Gustavo donned a mistrustful expression.
“Brigadie’, I’ll tell you only if assure me on your word of honor that I’m talking to you as a civilian and not as an officer. Because otherwise, as you know, I can’t say a thing.”
Maione spread his arms wide.
“Hey, no, now you’re overdoing it. What am I supposed to do, give my word of honor to a two-bit criminal?”
“It’s either this or that, Brigadie’. I’m not a stool pigeon. I have a name to live up to, you know.”
Maione slammed a fist into the wall.
“I’ll give you a name to live up to if you don’t watch out. A bad reputation isn’t a name you can live up to. And anyway, all right, I made my promise and I have to live up to it. Go ahead and talk, I’m just an ordinary guy, not a brigadier.”
The little man narrowed his eyes.
“Word of honor?”
Maione sighed.
“Word of honor.”
Gustavo seemed to be satisfied.
“Well, then, Brigadie’, it’s a simple enough situation. I sold a couple of goldsmiths some little objects I had bought from a few friends I knew in Poggioreale during the period . . . when I was away on holiday. Now, in good conscience, I can’t really tell you that I’m entirely certain of their provenance, but it was certainly good stuff.”
Maione slapped himself in the face.
“Now you tell me, of all the things I have to stand still for. I don’t want to hear all this. Just go on, okay?”
“Anyway, a couple of months ago someone comes to see me, someone I’ve never met before, a skinny guy, very well dressed. He says to me: ‘Are you Gustavo ’a Zoccola?’ ‘At your service,’ I reply. And then he says to me: ‘Look, you can’t be doing business in the zone of the goldsmiths and the market.’ ‘Says who?’ I retort. Says he: ‘Let’s just say that a lion says so.’”
A grimace appeared on the policeman’s face.
“Now he’s even got himself a team of ambassadors, that thug Lombardi.”
Donadio turned pale and took a step back.
“No, Brigadie’, for God’s sake, don’t you dare utter that name. Every time I hear it, it puts my bowels in an uproar.”
“Then why did you get yourself into this mess, if I may ask? Couldn’t you just do as people told you?”
“I tried, Brigadie’, but in this city, the only people who were buying objects made of gold were in the districts where the goldsmiths worked: where else could I go to fence them? Nobody else wanted them, in any of the other shops. And so I figured that nobody would notice if I placed one or two. Turns out . . . ”
“ . . . And it turns out you were wrong. And since you’d already been warned once . . . ”
Gustavo nodded his head. He was heartbroken.
“They’ve sent for me. I’m supposed to go the day after tomorrow. I’m hoping that they just want to give me a second warning, sometimes that’s what they do. I was hoping to find some kind of an understanding, maybe I could kick back a percentage on what I make, but lion or no lion, I need to ply my trade.”
Maione looked him in the eye.
“Donadio, don’t you understand that they’re going to slaughter you right then and there, that they’re going to make you disappear? You need to understand things. Run away, hide somewhere.”
Gustavo met his gaze.
“No, Brigadie’, by now I’ve pushed too deep into it. And anyway, they’d be sure to find me. I have to care for my kids, even if my wife won’t let me see them. They need me. And then, what if they couldn’t find me and decided to take it out on the kids? You have kids of your own. You know how it is. And then there’s Bambinella . . . I’d hate to think of her getting into trouble on my account. I have to show up, there’s no two ways about it.”
Maione thought it over. He hadn’t considered the possibility of backlash against the family.
“How do you think you’re going to bring them around?”
The other man shrugged his skinny shoulders.
“I’m a good talker, and no matter what, I have to make the effort. There’s no other solution. If it goes wrong . . . well, that’s how people like me wind up, Brigadie’. I’m not the first, and I certainly won’t be the last. Maybe my wife has a point, it’ll be better for our children this way. I just hope they can forget me, their father, and in time it will be as if I had never even been born.”
The policeman, in spite of himself, felt a tug at his heartstrings.
“Can’t you spare a thought for Bambinella? He really loves you. Last night, when he sent for me, he was beside himself . . . ”
The poor man stared into the damp shadows of the courtyard.
“Rejects, Brigadie’. Bambinella and I are just a pair of rejects. Badly baked rolls, you know what I’m talking about? The kind that the bakers throw away or give to those who have no money to pay. People like us meet each other and keep each other company. To really love someone, you have to be doing all right, and people like us are never doing all right. For fear they might do something to her, I’ve stopped going to see her, did she tell you? That’s better for her too.”
How strange, Maione thought, to find himself in a miserable courtyard offering his personal help to a criminal. And yet he was pained by the idea that he would be unable to rescue that bizarre individual, with a monicker and a face befitting a rat. For no particular reason, he was suddenly seized with a strong yearning to go and see if his children’s fevers had subsided.
He spoke one last time to Donadio.
“But . . . is there anything I can do? If there is, tell me now.”
Gustavo smiled at him; now he looked very young.
“No, Brigadie’, there’s nothing. I thank you. Or actually, yes, there might be one thing you can do for me. In a little while, when it’s all over, tell Bambinella that I loved her. And, if it’s not too much to ask, make sure they don’t do anything to my children. I don’t need anything else, I can assure you.”
Maione went out into the street, into the pouring rain, furled umbrella clutched in his hand.
And he wondered whether it was rain that he felt running down his face.
Whether it was just rain.
XV
The autumn had unmistakable effects on the Deed. Over time, Ricciardi had come to the belief that, by virtue of some strange phenomenon associated with the weather and its atmospheric effects, the sensitivity increased with the arrival of the rains; after that he had stopped trying to find measurable relationships between reality and what he had become accustomed to thinking of as a form of madness, a damnation that forced him to hold himself aloof from the rest of humanity.
Every so often, he had chanced to stumble across people who behaved as if they possessed the same faculty, though to a lesser degree. But these were always mental defectives, men and women who would never have been capable of recounting their experiences. The only way that the commissario understood that these people recognized something was because they would wave or turn drooling smiles in the direction of ghostly images that he thought only he could see.
The simulacra of those wounded, crippled, ravaged cadavers actually existed in reality. However faded they might be by the passage of time, even though they eventually dissolved into the air with a sharp tang of decomposition, they were still perceptible. And perceive them he did, with a full awareness of all their suffering, a sense of the melancholy they felt at the life that they had left behind, their sorrow at the loss of all they held dearest. He could see them in the shape of body and blood and bones and tortured flesh, he could hear their words and their laments, their thoughts, until they finally vanished, though where they then went was unclear; into the semblance of a soul, said the priests; into nothingness, claimed the atheists.
The autumn seemed to have a higher population of the dead than other seasons. Perhaps that was because, as Ricciardi reasoned, staring down at the piazza glistening with rain from his office window, the autumn gave those wh
o already wished to die that gentle little shove, offering a light touch to those who were dancing balanced on the margins of life. And what had caused these reflections was the sight that greeted his eyes at that very moment.
On a bench, in the midst of the rain-beaten holm oaks, there sat the outline of an old man in a light-colored suit that was incongruously dry. A rivulet of blood was streaming from an enormous exit wound in the ghost’s right temple; for the past week he’d been vociferously consigning his soul to the mother he was about to join. Debts, or perhaps loneliness, the commissario told himself.
At the corner of one of the main thoroughfares, on the other hand, he glimpsed the glow of a young woman with her back bent crooked the wrong way and her skull crushed in from a fall from one of the building’s higher floors. The commissario still couldn’t get out of his head the phrase that he had heard her repeat endlessly, as if she were whispering it right into his ear: my lovely child, my lovely child. It had happened while he was on duty. The lovely child in question had died of dyptheria and the mother had been unable to bear the burden of the loss.
That’s the way autumn is, Ricciardi told himself. Everything is more burdensome. And, all things considered, death offers itself as a good escape plan.
A light knocking startled him. He turned and said: “Avanti!” Come in.
At the door, Special Agent Ponte poked his head in. He was on permanent office duty. A short man, mellifluous and unctuous, one of those who believed fervently that Ricciardi had occult powers and a generally baleful influence, in short, the evil eye—which is why Ponte took great care never to meet Ricciardi’s gaze. The commissario found the man extremely irritating, in part because, for some unclear motive, Ponte was a favorite of Deputy Police Chief Garzo, whom Ricciardi considered a perfect idiot.
As usual, the little homunculus of a man spoke to the portrait of the king, hanging on the wall over Ricciardi’s office chair.
“Commissa’, forgive me, I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“Then don’t, Ponte,” Ricciardi retorted.
The irony was lost on the officer and he spoke, addressing Mussolini, in a frame a few feet past the king of Italy.
“No, it’s just that we have two people here who say that you’re expecting them. Shall I let them in?”
Ricciardi decided to make things hard for the man.
“Well, that all depends. In fact, I am expecting people, but I’m not sure these are the people I’m expecting. So, if it’s them, then let them in, and if it isn’t, then don’t, otherwise I might be busy with these people when the people I’m expecting show up for their appointment. See what I mean?”
Ponte started to sweat.
“Certainly, Commissa’, no doubt about it,” he replied uncertainly to the inkwell that stood at the corner of the desk. “You’re absolutely right. Only: how can I tell whether or not these are the people you’re expecting?”
Ricciardi stifled a ferocious smile.
“Just ask their name. I know the names of the people I’m expecting, but I don’t necessarily know the names of the people I’m not expecting.”
The other man ran a hand over his eyes, as if to ward off an incipient headache, and turned to advice for the paperweight made out of a shard of granite.
“Then I can go ahead and ask them then, right, Commissa’? Then I’ll tell you what they say, and then you’ll know who they are. Is that okay?”
The officer’s voice had gone up a couple of octaves from its usual range. If Maione had been there, he would have been highly amused.
“Right, good thinking, Ponte. Congratulations, very insightful, it never would have occurred to me. Proceed accordingly.”
The policeman furrowed his brow, taunted by the suspicion that his superior officer might be making fun of him, then he spoke to the side table: “Then, I’ll go, with your permission. I’ll take care of it immediately.”
A moment later, he knocked again. Ricciardi, diabolically, chose not to answer, forcing Ponte to knock again two more times, each time a little louder. In the end, he called out to come in, and Ponte announced to the backs of the chairs: “Signora Irace and the lawyer Capone, Commissa’. Are they the people you were expecting?”
Ricciardi sighed, as he pondered the heights that human imbecility was capable of attaining.
“Yes, Ponte, that’s them. Show them in, if you would.”
The woman who walked into his office was a very different person from the one that Ricciardi had just met a couple of hours earlier; but that was a metamorphosis to which the commissario had become accustomed.
She was dressed in black, a dress that reached almost all the way down to her ankles and a cap with a light veil that covered her eyes; the fact that her shoes were dry and there were only a few scattered drops on the shoulders of her overcoat made it easy to guess that she had come by car. Her face was calm and composed, fixed in an impenetrable expression that seemed carved in stone, but her ashen complexion and weary eyes clearly bespoke her suffering.
It had dawned on the Signora Irace that she had become a widow.
The lawyer Capone had put on a suit, shaven, and carefully brushed his hair to conceal the signs of incipient baldness. He held his hat in his hand and looked grim. His attitude clashed with his chubby figure and pudgy face, both of which one might normally associate more with a jovial disposition which the man certainly didn’t seem to possess.
Upon Ricciardi’s invitation, the two of them sat down.
Capone was the first to speak.
“Commissario, I was at the Pellegrini Hospital. It’s him. My cousin. Or actually, my cousin’s husband, to be precise. There’s no doubt about it.”
“Did you go to identify the body?” Ricciardi asked. “That is to say, did you go alone?”
“Yes. I wanted to spare Cettina this heartache. But if you consider it necessary that . . . ”
“No, no. I agree with you, if we can avoid it, so much the better.”
Capone ran a hand over his face, shooting a glance at the woman, who sat impassive at his side.
“Certainly, it wasn’t . . . I mean to say, it wasn’t easy for me either, I have to admit. A cheerful dinner with a person, you say goodnight, and . . . the next morning, there they are, battered into that state. You must understand, right? I handle civil lawsuits, commercial matters, business issues: I don’t find myself face to face with . . . with this sort of thing very often.”
Ricciardi noticed that the lawyer had lost all the confidence displayed previously; now he seemed like someone who would gladly have been anywhere but there.
He spoke to Cettina Irace.
“Signora, I have a few questions to ask you. Believe me, I fully understand the difficulty of the moment you’re going through right now, but it’s crucial that you remember as accurately as possible all the details, even those that might seem to be of no importance. Do you feel up to it?”
She looked up, revealing two deep creases on either side of the mouth; Ricciardi reflected that nothing can change a person’s appearance like a recent personal loss.
“I thank you for your sensitivity, Commissario. If I’m remembering rightly, when you came to my home, you told me that it’s important to the success of the investigation to get a complete picture of events as quickly as possible. So I’d rather answer your questions now; later, if anything happens to occur to me . . . ”
Capone interrupted, gently: “But, Cetti’, you can’t wear yourself out. You promised me that.”
She gave him a brief glance and a weary smile.
“Don’t worry, Guido. I’m up to it. Ask, Commissario. Ask away.”
Ricciardi began.
“All right, then. You mentioned the fact that your husband had told you he would be leaving your home quite early this morning. Do you know the reason why? And what time did he usually go out?”
The woman ran a hand over her cheek.
“My husband was a very methodical man. He would leave home at eight
in the morning to look after the things that needed to be done before the store could open, and he would be joined there by my younger brother, who is . . . who was his partner. This morning, though, he went down to the port very early to settle the purchase of a large shipment of worsted wool fabrics.”
“But why so early?” Ricciardi asked. “Couldn’t he have settled this matter later in the day, perhaps at his own store?”
Signora Irace shook her head.
“No, no. He wanted to beat his competition to the punch. Ships carrying the merchandise arrive from England or Scotland, and whoever shows up first gets the lot. And then if you pay in cash, the way he always did, you get a discounted price.”
“I understand. So that means he had a large sum of money on his person, is that right?”
“Yes. I don’t know how much, because I’m not involved in these things. But certainly a large sum, yes.”
Ricciardi leaned forward.
“So you think that the motive for the assault was attempted robbery, am I right?”
The lawyer snorted in annoyance.
“No, we don’t think that.”
The woman sighed.
“Actually, we can’t rule it out. Was he robbed?”
Ricciardi once again leaned back in his chair.
“No, Signora. The large sum of money was found on his person, and as soon as the magistrate issues the order, you will receive it back, along with his personal effects. But why didn’t you assume it might have been a robbery? A vicolo down by the port in the morning, so early that it was practically still dark out, with all that money on him . . . It would be only natural.”
Capone intervened: “Not after a man has just been publicly threatened with death, in front of dozens of people.”
Ricciardi was surprised.
“Really? Where, and by whom?”
Signora Irace had lowered her eyes. She said: “Yesterday, before going home to have dinner with Guido and my brother, Costantino and I went to the theater. At the end of the show, there was . . . a man tried to . . . ”
The lawyer gently laid a hand on her arm.
“May I, Cetti’? If you’ll allow me, I’ll tell him all about it.”
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 11