“Signora, I’m so sorry. I understand your pain and, believe me, we are here for you. If there’s anything that we can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Concetta took a step forward and drew a deep breath.
“Commissa’, my mother-in-law and I gave this a lot of thought last night. On one hand, we thought that Tonino . . . my husband, that is, should rest in peace. That there should be no more talk about him, especially not under this roof—forgive me, Commissa’. But then, we thought about my children. There are three of them, and they’re young; they have their whole lives ahead of them. And they’ll have to bear this name. And this name musn’t be tarnished.”
Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a glance. Concetta had stopped talking, overwhelmed by emotion. Her mother-in-law, standing one step behind her, laid a bony hand on her shoulder. She heaved a sigh and went on.
“We sometimes say that you can feel things. Things happen, and a person might see them with his own eyes and understand them. Other times someone might tell you about them, so you hear them with your own ears and understand them that way. Then there are other times still when you can see some things and you can’t see others, and yet you still understand it all in your head. But sometimes there are things, Commissa’, that you can’t see and you can’t hear, things you can’t even think in your head, and yet you know them all the same. That’s what happens with people you hold dear in your heart,” and with those words she clutched to her breast a hand reddened by hard work and tears, “and you’re never wrong. You’re never wrong.”
Ricciardi stared straight into the woman’s face and his green eyes were clear and empty. Concetta stared back unwaveringly from the depths of her certainty, her pupils two dark stars swimming in her reddened eyes.
“My husband never killed anyone, Commissa’. Only himself. I know this, his mother knows this. His children know it too.
“So what we want to do is, what’s the word, cooperate. We talked it over between us. You and the brigadier here strike us as two kind and decent men. You’ve offered us help, and we can see that you’re sorry about what happened to my husband. We’re poor people, we don’t even know how we’re going to make ends meet now; we can’t hire a lawyer to defend us. All we can give our children is our name, and it must be untarnished.”
“Signora,” Ricciardi said, “our job is to find out the truth. Whatever that truth might be, whether or not we like it, even if it creates suffering. We’re not on anybody’s side. We’re here for one thing only: to find out what happened. We’re glad that you want to cooperate. But if we happened to discover that . . . that your husband were responsible for something bad, something serious, it will only be worse. You understand that, don’t you? If we close the case the way things stand now, there might still be a shadow of a doubt. But if we proceed, then there will be no doubts left. Are you sure this is what you want?”
After a quick glance at her mother-in-law, behind her, Concetta answered.
“Yes, Commissa’. That’s why we came here to see you, with my dead husband still at the hospital, like a man without any family picked up off the street. Did they tell you what he screamed when . . . when he did this thing? He screamed: my children! And that’s what we have to do: what’s best for his children. We’re sure, Commissa’.”
XLV
Ruggero was preparing himself to knock on Emma’s door. He was trying to summon the strength. He’d washed, shaved, changed clothes, and considered himself at some length in the mirror. The fact that he’d regained his image, the picture of himself that he was used to, the self that struck fear and respect into others, reassured him and gave him a sense of equilibrium.
But the trial that he had to face was a difficult one: perhaps the hardest of them all.
How long had it been since he’d spoken with his wife? Certainly, brief exchanges of courtesies at the dinner table; simple instructions concerning the management of the domestic help and the running of the house, but real conversation, no. They no longer even looked each other in the eye.
Over time, they had also consolidated their territories. Invisible walls had gone up: the study and the green parlor were his, the bedroom and the boudoir were hers. All they shared were the dining room and their loveless nights. The rest of the rooms were closed off, or else inhabited by the servants.
But now they had to talk. There was no more time for tacit understandings, hidden truths, silences charged with rancor. It was time to talk.
Before everything was irretrievably lost.
Ruggero knocked on Emma’s door.
Ricciardi thought something through and then spoke to Concetta Iodice.
“All right then. I have to ask you a few questions. Let’s start with your restaurant, the pizzeria. How did your husband get it off the ground? Where did he get the money?”
“Part of it came from our own savings and from the sale of his pushcart. The rest of the money was borrowed. From Carmela Calise.”
“What kind of terms was your husband on with Calise?”
“I never went to see her; I don’t even know where she lived. A friend of my husband’s, Simone the carter, told him about her; he said she was different from . . . from those other people, the ones who come and break your legs and arms if you don’t pay back every penny. I’m sure you know all about that here . . . Anyway, he told him that this one was more, how to put it, more human: if you don’t have all the money, you can bring the rest later; she gives extensions.”
“And did your husband ever have to extend his deadline?”
Concetta looked down at the floor.
“One time. The pizzeria wasn’t doing well. And the other day . . . the other day he had gone to see her, to ask for another extension. It had taken him two days to screw up the courage. He thought that I didn’t know, but I could see that he wasn’t sleeping at night. And so I put two and two together.”
“Did he seem desperate to you, at his wits’ end?”
“No. But worried, yes. Before . . . before he opened the pizzeria, he used to laugh all the time. Afterward, he stopped laughing. Maybe that’s why people weren’t coming. Why would you go to eat at a place where no one laughs?”
Ricciardi listened carefully.
“Let’s go back to that evening. Did he tell you that he was going to see Calise?”
“No, he didn’t tell us. But we knew.” She shot a fleeting glance at her mother-in-law, who hadn’t taken her arm off her shoulder the entire time, giving her strength. “And he left the pizzeria about nine o’clock, when most of the crowd had gone home. He told me that he had an errand to run, that I should close up and go home. So I closed up, cleaned everything, and waited a little longer just to see if he’d come back. Then I went home, thinking he might be there already. But he wasn’t. We fed the children and we put them to bed. He still wasn’t back. Then the two of us looked out the window, she and I,” and she tilted her head in her mother-in-law’s direction, “saying: ‘He’ll be here any minute.’ But it was past midnight when he came home.”
“And what was he like?”
Concetta’s eyes welled up with tears, and there was a quaver in her voice.
“As if he were drunk, but he didn’t smell like wine. He couldn’t walk straight; it took him forever to get up the stairs. He said that he was tired and that he didn’t feel good. He fell down on the bed with all his clothes on; he had a fever, and he fell straight asleep. I undressed him, the way I do with my children when they fall asleep in their clothes.”
She exchanged a glance with her mother-in-law; the older woman nodded her head yes ever so slightly. Then she pulled a folded scrap of paper out of her dress.
“And I found this. It fell out of his jacket.”
She handed the sheet of paper to Maione, who unfolded it.
“A promissory note, Commissa’. Eighty lire, payable April fourteenth, signed by Iodice, Antonio. Beneficiary: Calise, Carmela. And . . .”
Ricciardi looked up at Maione.
<
br /> “And?”
Maione spoke in a low voice, looking at Concetta.
“It’s covered with blood, Commissa’.”
Emma opened her door just a crack. Her husband glimpsed part of her face, her hair in disarray. Her eyes were red from weeping, or possibly from sleep.
“What do you want?”
“May I come in? I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
Emma’s voice was full of pain.
“What could be all that important?”
She turned and walked toward the bed, leaving the door half-open. Ruggero entered the room, shutting the door behind him.
The bedroom was a mess. Clothes and undergarments scattered across the floor and furniture, scraps left over from breakfast lying forgotten on the night table, a large, filthy handkerchief spread out on the bed. There was a stale, dank smell in the air.
“You’ve thrown up. You’re not well.”
Emma was shaking. She ran a hand through her hair.
“Aren’t you sharp. So that’s why they call you the Fox. Prego, have a seat. Just make yourself at home.”
Ruggero ignored the sarcasm. He looked around, still standing. Then he turned his gaze on his wife.
“You’ve been drinking, too. Look at you: you’re a wreck. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Emma let herself flop back on the bed, snickering.
“You want to know if I’m ashamed? Of course I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed I never had the courage to tell my father no when he arranged for me to marry you. I’m ashamed that I didn’t have the strength to leave you and this house all the times you treated me like a spoiled child. And I’m ashamed to be here right now, instead of . . .”
Ruggero finished her sentence for her.
“. . . instead of with him. With Attilio Romor.”
A long silence ensued. Emma struggled to focus on her husband’s image through her clouded vision.
“How do you know his name? Damn you! Have you been following me? Did you hire someone to investigate me? You coward!”
With her lips drawn back in a snarl, showing her gums, her head drawn between her shoulders, her fingers spread like claws, eyes red with fury and wine, her hair a tangled mess, Emma looked like a wild animal. She looked around for something to throw at him.
A bitter smile appeared on Ruggero’s lips.
“Investigate you? Spend good money to find out something everyone is eager to tell me, precisely because I don’t ask about it? Everyone: my friends, male and female, even the doorman. You didn’t deny anyone the sight of you, the spectacle of you playing the stupid slut. And now you’re surprised? Spare me your anger and settle for what you’ve brought down on yourself already.”
Emma turned pale. Reaching out with one hand, she groped for her filthy handkerchief and raised it to her lips, fighting back a retching impulse to vomit.
“I’ve left him, I won’t be seeing him again.”
“I know.”
She lifted her head and looked at him.
“How do you know that? You can’t possibly know that.”
“It doesn’t matter now. We have a more serious problem to deal with. Actually, to be precise, you’re the one with the problem. But you’re still Signora Serra di Arpaja, to my misfortune, and you need to listen to me, carefully.”
Ruggero pulled Emma’s summons out of his jacket pocket and started talking.
XLVI
Ricciardi took the promissory note, immediately noticing the bloody fingerprints near where the amount was written in numerals and by the signature. It looked as if Iodice had traced the parts that had been filled in with his finger, stained with Calise’s blood, making sure that it was the document he was looking for. He looked up at Concetta.
“He didn’t do it,” the woman said immediately.
Ricciardi shook his head.
“I know you’re convinced of that, Signora. Otherwise, you’d have never given me this note. But you have to admit that it’s hard to reconstruct what happened without thinking that your husband might have been the one to kill Calise.”
Concetta took a step forward. Her voice broke as she talked.
“I know it: I know it wasn’t him. After all, Commissa’, tell me this: why would he have kept the note? Wouldn’t he just have destroyed it and said he’d paid it in full? Even if his name did come out as one of the people who owed money to Calise. No, you know it yourself that it wasn’t him. He found her already dead, he took the promissory note, and he left. You have to find the murderer, Commissa’. Now there’re two souls that need to rest in peace.”
Ricciardi and Maione looked at each other uncertainly. What Concetta was saying was speculation. Evidence was quite another matter.
Iodice’s mother stepped forward out of the shadows. She spoke up in a low voice, roughened by silence and grief. It was clear that she had a hard time expressing herself in a language other than the dialect she was used to speaking.
“Commissario, Brigadier, forgive me. I’m an ignorant woman; I don’t know how to speak properly. I’ve worked hard all my life. That’s our fate, to struggle to raise our children. I watched this son of mine grow all his life long, minute by minute. I saw him cry and laugh and then I saw the children he and this fine girl brought into the world, this fine girl who tied her life to his, to ours. I knew him the way only a mamma can know her son, and I can tell you: my son never killed anyone. Much less an old woman, like his mother. Impossible. Believe what my daughter-in-law tells you, believe us both. Don’t let a murderer run loose in the streets; don’t let our name be stained just because it’s easier to stop looking.”
Ricciardi gave the woman a searching look.
“Signora, believe me when I tell you that we have no intention of letting the guilty party go free. I promise you: we’ll continue the investigation. But I have to tell you, the way things look right now, your son would appear to have committed this murder. You may go now. Maione will see you to the front door. And once again, my condolences.”
The women nodded their heads in farewell and walked toward the door. Before they left the room, Tonino Iodice’s mother turned back to face the commissario.
“The things a person does, sooner or later they have to pay for them, Commissa’. Or else they get their reward. Remember: ’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.
When he returned to the office after seeing the two women out, Maione found Ricciardi staring nonplussed at the door.
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean, Commissa’?”
“What Iodice’s mother said. What did she mean?”
Maione looked at him with concern. This investigation was introducing him to a Ricciardi who was very different from the one he’d come to know.
“The line about God Almighty and Saturday, you mean? Sometimes I forget that you’re not Neapolitan. They don’t say that where you come from? It’s a proverb. It means that when you do something, you don’t get your reward or punishment on a set date, like with debts between human beings. But I don’t think she was trying to threaten you.”
Ricciardi waved his hands briefly in the air, as if dismissing Maione’s suspicions.
“No, I know, I know. It’s just that I’ve heard it somewhere before. And I thought it had to do with actual debts and payments. That the saying was literal, in other words.”
There was a discreet knock at the door, followed by the pinched little face of Ponte, the clerk of the deputy chief of police. Ponte glanced at the armchair, the wall, and the bookcase in rapid succession, then spoke.
“Commissario, forgive me. The deputy chief of police is expecting you.”
As he was climbing the stairs to Garzo’s office, accompanied by Maione, Ricciardi reflected on the shift in perspective brought on by his conversation with the two Iodice women. As soon as he’d heard about the suicide he’d thought that the pizzaiolo must be the killer;
and, rationally, that’s what he continued to think. But he had to admit that the emotional impact of what the two women had told him had been powerful, and it had shaken his certainty.
Then there was the matter of the proverb. Ricciardi believed that the murder was somehow connected to Calise’s loan-sharking activities, and in fact her last thought, revealed to him by the Deed, seemed to point to the repayment of a debt, which would confirm his hypothesis. But now that he knew that that same proverb could refer to the course of fate, he could see that there were some murky points that needed to be cleared up. Iodice was certainly the most likely suspect for the murder, but he’d have to complete his investigation before he could give in to that belief.
Fate. Once again, there it was: cursed, inscrutable fate. The last refuge from all one’s fears, all responsibility: “That’s fate”; “Let fate decide”; “Fate will determine the outcome.” In songs and in stories. In people’s minds.
As if everything were preordained or carved in stone and nothing were left up to the free will of human beings. But that’s not the way things work; there’s no such thing as fate, Ricciardi mused as he and Maione approached the door to the deputy chief of police’s office. All there is in the world is evil, sorrow, and pain.
Garzo came to greet him with a dazzling smile.
“My dear, dear Ricciardi! Life is peculiar, isn’t it? We still have to deal with the occasional trivial crime; even if in this brave new era, murders are practically a thing of the past. We live in an age of law and order and prosperity, but if some lunatic decides to buck the system, we’re here to set things right. Prego, prego, Ricciardi, come in, have a seat.”
Ricciardi had listened to this little set piece of political oratory with an ironic smirk on his face. I’d like to send you down to spend just one day in the poorest quarters of this city, you bumptious peacock, he thought. I’d show you law and order and prosperity.
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