“And can you remember what hand he took the ring from? This is important.”
Garzo mimed Capece’s gesture, trying to reconstruct the duchess’s position.
“From the left hand, I think. That’s right, the left hand. Why, is it significant?”
Ricciardi had half-closed his eyes. He was reviewing the image of the dead woman, standing there, her hands at her sides.
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
“It might be, yes. It might be significant. Then what happened?”
“Then he stormed out, without a word to anyone. He even shoved my wife aside, complete boor that he is, and the poor thing was almost knocked to the floor. The duchess, on the other hand, went into the bathroom to redo her makeup and shortly thereafter she was back in her box, laughing and bantering with a couple of gentleman who had hastened to take Capece’s place. That’s just the way she was.”
“And Capece wasn’t seen again?”
Garzo furrowed his brow, doing his best to concentrate and remember.
“No, at least I didn’t see him. But yesterday, at the Circolo dell’Unione, before anyone knew what had happened, the waiter told me that he had stayed there until later, drinking and ranting. Then he left.”
Ricciardi tried to find out other details.
“Ranting about what? Also, what time did he leave?”
Garzo seemed to be stumped.
“The Circolo closes at midnight. And he was saying . . . he was saying that there are women who don’t deserve to go on living. But that doesn’t mean a thing: people say all kinds of things, don’t they, Ricciardi?”
The commissario looked his superior officer in the eye, without answering.
“In any case, Ricciardi, I’m telling you, or I should say, I’m asking you just this once not to step on people’s toes just for the fun of it. The press is involved, and that may not be all. You’re going to have to be careful when you question the family. The duke is very old and sick, he’s on his deathbed: but he’s still one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the city. And the duke’s son, Ettore . . . is widely esteemed and respected, a man of culture, a philosopher.”
It had become clear to Ricciardi that nothing useful was going to come of their conversation, only calls for caution.
“All right, Dottore; I’ll keep in mind all this exceedingly useful information you’ve given me. And I’ll keep you informed. Now I’m heading to the morgue; Doctor Modo promised me that he’ll give me advance word on the autopsy findings. If you have no further orders, buon giorno.”
And he left the room, plunging Garzo even further into his sense of insecurity.
X
Looking out from her balcony on the fourth floor of the Hotel du Vésuve, Livia was drinking in the view of the Via Partenope. Stretching out before her eyes, the smooth calm sea was taking in the splashing dives of hundreds of boys and girls from the rocks and from the walls of the castle, which had stood on the water’s edge for countless centuries.
The day before, upon her arrival at the Chiaia station, she’d immediately felt the air ringing with the city’s wholehearted welcome. She’d smiled when at least three men had offered her a lift—and one of them had said that he’d be glad to take her to the ends of the earth;—and she’d been indulgent with the urchins who immediately surrounded her clamoring for a penny, a piece of candy, or a cigarette. She recalled a discussion in a Roman drawing room, a few weeks back, when an arrogant businessman had said how sick and tired he was of these Neapolitan scugnizzi who waited, in swarms, for arriving tourists at the port and the train station; they begged, the man had said, and they slipped their little hands in anywhere, eager to pilfer and steal. She’d broken in, informing him that the true underlying cause of this behavior was the state of poverty and neediness for which the city’s most powerful citizens were ultimately responsible, and that in any case children always brightened her spirits; far more than certain dull conversationalists whom it had been her misfortune to meet in the city of Rome, for instance. She smiled as she recalled the icy silence that had settled over the room; no one there had the nerve to gainsay a woman who, as they all knew well, was a close friend of the Duce’s wife and the Duce’s daughter.
She had hired one of the distinctive red public automobiles, a three-seater with a yellow strip, and told the driver that she wanted to take a spin around the city before going to the hotel. She wanted to regain familiarity with the streets and the piazzas that she remembered swept by winter winds, places that she had experienced at such a sad time in her life. Now she saw sunlight and cheerfulness, strolling vendors shouting their wares, spontaneous would-be singers and smiling women, lovely shop windows and little children playing with rag-balls in improvised fields, darting among and around automobiles and trolley cars. It was a crazy, laughing city, and she liked it.
She couldn’t say how much weight the fact that this was Ricciardi’s city had on her opinion; in any case, she suspected that her memory of the commissario played an important part. She’d decided to let this first day go by, so that she could explore the battlefield before unleashing her first attack. She considered what dress she’d wear, what pert daring little hat.
She smiled at the sea and the sky.
Maione had made the rounds of the merchants of Santa Maria La Nova, in accordance with Ricciardi’s instructions. It hadn’t been easy: not because there was any reluctance or hesitation on their part, but rather because the Musso di Camparino family actually had no direct interactions with the quarter in which it lived.
The duke was held in the highest regard for his humane generosity toward the organizations that assisted the needy, but he’d been bedridden for over a year by a grave pulmonary disease and everyone expected him to die any day now.
Young master Ettore, who was about thirty, practically speaking lived on the terrace, surrounded by the plants that he cultivated with such passion. He wrote articles for newspapers and journals about philosophy, and was a celebrated scholar on the subject. It was said that he sometimes went out at night, but no one ever seemed to see him.
The duchess, on the other hand, was everywhere. There wasn’t a party, a gathering, or a social event that didn’t count her among its inner circle. Lovely and elegant, she put on a display of wealth and opulence on every occasion. She was the duke’s second wife, and had been for ten years now: he married her a year and a half after the death of his first wife, to whom Adriana had ministered as her nurse. Maione detected disapproval from the sausage-maker he was talking to, given the fact that they hadn’t even waited for the end of the second year of mourning.
Regarding the household help, the quarter was a goldmine of information. Concetta Sivo was a tranquil lady who was widely respected, a careful frugal shopper and a skillful manager of her household. She had no relatives in the city, and every couple of months or so she went back to the village where her elderly aunt and her cousins still lived. When they talked about the Sciarras, everyone smiled, amused by his comic turns, her utter simplicity, and the four children’s lively voracity, constantly fighting over the last bite of food or visiting the local shops begging for something to eat.
In other words, these were people who did their work conscientiously, but easy enough to trick if some ill-intentioned individual wished to get into the palazzo. Moreover, the other night the neighborhood festa had been particularly crowded and noisy, and had ended with a burst of especially deafening fireworks that had illuminated the piazza and left everyone’s ears ringing. Maione concluded that no one would have heard cannonfire, much less a gunshot muffled by a cushion.
Nothing especially interesting, in other words; except that every one of those businessmen had offered him something to eat, and he—with death in his heart and especially in his stomach—had been forced to turn down the offer in every case. Sadly shaking his head, he decided to move forward the timing of the visit he had planned to pay on Bambinella: if there wa
s something worth knowing, he’d know it.
The knight of commerce, Cavaliere Giulio Colombo, saw his wife and started worrying. It was hardly an uncommon event for his energetic spouse to come in to inspect the shop; what worried him was the grim expression he’d glimpsed on her face through the plateglass window.
The family’s chief source of income was the handsome hat shop at the corner of the Via Toledo and Piazza Trieste and Trento, near the church of San Ferdinando. In the thirty years they’d been in business, they’d developed a loyal clientele, to whom the Cavalier and the three salesclerks provided meticulous and personal service. One of those salesclerks was the husband of the youngest daughter, a capable young man and a very hard worker; the only headache he gave his father-in-law, a longtime liberal, was his enthusiastic support of the Fascist Party, which Colombo considered to be uncritical and therefore verging on fanaticism.
He was in fact discussing the increasingly common nighttime raids of the enforcement squads that, hiding behind the Fascist flag, committed acts of common brutality, when he saw his wife arriving. Signora Maria had a strong personality, even if she was capable of being a sweet helpmate and a perfect mother: problems arose only when the two roles conflicted, and this was one of those occasions. Cavaliere Giulio immediately guessed, even before the bell on the front door had stopped ringing, what the purpose of her visit was. It was about their daughter, Enrica; and her marriage.
Not that there was any marriage in immediate sight, in fact, to tell the truth, that was exactly the problem: that there was no marriage on the horizon. Maria strode to the cash register, an enormous piece of glistening metal machinery that was the pride of the store and behind which her husband had tried to conceal himself.
“Can I speak to you, alone, if you please?”
Uh-oh. This meant things were serious.
“Certainly. Marco, you stay at the cash register. I’m going in back.”
Like all the city’s haberdasheries and tailor shops, there was a room in the back where the various items could be adjusted for a better fit. Just then, it was empty because the two employees were on their lunch break.
Maria came right to the point.
“What do you intend to do for Enrica?”
This was a discussion they’d had more than once. The father was very fond of his firstborn daughter, who shared his smiling, orderly character; he didn’t mind keeping her at home for as long as he could. His wife, who had noted this impulse, missed no opportunity to point out to him and especially to Enrica that, at twenty-four, she had amply reached the age when she ought to be thinking about starting a life of her own; all the more so, considering that these were hard times and business wasn’t good enough to let them take care of the needs of a large family, actually two families, since the other daughter, with her husband and infant son, was still living with them. If only she were willing to meet some nice young men, instead of insulting every new suitor who ventured to show a little interest.
The night before, when she had lanched into her usual jeremiad, her husband had cut her off with a gesture of annoyance, begging her just to let him listen to the radio for once. Then and there, Maria had said nothing, but the way she glared at him promised nothing good: and in fact here she comes now, thought Giulio, more determined and combative than ever.
“You don’t understand what a serious matter this is. Your daughter is an old maid, and she’s starting to look like she’s going to be an old maid for the rest of her life. For now, she has us, but we’re not going to live forever; one day, when we’re dead and gone, what will Enrica do, go and live in an old people’s home, without a child to care for her?”
There was no stopping her once she got on her hobbyhorse, and Giulio knew it all too well. Might as well try to be conciliatory.
“But what do you think I can do about it? Should I grab her, put makeup on her, dress her up, and put her out on the street? If she doesn’t want to go out, what can I do about it?”
Maria had been waiting for those exact words.
“If she doesn’t want to meet anyone, then it’s up to us to bring someone into the house. Here’s what I’ve decided to do.”
Maione had met Bambinella a year and a half ago, when he’d been hauled into police headquarters along with four other streetwalkers.
There were a great many prostitutes in business for themselves, and they were openly competing with the city’s officially sanctioned bordellos, with relative impunity; but there was no violating the basic principle that the city had to present at least an apparently clean façade; moreover, the madams of the officially licensed brothels, who were required to pay taxes on their business, often complained to the city officials who frequented their houses of ill repute. From time to time, therefore, the mobile squad would make citywide raids, making a clean sweep of the streetwalkers pitching their wares to passersby, especially in the streets of the city center.
That night Maione, who was on duty, found himself with a complicated situation on his hands: the other girls were waiting patiently for their inevitable release; but the youngest of them all was writhing and fighting and, unexpectedly, bit the hand of a policeman, who in turn slapped her violently in the face. At that point she began to shout and the timbre of her voice unequivocally revealed her true nature. Maione intervened, separating the young man from the other girls, but in the long hours over which he held him in the cell, he was unable to obtain the basic elements of his identity, first and last names, date and place of birth; what did surface however was a complex personality—that of a young man who had learned to accept the fact that he was profoundly different from other young men without, however, resigning himself to hide the fact. Quite the contrary in fact: he felt like a woman and it was as a woman that he wanted to earn a living. The same way that other poor and desperate women were often forced to eke out their existence.
In the months that followed, the brigadier frequently encountered Bambinella, who seemed to have a gift for always being in the midst of social circles where murders ripened and were committed. A strange relationship of reciprocal esteem, if not friendship, developed between the two men, who could not have been any more different. Moreover, and above all, Bambinella had a remarkable network of acquaintances and contacts, and therefore a bottomless wealth of information, which he made available to the brigadier, and to the brigadier alone, without ever actually becoming an informer. It was all gossip with a foundation of fact that more often than not proved to be enormously helpful in this or that investigation. In exchange the mobile squad had unwritten orders to ignore the presence of Bambinella among the prostitutes who plied their trade on the outlying border of the Spanish Quarter, along the Via Toledo. One hand washes the other, as the old saying goes.
Bambinella lived in a ratty attic apartment at the end of a vicolo, not far from Corso Vittorio Emanuele. From his window he could look out on a bit of countryside next to the Vomero hill and, on the other side, a slice of distant blue sea. Maione, as hardly needs to be stated, got there in a puddle of sweat, after a long uphill climb and a hundred or so stairs, hungry as a wolf.
And, as hardly needs to be stated, Bambinella was having something to eat.
XI
Everything has to be normal. Everything has to be the way that it is every day.
You’ve cleaned and tidied the apartment, let it never be said that the children have been neglected or that there’s a spot of dust on the credenza. Let no one say that the curtains are stained, or that the linen is less than spotless.
Now you’ve gone to do the shopping for the day’s meals. You bring home a wrapped package of macaroni, the bread, the tomatoes. You have a fine lunch to make, and then a nice dinner. And tomorrow another lunch, and another dinner. And on and on it goes, because he’ll be coming home, and he’ll sit down across the table, and he’ll smile at you. It’ll all be just the way it used to be, once again. Just the way it was.
It’s hot, and you walk along under the ferocio
us sun, loaded down with groceries. Your head starts to spin slightly, and no one offers to help.
You go on smiling just the same.
“Why Brigadie’, what an enormous pleasure. Come right in, make yourself comfortable, sit on the pouf, here, next to me. Do you mind if I go on eating? Today of all days I’m dying of hunger, even with this heat. Care for some?”
Maione felt the room spinning around him, and let himself flop down onto the large damasked cushion.
“Oh my goodness, Brigadie’, don’t you feel well? You’re white as a sheet! Come over here, and I’ll give you a little sugar water!”
Maione weakly waved his hand in front of his face.
“No, no, don’t worry, it’s just the heat. But what are you eating, if I may ask?”
“Oh, I just made a bowl of pasta, I know I ought to think about my figure but, I told you before, today for some reason I’m just starving. Maybe it’s because I had a hunch you’d be coming by, a big handsome man like you, and I thought I’d better get something to eat to keep my strength up.”
“Oh, I’ve told you a thousand times, there’s a line I forbid you from crossing, can’t you get that through your head? You know that I don’t even fool around with . . . with women like you, much less with you! Now look what you’re making me say . . . so come to the point, why is it that you were expecting me? Who told you that I might be coming by?”
Bambinella coquettishly tightened the silk kimono against his breast and put one hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.
“No one told me. But everyone in the city knows that yesterday the duchess of Camparino was murdered, and a girlfriend of mine who works as a maid in the building across the street told me that you and your commissario were there; why on earth were the two of you working on a Sunday?”
Everyone in Their Place Page 7