Everyone in Their Place

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  And he left the room, touching his fingertips to the visor of his cap. Garzo, pigeon-chested and all smiles, turned and spoke once again to Ricciardi, who hadn’t moved in the meantime:

  “All right, Ricciardi, I’ll be expecting that report. Again, congratulations, and on to bigger and better things. Come along, Ponte: we have a thousand things to do.”

  Ricciardi’s sense of unease, increased considerably by the visit from the deputy chief of police, led him to go out into the street even before lunchtime. Pensive and unhappy, he found himself in front of the hospital, just as Doctor Modo was heading out for a bite to eat.

  “There you go, the story of my life. All my colleagues are greeted at the front gate by lovely women, either enchanting girlfriends or loving wives. And here I am, awaited by you: a melancholy policeman, and ugly, to boot.”

  “Stop complaining, Bruno: I don’t recall having to stand in line to buy you lunch.”

  Modo tipped his hat to the back of his head and mopped his brow with his handkerchief.

  “Better alone than in bad company. In any case, I swore an oath to fight suffering, and as far as I can tell you’re the unrivaled champion of misery; and so, though it’s with a heavy heart, I’m going to take you up on your offer. After all, you’re a wealthy man, and I’m just a penniless medical examiner. Where are you taking me for lunch?”

  At the trattoria the doctor, as usual, ate for two; Ricciardi on the other hand, toyed listlessly with a forkful of pasta, responding monosyllabically to his friend’s efforts to draw him out in a conversation. His chosen topic, needless to say, was politics.

  “Do you have any idea how low we’ve sunk? I find this young man in my waiting room, a student, as far as I could tell, glasses, clean but shabby clothing, the elbows of his jacket looked as thin and delicate as onionskin paper. A Calabrian, perhaps, or maybe from Lucania, I can never tell them apart. But a respectable polite young man. You know the kind, put themselves through school by working on the side, and even send a little extra money home. So I find him sitting in the waiting room, he hadn’t made a sound, patiently pressing a handkerchief against his forehead. So I say to him, yes, young man, how can I help? And he shows me a five-inch cut. Probably a knife wound, and they came this close to taking his eye out, just a hair to the left and he’d have been blind in one eye. I asked him, son, who did this to you? And he said: I fell and cut myself. He fell, my foot! There’d been a meeting of freethinkers, socialists, maybe, and those guys showed up, a squad of enforcers, probably ten of them. He’d been a straggler when everyone took to their heels. Getting the story out of him was like pulling teeth. But in the end, do you know what he said? Doctor, I’ll let you stitch up the cut only if you promise not to tell a soul. What kind of filthy world has this turned into? Can you answer me that?”

  Ricciardi sadly shook his head.

  “Bruno, I know that things aren’t going particularly well. Believe me: I’ve experienced it personally. But you’re important, for all the people you help and you protect. For once in your life, let me try to protect you, by asking you to take care. That’s right, I’m asking you—I’m begging you—to be careful what you say, especially in public places. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do: there are people keeping an eye on you. And if they locked you up, even if it would mean not having to look at your ugly face anymore, it would be a serious loss for everyone.”

  Modo slammed his fist down on the table, making the silverware dance. Heads turned to look at them.

  “What’s this, you too now? You’re starting to talk like them? Who did you talk to about me, if I may ask? Don’t I at least have the right to know my enemies?”

  Ricciardi laid a hand on his arm, whispering: “There, you see: they’re watching us. These are exactly the kind of situations to avoid. During the course of the investigation into the duchess’s murder, you remember, your last autopsy, I had to question a person. A man who works for their secret police, to be exact: even if I find it repellent to dignify them with the name of police. Still, he wasn’t a bad person, at least, that was the impression I got. And he told me to give you some advice: try to stay out of trouble. Now I’ve done it, at my own risk and danger. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Modo considered the matter and calmed down, just as Ricciardi had expected. He wouldn’t risk his friend’s life just to make a point. Plus, it warmed his heart to think that someone like the commissario actually worried about him.

  “Fine, you’ve talked me into it. I’ll try to be more careful. By the way, I hear that you caught the duchess’s murderer, or perhaps I should say, her murderess, the wife of that journalist, what’s his name . . .”

  “Capece, that’s right. But I wanted to talk to you about that, too. Now then, this woman, Signora Capece, is crazy. Of course, there will be an expert evaluation and all the rest, but she’s certainly not of sound mind. So: in your experience, can a person like that do something and then remember only a part of what they’ve done?”

  Modo looked at him intently through the cigarette smoke.

  “If you explain to me exactly what you mean, I may be able to answer your question.”

  Ricciardi sighed:

  “Do you remember when you described the condition of the corpse to me? You mentioned a struggle. Broken fingernails, broken ribs.”

  “And signs of asphyxiation, of course, I remember perfectly. So what?”

  “So Signora Capece told us that she came in and shot the duchess through the cushion, and that the duchess was fast asleep. But she didn’t say anything about a fight.”

  Modo shrugged:

  “I’ll say it again: so what? Did she fire the gun, yes or no? If she pushed the cushion down onto the duchess’s face, whether it was for one second or thirty seconds, if she braced her knee against her abdomen so she was better able to fire the gun, if the duchess grabbed her dress, breaking her fingernails in the processs—and they were long, well manicured nails, and therefore quite fragile—well, there you are, you have your full clinical picture of the autopsy. It all lines up perfectly, as far as I’m concerned. If you tell me that she’s crazy, well, as you know individuals with mental problems can wield enormous strength without even being aware of it. I remember, during the war, there was a guy . . .”

  But Ricciardi was too focused to listen to the doctor’s postprandial digressions.

  “And the fingers? You told me that there were abrasions on one of the fingers, as if someone had violently ripped off a ring, and the explanation for that emerged in the investigation; but the other finger, the one that was dislocated when she was already dead, given the absence of hematomas? The Signora Capece said nothing about having taken a ring off the corpse.”

  The doctor spread both arms wide:

  “Ah, well, that’s something I can know nothing about: I’m a scientist, not a seer. I can tell you with great confidence, and in fact I did, that the finger was dislocated after the poor duchess had shuffled off this miserable coil. Whether someone then took her ring or visited a strange and perverse desecration upon her corpse, I have no idea. But forgive me if I say: now you’re starting to look like the lunatic in this story. Signora Capece has confessed, you’ve found the murder weapon, and her confession fits in with all the evidence and clues that you’ve found. Can you tell me what more you want?”

  Ricciardi ran a hand over his face as if brushing away a fly.

  “You’re right. Maybe it’s just that I can never seem to give up an investigation just like that, that’s all.”

  Modo stretched out in his chair, knitting his fingers behind his neck and smiling:

  “Of course. If it were anyone else but you, the high priest of crime and justice, I would suggest you come with me to sample the delights of a new bordello that just opened its doors at La Torretta, with a team of French mademoiselles who are actually from Mugnano, but trust me, they’ll take your breath away. But since you stubbornly insist on being yourself, I think I’ll let you go back to your muckrakin
g. But I want to give you a piece of advice, too, in exchange for the advice you gave me: every so often, why don’t you give yourself a little peace. Take some time off, do something fun. Otherwise they’ll be checking you into a room next to Signora Capece, take it from your friend Bruno.”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll just have to devote a little leisure time to my favorite pursuit: hunting for dissident doctors. Come on, let’s go get a cup of coffee. And this time, it’s your treat.”

  XLIII

  Maione slowly made his way up the last part of the steep uphill street that led to his home, where lunch was waiting. Incredible as it might seem, given how hungry he was, he’d happily have skipped lunch entirely, for a number of reasons: first of all, he couldn’t stand the prospect of another bowl of vegetable soup; next, last night’s spat was certain to mean a chilly silence on his wife’s part, and that meant he couldn’t hope for the friendly conversation that was his one sure way of getting his mind off work; last of all, he’d have to walk past the fruit and vegetable shop run by that damned Di Stasio, who had greeted him with a smile that struck him as faintly sarcastic.

  Things changed radically however when, still a good fifty yards, perhaps more, from his own front door, he caught an unmistakable whiff of Lucia’s Genovese savory pastries. It couldn’t be anything else: the meat and onion sauce his wife cooked, and no other sauce out there, would have woken him out of a deep coma, and it was famous throughout the quarter. Long before the topic of food became a minefield, Lucia used to rib him, saying that the reason he’d married her was her Genovese pastries: and he, with a laugh, would say that she was probably right.

  The thought only irritated him more: it struck him that making Genovese pastries for their children, now that he couldn’t eat them, was gratuitously cruel; a torture that Lucia was inflicting on him to punish him for rejecting the soup she’d made the night before. He was tempted to turn around and head straight back to police headquarters, just to deprive her of that satisfaction; then he decided that a real man faces challenges, he doesn’t turn and run, so he climbed the stairs, down in the mouth but grimly determined.

  When he opened the front door, the celestial odor wafted over him violently; he even thought that he could detect the scent of fried broccoli and roasted potatoes, and possibly even a rum baba. He couldn’t believe it: a full Christmas banquet in the middle of August. What on earth was happening?

  He noticed that none of the children came running to greet him the way they usually did. He made his way into the kitchen and stood there, openmouthed: the table was groaning with an array of food, cooked in every style imaginable. There were only two place settings, with the tablecloth and silverware that were only used on very special occasions. Lucia stood glaring at him, combatively, by the kitchen sink as she dried her hands with a dish towel. He asked her:

  “Where are the kids?”

  “They’re down at my sister Rosaria’s. They’ve had lunch there and they won’t be back until tonight.”

  The brigadier pointed to the dishes arrayed on the table: “And all this food . . . who put it here?”

  Lucia replied in a harsh voice, but laughter was glinting in her eyes. She was enjoying herself.

  “Who do you think put it here? And you tell me, who else would I let set foot in my kitchen?”

  As she spoke, she came closer to Maione and gave him a fake punch in the chest, and another, then another, punctuating the things she said:

  “And you tell me, is there a woman in all Naples who cooks better than I do? And you tell me, is there a place in all Naples where you’d be more comfortable than in your own home? And you tell me, how should a woman feel when she sees her own husband not bother to come home for dinner? And you tell me . . .”

  He seized her wrist to stop her from hitting him and put one arm around her waist, pulling her close to him.

  “Well, while we’re at it, how is a man supposed to feel when he’s rejected in his own home? And you tell me, how is a husband supposed to feel when he sees his wife flirting with an idiot fruit vendor—and even if we went to school together when we were kids, it’s never too late for me to pluck out every last whisker in his whorish mustache, one by one?”

  And they both burst out laughing and crying, until Lucia said, sit down and eat, or else we’ll have to throw out this whole banquet; and Raffaele replied, if you’re thinking of throwing away your Genovese pastries, you’ll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands. And they sat down and ate for an hour, and then they made love, and then they ate the rest.

  Crying and laughing the whole time.

  His lunch with Modo had at least helped Ricciardi to pinpoint the source of his uneasiness: the duchess’s second ring. He realized that whoever had torn the ring off her finger, dislocating it in the process, had done so after she’d already been killed, but still he felt compelled to complete his picture of the emotions that had danced around her corpse that night. His sense of order demanded it.

  He headed off toward Palazzo Camparino, on an afternoon so muggy that the movements of the few people out on the street seemed to be in slow motion, as if they were underwater.

  In the courtyard he saw Sciarra sweeping, doing his best to stay in the shade of the columns; he had his back to Ricciardi and didn’t see him coming. When the commissario tapped him on the shoulder he lofted straight into the air from a standing start, a comic sight accompanied by the loss of his hat and a high-pitched scream.

  “Oooh, Madonna mia, Commissa’, it’s only you. You’re going to give me a heart attack, you know, really! I was lost in thought, I was . . .”

  “Forgive me. See if young master Ettore is in, I’d like to talk to him.”

  The little man was panting, with one hand on his chest and the hat he’d picked up from the ground in the other hand; after brushing it off as best he could, he put it back on his head. In an apologetic tone he said:

  “There’s so much sweeping to do, there’s always dirt on the pavement out here. The young master says that I’m supposed to water the hydrangeas now, in the heat of the afternoon: but I can’t do that, climbing up and down the stairs with a heavy pail of water in this heat. So I water the plants in the evening, and I just pray that he doesn’t notice. Yes, Commissa’, he’s here. He’s upstairs, surrounded by his plants, as always. Just a minute, I’ll walk you up, and let him know.”

  Ricciardi replied:

  “I just want to stop by the duchess’s anteroom first.”

  He followed the doorman up the first flight of stairs and stopped on the landing, waiting for him to open the gate. He sensed how uneasy the man was, but that was certainly par for the course. Everyone was uneasy around him: Ponte, the other policemen, sometimes even Maione. He was the only one of his kind, he thought. From another planet, the moon or Mars, or another star. Condemned to spend his life alone, and watch the others avoid him like the plague.

  He took one step into the room, which was now clean and tidy, as if nothing had ever happened; but something had happened, and evidence of the fact was Adriana’s corpse, still visible, even if it was gradually fading, speaking to him in a subdued voice from the same corner where he’d first seen her six long days ago.

  “The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing,” murmured the woman’s dead and swollen mouth, her strong white teeth bared, with the black tip of her tongue extended between them. Ricciardi stood still, staring at her, his hands in his trouser pockets, his shirt collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He wondered why her last thought should have been for her piece of jewelry, instead of some final curse or a note of regret.

  Turning his back on the corpse he gestured to Sciarra and followed him upstairs to Ettore’s apartment. The duke’s son was on the terrace, leaning over a yellow rose bush. His back was to the two men, as he worked carefully with a pair of shears to trim the branches, with the utmost attention. After a moment, without giving any sign of having noticed that Sciarra was waiting, hat in hand, to announc
e Ricciardi, he said:

  “Prego, Commissario, come right on in. Do you know the story of the yellow roses? Sciarra, you’re free to go.”

  With unmistakable relief, the doorman moved off quickly: it was clear that he enjoyed neither the commissario’s nor the young master’s company. Ricciardi stood at the threshold of the terrace.

  “No, I don’t know the story. Should I?”

  Ettore stood up and turned to look at his guest, mopping his sweaty brow with his sleeve.

  “No, I imagine you wouldn’t. It’s an Arabic story: Mohammed suspected that his favorite wife, Aisha, a beautiful woman, might be betraying him. And so he asked an angel how he could find out the truth; there are angels, you know, in almost all religions. Well, the angel told him to bring the woman some red roses, and then to dip them in water: if the flowers changed color, it meant that the woman had been unfaithful to him. Mohammed brought her the flowers and arranged for her to drop them into the river: the roses turned yellow. The color of jealousy, of love betrayed.”

  Ricciardi heard Sofia Capece’s voice in his mind, as she claimed to be the angel of death. And he thought about jealousy, which had driven her so mad that she had decided to punish Adriana for betraying her own husband.

  “And what happened to the favorite? Did someone shoot her between the eyes?”

  Ettore laughed.

  “No, of course not. She was kicked out of the house, that’s all. She was really rather lucky, wasn’t she?”

  “But the duchess wasn’t lucky. She met quite a different fate.”

  The man’s expression hardened.

  “She was a bitch, Commissario. A vile, stupid bitch. She did whatever her diseased appetites suggested to her, she had no interest in anyone else’s feelings. If you expect thanks for having identified her murderer, don’t look at me. In fact, her lover’s wife has my pity and comprehension: she did what a great many of us ought to have done long ago, believe me.”