Everyone in Their Place

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  “There are two . . . the police are here, the mobile squad. One’s in uniform, the other one’s in civilian clothes. They’re looking for you.”

  Mario smiled wearily.

  “At last. They took their sweet time, almost two days. Show them in.”

  “Do you want me to be present too? As a witness, you know.”

  Capece looked at his friend intensely: he deeply appreciated the offer, knowing as he did that Dominici too assumed that he was guilty of Adriana’s murder.

  “No, Arturo. That’s not necessary. If I need you I’ll call you. Grazie.”

  Ricciardi and Maione walked into the office just as Capece was throwing open the window. The room was hot as an oven and it reeked of stale air and liquor; it was like being in a bar. They introduced themselves and when Capece pointed them to two chairs, they sat down. Maione asked the journalist his name and age and other basic details, and he supplied them with a voice that was only slightly slurred and with eyes half-closed from the pain of his migraine.

  Capece wasn’t tall, but his frank and extroverted expression gave him an imposing air. His professional skills were highly esteemed, and the fact that he didn’t pander to the powerful, that he criticized or praised openly and as he saw fit, had won him the admiration of many, but also the hatred of the fanatical supporters of the regime. His weak point had been his affair with Adriana, a weapon that the fanatics had used to hinder the career that he would certainly have enjoyed otherwise.

  The man that Ricciardi and Maione had before them, however, was a different person from the one that Mario Capece had been until just a short while ago. His three-day growth of whiskers, his loosened tie, his shirt half-untucked, his single buttoned suspender, and his waistcoat dangling open were so many signals of the state of prostration into which the journalist had slipped. Still, he looked at them mockingly and said:

  “Well then, you must be Commissario Ricciardi. The solitary hawk at police headquarters, the man who doesn’t want career advancement. The implacable hunter of murderers. I’ve been following your work, did you know that? Your progress is interesting. Your superior officers are afraid of you, and so are those who report to you. They say you bring bad luck.”

  Maione was about to repond but Ricciardi held up his hand.

  “Interesting information. But as luck would have it, we’re not here to talk about me today, but about you, Capece. And in particular about the death of a woman whom, from what I’ve heard, you knew very well. Is that right?”

  Capece shot to his feet like a spring suddenly released, his bleary eyes red with rage.

  “The death of a woman, you say. A woman I knew well. Careful, Ricciardi: never use that tone of voice again. Never again. That woman has . . . had a name, and her name was Adriana Musso, duchess of Camparino. And I didn’t know her: I loved her. Not that I’d expect you, a dreary little policeman who lives alone, to understand. But I loved her.”

  Maione had no intention of tolerating that tone, no matter what Ricciardi said. He leapt to his feet and, towering over Capece, leaned toward him, placing both hands flat on the desktop.

  “Listen up, Capece: you try talking to the commissario like that one more time, and dead woman or no dead woman, I’ll smack you so hard that you’ll get over your drunk in the blink of an eye. You respect us and we’ll respect you. Otherwise, we can go have this little chat at police headquarters, and your children will wake up to find that their father’s in prison. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Capece and Maione stared at each other for a good thirty seconds, face to face. Ricciardi watched the journalist as the two men faced off, wondering whether this reaction was a product of his personality or simply a state of despair. He opted for the first factor, but with some reservations.

  At last the man sat down, and the brigadier sat down after him. Unexpectedly, he smiled.

  “So you do you have blood in your veins, after all! And you don’t find your courage only when you outnumber your opponent. Fine, then, let’s respect each other. And I’ll answer your question: yes, I knew her. And I didn’t kill her. Even though it’s my fault that she’s dead, and I’ll never be able to forgive myself for the fact.”

  Ricciardi tried to delve deeper: “What do you mean, it’s your fault?”

  Capece smiled a bitter smile, staring into the void.

  “You must already know that on Saturday night we had a fight, at the Salone Margherita. I have no doubts that you were informed, because that incompetent Garzo, the deputy chief of police and your boss, was there, and I’ll never forget his face and his foolish stunned expression. It was a typical lovers’ skirmish. But, idiot that I am, I stormed out of the place and I let her go home alone, or else accompanied by who knows who. That’s just the way she was, you know: instinctive. And someone killed her.”

  While he was speaking he’d started weeping, without even realizing it. Tears rolled down his cheeks, in a silent incessant stream, like some hemorrhage of unbroken grief. Maione, who’d been pleased to hear that open reference to Garzo’s incompetence, handed him a handkerchief.

  Ricciardi resumed:

  “And you, where did you go?”

  “I went drinking. First at the Circolo dell’Unione, then in one cantina and then in another, and finally to the train station where there was the one last bar in the city that was still open. I was alone, I imagine you want to know that. No one can confirm it. Nor do I care whether or not you believe it.”

  XXI

  All alone in your kitchen, you wait. You know that he might never come back home. You’ve factored that into the equation.

  You’ve known ever since you saw him slap her face, ever since you saw him storm out the door, alone. You know where he went, and what he did. And you know that, logically, he’ll be the first one they’ll think of.

  The cookpot bubbles away. It’s hot, so very hot. On your forehead, on your lip, beads of sweat form that you mop away with your handkerchief, before they can drip down to ruin your hair or your makeup.

  You’ve dressed the way you usually do, you want him to find you neat and clean, if he happens to return. If by some chance they let him go. And if they decide not to, then he brought it on himself, then he asked for it. It was only natural that this is how it ended, you always knew it.

  And that’s why you’re sitting and waiting now. Not that this is the first time; so many other nights you’ve pretended to sleep, your ears uselessly alert for the sound of a key turning in the lock, the sound of a door opening. So many times you’ve prayed for hours on end, hoping for him to come home. But this time it’s different.

  Because, whether or not he comes back, today is a new day.

  Ricciardi broke the silence that had followed the last statement.

  “What were you fighting about?”

  Capece smiled.

  “I told you. It was a lovers’ skirmish. Jealousy. Do you know what jealousy is, Commissario? No, I imagine that you don’t. You’re a famous loner, aren’t you? No wife, no girlfriend. No friends, I believe. Yes, yes, you told me before: we aren’t here to talk about you. Jealousy, I was saying. The green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on, as the English poet put it. That poet we soon won’t be allowed to read anymore. It’s true, Commissario: jealousy is a monster. But it isn’t true that those who suffer from it create it, no, that’s not true. Adriana was beautiful, incredibly beautiful. The photographs that you might have seen of her don’t do her justice, and neither do the unfortunate remains that you recovered. I don’t want to know what you’ve done with her, don’t tell me what it was like. I’ve heard about a gunshot, that much I know. And I’d just as soon know nothing more.”

  The commissario had no intention of dropping the matter amidst the journalist’s literary lucubrations.

  “And what exactly was the reason for this, I believe you called it, skirmish?”

  Capece hesitated, then he said:

  “There was a guy, a young man, who was squiring
some old hag to the theater. He was a gigolo, a kept man. Or for all I know he was her grandson, I can’t say and I don’t care. He kept staring and staring at Adriana while I pretended to watch the show. But I never really looked away for a second; I was watching him, and I was watching her. When she noticed him she started returning his glances. Once, twice, a third time. And smiling: you can’t imagine how lovely she was when she smiled, Commissario. She knew it, that she was beautiful; and she enjoyed playing with men, the way a cat toys with a mouse, using her beauty like a claw.”

  His tone of voice changed, as he thought back to the situation that night in the theater. A muscle in his jaw twitched uncontrollably, his right hand kept clenching into a fist. A man like this, thought Maione, would be capable of anything. Ricciardi said:

  “Then what did you do?”

  “What did I do? I put up with it for as long as I was able. And then I exploded, then I couldn’t take it anymore. Jealousy is a vicious beast, Commissario. It stabs you right behind your stomach, clamps you like a vise. It’s a physical sensation, and it won’t let up.”

  It looked to Maione as if Ricciardi had suddenly turned pale; the commissario brushed his hand over his jacket, right on a line with his solar plexus. Perhaps he’d eaten something that disagreed with him. Capece went on:

  “But I could never have done anything to hurt her. It’s absurd to say it, I know that: I could have throttled her with my bare hands, and yet I would never have hurt her. I don’t see how you can believe me, but that’s the way it is.”

  The commissario wanted something more. He wanted to know about the ring; he could hear the voice of the dead duchess as if she were sitting inside his head:

  “The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”

  So he asked:

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then we started quarreling. I asked her to explain her behavior, and she laughed in my face. She ridiculed me, in front of that callow young man, in front of the whole room. The more she laughed, the more I saw red. And then I hit her, I slapped her in the face. Like this,” and he imitated the way he’d hit the woman. “She stopped laughing, she looked at me with hatred. And I grabbed the ring, and I turned and left.”

  “What ring?”

  Capece put his hands in his pockets, in a moment of confusion. Then he pulled a golden ring with a small diamond out of a fob pocket in his vest and set it on the table.

  “It’s a small thing, of no real monetary value. But it was a token of our love, a miserable trinket I gave her when . . . when we first met, on a certain occasion. I told her that she didn’t deserve to have it, and I yanked it away from her. I think I hurt her when I did.”

  Ricciardi hadn’t once stopped staring Capece in the face the whole time. More than his words, he was trying to understand his emotions, which veered sharply between hatred and love.

  “What do you know about how she was killed? You talked about her being shot in the head, and this is public knowledge. You must know other details, from the line of work you’re in. Who do you think could have done it?”

  Capece fell silent, staring into the empty air. Then he started to talk again, in little more than a murmur.

  “When I first started, this was a different profession. Very different, more than the two of you would ever be willing to believe. You could tell stories, you could provide commentary. A journalist would pursue an investigation and he was allowed to talk about it, sometimes we even cooperated with you policemen. Then the decision was made that the world was clean, that there were no more murders. It was decided at a drawing table, while completely ignoring reality. A telegraphic circular letter came in, one of the ones we call veline, at the beginning of 1926, and no one paid it any mind. I remember how we laughed in the newsroom, we laughed until the tears came; the orders had come down to ‘demobilize the crime reporters.’ As if it were possible to sit down at a telegraph machine and, by tapping away with your forefinger, eliminate darkness from the human soul. Then, three years ago, on September 26, 1928, the prefect called us into his office. All of us, editors-in-chief, bureau chiefs: and he said that from that day forward the velina of 1926 would have to be followed to the letter. I remember his exact words: with special reference to the reporting of suicides, crimes of passion, rapes and abductions, and so on, because they can have an unhealthy effect on the spirits of the mentally weak or weakend. Can you imagine? Everything that happens all around us, the things you see from dawn till dusk, must no longer exist as far as the press is concerned.”

  Ricciardi didn’t understand what this had to do with Adriana’s murder.

  “And so?”

  Capece stared at him with reddened eyes, as if he were a particularly stupid student.

  “And so? And so this was no longer the job I’d set out to do. If all I can write about is the party of the Baroness Thus and Such or the visit of the royal prince and princess, if I have to talk about this ship being launched or a formation of seaplanes crossing the Atlantic, then that’s not my profession anymore. But I don’t know how to do anything else, so I kept it up, though my heart wasn’t in it. Then I met Adriana and life regained its color. This is to explain why we can no longer explore and investigate, discover how it is that John Doe killed Richard Roe. And this time, believe me, I thank God that’s how it is. Already, I’m struggling with the guilt of letting her go home alone, and slapping her in the face before she left.”

  He looked at his open hand, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

  “Can you imagine? The last time this hand touched her, it was to slap her face.”

  And he began crying, sobbing. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance; each, without knowing anything about what the other was feeling, saw in Capece’s sobs the emotions that he was feeling so deeply at that moment.

  Once he had recovered, Ricciardi asked in a gentle tone of voice: “Forgive me, Capece. But you understand perfectly well that I have to ask you this. Do you own a revolver?”

  Capece looked up and stared defiantly at Ricciardi:

  “First you’re going to have to arrest me, Ricciardi. If I’m a suspect, first you’re going to have to arrest me. I’m not going to answer your questions, this one or any of the others. Take care, I know all about your methods. I still have weapons, you know; not the ones you’re thinking of. I can still take you apart, one piece at a time, with a single article. Now, get out of here. I want to drink, and I want to sleep.”

  Ricciardi and Maione were walking slowly, hunched under the burden of their thoughts. Capece’s interrogation had touched them deeply. The brigadier finally broke the silence:

  “Commissa’, I don’t know. I feel sorry for this man, it pains me to see him, but I have to tell you honestly that he strikes me as the kind of guy who could lose his mind from all this grief. I’ve seen other men like this, heads of families, fathers, respectable people, but sensitive, far too sensitive. For better and for worse.”

  “It’s true, all too true. He’s a good man, no doubt about it. But he’s also a person who could do something rash, because he feels he’s been humiliated or else because he thinks he’s losing something. And in the end he challenged us, but it was only out of despair.”

  Maione ran a finger under his collar, trying to get a little cool air.

  “Well, whatever the case, they’re not letting us work under ideal conditions, eh, Commissa’? That idiot Garzo threatening us, now Capece here threatening us, the young master with his plants on the terrace threatening us. But we can’t threaten anyone: if we do, we’ll wind up in a world of trouble.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “True, but we’ll go on doing our best to get our work done. Do me a favor: make the rounds of the cantinas and dives, find out if anyone remembers seeing Capece getting drunk. Maybe he passed out someplace, someone saw him, and we’ll strike him off our list. Otherwise, we’ll get a warrant and go search his office and his home to see if by any chance he happ
ens to own a Beretta 7.65.”

  “Yessir, Commissa’. It’s just that in the cantinas and dives, people drink but they also eat, and lately, whenever I go someplace people are eating, it gets on my nerves. Anyway, the young master gardener strikes me as quite a lunatic too. Maybe he’s got a nice Beretta tucked away somewhere. Or not?”

  Ricciardi shot Maione a rapid glance.

  “You, with this food obsession of yours, sooner or later you’re liable to kill someone. And then I’d wind up having to put you in prison.”

  Maione laughed bitterly.

  “And I’d eat more in prison than I do at my house, these days, Commissa’. Even if you put me on bread and water!”

  “As far as the young master is concerned, you’re perfectly right, and don’t think that Garzo can bark loud enough to throw a scare into me. We’ve got to do some digging, and the first thing I want to find out is whether on the night in question the young master was at home, or whether he might have come in just a few minutes after his stepmother. The festivities were underway outside, as we know, so if they quarreled it’s entirely possible that no one heard them. All right, we’ll learn more tomorrow. For now, let’s go home, because it’s late and it’s still just as hot as ever. I’m not even hungry.”

  Maione spread his arms.

  “Lucky you, Commissa’. The heat makes me even hungrier. Buona notte, then, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  XXII

  Sitting in an armchair and knitting, Rosa watched Ricciardi eat. Or really: she watched him play with his food, pushing it around the plate with his fork.

  This truly was an unusual turn of events; even in his darkest hours, he’d never lost the ravenous appetite that was a crucial element of his personality. It wasn’t like he savored his food: he bolted it fast, one mouthful after another, his forehead creased by a single deep wrinkle of concentration, as if he were intent on completing some challenging task. But when he was done, the plate was wiped clean.