Maione was perplexed.
“Maybe that’s exactly the strategy, Commissa’. For sure, he has no alibi. And now, perhaps, he can go ahead and make the deal with Martuscelli, instead.”
Ricciardi shook his head, scattering raindrops in all directions.
“I don’t think so. By now the money will have been returned to Taliercio. He’ll complete the transaction. Remember that the import-export agent was only waiting for this. I imagine that Merolla is resigned to it. For that matter, as far as I can tell, this wasn’t the first time that Irace had beaten him to the punch.”
“No, certainly not, Commissa’. Still, I don’t like Merolla one little bit, in that dark shop with his two ugly daughters. He gives me the shivers.”
“If you ask me, it’s the rain that’s giving you the shivers, Raffaele. And now we’re just going to have to go back out again. The time has come to obey Garzo’s orders and arrest Sannino. Call a couple of officers and let’s try to get this taken care of quickly, that way we can get back to work.”
The bad weather and the absence of any new noteworthy developments had scattered the crowd of journalists. When the policemen arrived at the hotel, there was no one outside the entrance except for the liveried usher who was beating his feet on the ground to ward off the dampness from which no awning could protect him.
The brigadier ordered the officers to wait outside and entered with Ricciardi.
As soon as the desk clerk saw them, he greeted them with sober deference. Maione glared at him, with a clear memory of their previous run-in, but the other man behaved impeccably.
“Buonasera, Signori. What can I do for you?”
Ricciardi replied to the greeting with a nod of the head and said: “Call Signor Sannino, if you please.”
The man flipped a switch on a brass plate with room numbers engraved on it, then he spoke into a microphone and said that the gentleman had visitors in the lobby, the same two gentlemen that had come yesterday morning; no mention of the police.
After a few minutes, Biasin, the boxer’s manager, appeared.
“Buongiorno. Have you come to ask more questions? Because Vinnie is taking a rest, so . . . ”
Ricciardi prevented him from continuing.
“I’m sorry, but he’s going to have to wake up. He needs to come with us. At least until his role in this matter has been cleared up, he’s going to be detained at police headquarters.
The man’s disfigured face was a mask with an incomprehensible expression. He lifted his hat to scratch his foreheard, revealing a hairless pink cranium.
“You’re making a mistake. At that time of the night, Vinnie was in bed in Penny’s room and . . . ”
This time, it was Maione who interrupted him: “Actually, Signorina Wright doesn’t remember hearing him come back in. She therefore won’t be able to back up your statement.”
Jack was about to reply, but then he stopped, struck by a thought.
“I understand now,” he said. “She took her revenge on him, that bitch,” he threw in the insult in English, “because he doesn’t want her, because he keeps her on the margins. It’s since she understood that he . . . since she realized who Vinnie really has in his heart, that she’s lost her mind. I can assure you that he was in the hotel. I accompanied him back there myself.”
Ricciardi furrowed his brow.
“It would have been smarter to tell us that right away, don’t you think?”
Biasin took a deep breath.
“I never thought it would have come to this. When you first showed up, you said that you just wanted to ask him a couple of questions. Now, in fact, you’re taking him away,” and the last couple of words he said in English. “I was just trying to protect his respectability.”
“Then what happened, the other night, Signor Biasin? Explain it to us.”
“After . . . after the dispute in the foyer, Vinnie was beside himself. He was shouting, in a frenzy: we were unable to restrain him. We took him out to get some drinks. If he drinks, then at a certain point he calms right down, and before long he falls asleep.”
Maione pulled notebook and pencil out of his pocket.
“Do you remember the name of the bar?”
Biasin shook his head.
“No; it was a place not far from the theater. When they kicked us out, because it was time for them to close, Penny returned to the hotel; she said she was sick and tired of hearing him sob. Vinnie on the other hand wanted to take a walk on his own, but I followed him and caught up with him. We went to yet another tavern that was still open.”
“And then what?” Ricciardi asked.
“We headed back to the hotel. Along the way, we hit a small snag on the street, but that matter was settled in a flash.”
“What snag?”
Jack’s face crumpled, but his scar-altered features made it impossible to say whether he was smiling or grimacing.
“A couple of fools,” and he used the English word though he was speaking Italian, “got it into their heads to rob us. They had no idea who they were dealing with.”
Maione shot a glance at Ricciardi, then asked: “And that’s the reason for the . . . ”
Biasin nodded.
“For the rips and the stains, and also for the cuts on the hands, that’s right.”
The commissario was taken aback.
“Again, it might have been better if you’d told us this story when we met for the first time.”
Biasin shrugged his shoulders.
“You didn’t ask me. And anyway, I thought that Vinnie had changed his clothes, after I left him in Penny’s room.”
Maione was dubious.
“How many men attacked you? And where did it happen?”
“I don’t know the names of the streets. What’s more, it was the middle of the night. There were four of them, maybe five. It didn’t take much to scare them off. I think one or two of them got a broken nose, by the way.”
“In other words, no witnesses here, either.”
Biasin looked coldly at the brigadier.
Speaking at first in English, he replied, “You’re right. The next time someone assaults us, I’ll make sure and get their name and address, as you suggest. All right? Or isn’t it your job to keep people from being robbed in the street? Luckily, we were perfectly capable of defending ourselves. Even though we were drunk.”
Maione pointed the pencil at him.
“Oh, oh, listen here, you don’t have to come all the way from America to teach us how to do our job, is that clear? Too bad for you if you wander around in the middle of the night in certain parts of the city, that is, if what you’re saying is even true, and I’m certainly not saying that it is.”
Ricciardi interrupted in a brusque tone: “It hardly strikes me that we need to have that argument right here and now. Instead, Signor Biasin, if you could, please explain why you care so much about Sannino.”
Biasin lowered his head, then looked up and replied: “Commissario, Vinnie is a champion. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The things that other men learn with hard work and years of effort, come natural to him. I’ve never met such a powerful boxer.”
Ricciardi narrowed his eyes.
“Go on.”
Biasin continued: “He can’t quit boxing. Not like this. He can’t let the whole world assume that he’s a coward. A little girl who, because she’s hurt someone, is afraid to get back in the ring now. He needs to take back his title and quit, undefeated, when the time is right.”
“Oh right,” Maione muttered, “so you make up his mind for him, is that how it works? It’s his right to stop if he . . . ”
Jack started up argumentatively: “What about you, for that matter? You come in here to arrest him without a shred of proof! It’s a vendetta, that’s all it is. That imbecile of an ambassador had warned him, that he couldn’t say no to the Duce, that if the Duce demanded something, there was only one conceivable answer. If he had only listened to me, if he’d stayed in the States a
nd gone on fighting, now he wouldn’t be tangled up in this ridiculous imbroglio that . . . ”
Ricciardi stopped him in a flat tone that was more eloquent than the loudest shout.
“You’re calling the murder of a human being a ridiculous imbroglio, Biasin. A man whom your friend had threatened just a few hours earlier. And the unfortunate timing with which you’ve come up with this alibi for that night undercuts your credibility very badly.”
Biasin stared at him. The features of his ravaged face expressed no emotions.
“Love. What idiocy, love. Like writing on the water, like making promises to the wind. This woman, this damned Cettina, is Vinnie’s only real weakness. An incurable disease. He’s been telling me about her since he was just a kid. Since he first came to clean my gymnasium, running all the way there from the port. Every punch that he threw, every drop of sweat that he shed, were all just so he could get back here. And when Rose, his last opponent, died, he said to me, very simply: ‘Jack, I’m going back. I’m going back home.’”
“And what did you . . . ”
Biasin spoke over him, in a sort of fury.
“This is no longer his home, this country! Everyone hates him here, or haven’t you seen? You throw him behind bars for no good reason, and he’ll never get a chance to prove his innocence.”
Ricciardi replied in a low voice.
“No, Biasin. That’s not the way it works. Believe me, if we’re detaining him now it’s precisely so we can carry on the investigation, and figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether it was him or not.”
“I know that it wasn’t him, don’t you understand that? We came back here together, I left him outside . . . ”
“ . . . outside Penny’s room, I understand that. But I didn’t go right in, Jack. I went back out, and I don’t remember what I did. I know that you’re speaking in good faith, that you’re trying to protect me, the way you always do. But it really could have been me.”
Sannino had appeared from behind Biasin’s shoulders. He had changed his clothes, but he still looked like a man who hadn’t had a wink of sleep in days: he was pale, his face was creased, his hair was a mess.
He spoke to the commissario.
“So you’ve come to take me in. I’m not surprised. They were just waiting for the opportunity.”
Maione put away notebook and pencil.
“Signor Sannino, let’s try and do this discreetly, taking advantage of the fact that the reporters have all left.”
The boxer never took his eyes off Ricciardi’s.
“Commissa’, I have a favor to ask of you. Just one.”
“Ask away.”
“I’d like to take a walk along the waterfront. Just a few hundred yards. You can come with me, if you like. I only need a few minutes.”
Maione objected.
“Let’s not joke around, we need to take you in to police headquarters and . . . ”
Ricciardi raised a hand.
“Don’t worry, Raffaele. You’ll follow behind us at a short distance with the officers. All right. Let’s go take this walk.”
XXXIV
It hadn’t been hard. It never was.
Livia never encountered obstacles of any sort when she wanted a man to ask her on a date. She had become aware of this power of hers when she was just a teenage girl, in the town in the Marche region where she was born. Back then, though, she was focused on her studies and her singing, even though she was already aware that she drew stares from grown men. As she decided to develop other talents, she had made up her mind to keep beauty and charm in the arsenal of weapons to be used with full awareness, and only when strictly necessary.
Then her work as a singer had led her to Rome, where she had lived ever since, up until little more than a year ago. There she had found herself at the center of a world in which female beauty constituted a genuine point of leverage. A woman who was already universally admired in any setting constituted an enormous advantage for an ambitious man. Arnaldo Vezzi, her late husband, had made up his mind to have her; and so he had taken her, making her his possession, an object to be shown off, no different than a gleaming new car or a prestigious painting.
Desire to possess, veneration, sometimes even disagreeable obsessions. These were the emotions that Livia stirred in the opposite sex. In the eyes of the men who stared insistently at the outlines of her body, of those who stared mouths agape at the way she walked, of those who listened raptly to her voice when she sang, there always flickered a light whose nature she could easily recognize. She had experienced the domination of Arnaldo, on the one hand, and the submission of an infinite array of admirers on the other, and she had learned to isolate her heart from emotion.
It was only with Ricciardi that she had been unable to make that work. As her driver took her to the site of her afternoon rendezvous, she watched the rain stream past on the car window and set her mind free to roam wherever it chose, and as always, that mind fetched up again those green eyes, profound, intelligent, sorrowful, and indecipherable. Those eyes that were poisoning her soul. Those eyes that, to her—certain though she might be that she knew all too well the banality of the human male—nonetheless remained an authentic mystery.
Her girlfriends in Rome, the few friends with whom she had established a profound relationship, were all convinced that this was just a whim of hers, because the smouldering, dark commissario was the only man who had not fallen head over heels for her, in spite of the fact that she had openly avowed her love, shamelessly, something that had never happened with other men. But Livia knew that wasn’t true. Because she remembered that first exchange of glances, in a place and a setting that ruled out the possibility of any reciprocal attraction, the day that he had expressed his condolences for the murder of her husband. An exchange of glances—it occurred to her, while the passersby cursed at her vehicle for the sprays of mud that it kicked up—an exchange of glances that had been sufficient to turn her life inside out like an old and worn overcoat. An exchange of glances between two shipwrecked seafarers, each lost in their own personal tempest, both beyond hope of rescue.
No, Ricciardi was not just a whim. He was the one great love that she had ever experienced in a lifetime full of suitors and loneliness. And he was capable of experiencing passion: Livia had realized that immediately, and she had even experienced it, exactly one year ago, when she knew his flesh and his hands on a rainy night just like the one that was in the offing now. And yet, he had chosen to hold her at arm’s length, to turn his back on her love.
The days of rage and anger had passed. The wound that had been opened by her mortification at his rejection had healed over. For the umpteenth time, she told herself that she ought to have been less impatient, that she should have instead tried to melt with the warmth of her tenderness the prison of ice in which that man had locked himself. He wasn’t like other men, Ricciardi. He didn’t send enormous bouquets of red roses and letters of fiery passion, he didn’t lavish jewelry on her. And he asked nothing, but he required gentleness and respect.
Livia couldn’t forgive herself for having been the cause of his potential arrest. And she couldn’t stand the idea that he believed her to be an enemy.
To have come face to face with him, the previous night at Luisella Bartoli’s party, had hit her like an electric shock. To lock eyes with that gaze again, to feel the same old hollow in the pit of her stomach and the familiar faint sense of dizziness, to experience the well-known sensation of heat blending in her chest with happiness, illusion, and fear, had troubled her. What’s more, he hadn’t been alone. He was in the company of a very elegant lady, long-necked and copper-haired, into whose arms she and no one else had pushed him, with a shabbily constructed, false accusation, tossed off in a burst of resentment and ill will.
She knew Ricciardi, and she knew that he would never have been willing to attend a party of the sort unless he’d been forced into it by circumstances beyond his control; but to see him dance with that woman who, she
had to admit, was very beautiful, if a little chilly, had been too much for her.
But now it was her job to protect him. She owed him that, for the harm she had done to him and the harm that might still come as a result of Falco’s extortion. And she owed it to herself, in order to keep the flame of hope burning, the hope that she might have him at her side, one day.
The appointment she was on her way to keep had to do with this very matter.
Falco had pointed the man out to her at the reception, a fine-looking German officer who spoke an excellent Italian. After that, all it had taken to wangle an invitation for herself was an introduction from a compliant girlfriend of hers, along with a smile, a few wisecracks, and a dance. The plan called for her to approach him, establish an amiable friendship with him, and then deepen that acquaintance until she was able to obtain the desired information. Little by little, Falco had instructed her. Without haste, in no great hurry.
The chauffeur opened the car door for her, holding the umbrella high overhead, to make sure she didn’t get wet. She had selected her clothing with care, opting in the end for a calf-length dress, dark orange in color, with a dark brown belt at the waist, the same color as the shoes, a jacket in a matching hue, with a mannish cut, barely tapered over her hips, and a fur stole draped over her shoulders. The general impression was one of sobriety, nothing aggressive about it, in other words, but the neckline plunged a bit more generously than was strictly necessary. Livia was well aware of her strengths and her fortes, and she wasn’t shy about when and how to use them. She needed to intrigue the German major, not seduce him. At least, not yet.
Manfred came to meet her at the door of the tea parlor where they had arranged to meet, not far from the consulate. He smiled at her, he paid her a few compliments, and he extended his arm to lead her to the table; she, too, smiled, replied with feigned modesty, and leaned on him, letting her breast brush his elbow as if by chance. An old script, all too familiar, the kind that you can perform effortlessly, from memory.
The conversation unfolded smoothly and superficially, while beneath the words, their bodies conversed in a very different way. All according to plan.
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 25