Maione rubbed his chin.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. In any case, that means that, as usual, we’re going to have to work fast. But now we have one more reason to hurry.”
Ricciardi stopped with his hand on the door handle.
“That’s right, Raffaele,” he said. “Now we have one more reason.”
XXX
The doorman of the apartment building where Irace and his wife resided welcomed the two policemen in a very different manner than the last time. He unfurled a respectful bow, sweeping off his hat, and then stood to one side, gesturing toward the stairs.
“You know the way, don’t you? But if you like, I’d be glad to accompany you up all the same.”
Maione gave him an unfriendly look.
“Don’t go to any trouble. That way you can send your son to alert them that we’re here.”
This reference to the timely message sent over to the store, about which Maione had learned from the widow’s brother, was intended solely to make it clear to the man that the brigadier was keeping his eye on him. The doorman blushed and bowed his head.
As they were climbing the flight of stairs, Maione spoke to Ricciardi.
“Commissa’, though, weren’t we supposed to go and pick up Sannino? Shouldn’t we, just this one time, as you yourself said, follow the orders of that fool Garzo, and if we put it off, aren’t we running the risk of some serious trouble?”
Ricciardi shook his head ever so slightly.
“He said by the end of the day today, and we’ll head over there by the end of the day today. First, though, I want to talk to the widow again. That’s what I would have done ordinarily, and that’s what I plan to do now. I’m not going to alter my mental processes to accommodate the demands of the deputy police chief, that much is certain.”
They were welcomed by the same maid as the day before, her eyes bloodshot from crying and her manner contrite. The door was already ajar, and inside there was a small crowd engaged in the usual procession of condolences, prompted by the morbid curiosity that seems to accompany any unexpected death; in this case, a murder, no less. Ricciardi and Maione frequently found themselves immersed in that sort of atmosphere, as part of their duty to speak with the members of the victim’s family in the hours immediately following a murder. There was always a very particular tone to the experience, with a component of heartfelt grief, but also a note of astonishment and wonder, as well as a vague undertone of relief, at the knowledge that the misfortune had befallen someone other than them.
Concetta Irace was standing at the center of a knot of women and men who all looked stricken, all of them murmuring standard phrases of condolence and comfort, and all of them in the meantime maneuvering to pick up tidbits of information. She was wearing black, and her face was creased with weariness; her eyes, deep and dark, were chasing after thoughts that were taking her far away from that room. The light from a couple of table lamps, turned on to ward off the gloom of the incessant rain—which made the morning look like late afternoon—reflected off the brightly colored upholstery and wallpaper and the wet overcoats, creating a contrast that in some way underscored the difficulty of that gathering.
As soon as she saw them, the woman stepped away from the group and came to meet them.
“Commissario, Brigadier. Please, come right in.”
Ricciardi noticed the silence that had immediately fallen over the room and could sense the eyes of everyone present focused on him.
“Buongiorno, Signora. And once again, my condolences for your loss. We realize that this is hardly an ideal moment to talk to you, but we urgently need to have a brief consultation with you, if you are willing.”
“Certainly,” Concetta replied. “Perhaps, though . . . perhaps I ought to send for my cousin. He told me that, if I was going to speak with you, he’d rather be there when I do.”
Maione minimized.
“Why, no, Signo’, I don’t see why he’d need to be here. We only need a couple of minutes of your time, we don’t want to intrude.”
The widow Irace seemed relieved.
“Yes, I’d just as soon not bother him. Poor thing, he was here all night long, and this morning he absolutely had to put in an appearance in court. My brother stayed with me, too, then, very early this morning, he went to the shop. Without Costantino it must be . . . ”
Her voice failed her; she turned her eyes to the window as if in search of the strength to go on. Two older women exchanged a glance of mischievous delight that didn’t escape Maione’s notice.
Concetta went on, in a flat voice.
“We’re all going to have a lot more on our hands, now that Costantino is gone. It won’t be easy, but we really have no other choice, do we? Come along, please, follow me. Let’s go in there.”
They followed her through a doorway into another drawing room, smaller but clearly more lived in. On a side table was an embroidery frame with needles and a book with a bookmark more or less halfway through. Atop a credenza stood a large radio. The woman sat down in an armchair, pointing the policemen to a small settee.
“I spend my days in this room. I like to read, embroider, and listen to music. I have plenty of time on my hands. Now I imagine that I’ll have less. A great deal less.”
“May I ask why, Signora?” said Ricciardi.
Signora Irace sighed.
“We never had children. I’m afraid they just never came, even though I wanted to have lots of them. Who knows, maybe I would have been a bad mother so the Lord Almighty chose not to send me any, I couldn’t say. Over the years, I resigned myself to the idea and found other pursuits. But now, I’m going to have to run the store. My brother is going to need my help, he . . . he can’t take it all on himself.”
Maione asked: “The shop belonged to your father, didn’t it? I remember it from when I was just a young man. I’d walk past it on my way to school, down by the train station.”
Signora Irace smiled a melancholy smile.
“Yes, Brigadie’. It belonged to my father. And he cared very much about showing us the way the business worked, me and Michelangelo. He said that one day we’d have to take over the business, when he was too old to run it himself. Poor Papà, he never had a chance to grow old.”
“So then you took over the management of the store?”
“Well you see, Commissario, my father . . . when he died we discovered that things hadn’t been going well for some time already. Michelangelo hadn’t noticed, he was strictly in charge of sales. There were debts, substantial ones. I had already been engaged to Costantino for a few years; we were planning to get married, but we kept putting it off. He had plenty of money, he traded in fruit and vegetables. He paid off the creditors and rescued us from bankruptcy, then he became a partner, buying my share of the business.”
Ricciardi nodded. This account confirmed the version provided by Taliercio the previous day.
“Let’s get back to the facts, Signora. The evening before the murder there was the episode in the theater, the threats that Sannino made against your husband. Do you know what his motive could have been? Your cousin, at police headquarters, told us that that man had been persecuting you for several days already. Why?”
The woman lowered her eyes, and for a long moment remained silent. Ricciardi noticed that she was twisting her hands together in her lap, as if trying to work up her nerve.
When she raised her head, her eyes were puffy with tears.
“Sannino and I have known each other for many years, Commissario. When we were kids, we were . . . we were in love, I guess. Puppy love, the way kids can be in love at that age, of course, but we both thought it was important. In 1916, he decided to go to America, and I told him that, if he left, he could forget about me. And that’s what happened. I got married, he led his own life.”
Maione whispered: “And then?”
“Three nights ago, all of a sudden, I heard his voice out in the street. I thought I must be dreaming, it’s happened before
over the last few years, but instead it was actually him. He was singing that song, Voce ’e notte; I imagine that you know it. It’s about someone who goes to sing under the window of a married woman. You understand? Married. He’d brought a concertino with him.”
“Just how did you react?” asked Maione.
Concetta bit her lip, then replied: “And how was I supposed to react, Brigadier? I did just what it says in the song. I recognized the voice and I stayed in bed, my eyes closed as if I were still asleep. I was no longer the young girl that he remembered. I had become a woman, I had a husband. That song wasn’t for me.”
Maione scratched his forehead. He wondered what he would have done if someone had shown up on the street beneath his window to sing a serenade to Lucia.
“What about your husband, Signo’? Did he stay in bed, too?”
“No. He got up and went to see. He told me that all the tenants in the building were looking out their windows. And that the singer seemed to be looking directly at our window. I told him that I didn’t know anything about it and that I didn’t want to know anything about it. And that was that.”
Ricciardi broke in: “But was your husband informed about Sannino? I’m referring to the fact that in the past . . . ”
The woman shook her head.
“No, I’d never told him about Sannino before. It was ancient history, and there’d never been anything between us. It was strictly puppy love, like I told you.”
“It must not have been that way for Sannino, otherwise he wouldn’t have brought that serenade to you. And he wouldn’t have approached you the other night at the theater, for that matter, threatening your husband the way he did.”
Signora Irace replied calmly: “Commissario, I have no way of knowing what thoughts were stuck in Vincenzo’s head, after all these years. I know what’s in my mind, and in my mind is the life that I chose, that I wanted.”
Ricciardi insisted: “But the threats . . .
“The threats were a response to what my husband had rightly said, that if Vincenzo continued to bother me, he’d have him arrested. The night of the serenade, he had seen him out the window, but he couldn’t be certain that he was interested in me. But when he approached us in the theater lobby, after the show, there could no longer be any doubt.”
Maione, who almost seemed to be taking a personal interest in the matter, asked her, grimly: “Excuse me, though, didn’t your husband say anything to you? Didn’t he ask you who that man was and why he was behaving that way?”
Signora Irace turned to look at him.
“Yes, Brigadie’. Of course, he asked me. And I told him the way matters stood, and when the last time I’d seen him had been. I also told him to forget about him, that the man was drunk, and he only needed to take a good hard look at the people who were with him, a flashy blonde and a man with a terrifying face, in order to understand what he had turned into. And Costantino had to admit I had a point.”
“So you’re saying he wasn’t worried?” asked Ricciardi. “He wasn’t afraid he might run into him again, after those threats?”
Concetta put on her sad smile again.
“My husband wasn’t afraid of anything, Commissario. He’d lived for too many years out on the streets. When he was still a wholesale businessman, he’d emerged unscratched from situations you couldn’t even imagine. Not even the fact that Vincenzo was a boxer really worried him. Actually, to hear him tell it, he couldn’t wait to come face to face with him again, so that he could explain to him after his own fashion that no one had better dare and try to approach the Signora Irace. That I belonged to him. That’s what he said.”
Ricciardi and Maione fell silent, taking in the information. All the same, they thought to themselves, just a few hours after that display of confidence, that fearless man had been murdered. Murdered bare-handed; kicked and beaten to death, apparently.
The commissario went on: “Signora, let’s talk about the next morning, the morning of the murder. It was very early: were you asleep when he left?”
“No, I always get up . . . I always got up, that is. I always got up . . . ” Concetta reflected for a moment, as if to drive it into her memory that from now on she would need to conjugate her tenses in accordance with her new circumstances. “I always got up when he did. I liked to make his coffee myself, instead of letting the housekeeper do it.”
“Did he say anything in particular to you?”
Concetta took a deep breath.
“No. I knew about the deal going on down at the port, he’d talked to my brother about it many times, and in my presence. It was a significant transaction, something that might even take care of the competition for a couple of years. He’d had the necessary cash on hand for a few days now, and the middleman had explained to him that it was the only way to obtain that discount.”
“What kind of a mood was he in?”
Concetta shrugged her shoulders.
“Excellent. He was whistling under his breath. He had showed me the bundle of cash and he’d stuffed it into his trouser pocket. He said that from now on, there would be a line of customers outside our shop. I never saw him again.”
“Signora, have you got any suspicions of your own as to who might have done this thing?” Ricciardi asked her without warning.
Concetta said nothing for a long minute, staring into the empty air. Then she answered: “I’ve thought of nothing else since the morning you came in here with the news that he was dead. The money wasn’t taken, so . . . Costantino led an intense life, he might have made some enemies, but he never talked about them, if he did have them. But if you want my opinion, Commissario, I don’t think that Vincenzo killed him. The young man that I knew would never have done such a thing. Never.”
Maione coughed softly.
“He might have changed after all these years, don’t you think, Signo’?”
She went back to looking at the rain that incessant streaked the window panes.
“Yes, Brigadier. He might have. You’re right, after all: people change. We all change.”
XXXI
Maria Colombo, arms akimbo and an expression of concentration on her face, looked around for the umpteenth time and said: “Now then, let’s set the table with the Flanders linen tablecloth, the one from my trousseau, and since we’ll be moving the table over to the wall, let’s make sure that the damask pattern falls forward, like that, sort of draping. Today we can already get the Limoges china service out, the one with the gold border, and also the Baccarat crystal glasses. He’s accustomed to grand diplomatic dinners, we can’t fail to live up to that standard.”
The little drill squad that stood listening to her was composed of Susanna and Francesca, her younger daughters, Fortuna, the elderly maid who had cared for two generations of the family’s children and was the only one allowed to handle the crystal and the silver, and Lina, the doorman’s wife, who was summoned in cases of grave necessity. A little off to one side, in mute testimony to the fact that she would rather have been anywhere but here, was Enrica, the person on whose behalf all those preparations were being carried out.
Maria went on, following the thread of her own thoughts.
“We’ll push the tea table over into the corner. In the next few days we’re going to need to find out exactly the right way to serve it. I’ll go get some tea at Codrington International Grocers, which is on Via Chiaia, number 94. I asked Papà to ask Baroness Lubrano about it. She entertains English sea captains because her late husband was English. We can’t be caught unprepared.”
Enrica tried weakly to object.
“Mamma, what are you talking about, unprepared? This isn’t an examination, you know. And Manfred is German, not English.”
Maria froze her with a chilly glance.
“English, German: they’re all just northerners. No doubt about it, at the consulate they have tea every afternoon, so we can’t come off looking like hicks. And one more thing, an examination is exactly what this is. It always is, and the
results might only come out years later. You’d be well advised to understand that, once and for all. All right, then, we’ll put the tea table in the corner. And . . . ”
Enrica sighed and let her mind drift away. She found it ludicrous to prepare an ordinary afternoon reception six full days in advance.
Her birthday was coming, on October twenty-fourth. The topic had come up the week before, mentioned by none other than Manfred, during one of his after-dinner visits. After her initial sense of surprise that he had even remembered it, came a wave of unease in the young woman’s heart, when, in a low and serious tone of voice, the German officer had added: “Would you consider it very discourteous if I asked for an invitation to your party? That would be a perfect occasion to tell you one thing and ask you another.”
That short speech had landed in the drawing room with the spectacular effect of a Bohemian crystal soup tureen that slips out of a waiter’s grasp and shatters on the floor. Enrica’s father had sat in silence, his eyes expressionless behind his glasses, his lips pressed firmly together beneath his mustache. Maria had lit up with a smile that Enrica never remembered having seen before. Enrica herself, in an attempt to ward off the threat, had hastened to stammer out: “Well . . . actually, we . . . we tend to celebrate our name days, to tell the truth. Birthdays aren’t such an important thing, for us. I was named after my grandmother, you see, so we celebrate on the thirteenth of July and . . . ”
Her mother, though, drowned her out.
“Enri’, whatever are you talking about? Of course we’re going to celebrate your birthday. It’s the day that your father and I became parents for the first time, and therefore, in a way, the most important anniversary for our family. And after all, this year you’re turning twenty-five, a quarter century: it must and will be an unforgettable day. We’ll have an afternoon reception, with coviglia gelato from Caflisch and almond pastries, vermouth and rosolio liqueur. It will be a pleasure to have you, Major. A pleasure for us all. Right, Giulio?”
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 23