He had scrupulously kept himself at a safe distance from all passion. He’d walled emotions out of his life, keenly aware as he was of how love could destroy and corrupt. Every grave in every cemetery is full of love, he thought. And so the best thing to do is to remain alone and observe love from a distance; as far away as possible.
And yet for the past few months this distance had been growing narrower, in a worrisome and unexpected fashion. Ricciardi threw open the shutters and let in the sun; the first shaft of light illuminated the heap of documents on his desk, waiting to be filled out. With a sigh, he began writing. Better to work: God bless the Sunday shift.
III
God damn the Sunday shift, thought Brigadier Raffaele Maione with a snort of annoyance as he headed downhill from Piazza Concordia toward police headquarters. The heat was already hellish, and it was only eight in the morning. God damn the summer, too.
The brigadier was furious, and he really shouldn’t have been. But he decided that he had perfectly good reasons. Actually, he was having a good moment, the best in the three years since a thief had stabbed his son Luca to death. This horrible event had not only broken his heart, it had also driven a wedge into his family, separating his wife from him and the other children, and leaving her closed up in a silent, inconsolable grief.
Until the miracle happened that spring, just when he was beginning to despair of ever seeing her enchanting smile again. Man and wife had come together, united again the way they had been so long before, and at age fifty Raffaele had been given another unhoped-for chance at happiness. Once again, the Maione household rang with the bright laughter of mother and children, once again the father good-naturedly allowed himself to be mocked and ridiculed; once again on Sundays Lucia’s legendary spaghetti sauce opened stomachs and hearts to optimism. And so, why was the brigadier striding off with a grim expression of discontent toward his Sunday shift? And above all, why had he intentionally accepted that shift, swapping with a colleague who could hardly believe his ears when Maione proposed the trade?
This is how it happened: a week ago Raffaele had gone out for a stroll, arm in arm with his pretty wife, their five children trailing after them. Just a short distance from their front door they had walked past the shop of Ciruzzo Di Stasio, vendor of fresh fruit and vegetables, one of the brigadier’s old schoolmates and longtime official purveyor to the Maione family. The man had stepped forward, doffed his cap, and had proffered a gallant compliment to Maione’s wife:
“Donna Luci’, you’re simply enchanting. There is gold in your hair and your eyes are the color of seawater. One of these days I’m going to write you a song, you know how much I love to sing. But what are you doing with this burly bear, is what I’d like to know?” And he’d reached out to give an affectionate pat to the jacket of the police uniform, comfortably stretched over the prominent belly.
Lucia had laughed and thanked him. Maione however was hurt, and a stab of jealousy had pierced his heart. He preferred not to show it however, swallowing bitter gall when Lucia commented that Ciruzzo too was holding up well, still thin as a nail at age fifty. Maione, who weighed a corpulent 265 pounds, now felt even worse; actually Lucia’s comment was due only to her concern for her husband’s health. His father, after all, had had the same physique and had died a young man, of a heart attack.
And so it was that, from that day forward, every time he took a bite of food, his mind ran to Ciruzzo and Lucia, which put him in a bad mood. And so he decided to lose weight, and right away; he’d teach that oaf of a grocer to court his wife; he’d show him who was still the luckiest husband in the Spanish Quarter. So there he was now, cursing under his breath and going into the office on a Sunday for a reason he would never have confessed, not even under torture: to avoid eating Lucia’s wonderful spaghetti sauce.
From behind the shutters, already half-shut to ward off the ferocious sun, Lucia was watching her husband leave for the police station. On Sunday. Just when she’d finished cooking the finest pot of beef ragu in the city: nine pieces of meat, nine different varieties, sautéed in lard and then left to simmer for a whole day in tomatoes, onions, and red wine. This was impossible, she knew her husband too well. He’d never give up his ragu. There could be only one explanation: Raffaele had another woman on his mind.
That was the only possible explanation for the silences and unhappiness of the past few days, ever since they’d gone out for that stroll with the children; it was unmistakable, he’d met another woman and it had altered his mood.
Stirring the terra-cotta pot with her wooden spoon, she remembered that her mother used to tell her that the cook’s mood altered the food that she prepared: to cook well, you had to be happy. This ragu would no doubt be bitter as wormwood, she decided.
A sharp stabbing pain in her chest: jealousy. She was not going to let destiny deprive her of someone that she loved so dearly. Biting her lip, Lucia walked away from the window.
Enrica Colombo liked to wake up early on Sundays, so she had plenty of time to prepare the midday meal while the rest of her family lazed away in bed, taking advantage of the fact that it was a holiday. Her methodical personality required order, and order required time. She laid out on the table all of the ingredients for her ragu, and wondered what her parents and her brothers and sisters would have thought if she suddenly burst into song. Certainly not because of the dawning Sunday—considering the heat, already blistering in the early morning—nor because of the family stroll that would come later in the Villa Nazionale, with the traditional purchase of peanuts for the little ones by her father. There was another reason entirely.
Enrica was twenty-four years old and she’d never had a boyfriend. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but you couldn’t call her homely either, because she possessed an utterly feminine grace and kindness as well as fine delicate features. A little too tall, perhaps, and reluctant to open up to strangers; from behind her tortoiseshell rimmed glasses, her eyes were perfectly capable of chilling the ardor of anyone ill advised enough to try to bridge the distance that she put between herself and outsiders. This attitude was a source of great concern to her parents, who were afraid their firstborn might be looking at a future as an old maid; after all, her younger sister had already been married for two years, while she seemed unwilling even to meet anyone. She’d had her suitors, but she’d discouraged them all, turning down invitations courteously but firmly.
Truth be told, Enrica was not indifferent to the subject. Quite simply, she was waiting. She was waiting for the man she had slowly fallen in love with over long blustery winter evenings and then during the sweet mild flower-scented nights of springtime, to finally step forward in some fashion.
After waiting for a year, she’d had an opportunity to speak to him. The occasion was hardly what she’d been dreaming of: she’d learned that the man of her dreams was a commissario in the police department, a discovery that had come when he’d questioned her about the murder of a certain fortune-teller she’d been to see a couple of times. The interview hadn’t been particularly friendly,—he sat there in silence and she was furious at how unprepared she’d been for the meeting;—but at least the ice had been broken and now, in the evening, when she sat stitching her embroidery by the kitchen window, she’d tilt her head ever so slightly in his direction, and in return she’d receive a hesitant wave of the hand from him. It might not seem like much, but to her it was a great deal.
Now she had to wait for Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, for that was his name, to find a way to be introduced to her father and ask his permission to pay a call on her. That, too, might take time, but she was certain that he’d manage it; because otherwise why would he come to his window, every night between nine and nine thirty, to watch her embroider? It was only a matter of time.
Enrica Colombo had a quiet, determined personality. And she knew how to wait.
Livia Vezzi, née Lucani, and now widowed, believed that she’d waited long enough. That was why she was now sitting in th
e central Rome train station waiting for the direttissimo to Naples, where she planned to take an extended holiday. The choice of destination was no accident, of course; and of course it had caused concern and worry among her friends and relatives, becoming a topic for the gossips who inhabited the high society of Italy’s capital.
Livia Vezzi was in fact a prominent personality: she was beautiful, dark, and feline, her buxom figure and symmetrical features embellished by a dimple in her chin and a dazzling smile. Moreover, she had been married to the nation’s most famous tenor, Arnaldo Vezzi, an absolute genius, the leading man in the society pages for a decade; she herself had been an opera singer, endowed with a lovely contralto voice. Her promising career had been interrupted by marriage. Her husband had had plenty of lovers before being murdered in his dressing room at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, just four months ago; and Livia, too, had had fleeting affairs that had left her untouched except perhaps for a deepening of her loneliness. As for her marriage, Livia couldn’t remember it ever being a happy one.
When she was left a widow, there were plenty of men who stepped forward; her beauty aside, she possessed an attractive position in society, and plenty of money, too. There weren’t many women who could boast among their friendships the daughter of the Duce, and she was invariably invited whenever he entertained. But she didn’t seem interested in new relationships; she showed the world a calm and smiling face but kept everyone at arm’s length. It was said that she had other things on her mind.
Putting on a show of indifference to the two men who were trying to strike up a conversation in the train station waiting room, the woman admitted to herself that what they said was true: she had other things on her mind. What she had on her mind was a pair of extraordinary green eyes, whose gaze she had met at an absolutely inappropriate moment, during the investigation into her husband’s murder.
A pair of eyes that had remained indifferent to her allure, which was something she was unaccustomed to; and yet it was no mere whim that had led her to take a train back to the city of blinding lights and deep dark shadows. She’d told her girlfriends, who were eager to determine whether there was a love story behind her apparently macabre decision to return for a holiday right in the city where her husband had been murdered, that her decision was an attempt to exorcize that ghost, once and for all. The truth, however, was that she wanted to understand what lay beneath her uneasy dreams. And if she wanted to understand, she’d have to see those eyes again.
As she watched the direttissimo come puffing into the station, offering a smile to the two men who’d offered to carry her luggage, she decided that she’d waited long enough to understand this thing about herself.
Perhaps she’d waited too long.
IV
The door of Ricciardi’s office swung open and the broad sweaty face of Brigadier Maione appeared.
“Commissa’, buon giorno, and good Sunday to you. You too among the lucky few working today?”
Ricciardi gave him a half-smile.
“Ciao, Maione. Come in, come right in. How is the day shaping up?”
Maione walked in, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, and dropped into a chair.
“Just like yesterday, Commissa’. Hot, a scorcher. It’s still early morning and already you can hardly breathe, and personally I had a lovely night, tossing and turning in my bed like a cutlet being braised. At a certain point, I had to sit down out on the balcony so I could get a breath of air: no matter what I tried, I was awake, and awake I remained. Can you believe it, Commissa’? I couldn’t wait for morning to come so I could get up and come into the office.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“I don’t understand what makes you do it, coming in on a Sunday. You have a lovely family, and for all I know your wife even made ragu today. Shouldn’t you be at home with your children?”
Maione’s face tightened into a grimace.
“Let’s not start talking about food, Dotto’. I’ve decided that I absolutely have to lose weight: the jacket on my summer uniform won’t button and, as you can see, I’ve had to put on my winter jacket and I’m about to faint from the heat. If you want to know the truth, it’s precisely because Lucia made ragu that I’ve decided to take the Sunday shift, otherwise, I know myself, I wouldn’t be able to resist, I’d gobble down three bowls. No, no: better if I stay here. After all, it ought to be a quiet day, don’t you think? Who’s going to have the energy to start trouble in this heat?”
Ricciardi had stood up from his desk and was looking out the window with both hands in his pockets.
“I don’t know about that. You can never say. You see, people are strange: their passions gain energy at the most unexpected times. The heat makes them lose their minds, makes them intolerant; things you’d put up with in the winter or spring irritate you in the summer. Believe me, the craziest things happen in this season.”
Maione gazed tenderly at Ricciardi’s back. He was the only one in police headquarters and, he suspected, in the whole city to be fond of the commissario. He liked the way that Ricciardi took the grief and pain of the victims and their families as his own, but also the way that he could understand, if not justify, the motives behind certain murders, comprehending the emotional turmoil of the guilty parties as well.
There were times when he’d also worried about the commissario’s loneliness and the suffering that he could sense formed a permanent background to his life. He’d even talked about it with Lucia who’d said, with an enigmatic smile, that every type of fruit ripens in its own season. Who knows what she had meant by that.
Well, one thing is certain, he thought to himself, you could say anything about Ricciardi except that he was an optimist.
“Well, what can I tell you, Commissa’: let’s just hope that no one gets worked up today. Let’s hope that instead of killing each other or beating each other up they just go for a nice dip in the sea at Mergellina, and they enjoy a nice bowl of pasta—damn them because they can eat pasta and I can’t—and then fall asleep in the bright sunshine. And that they leave us in peace, the few of us that are in here dripping sweat.”
He hadn’t finished the sentence when there came a knock at the door. Through the half-open door, the hawk nose of Ardisio, the policeman manning the switchboard, appeared.
“Commissario, Brigadie’, forgive me. A call has come in from Santa Maria La Nova, someone’s found a corpse.”
Maione got up from his chair with a look of misery on his face.
“And just once, they could’ve let us be. Of course, Commissa’, if someone actually decides to invite trouble in . . .”
Ricciardi had already thrown on his jacket.
“Don’t try to be funny, and let’s do our best not to be superstitious, at least in here. Ardisio, send for a photographer and the medical examiner, see if Dr. Modo’s in, give him the address, and ask him to join us there. You, Maione, get a couple of uniformed men: who’s on duty?”
The sun was high in the sky by now, and it was taking no prisoners. The part of the piazza in front of City Hall not shaded by the crowns of the holm oaks was deserted, except for the occasional automobile which drove through without stopping. The few pedestrians sought the shade of the taller buildings, such as the Teatro Mercadante or the Hotel de Londres, even if it meant walking an extra two hundred yards. No noise came from the port, either, except for the quiet lapping of the waves.
The mobile squad usually moved on foot, given the chronic shortage of motorized vehicles. But their destination wasn’t far away and by now, according to the information taken down by Ardisio over the telephone, whatever may have happened was over—there was no longer anything to put a stop to. Ricciardi knew perfectly well that without being there himself there wasn’t much hope of keeping the crime scene intact; in a city where everyone spent their lives peering into other people’s business, no one would admit to having seen a thing, but they’d all do their best to help by moving objects, gathering evidence, and fiddling with cor
pses. So they might as well arrive with calm deliberation and in considerable force, to gather as much information as possible according to the particular procedure required by Ricciardi.
To reach Piazza Santa Maria La Nova they had to take Via Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, which the populace who never read the marble plaques bearing the street names continued to call Via Medina, the name it had had for centuries. The shaded part of the street ran alongside ancient and aristocratic palazzi, behind which unfolded a tangle of narrow alleys running down to the waterfront. The population of these lanes, which were dark even in broad daylight, was ignored by the census takers, didn’t know how to read and write, and lived like so many mice, according to codes unknown to the law.
As the team led by Ricciardi and consisting of a huffing and puffing Maione and the two uniformed cops, Camarda and Cesarano, moved slowly by, you could see shadows moving frantically in the narrow passageways between the buildings to conceal whatever business they had in hand.
The other side of the street, in the harsh bright wash of sunlight, was deserted. Or almost. Ricciardi saw the image of a dead man standing outside a large street door. He remembered the case: the corpse had been found one morning a few months back, beaten to death by fists and feet and some blunt object, perhaps a club. The killer, or more likely, the killers, had worked the victim over for a long time. Incredibly, though perhaps it wasn’t all that unbelievable given the times they lived in, the family hadn’t filed a criminal complaint, claiming that the man had simply fallen down; as if it were possible to fall from a standing position and split your forehead open like a watermelon. But, as the deputy chief of police had commented as he signed the order for the police to drop the case, if two family members, a brother and a cousin, were both present and gave eyewitness testimony to that effect, there was little point to investigating further. Cimmino, Ricciardi’s senior colleague who was assigned to the case, had been happy to go along with Dottor Garzo’s instructions, both to please his boss and because the dead man, who was unemployed, also had a reputation as an anti-Fascist activist.
Everyone in Their Place Page 2