The impression was of a place where one or more persons lived every minute of the day, working, relaxing, and resting; and where someone who might tidy up was only rarely admitted. Light and an intense scent of flowers came in through a set of French doors, half open, along with the sound of someone whistling.
Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a glance and then headed toward the half-open door. The brigadier called out, asking leave to come in:
“È permesso?”
The whistling stopped and a low, musical voice said: “Prego, come right ahead. I’m out here, on the terrace.”
The setting was somewhat surprising. The light of the sun, at its zenith at that time of the day, was filtered through plants of every kind: the only thing missing was trees, even though some of the climbing vines had trunks of considerable size. Ricciardi was no botanist but he had grown up in the country, in regular contact with fields, orchards, and gardens, and he understood the attention and the immense love required to create that only apparently wild tangle of plants. Whoever cared for that open-air greenhouse had to devote a great deal of time to its cultivation, along with considerable enthusiasm.
From one corner a young man of pleasing appearance, about thirty, came toward them. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up onto his forearms; he was slender, with a dark complexion, and a hooked nose and a thin mustache. His black hair, parted in the middle, was wavy and neatly brushed. With a frank and open smile, he extended his hand.
“A pleasure. I’m Ettore Musso.”
“The pleasure is all ours, Signor Duca. I’m Brigadier Maione from Naples police headquarters, and this is my commanding officer, Commissario Ricciardi. Our sincerest condolences for your loss.”
The man looked at him vaguely, as if he hadn’t quite understood what Maione had just said. Then he burst out laughing.
“That’s rich! No, forgive me, gentlemen, but that’s truly rich. For my loss, did you say? Condolences?”
Maione stared at Ricciardi, nonplussed. The commissario, on the other hand, was looking at Ettore; his expression hadn’t altered. When he’d finished laughing, the man went on:
“Excuse me. I really am unforgivable. Please, make yourselves comfortable. Would you like something to drink? Or to eat, perhaps?”
He sat down on a wrought-iron chair, which stood with two other chairs like it around a small tile-top table. At the center of the table was a carafe of coffee and a dish of sweet rolls and a bowl of marmalade. With an apologetic air he added:
“I’m breakfasting late. I’m afraid I was up until very late last night; I’ve only just woken up. Now what can I do for you?”
The two policemen sat down. The man’s manner was certainly charming and the setting was pleasant. The plants, recently watered, provided shade and humidity, making it pleasantly cool. The corner with the table was free of buzzing insects, which could however be heard everywhere else on the terrace. Guessing what Ricciardi was thinking, Ettore said:
“Bravo, Commissario. So you noticed, eh? If you don’t want insects around you, you need only choose wisely when it comes to picking the plants you put near you. You must above all avoid flowers: they’re lovely to look at from a distance, too, and the scent will reach you just the same.”
While he was speaking he’d taken a roll, spread marmalade on it, and now he was nibbling at it eagerly. Maione felt his instinctive liking for Ettore melt away.
Ricciardi finally spoke:
“May I ask you to explain why you laughed, Duke? I failed to grasp what was funny about what the brigadier said. That may just be because I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”
Ettore stopped, then he laughed again, scattering bits of bread all over the table.
“No, forgive me again. The reason is quite simple: the death of my . . . of my father’s wife is perhaps the best piece of news I’ve received in the last several years. And so it struck me as ridiculous to have you offer your condolences, that’s all.”
Ricciardi looked him hard in the eyes. He wanted to be very sure of what he was taking in.
“And why is that? News of a death, and a violent death at that, the death of a woman who was still young. How can that come as good news, Duke?”
Ettore waved his hand in front of his face, as if shooing away something unnecessary.
“I beg you, Commissario, please. Just call me Ettore, or Musso; but let’s dispense with titles. They couldn’t be any further from the way I think and feel, believe me. How can it come as good news, you ask? Nothing could be simpler: I hated that woman. I hated her with all my heart and all my soul. Didn’t they tell you that?”
A moment of awkward silence ensued, a moment that Ettore spent continuing imperturbably to eat and gracefully sip his coffee. To Maione and Ricciardi it seemed unbelievable that, on the day after a murder committed in his home, Ettore should candidly confess that he’d hated the victim. The man must have an ironclad alibi, they both concluded.
Ricciardi said:
“May I ask where you were on the night between Saturday and Sunday, between midnight and two in the morning?”
There was another moment of rapt silence. Ettore dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and got to his feet, stretching lazily. He walked over to an opening in the hedge through which it was possible to see the piazza; there was no one but a small knot of children playing, indifferent to the heat and the bright sunshine.
“This, as I’m sure you would tell me, is a strange city. Clamped between the sea, the hills, and the mountain, it continues to grow on top of itself. The vicoli get narrower, the buildings grow taller. Everyone on top of everyone else, more and more, just to keep from being pushed any further away. And so we’re all in constant contact, without respite. No one has any time to themselves. And why did I hate her, you may ask me? The answer is simple. Because she had nothing in common with me, with that weakling of a father of mine, and above all, with my mother, whose memory she besmirched with her mere presence. That’s why.”
His tone of voice remained unchanged, still just as cheerful and conversational as before. It was as if he were chatting about the weather or his plants.
“She slipped into this house through deceit, and through deceit she cast a spell on my father, and with the same deceit she won herself friends and lovers. She took our name and donned it like a dress, with utter indifference for those who, centuries before her, bore it proudly. That is why I’ve stopped using it. She cast shame on us all, with her continuous and unconcealed adultery, going so far as to bring her lover, a married man with children, under the roof of this home.”
The silence that followed was broken by the cries of the children below and the seagulls that pinwheeled lazily through the sky overhead. Ricciardi mused that, whoever Adriana Musso di Camparino might once have been, she was now a badly restitched piece of old clothing lying on a slab in the morgue. And all that remained of her was an image made of mist that no one could see but him, an image that went on endlessly repeating a senseless phrase and bleeding from a bullet hole in its forehead. He said again:
“Where were you, sir, on Saturday night?”
Ettore went on as if he hadn’t even heard him:
“As you can imagine, anyone would have hated her in my place. To keep from having to see her, I moved all the way up here. And from up here I look out on this city and its populace, and I admire my plants. And I learn a great deal. These are meaningful times, Commissario. Times that will forever be remembered. Destiny is about to make itself felt, and everyone can see that: you need only read, look around you, listen to the radio. Those children down there, you can see them: they don’t know it. But there will come a man who will lead them toward the sun, who will make them the masters of history. They live like little animals, the way their fathers and mothers did, incapable of understanding even whether they’re alive or dead. But they must stay in their place. All that matters is that each and every one stays in their place. That everyone does their part. In the world of
tomorrow there is no place for deceit; and therefore there is no place for women like my father’s un-dearly departed wife.”
Maione sweated in silence, under his cap. He was thinking that people were simply no longer ashamed to say certain things, even in the presence of two strangers. And that the fact that they were in uniform, or at least that he was, must make people like Musso assume that they too were fanatical supporters of the Fascist regime. He was also thinking that all that nonsensical chatter must be an attempt to shift attention away from the commissario’s question, though he was certainly not about to let himself be distracted.
“Sir, I asked you a question. I’d like you to answer it.”
Ettore turned his back on the view and looked Ricciardi in the face. Now he was no longer smiling.
“I didn’t kill her, I’m sorry to say, if that’s what you’re asking. I should have, and I could have done it a thousand times over the past ten years. And God only knows how much I’d have wanted to. But I didn’t kill her. Maybe out of fear, or perhaps out of courage. I couldn’t say. And when she died, if she died during the night between Saturday and Sunday, I wasn’t home. I returned home at dawn, and I came directly up here.”
Maione seemed to have dropped off into sleep, as he always did when he was at the peak of his concentration. He asked:
“Forgive me, but I have a question: do you own a pistol? Or, as far as you know, does your father own one? In other words, are there weapons in the house?”
“No. No firearms, in this house. If I’m remembering rightly, there must be a saber somewhere, my father was an officer. But no pistols.”
Silence followed Ettore’s words. Even the insects stopped their buzzing for an instant.
“And where were you, that night?”
The man held the transparent gaze of Ricciardi’s eyes.
“That, Commissario, is none of your business. If you have nothing else to ask me, I’d like to go back to my plants. Buon giorno.”
As they went back out through the study, Ricciardi noticed a large, yellowing photograph, hand-colored, framed, and hanging in the place of honor over the desk. An elderly woman with a proud gaze, a hooked nose just like Ettore’s, and the same line of the mouth. In her hands, crossed beneath her bosom, she held a rosary.
On her left ring finger a golden ring could be seen, with a heraldic crest.
XVII
Looking through the plateglass window, Giulio Colombo saw Enrica arrive, and noticed how she resembled her mother: in just two days he’d been subjected to two assaults on his tranquility, and for two different reasons.
It seemed harder for him to face his daughter, because he felt guilty about what he’d done to her; the evening had hardly been a success, precisely because of the girl’s stubborn refusal to join in the conversation. In fact she’d spent nearly the entire dinner grimly looking out the window, despite her mother’s best efforts to draw her out by praising her domestic and cultural gifts. As far as that goes, he himself hadn’t been particularly impressed with the Fiores’ son, a fairly superficial young man who had bored him stiff with a lengthy disquisition on the latest automobile models: there was no topic on earth that attracted him less, as he was a diehard proponent of the belief that those horrible noisy contraptions were irreparably ruining his city.
Nor did the situation improve after dinner, when they all went to sit in the drawing room: while the mother took command of the conversation, gossiping relentlessly about the entire city and in particular about the talk of the town, the murder of the duchess of Camparino, the son sat down practically on top of Enrica, and whispered in her ear incessantly; an unseemly approach, especially considering it was the first time they’d met. Giulio had given signs of annoyance, but one angry glare from his wife was enough to stop him cold, and so he sat there obediently, pretending not to notice what was happening. Poor Enrica had scooted over as far as she could, closer and closer to the armrest, pursued implacably by Sebastiano. A genuine nightmare. Once the three guests had left, Giulio had heaved a sigh of relief and then braced himself for the inevitable argument, but Enrica had immediately withdrawn into her bedroom without even wishing him goodnight. That was the first time he could ever remember that happening: his daughter’s goodnight kiss was a consolation he sorely hated to miss.
And here she came now. Her expression, usually so sweet, was grim and set. Giulio wondered whether there was a reason that everyone had it in for him. He sighed and prepared for the clash.
Ricciardi and Maione, on their way back from Palazzo Camparino, were still in bad moods; but at least their work was distracting them from their personal problems. The interviews with the duke and his son, instead of clearing up any details of the case, had only stirred new doubts. Maione seemed especially baffled.
“Commissa’, what do you think of this? The duke certainly isn’t strong enough to break a couple of anyone’s ribs, he might not even be capable of getting out of bed. Still, I don’t know if you noticed, the housekeeper obeys him like a lapdog, and she’s plenty strong.”
Ricciardi walked, lost in thought.
“Yes, that’s true; and there’s another thing: the Sivo woman, who kept us company close to the duke the whole time, stopped at the door with Ettore, she didn’t even come in. And the room struck me as remarkably messy, while the rest of the palazzo is clean and tidy. I’d like to understand the relationship between the two of them.”
“I’d like to understand what relationship there is between the father and the son, Commissa’. The fact that the son doesn’t want to be called ‘Duke,’ for example, seems important to me. And then the father, when you asked him, said, ‘Yes, I have a son,’ full stop. It seems curious to me.”
“That’s true, you’re right: that’s an odd thing too. No doubt about it: a nice case of family togetherness. All of them held together by hate.”
Maione continued to be baffled.
“But why, after ten years, would either the duke or his son have wanted to kill the duchess? By then, the situation was what it was, everyone was minding their own business. The duchess had her journalist, Ettore was cultivating his plants, and the duke was dying in his bed.”
Ricciardi had seen too much in his time to believe in stable situations.
“Why, haven’t you ever seen things change all of a sudden? A situation that you always tolerated, and one day without warning you can’t take it anymore. A word, a chance phrase. Maybe even the heat. Or an object, a piece of jewelry; and you lose your temper, you grab a gun, and you shoot.
“And then you recover your senses, you wake up from the madness, and you try to put things back the way they were, taking advantage of the fact that you know the house and you can make it all nice and orderly the way it was. Of course that’s happened to me, Commissa’. As for the piece of jewelry, you’re thinking of the duchess’s hand, aren’t you? I remember exactly what Doctor Modo told us: dislocated finger, abrasion on the other finger of the same hand. And I noticed that you asked the duke about the ring. I meant to tell you that the portrait in the young master’s den was wearing a ring: if you ask me, that was the first duchess, God rest her soul, she had the same nose as her son. And that’s the ring that’s disappeared.”
Ricciardi ventured a half smile.
“You don’t miss a thing, do you? Even in this heat, and as hungry as you are. The only thing that strikes me as strange is the silence. If there was a struggle, as it would seem from the contusions on the body, then there must have been an argument, and in fact the killer put the cushion on her face to keep her from screaming. How could it be that no one heard a thing, inside the palazzo or out? It was nighttime.”
Maione smiled and shook his head.
“Commissa’, you’re underestimating the neighborhood festas, it’s obvious that you’re not from Naples. We common folk have nothing but those festas, when it comes to having fun: we sing, we dance, and we misbehave until dawn. Believe me, you can’t hear a thing for a mile around, at leas
t. And the festa in the Santa Maria La Nova neighborhood is especially famous. There’s the bonfire of old wood and a sort of tarantella contest: if you stop dancing you lose. The local girls spend months and months on their dancing dresses. You have to trust me on this, they could have sung the entire third act of La Traviata in the duchess’s anteroom and nobody would have heard a thing, not even from the room next door.”
Ricciardi wasn’t so sure.
“Well, fine, maybe nobody could hear. But getting into and out of the palazzo is no simple matter, and the festa was going on right outside the front door. Can you imagine that no one noticed a thing? I don’t believe that the murderer dressed up as a tarantella dancer. I can’t figure it out, there are certain details that make me think of a well-planned murder and there are others that point to an impulsive fight.”
Maione, mopping his brow, shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s not necessarily so, Commissa’. If the murderer was moving quickly, he could get in and out without any trouble. No question, Sciarra’s children were eating, as usual, handfuls of semenzelle in the middle of the festa, and the front door was wide open; or else, and this is a possibility worth considering, the murderer actually came in with the duchess. We haven’t even talked to ‘Yours, Mario,’ yet, have we? Capece was at home here, from what we’ve heard.”
“You’re right. Until we’ve talked to Capece we can’t say a thing. Late this afternoon we’ll go to the Roma and talk to him, journalists work at night, right now we wouldn’t find a soul. As for me, I’m going to go eat a sfogliatella at Gambrinus. What are you going to do, go on playing the fakir? Make sure you don’t wind up like the famous donkey: just as he’d almost learned how to go without eating, he up and died.”
Maione sighed.
“Sure, sure, Commissa’, make fun all you like. The way things are going, the less I eat the more I sweat, and the tighter my jacket fits me. One of these mornings, I’m going to lose my patience and lock myself into a trattoria, and nobody’s going to stop me then. You go ahead, take your time; I’ll wait for you back at headquarters, I’m going to go assign those lazy bums a few jobs to do. I’ll see you later.”
Everyone in Their Place Page 12