Maria shot a fiery glance at her daughter, but the girl looked back with her customary tranquil determination. At that point, the woman tried on a conciliatory tone:
“How on earth can you say such a thing? Has he somehow disrespected you, is there something wrong with him? Do you think you deserve better? Don’t you like his family? Or is it . . .”
Enrica raised one hand to stem the rising tide of questions.
“No, Mamma. Nothing like that. It’s simpler than that: I don’t love him.”
“But you could get used to him, in time. Perhaps, a little at a time . . .”
“I’m sorry, but you refuse to understand.” Enrica heaved a deep sigh; her whole family was looking at her, no one touched their piping hot bowls of pasta. “I know that I’ll never be able to love him the way a wife must love her husband; the way you love Papà.”
Her mamma sat, waiting, openmouthed: “Why on earth not?”
“For the simplest reason imaginable, Mamma: I’m in love with someone else.”
In the quietest tone of voice on earth. A bomb like that, tossed in the quietest tone of voice on earth. Maria turned to Giulio:
“And you? You’re her father, and you ought to have her best interests at heart; what do you have to say about it?”
Her husband straightened his back and, looking his wife right in the eye, said calmly:
“I say that this ragù looks like it must be delicious. It’s Sunday, it’s lunchtime, and I say: buon appetito.”
And with that, he dug in.
XLVII
In the silence of Sunday afternoon, Ricciardi was looking at Adriana Musso di Camparino’s murderer.
He watched him move lazily in the heat, taking care of minor chores. He watched him look up at the sky, when a distant rumble announced that the weather was finally about to change; the man shook his head, sighed, and went back to pruning dry leaves off the plants.
Ricciardi’s head was no longer spinning. The walk he’d taken all the way from Santa Lucia had cleared his thoughts, and he’d felt the usual miracle take place in his mind: with the new interpretive framework, every individual piece slotted into its place, every element harmonized with the others, and now, at last, they formed a picture that was fully plausible from every point of view. To a certain extent, he’d also forgiven himself: he’d been superficial and careless, he knew that; but deep down he’d also gone on thinking, investigating that murder without ever really stopping. Because he’d never really been convinced that it had gone the way everyone thought.
By the halfway point along his walk, he’d reconstructed all the various events, exactly as they had occurred. Now he needed to know the rest: the motives, the reasons why. The context of the passions, the emotions that had danced around the duchess’s corpse.
He walked over to the murderer and the man saw him. He didn’t seem surprised, nor did he appear to have any thought of running, no sudden impulses. The commissario greeted him with a nod of the head and sat down on a marble bench: Peppino Sciarra, the doorman of Palazzo Camparino, doffed his oversized hat and let himself sink down beside him.
They sat in silence, for a while. Somewhere, from a window not far away, several goldfinches sang sweetly to the dying summer. It was Ricciardi’s turn to speak, and Ricciardi spoke:
“When Signora Capece confessed, I believed her. We all believed her; and we were right, because everything she said was true. But there were a few pieces that didn’t fit, with either Sofia Capece’s account or some of the things that we’d found. Still, Capece confessed, Musso was somewhere else, so was the journalist, and her new lover would have been noticed. So for all of us, it was Signora Capece, end of story. But it wasn’t the end of the story.”
Sciarra looked straight ahead, head bowed as if the weight of his enormous nose were simply too much.
Ricciardi went on:
“There were marks on the duchess’s body: broken ribs, shattered fingernails. And the cushion, the cushion pushed down on her face. The duchess was already dying. Those were her death throes, the last rattles of her respiration: she wasn’t snoring when Sofia Capece shot her.”
The doorman ran a trembling hand over his eyes. Ricciardi didn’t bother to look at him, but went on with his reasoning in a cold, remote voice:
“And she was dying because she’d been suffocated. The bullet hole between the eyes distracted us, kept us from understanding: in fact, when she was shot the duchess’s fate was already sealed. But then, who killed her?”
He turned to look at Sciarra, who was covering his eyes with his hand. He hardly even seemed to be breathing.
“We could have seen it. I could have seen it. I had all the evidence in hand. The murderer’s strength was the strength of desperation; there was no fury, there was no rage. The murderer didn’t take it out on her, he didn’t disfigure her. He was fighting for his life, he was afraid. He fought and he won, the murderer. The only disfigurement was Ettore’s work, when he tore his mother’s ring off the dead finger, dislocating it. And Signora Capece’s gunshot: there was no violence, there was no rage; it was simple madness. Sofia Capece wanted to execute a guilty person. Three different acts of violence inflicted on Adriana’s body. That’s what confused me, threw me off. I didn’t understand that the solution was a simple one: three acts of violence, three guilty parties.”
Sciarra shook his head gently, almost as if he were lulling himself. The murmur of Ricciardi’s voice continued:
“There were two clues I didn’t understand, two clues I chose to overlook. There was a partial footstep on the carpet. A strange mark, you could only guess at it. Grit, a little mud, and it hasn’t rained for two months. Where did that mud come from?”
Sciarra lowered his hand and for the first time he looked the commissario in the face. His strange eyes, set apart by his nose, were glistening like the eyes of a fawn. He said nothing.
“Then you told me that you watered the hydrangeas late at night, even though the young master scolded you for it. Water and dirt: that footprint was yours. And the other clue that I missed at first, fool that I was: the chain. The padlock was shut, the duchess would open it when she came home: but this time she came home earlier than expected, because she’d quarreled with Mario Capece, and she found the door open even though she had the keys. Why? Very simple: the hasp ring was missing.”
Ricciardi heard the last lament of Adriana’s dead soul, loud and clear:
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
And all the while, he, idiot that he was, wondering which ring she meant, whether it was Capece’s ring or Ettore’s mother’s ring. Instead, it was quite simply the hasp ring, which had been tampered with. With that ring removed, the chain no longer held the gate shut, and Sciarra—who had done the tampering—was able to get into the apartment when she was out and the housekeeper had already retired for the night. It took Don Pierino and the chain binding man and God, shattered by sin, to bring the truth to the surface, to make it emerge from the depths of his subconscious.
Slowly, the little man slipped one hand into his pocket and pulled out something, which he handed to Ricciardi. A circle of burnished metal, open in the middle; it wasn’t steel, but a softer metal painted to look like it, perhaps lead. This was Sciarra’s skeleton key to the apartment of the duke and duchess of Camparino.
Night fell over the palazzo’s courtyard, lengthening the shadows and making the colors fade. At last, Sciarra spoke, and in that whisper his cracking voice seemed more pathetic than comical.
“What’s my place? Do you know that, Commissa’? Can you tell me? Everyone says to me: stay in your place. Don’t try to rise above your place. But no one seems to know my place, my real place. Even I don’t know what my real place should be.”
The goldfinch suddenly stopped singing. Then it started up again, full-throated. And Sciarra, too, went on.
“I’m from Pozzuoli. In my hometown, if you don’t have a fishing boat, you can’
t do a thing. I met my wife when I was little more than a boy; we’re simple folk, our dreams are simple ones: we’re not like our masters, here, who all have a thousand things spinning through their heads. We wanted a roof over our heads and enough food to eat, for ourselves and our children. And we wanted to do an honest day’s work. Where I come from, if you don’t have a boat, you have only one choice, if you want to get enough to eat: you have to work for those people, you know the people I mean. And I didn’t want to work for them. So we loaded our few possessions onto a cart and we came to Naples, to the big city.”
Ricciardi knew from personal experience that every murderer is searching for that moment: he yearns to speak, he wants to get it off his chest. He wants to be understood. He wants the person who listens to him to support his reasons, to tell him, “Poor Sciarra, it’s just the way you say it is: you’re the victim, not the guilty party.” The usual story.
“But instead, Commissa’, we found blackest hunger here too. We slept under the cart, one at a time, otherwise the rats would gnaw away at the noses and ears of our babies, I’ve seen it happen, trust me. And when it wasn’t rats, it was people who were even worse off than we are, who wanted to steal our few miserable rags. But then, one morning, when I came to this very piazza to ask the Madonna in the church to intervene on my behalf, I saw Signora Concetta, the housekeeper; she was talking to a shopkeeper and complaining about how it was impossible to find a doorman and a maid, and that she just couldn’t keep the household going all on her own.”
Sciarra’s eyes lit up at the recollection of that divine grace, accorded even before he could ask for it.
“I’ve thanked the Lord God every day, and I thank Him still. A position, a place: I finally had a place of my own. This was it, my place. My children could grow up under a roof, and they’d be able to get enough to eat. You can’t imagine how hungry we were. And what it meant to us to be able to eat, twice in a single day. My children forgot about hunger; the littlest girl never actually experienced it. But not my wife and me, Commissa’; we’ll never forget it. We still wake up at night, terrified, when we dream about going hungry and spending nights under the cart, with rain splashing in everywhere and the noise of chattering teeth. We looked death in the face, Commissa’.”
Looking death in the face: and he said it to him of all people. The duchess, who was dead, was looking him in the face; who knew how many years she would have still had to live.
“I can’t stand it, watching my children go hungry. I can’t even take it when they’re peckish. If my children ask me for food, I give it to them. I’m their father: it’s my duty. And maybe because when they were little they had nothing, now they always seem to be hungry; always, Commissa’. From when they wake up until night falls, they’d eat every second of the day. It’s not that they’re gluttons: it’s just that they’re hungry.”
Ricciardi remembered Sciarra’s two children, fighting over bread and cheese the morning the duchess was found dead.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s in the pantry in this house. No one eats a thing, one person goes there, the other goes here; and the duke, poor old man, lives on thin soups and broths. But from the farms they own, every delicacy imaginable comes pouring in, tons of food. They waste it, they let it go bad, they literally throw it away. It would break your heart to see the things they throw away every week: meat, pasta, fruit. With children dying of hunger in the middle of the street. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is: everyone in their place. But where is everyone’s place? Can you tell me that, Commissa’?”
Ricciardi said:
“Go on. Tell me about that night.”
Sciarra ran his trembling hands over his face again. There was another rumble of thunder, closer this time.
“Signora Concetta, when she retires at night, locks the chain on the gate with the padlock. She goes straight to sleep, she’s a heavy sleeper, and she never wakes up until morning. Much later, never any earlier than two in the morning, the duchess would come home and go to bed; she’d unlock the padlock with her keys, she’d relock it, she’d put the keys in the drawer where Concetta would find them the following morning, and then she’d go to her bed. Sometimes she’d retire with . . . with someone else, in other words. But the passages of keys and padlocks were always the same.”
“And so?”
“And so, a year ago, or thereabouts, I thought to myself: who would ever notice if a little piece of meat is missing from the pantry? Sooner or later they always wind up throwing it away, after all. My son, the eldest boy, was very sick. He’d turned white as a sheet, his blood counts were low. And I made a hasp ring, a ring of lead, identical to the ring that anchored the chain to the wall. And I replaced the real hasp ring with the lead ring. And at night, before the duchess came home for the night, I’d pry it open with my hands. I’m strong, you know: nobody’d ever believe just how strong I am.”
Maybe the duchess would believe it now, thought Ricciardi; since she couldn’t break free of your grip, the grip that suffocated her.
“From that day on, every so often, I’d pilfer a little something to eat. Not always, Commissa’. Just now and then. I’d slip in, take a little oil, a piece of meat, some bread. A hunk of cheese. That night, in fact, I’d taken a piece of cheese. The child was hungry, she’d asked me a hundred times, and I’d promised her some. Well, I walk out of the pantry and I come face to face with the duchess, with the keys in hand. She took one look at me and said: tomorrow you’re packing your bags and you’re out on the street. All of you. None of your family will ever set foot in this palazzo again. It’s not your place anymore. Do you see, Commissa’? Our place. The cart appeared before my eyes again, the rats, the rain. I thought about my little girl, who’d never lived in the street in her life. And I said to her, Signora Duchessa, take pity on me. And you know what she said? If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to scream. After that, I just lost my mind; outside you could hear the festival, the piazza was still full of people. It would mean humiliation, the worst mortification imaginable. So I grabbed the cushion and put it on her face.”
Ricciardi fell silent, picturing the scene.
“You fought; the duchess lashed out.”
Sciarra looked into the empty air, immersed in the murder he was reliving.
“Like a cat. She fought like a cat. She kicked, she scratched; I was wearing my uniform jacket; if I hadn’t been, she’d have ripped my arms to shreds. But then she stopped moving: she was still breathing, or at least I thought she was. I picked up the keys from the floor and I put them in the drawer, and I left. When I got home, upstairs, I realized I still had the piece of cheese in my hand. My wife started crying, and she’s crying still.”
Ricciardi shook his head; as incredible as it seemed, the true guilty party was hunger. Not some complicated love story, with its countless paths to murder, rage, possessiveness, jealousy; but instead none other than dull, stupid hunger, with its blind shrieking need.
By now the courtyard was almost dark; a muggy evening had fallen over the city. In the half-light, he heard the faint sound of footsteps, and Ricciardi glimpsed Sciarra’s two youngest children as they approached, hand in hand.
“Papa? Mamma wants to know, aren’t you coming up?”
The boy’s voice was worried, clearly by Ricciardi’s presence: what could that grim-faced gentleman want with their father? Sciarra replied:
“Yes, but you go up first. Tell Mamma that . . . tell her that I’ll be up as soon as I can.”
The two children went off reluctantly; before turning away, the girl curtsied to Ricciardi.
“They’re beautiful, eh, Commissa’? My children really are beautiful. And they help me, you know. They do all the little chores around the house. And at school, they’re at the head of their classes. Who knows what their place is. Who can say what their place will be now.”
The thunder roared violently, and the wind picked up. Ricciardi shivered. Hunger, he thought. And the Capece family, the b
oy and the girl left without their mamma, with a father who was now a stranger, a father they’d have to forgive every day, though they could never forgive him entirely. And the duke dying alone in his bed, and Achille and Ettore and their love that could never see the light of day. And Sofia Capece, in the darkness of the room and the madness where she might spend the rest of her life.
How many victims had the duchess’s murder taken? Who’d actually killed her? Perhaps Signora Capece’s gunshot had been enough. Or perhaps the angel of death had done it all on its own.
For the Capece children it was too late; but not for Sciarra’s children. Ricciardi’s conscience was pitted against his sense of justice. He followed his instinct as he spoke.
“Your prison will be your children, Sciarra. If they end up badly, you too will end badly. I won’t forgive you, because that’s not my job: but your children need you, and they come before justice.”
Sciarra hadn’t raised his eyes from the pavement.
“I can never forgive myself, Commissa’. Whether I live here or in prison, I’ll never be able to forgive myself. And I’ll dream about the duchess every night of my life. Now I know where my place is. You’ve told me yourself. My place is close to my children.”
When Ricciardi left, in the first drops of rain, he was still sitting there, staring at the ground.
XLVIII
Rosa’s bones were warning her that the weather would be changing, and had been since the day before. The advantages of age; like wisdom. But she would gladly have done without them. While she was massaging her aching elbow, in front of the sink, she thought—as usual—of Ricciardi.
He’d come home late, damp from the first onset of rain, his face more melancholy than usual. He’d eaten without a word, answering her questions with grunts; God, how hard it was to understand him, he was so closed, so shut off.
Everyone in Their Place Page 34