“Signor Vincenzo Sannino? I’m Commissario Ricciardi and this is Brigadier Maione, from police headquarters.”
The man nodded, boldly. Behind him, standing side by side, were Wright and Biasin. You could sense a note of high tension in the air.
“What do you want from me?” asked the boxer. His accent revealed unmistakably that he had grown up there, in that city.
Ricciardi remained unruffled: “Do you know Signor Costantino Irace?”
The man blinked twice, but he maintained his expression of defiance.
“No. I don’t know him. But I know who he is. Why do you ask?”
Maione replied, rudely: “What do you mean by ‘I don’t know him, but I know who he is’?”
Sannino kept his eyes trained on Ricciardi: “It means that I’ve seen him once or twice. But we’ve never been . . . we haven’t been properly introduced, is what I’m trying to say.”
Penny Wright murmured a few brief words to him in English. Sannino hushed her with a sharp wave of his hand, without bothering to turn around.
Ricciardi went on: “Is it accurate to say that last night, as you were leaving the theater, you had a fight with him?”
Jack threw both arms wide, and spoke partly in English: “Oh, come on now, a fight . . . ”
Sannino answered as if he hadn’t heard him: “Yes, that’s true.”
Maione pursued the point: “And you threatened to kill him, isn’t that right?”
Penny Wright lifted her trembling hand to her mouth and shut her eyes. Sannino said: “Yes. Yes, I threatened him.”
Ricciardi asked: “Can we ask why?”
There was a moment of awkward silence. For the first time, Sannino seemed to be having some trouble. He shook his head, lowered his eyes, and looked up again.
“Because he was keeping me from speaking with his . . . with his . . . with the wife. He was keeping me from speaking to her. But also because . . . because he had married her.”
Outside the plate glass windows, the reporters were desperately trying to make out the words of their conversation by lip-reading.
Ricciardi put on a more formal tone of voice.
“Signor Sannino, I’m going to have to ask you to tell me where you were between five and eight o’clock this morning.”
The other man seemed to have been caught off guard.
“What do you mean, where was I? Why would you ask me that? Has something happened?”
Ricciardi narrowed his lips, then replied: “Because, during that period of time, Costantino Irace was murdered. Less than twelve hours after you threatened to kill him.”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Penny Wright in English, and then she burst into tears.
Sannino turned pale and leaned shakily against the wall.
Biasin walked over to him and took his arm, as if holding him up, then turned to Ricciardi, again, beginning in English: “I’m sorry, but what is this supposed to mean? It’s one thing to have argument, to quarrel, it’s another thing to kill, to murder a Christian. You come here, to the hotel, and you accuse: you threatened, where were you at this or that time . . . ”
Ricciardi replied coldly: “No one’s accusing anyone of anything here. Not yet, anyway. We just want to know where Signor Sannino was at that time of the morning.”
Sannino ran his right hand over his face. Maione noticed that the back of his hand was skinned at the knuckles. His eyes immediately darted over to the other hand; the fingers were in the same condition. Ricciardi, too, had noticed the same thing, but he didn’t want to leap to conclusions.
“I . . . I don’t know, where I was,” the boxer stammered. “I can’t remember.”
Biasin butted in, partly in English.
“Shut up, Vinnie. Shut your trap! You were right here, and . . . ”
Penny Wright broke in loudly, though her voice was broken with sobbing: “He was with me, we slept together.”
Sannino shouted: “Shut up! Both of you just shut up! You know perfectly well that I got drunk and that I don’t . . . Commissario, I don’t remember where I spent the night.”
Ricciardi ran his eyes over the tear in the jacket, the stained trousers, the bruised hands. Then, in a low voice, he said: “I must ask you not to leave this hotel, Signor Sannino. And to preserve your clothing and make it available to us in the state in which we see it now. The order to remain here applies to Signorina Wright and Signor Biasin as well. The situation, as you have no doubt guessed, is very serious. It would be better if you tried to remember exactly what you did and where you went last night, so that you can reconstruct everything that happened. Otherwise you might find yourself in deep trouble. In any case, you’ll hear back from us by the end of the day.”
At the exit, the two policemen were thronged by the reporters, who were shouting questions through the wind and the rain about what they were doing in there and whether Sannino was the target of some investigation. Maione pushed them away without any excessive delicacy.
As they were walking back to police headquarters, the brigadier spoke uncertainly to his superior officer: “Commissa’, maybe we ought to have . . . I mean, his hands, his suit . . . ”
After a few more steps in silence, Ricciardi replied: “We can’t arrest him just because his suit is torn and rumpled. If that were all it took, half the city would be behind bars. No, there are still a great many things we need to understand first. And after all, there’s no danger of him escaping, the way the press is dogging his footsteps. In the meantime, we have other people to talk to.”
XX
When Clara, her housekeeper, knocked discreetly at her bedroom door, Livia was waging her daily battle to keep from waking up.
As usual, the night before, she had stayed out very late, dulling her senses with music, champagne, and cigarette smoke, wallowing in compliments, flowers, and ballerinas; laughter in her ears and sadness in her heart.
This is how it always went. Only when she felt she was sufficiently exhausted that she could fall asleep immediately, did she ask to be taken home. Then she found herself staring at the blades of light that filtered in through the shutters—the headlights of a car in the street, a streetlamp tossing in the wind and the rain—while with her mind, unanchored by exhaustion and devoid of the rational defenses that she normally erected during the day, she returned to the same identical room in her memory.
Less than a month had passed since the night that she had decided to banish all foolish hesitation and simply reach out and take the love that life owed her after taking so much from her, and yet it seemed to her that it had been an eternity. Perhaps because of the season that had brutally intruded in the air, as harsh and chilly as the previous season had been warm and sweet.
A few hours earlier, tossing and turning in her bed in search of a sleep that had finally crashed down upon her like a deadly mudslide, she had wondered for the umpteenth time why this long-awaited love had presented itself with the cold, deep, green, and sorrowful eyes of Ricciardi. Those eyes that she still hoped to see in theaters and ballrooms; those eyes unlike the eyes of any of her countless wooers and fancy men; just the thought of those eyes was enough to make her body and her heart burst into turmoil, tormenting her.
A woman like her, who could have had any man she chose, who was the queen of the world. A woman like her, who attracted the vicious envy of every other woman and the unconditional admiration of every man, why was she unable to imagine herself happy unless she were close to that strange, undecipherable individual who didn’t want her?
Because he didn’t want her. He had told her so, loud and clear, that night, while summer was giving way to autumn without any notice, while a sublime music was filling the room, while she was offering herself to him through the diaphanous translucency of a dress chosen expressly for the purpose, like a weapon chosen to commit a murder. He didn’t want her.
Accustomed as she was to being desired, to heavy sighing and fiery love letters, she had even come to the conclusion that he wa
sn’t interested in the flesh, or even that he didn’t like women. It might be. She had met others, even among the high officials of that Fascist regime obsessed with virility; they concealed their true natures beneath muscles and vulgar attitudes, only to go out purchasing cheap pleasures in the gutters and the skid rows.
Still, deep down, she knew it wasn’t true. Inside Ricciardi there burned desire and passion, a thirst for tenderness. It was merely a matter of bringing those sentiments to the fore.
This was exactly what was harrowing her all the more now that all was lost, now that with her crazed, reckless reaction she had gotten him into serious trouble, trouble from which, God only knew how, he had been able to save himself at the last instant. The idea that she had rushed things, that she had assaulted him in too explicit a manner: if only she had had the strength to wait, she would have been able to sweep any rival from the field, as she had always done before.
The knocking grew louder, finally forcing her to emerge from her half-slumber. And the migraine, by now a familiar condition, exploded.
Clara poked her head in the door.
“Signo’, are you awake? Forgive me if I insist, but . . . ”
Livia sat up in bed, blinking rapidly.
“No, no, Clara, don’t mention it. What time is it?”
“It’s two in the afternoon, Signo’. I didn’t call you for lunch because you came home so very late. I heard you come in at six this morning, just as I was getting up.”
Livia heaved a sigh in the dim light. There wasn’t the slightest shade of reproof in the young woman’s voice. Only a note of concern.
“Yes, it was late. Or early, depending on how you look at it. And why did you call me just now? Did you want to make sure I was still alive?”
The maid didn’t smile.
“No, no, Signo’. It’s just that . . . that gentleman you know . . . is in the living room. He’s waiting to see you.”
A sense of uneasiness penetrated through her headache. “That gentleman,” Clara had said. It was clear who she was referring to. Someone who had been able to slip past her chauffeur and the doorman as if he were a puff of wind. The invisible man, who manifested himself, appearing without anyone being able to say where he had come from or how, whether on foot, by car, or aboard a trolley.
Standing in the living room was Falco.
Livia walked into the room, tying the sash of her robe around her waist. She hadn’t bothered to straighten her hair, much less fix her makeup.
The shadow of a smile appeared on her visitor’s face.
“Someone once told me that if a woman is beautiful right when she wakes up, then she’s always beautiful. Congratulations, Livia, you are stunning.”
She made no attempt to conceal her annoyance.
“If you carry on with this horrible habit of showing up without any advance warning, you’ll run the risk one day of being turned away, probably because I’ll still be sleeping.”
“I apologize. I assumed that, even though you’d returned home at six in the morning, escorted by the Count of Torchiarolo, who for that matter will have a hard time explaining things to the lady contessa his wife, you would have gotten sufficient sleep. If you’d rather, I can certainly come back later.”
Livia had impatiently taken a cigarette from the case on the table and had lit it.
“No. Let’s get this out of the way right now. That way, after such a beginning, the day can only go uphill from here. And don’t try to surprise me with your detailed reports on my life, I know perfectly well that you have me under surveillance. But, when it comes to that, you have almost everyone under surveillance, don’t you?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. As usual, his appearance was tidy, understated, and absolutely nondescript. His gray hair, combed back, betrayed the fact that he was middle-aged, but his unlined face and his lean physique pointed to a careful regimen of self-care. His eyes, save for the occasional glimmer of excitement, were cold and ironic.
“Let’s just say that certain tasks are more agreeable than others. Are you really certain you don’t want me to come back later?”
Livia noticed Falco’s as he eyed, with apparent detachment, her shape, poorly concealed by her robe. She felt a shudder go through her, and she clutched the hem of the robe over her bosom.
“Again, no thank you. But get to the point, so that I can go get cleaned up and dressed.”
Falco took a step forward and picked up a ceramic Capodimonte statuette from a side table. It depicted a ballerina perched in delicate equilibrium on the tip of her slipper, one leg raised and both hands joined over her head in a graceful gesture.
“Dance. Music. Theater. The stage. Don’t you miss all these things, Livia? You, who have the voice of an angel, who could send any audience into a state of ecstasy, do you truly prefer to waste your time in sordid bars with foolish people like the count, who is, what’s more, married and a father with several children? Why don’t you go back to singing, as I thought you had decided to do?”
Livia blew a plume of smoke straight up into the air with a bitter laugh.
“And you come to my house, have me awakened, and drag me out of bed just so you can lecture me about how I’m leading my life? Who are you, my father or my older brother? Say whatever the heck it is you have to say and leave me to tend to my own business.”
The man continued looking at the ballerina, running a finger over her silhouette.
“Forgive me. You’re absolutely right, that’s none of my business. But your fate is not a matter of indifference to me, and in my line of work I’ve seen a great many people, far too many, ruin their leaves for no good reason. You have it in for yourself, and for me, over what happened a month ago; or perhaps for what, unfortunately, did not happen. But you should not take it out on others, with the possible exception of the person who prevented the best outcome from coming about.”
Livia remembered the look in Ricciardi’s eyes the day she’d run into him as she left a club. The accusation that she had brought against him, and which Falco had hastened to steer to completion, could easily have ruined him, and yet there was no hatred in his eyes, there was no resolution of vendetta against her. Nothing but bitter sorrow. Much, much worse.
“I don’t want to talk about that, Falco. For me, that chapter is closed. You took a confidential statement, a doubt I had shared with you, a simple, stupid doubt, and you made use of it for your own filthy purposes. You used me, and I will never forgive you for it. Just as I’ll never forgive myself. Now, if you’d be so good, let’s stop wasting each other’s time.”
The man heaved a sigh.
“You know, Livia, life isn’t like in books, or the theater and the picture house, where stories come to a neat conclusion and then everyone lives happily ever after, or else suffers for the rest of their lives. In real life, which we are obliged to experience every day, what happens is you get an opportunity to set things right. Or else to set them running on new tracks.”
“What the hell are you trying to say? I don’t follow you.”
Falco stared at her, continuing to toy with the ceramic ballerina.
“I’m sure you’ll recall the day that you asked me for information about that young woman, Colombo, Enrica, who lives across the way from . . . from you know who, whom you had convinced yourself he was in love with, or even engaged to.”
Livia nodded.
“Yes, of course I remember. What about it?”
“So, I’m sure you also remember that I told you about a German, Major Manfred von Brauchitsch, who was seeing the young woman, and that we were particularly interested in him.”
The woman furrowed her brow.
“You told me that you had him under surveillance and that I was to make very sure I had no interactions with him, not even through an intermediary, because that would be very dangerous.”
Falco calmly looked into Livia’s eyes.
“Precisely. Circumstances, now, have changed somewhat. The major, as I expl
ained to you, is the cultural attaché to the German consulate. But we believe, and our belief is shared in Rome, that his actual mission here is to observe and study certain military structures, especially in and around the port.”
Livia opened her eyes wide, now surprised in spite of herself.
“A spy, in other words.”
Falco minimized.
“Not exactly, or at least not a full-time spy, perhaps. Still, we’d be very pleased to get a better understanding of how he spends his days. Following him at a distance, which we certainly do twenty-four hours a day, isn’t enough to read his thoughts or discover, for instance, how he receives his instructions.”
Livia thought fast, in spite of the headache.
“Falco, are you asking me to become friends with this von Brauchitsch? Do you want me to socialize with him so I can report back to you?”
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“It would just be one more friendship for you, Livia. And I certainly wouldn’t want you to become . . . excessively close friends with him.”
The woman couldn’t believe her ears.
“Ah, so you’re saying I wouldn’t have to take him to bed. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Falco blushed, something that didn’t happen often.
“I really wish you wouldn’t talk like that. Not with me, at least. I can’t imagine how you could insinuate that I, I of all people, would come here to ask such a thing of you.”
Livia seemed more amused than angry.
“And yet I would have sworn that that’s what you had in mind. Because, among other things, it isn’t clear why else you would have thought of me.”
Falco went back to staring at the ballerina.
“You are beautiful, Livia. Intelligent, witty. You’re unfettered, free to go wherever you please. And even though you belong to the highest society, you are indifferent to its intrigues and feuds. There couldn’t be a person better suited to help us establish once and for all just who this Major von Brauchitsch really is. And that’s all.”
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 15