least I’d be able live free of your visits.”

  The guard, who was required by regulations to remain present, seemed ill at ease. He was accustomed to conversations of quite a different nature.

  Bianca struggled to master her breathing.

  “Romualdo, may I ask what it is you think you’re doing? Are you trying to kill yourself? Do you want to die behind bars, like some ordinary . . . some ordinary . . . ”

  Her husband finshed the sentence for her.

  “ . . . some ordinary murderer, that’s right. Which is what I am, some ordinary murderer. I wish you’d keep that in mind.”

  Bianca didn’t know what to say. She had prepared a little speech, but now she couldn’t remember even a word of it. She gathered her thoughts.

  “I know that you didn’t want me to come visit you, and now that I see you I can also understand why. Even your lawyer tries to avoid meeting with you. But I have to tell you this, I’ve made up my mind to find out what reason you have for doing this.”

  The man laughed bitterly.

  “Yes, I met the henchman you recruited to dig into matters that don’t concern you. That’s of no interest to me, after all, there’s nothing to find out and it wouldn’t change a thing. I asked you to turn your back on my life, Bianca. I’m turning my back on yours. Find yourself another man. Maybe my dear old lawyer will find a way to get you to marry that poor Marangolo. Come on, give him a little sweetness and light before his liver drags him down to hell.”

  The crass, vulgar reference to Carlo Maria was like a knife to the heart.

  “That’s petty and ungrateful on your part. You’re trying to wound me and in the meantime you vent your resentment against the only person that has tried to help you.”

  Once again, Romualdo laughed, uncontrolledly.

  “Help me? By financing a loan shark and allowing him to feed the flames of my ruin? If nature wasn’t already taking care of it, maybe I would have arranged to murder him, too. But I don’t care what you think. All I want is that you never come back here.”

  Bianca stood up. A cold fury surged up from her stomach like a column of bile. She regretted ever having felt an ounce of pity for that demon in human form.

  “You’re right. I’ve come here today to tell you goodbye, in fact. I’m going to follow this story all the way to its logical conclusion because I want to know the reason for what you did. But whatever the real motive, and I’m going to find out what it is, you can rely on it, it won’t change the fact that now you’re the opposite of the man I thought I wanted beside me for the rest of my life. I only thank God I never had your children.”

  The man replied contemptuously, looking her right in the eyes.

  “There’s more dignity in me, after I did what I did, than you’ve ever had; you who know just how much that man loves you, and yet you live off him without giving him so much as a gram in return. And do you know why, Bianca? Because you don’t have any love in you. You don’t know love. And you never will. Now, please, let me get back to my many important engagements: there are cockroaches in my cell that I’ll see more gladly than I’ll see you.”

  Bianca bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears and turned to go. Romualdo watched her grow smaller, pushing her way through the crowd of poor people who had come to bring a smile to their relations in prison.

  Once she had left the large visiting room, and not a moment before, the count of Roccaspina allowed himself to break into tears.

  Then he asked the guard to take him away.

  XL

  From the atrium of an apartment house, Maione and Ricciardi fixed their gazes on the entrance to the Vittorio Emanuele II high school. It was almost one o’clock and the students who were enrolled in the preparatory courses were about to be let go for the day.

  That morning the two men had talked at some considerable length about the Piro case, in part taking advantage of the enduring, extraordinary doldrums in police work. There had never been, as far as they could recall, a period like it: no serious case of violent crime, no murder that might demand immediate action, nor any of those situations that occasionally burst out of the shell of local omertà in the more densely populated neighborhoods, where disputes were more commonly settled with the blade of a knife and only rarely did those seriously wounded take their injuries to physicians or hospitals, which were obliged by law to report such cases.

  For the past two weeks, practically nothing at all had happened in the city.

  There had been a couple of street brawls, certainly, and one or two men had wound up flat on their backs, but nothing that required an actual investigation: a report was filed stating that a certain police officer, summoned to such-and-such a place at thus-and-such time of day, had proceded to arrest John Doe for wounds inflicted upon Richard Roe, and the matter was settled.

  And so Ricciardi and Maione, once they’d quickly worked their way through their daily duties, had been able to devote themselves to their unauthorized investigation; the brigadier in the vain hopes of distracting the commissario, the commissario in the equally vain intent of ridding himself of the brigadier’s solicitous attentions.

  They had agreed about how odd the shift in the victim’s wife’s attitude had been the night before, the instant they had mentioned the lawyer’s unusual twofold visit to the convent of the Madonna Incoronata. An inexplicable reaction at the end of a conversation that had been entirely urbane up to that point, if not indeed fully collaborative.

&
nbsp; Certainly, they would have to take into account the threat leveled by Signora Piro to reach out to some highly placed invidivual, but in Maione’s view, and on this point Ricciardi was in agreement, the woman had made an idle threat: if she really did have that power, she would have unleashed it immediately, the day after their first visit. What seemed more likely was that, just as it was with financial matters, interactions with the notables of the city had been the exclusive jurisdiction of the dearly departed.

  So it was worth looking into.

  Maione had spoken with the building’s doorman, who he thought had a familiar face. Sure enough, as a young man, the doorman had indulged in a few minor thefts that he hoped had long been forgotten, and all the brigadier had needed to do was speculate about the effects of publicizing that chapter of the man’s past among the tenants of the building, and his tongue had quickly been loosened, assuring at the same time the man’s utter and reliable discretion.

  He had thus come to learn that Piro’s daughter had already returned to her studies at one of the most respected schools in the city. A partial boarding school with a well established tradition, to be exact, which however also claimed a vigorous inclination to political renewal, since the new headmaster—himself a “veteran of the Great War and a Fascist from the very outset,” to put it in his own words—had just undertaken a rigorous process of application of the principles guiding the Fascist regime to his school.