Maione inwardly prayed that they’d keep it up, and that, strictly for educational reasons, let that be clear, he’d be forced to eat both pieces of bread. Possibly, to wash them down a little bitter, dipped in a nice tomato sauce. But instead, the two children, duly frightened, shot back up the stairs, each clutching his precious chunk.The brigadier heaved a sigh.
“Sweet. Are they yours?”
“Yes, Brigadie’, two scourges of God. And there are two others upstairs, an older boy and a little girl. But these two are the worst stinkers.”
Mariuccia had started up the stairs after her children, but Maione had halted her with a wave of the hand.
“No, Signo’, you’ll have to wait here until the commissario says otherwise, and allows you to go. And while we’re waiting, tell me something: just how is the duke’s apartment divided up? Are there personal rooms, shared rooms, and how many?”
The housekeeper struck a stance that seemed strangely defensive to Maione.
“No, you understand, Brigadie’, each of the three has his own rooms, they don’t actually see each other much.”
Sciarra grimaced, wrinkling his enormous nose.
“No, for that matter, they never see each other at all. The duke stays in bed and never moves, while young master Ettore is always out on the terrace, him, the flowers, and the plants, and the duchess . . .”
Concetta blasted him with a murderous glare.
“It would be best if everyone just stayed in their place, that’s what would be best. You won’t learn, will you, that we’re the servants and what the dukes do is none of our business.”
“Why, what’s the matter, Donna Conce’, what have I done wrong? All I meant to say is that each of them keeps to himself, to try to answer the brigadier here—that they might have common rooms, but they weren’t used.”
Mariuccia broke in; she’d never stopped sniffling into her handkerchief the whole time.
“That’s right, no one ever goes there, but the duchess insists that the room be kept clean and tidy, she checks, and if she ever finds anything out of place, she calls me and gives me a lecture. That is, she used to. Now, she’ll never give me a lecture again . . .” and she started in again, sobbing in despair. Her husband intervened:
“Now, what a fool you are, it almost sounds like you’re sorry the poor duchess can never scold you again.”
Once again, Concetta thought it her duty to explain to Peppino how matters stood.
“No, you’re the ones who don’t understand that now, with the death of the duchess, the way this house is organized might change, and maybe there’s no more need of us, and we find ourselves kicked out into the street.”
Sciarra shrugged his shoulders.
“Eh, when would that ever happen? If anything, now the young master and the duke will need us more than ever. After all, who’s supposed to keep all this household running, otherwise?”
Maione listened to the exchange of remarks, with apparent distraction but actually letting nothing get by him. He’d understood that in the palazzo there lived not one single family, but five different clans: the Sciarras, Concetta, and the duke, the duchess, and the young master, who had as little to do with each other as they could. He made a mental note to inform Ricciardi of the situation, just as the commissario stuck his head out the door again and told him to come in.
Now sunlight had filled the anteroom, and the temperature was rising noticeably. Ricciardi and Maione looked around at the wallpaper, the paintings, the furniture. Their expert eyes detected an abundance of silver objects, fine artwork, two Chinese vases, and an ancient bronze statuette: there had been no robbery, or if there’d been an attempt, it had been thwarted before it could be completed. Nor did they see any signs of a struggle; nothing was broken or even overturned. The only visible sign that anything had happened was a square cushion on the floor, at the corpse’s feet, with a hole in the side facing up. Ricciardi didn’t turn it over, because he didn’t want to move a thing until the photographer got there, but he was willing to bet that on the other side there would be unmistakable burn marks on the fabric, the very same signs that had been missing on the dead woman’s forehead. The murderer had fired through the cushion.
The duchess, if you didn’t look at her face, might have been sleeping, languidly stretched out on the sofa, just slightly relaxed, legs extended and hands in her lap. Ricciardi drew closer and noticed that she had no rings on her left hand, though there were marks of a ring on both her middle and her ring fingers. The middle finger actually seemed broken or at least sprained, though he saw no signs of bruising. He’d have to wait for the medical examiner and the photographer, before moving the corpse; but there was no mistaking the cause of death, the bullet hole in the forehead, right between the half-open eyes.
Maione, huffing and puffing and sweatier by the minute, had squatted down by the sofa and was trying to look under it.
“Where are you, now where are you, you damned little . . . ah, there it is now. Commissa’, here’s the shell, it was right under the sofa, exactly where I expected it to be.”
“Nice work, Raffaele. Don’t touch it, though; let’s wait for the photographer. And while we’re waiting, why don’t you call the housekeeper, let’s hear what she has to say.”
The Sivo woman entered the room, silent and bulky. She shot a quick glance at the duchess’s dead body and quickly looked away, her face turning pale but with no change in her impassive expression. Ricciardi, standing with his hands in his pockets, watched her sweat for a long moment without speaking, seeking any other signs of discomfort, but he saw none.
“Now then, Signora. Tell me how you discovered the corpse of the duchess.”
“I rise early, around six. When I don’t have to go to the market or run other errands out of the house, like today, since it’s a Sunday, I stay in my room for a while. I tidy up my own things, in other words. Then I go to the first mass, the seven o’clock mass.”
“So this morning you left around seven, too?”
“No, this morning I wanted to look around a little. Last night, I don’t know if you’d know this, but it was the Festa of Santa Maria Regina. Those people get up to everything imaginable, there’s garbage scattered outside the front door, they light a bonfire in the middle of the piazza. I wanted to give Mariuccia instruction to start cleaning up a bit.”
Ricciardi tried to reconstruct a time line.
“And in order to go out, you go by way of the anteroom?”
“Yes, I have to. At night, when I go to bed, I shut the padlock on the gate outside here. The Signora, who comes home late, leaves the keys on the chain in that drawer,” and she pointed to a console table next to the door, “so in the morning I can open up and let Mariuccia in to start her cleaning.”
“And you close the padlock with a key of your own?”
The Sivo woman shook her head.
“No, no. I don’t have the keys to the lock. I snap it shut, and in the morning I take the keys from the drawer. I take a look at the room, and usually I find it’s tidy and clean. But this time I found . . . I found the duchess.”
“And what did you do?”
The woman’s tone of voice remained subdued but her expression betrayed deep emotion.
“I thought that she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, fully dressed. It had happened before, more than once, the duchess . . . sometimes she came home tired, very tired.”
Ricciardi decided to call a spade a spade.
“Do you mean drunk?”
The Sivo woman had no intention of uttering words she didn’t feel authorized to use.
“I couldn’t say, Commissa’. It’s none of my business, and when something’s none of my business, I look the other way.”
Ricciardi looked her straight in the eye.
“But this time you couldn’t look the other way. What did you do when you realized that the duchess wasn’t sleeping?”
“I stuck my head out over the courtyard and I called Sciarra. I
told him to come upstairs and stay close to the duchess, and I went up to the top floor to call young master Ettore.”
Ricciardi tried to reconstruct events with as much precision as possible.
“And was the gate already open or did you open it?”
The Sivo woman seemed surprised. She furrowed her brow.
“It was open. Now that you mention it, the gate was open and the padlock was shut, the way I leave it in the daytime.”
“Go on. Was the young master at home?”
“Yes, he was already out on the terrace, watering the flowers. He wakes up early too.”
“What did you say to him?”
Concetta looked down.
“I told him that I thought the duchess was dead. That she had a hole in her forehead.”
Ricciardi kept pushing:
“What about him, did he come downstairs with you immediately?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the woman replied:
“No. He said that he’s no doctor. And he went to call the police. But he didn’t come downstairs.”
There was a long silence. Ricciardi processed the information.
“How long have you been in service with the duke and the duchess?”
“Twenty-five years, Commissario. Ever since I was twenty-one. First as a scullery maid, then as a cook and for ten years as housekeeper, since the duchess passed away.”
“What? What do you mean, since the duchess passed away?” asked Maione, staring at the corpse.
“The first duchess, I meant to say. The duke was married before, and young master Ettore was the son of his first wife, Signora Virginia. The Duchess Adriana is . . . was . . . his second wife.”
Ricciardi decided to dig a little deeper. He meant to understand just what relations there were between the two women.
“So when the duke remarried you were already here. And did you get along with the duchess?”
The woman shrugged.
“The duchess was almost always out. Practically speaking, the house runs itself, there’s not a lot to do. I do my work and, more importantly, I mind my own business.”
Ricciardi didn’t miss the implicit condemnation in the Sivo woman’s reply and he made a mental note to explore this matter further.
But there was one thing he wanted to see immediately: he went over to the console table and pulled open the drawer. And in the drawer, just where the Sivo woman had said it would be, was the key to the padlock that was used to fasten the chain on the gate to the landing.
You can see the street through a gap in the bougainvillea hedge on the south side of the terrace. I left it there intentionally, since there’s no way anyone can look in from that side. And the street outside the front door is full of people. Rubberneckers, passersby. Who knows what they expect to see. Don’t they already know what’s happened? But as soon as one person stops, another one stops and stands next to them; in this city no one minds their own business.
I remember when I was still attending the university, four or five of us would go to the Villa Nazionale or to Via Toledo and start looking up at the sky. Two minutes later, there’s be at least ten other people with their noses in the air, and no one would ever ask, “Youngsters, what are you looking at?’ No one. Then, as soon as we’d had enough of that game, one of us would say: “Well, let’s go now, it’s clear that the flying donkey won’t be coming today after all.” And back home I’d tell my mamma, and she’d laugh, even through her pain.
I still see you, you know, Mamma, in your bed, smiling, because now you’re too weak to laugh. I see that you don’t want me to see that you’re suffering, in your heart and in your soul.
Because you’d already figured out what that whore dressed as a nurse was planning to do.
But now that woman’s dead, you know that, Mamma? She’s dead too. And not like you, in your own bed with a rosary in your hand and with my tears. No, she died the way she deserved too. Murdered.
Like the bitch she was.
VII
By now everyone was up and about in the Colombo home, bent on creating the disorder of a typical Sunday morning. Enrica was resigned to the loss of the lovely peace and quiet she’d won by rising early; to make up for it, once breakfast was over, she’d expelled everyone from the kitchen with the excuse that she had to wash up and go on with her preparations for lunch.
As she went back and forth in the large room, every time she went by the window, she shot a fleeting glance across the street at another window. It was still Sunday, after all, and she hoped to catch him giving a chance look back at her, in broad daylight, for once; but she failed to spy the object of her interest. Instead, she saw the elderly woman who lived with him, as she was tidying up the apartment. In a strange fashion, she had learned that this was his old tata and not, as she had supposed for almost a year, his mother.
The one who had told Enrica was Signora Maione, the brigadier’s wife; a genuine angel who had come to tell her about the commissario’s introverted personality and his loneliness; and about his sadness.
Luigi Alfredo. She let the name roll off her tongue, alluring and slightly mysterious, like the man it belonged to. She uttered it to herself, at night before falling asleep or while taking a bath in the new metal tub that her father had triumphantly had delivered to the apartment. It had been Signora Maione who’d persuaded her that nothing was lost, that it was worth waiting because, certainly, even if he wouldn’t admit it, he was actually interested in her.
With a smile on her face as she took the long way around, for no good reason, to reach the sink, the long way around that took her past the window, Enrica decided that it was worth waiting. For as long as it would take.
Livia decided that it wouldn’t take long.
When she’d come to the city during the winter, summoned to indentify her husband’s corpse, she’d been unable to book a seat on the direttissimo that ran on the new line via Formia, and instead she’d been obliged to take the train that followed the old line, the one that ran through Cassino. She remembered a long, exceedingly tedious journey of more than four hours, interspersed with numerous stops, level crossings, and even flocks of sheep blocking the tracks, so that the engineers and firemen had to get out and chase them off. All the same, on that occasion she’d been glad of the extra time it took; she was in no hurry to come face to face with Arnaldo, even if he was dead. The longer the trip the better.
This time, instead, she’d have flown, if she could. Since she’d made the decision to go see Ricciardi, to find out why she couldn’t get him out of her mind, every day had been pure torture.
While the direttissimo rattled through the countryside, Livia, ignoring the conversation that was taking place in the first-class compartment, fantastized about meeting him again. The other seats in the compartment were occupied by two married couples, and the husbands were gazing at her rapturously while the wives stewed in angry silence; as far as she was concerned, they could have been dancing naked, and she wouldn’t have noticed.
Out the window, blending into the sea that she could just begin to glimpse and in the shimmering heat that was suffocating her, she could only see a pair of green eyes. And she thought about what a strange thing love is.
The door swung open and in came Doctor Modo, followed by the photographer with his camera, tripod, and magnesium flashbulbs. Beneath the broad brim of his white hat, the doctor was sweating freely. Without a greeting, as if he were simply continuing a conversation begun previously, he said:
“Now, I’m not saying that there are better times or worse times to be murdered, of course not. Still, once you’ve made up your mind, how are we supposed to do what’s necessary, on a Sunday, with a temperature of 105 degrees? I wonder if someone would be so kind as to explain that to me?”
Bruno Modo was a hospital physician, a surgeon, and, when needed, a medical examiner. He’d been an officer on the Carso front during the Great War, and he’d developed an exceptional body of experience, invaluable for pol
ice investigations; but he had no difficulty voicing his opinions and his clear anti-Fascist leanings made him a dangerous person to know. As a result, despite his outgoing personality, he had few friends. What’s more, a number of officials at police headquarters avoided using his services.
Not Ricciardi—he sought Modo out whenever he needed a doctor. He had the highest opinion of the man’s extraordinary expertise, and found him to be profoundly humane. Moreover, he had the gift of irony, as did Ricciardi himself; and so they had a working relationship that, while you might not call it friendship, was certainly something that verged on it. He was the only person who addressed the commissario with the informal tu.
“Oh, Ricciardi, and who else would it be? Tell me the truth, did you murder this lovely lady, with the sole purpose of making me sweat through my clothes and ruining my Sunday? Next time, I’d advise you to try suicide, just for something different: in that case, I’d even promise to come out and work the case free of charge.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“Ciao, Bruno, buon giorno to you, too. I felt sure you’d enjoy this little social occasion as a way of killing time on a boring day off. You’ll certainly appreciate the Signora’s company, accustomed as you are to the cheerful denizens of the morgue.”
The doctor was fanning himself with his hat, and sweating profusely beneath his unkempt mop of fair hair.
“Well, at least, from the look of things, I can say that the duchess didn’t leave us because she’d been beaten to death by some damned squad, like the guy we found in the Via Medina. I’ve drafted a forty-page report on the effects of the man’s ‘trip and fall,’ which is the finding you all came up with at police headquarters. You’re shameless, the whole lot of you. I often think life was easier in wartime.”
Ricciardi protested:
“Look, they didn’t even ask me to take a look at the crime scene. If they had, official complaint or no official complaint, someone would have wound up in jail. So, what do you have to say about this?”
Everyone in Their Place Page 4