Iovane turned to look at him with a half-smile on his face and said: “Did that scare you? Don’t worry, Dotto’. They’re all locked up tight. This is the ward of the more troubled patients; every once in a while, they’ll start kicking up a fuss, but they’re not dangerous. Not all of them, at least.”
Ricciardi went on walking without replying. He felt there was no need to tell the man that his physical safety was the least of his concerns. His fear—a fear that gnawed at his entrails and kept him from breathing, a fear that made him want to complete his business in that place and then flee as fast as his legs would carry him—was that he might wind up in a place like this himself one day.
Or even someplace worse.
They climbed a flight of stairs and turned down a second corridor. Everything was much cleaner here and the rooms were fairly well lit. They crossed paths with several other male nurses and a few busy looking nuns. At last, they came to a halt in front of a door that looked no different from any of the others. Iovane opened the door without knocking and Ricciardi saw something that made his heart lurch in his chest.
A woman.
She couldn’t have been all that old; her tangled hair was still black, her skin was still smooth. But what had terrified Ricciardi was the expression on her face, contorted into a silent scream. Her mouth was wide open, her teary eyes narrowed in a gaze that bespoke horror, and the sinews on her neck were strained in an endless spasm, head tilted at an unnatural angle. It was as if she had been photographed at a moment of recoiling in horror. At the moment she had come to the certainty she was about to die.
That, Ricciardi thought to himself, is the face of someone peering into hell.
For a moment, he felt unequal to the duty that awaited him. For a moment, he thought of running away, of getting as much distance possible between himself, that room, that building, and those grounds, so that he could finally forget them.
Iovane stood aside.
“I’ll be right outside. I’ll wait for you. If it’s something, just call me.
If it’s something. If something happens, in the local dialect. And what else do you think is going to happen, when you’re already in the flames of hell?
The room had a single bed, with a rounded headboard, a dresser upon which stood vials of medicine, a small table with a metal vase that held a bunch of flowers, a double-doored armoire with three drawers, and a pair of chairs.
On one chair sat the woman, on the other sat Michelangelo Taliercio, Cettina’s brother, holding her hands, his face turned to look at Ricciardi.
The man’s astonishment and the woman’s grimace seemed to come straight out of a scene in a silent movie.
Taliercio snapped out of his state of amazement and leapt to his feet, dropping the poor woman’s arms. As he did, the woman didn’t move an inch from where she sat.
“Commissario! What on earth are you doing here? How did you find out . . . And how dare you come into this room without my authorization? I do not consent to . . . ”
Ricciardi gazed at him, expressionless.
“Signor Taliercio, I’m begging you. I implore you. Stop. It just makes no sense anymore.”
The other man stood there, motionless, his face poised midway between astonishment and dismay.
“What . . . what are you talking about? I . . . I don’t . . . ”
Ricciardi turned to look at the woman.
“This is your wife, isn’t it? Signora Ada Riccio. You were married ten years ago, and two years later she was admitted to the hospital. She was never released after that, only to be moved here six years ago. I want you to know how sorry I am, Signor Taliercio. I really am sorry. And believe me, I understand you far better than you might ever imagine.”
Gradually, as new thoughts made their way into his mind, the businessman’s face twisted into a mocking, bitter grimace.
“You think you understand? No, Commissario. No one understands. No one can hope to understand. This thing goes well beyond human understanding. Well, well beyond.”
Ricciardi couldn’t seem to calm his own uneasiness, and if anything, his anxiety only continued to grow. No noises arrived from outside; for that matter, as Santoro had told him, Taliercio’s wife was in the ward of the tranquil patients who only occasionally behaved in a worrisome manner. He wondered what that woman must be like on those infrequent occasions.
“I meant to say that to have a person who is dear to you, and who is unwell . . . ”
The man snapped: “Unwell, did you say? Unwell? As if she had, I don’t know, a case of the flu? Or some intestinal problem? Or rheumatic pain? Unwell . . . If only my wife were unwell. If only the problem were a matter of having to spoonfeed or clean up after her bowel movements. Then I could keep her at home, with a trusted housekeeper, and when my working day was done I could come home and talk to her, and hear her talk back, confide everything to her, just the way it was at the beginning, and listen to the things she had to confide to me, in return. Look at her closely, Commissario, do you call that being unwell? Look at her!”
Holding the woman’s chin between his fingers, he turned her face toward Ricciardi. The woman’s expression didn’t change in the slightest, as if she were a mannequin, but a streamer of drool did ooze out of the corner of her mouth.
Ricciardi clutched at the reason he was subjecting himself to that torment.
“No misfortune justifies certain deeds, Signor Taliercio. Nothing on earth can justify them. We both know that.”
The other man maintained his defiant attitude.
“Oh, really? Then let’s hear, what am I supposed to have done? What do you want with me? Why didn’t you just wait for me at the store or summon me to police headquarters? Do you have any charges to bring against me?”
Ricciardi took a deep breath. The agitation he felt at the place in which this was all happening was making him extremely uncomfortable, as well as making an accurate reconstruction of events even more complicated.
Hunger, he thought. The first and the oldest of the two enemies. Hunger in one of its manifold shapes, disguised as a protective instinct toward those dear to a person. Hunger masquerading as love.
He called upon all the chilly resolve at his disposal and said: “The money, Signor Taliercio. A tawdry, unexceptional matter of money. Very few people had the opportunity to change the time of the appointment for the signature of the contract, so as to ensure that Irace would head down to the port when the streets were deserted. Very few people knew exactly when he would be heading down there. Very few people knew about his habit of keeping his money in a small pocket in his trousers, as your sister told us, a concealed pocket that he had paid to have sewn especially for him, rather than in the inside breast pocket of his overcoat, where we found the rest of the money. Very few people knew the exact amount of the transaction. Only one person who checks all these boxes also had a pressing need for money. What’s more, I just obtained confirmation that the fees for your wife’s stay in this magnificent private clinic were paid, just yesterday, by you.”
Taliercio had remained impassive, continuing to hold up his wife’s chin. He murmured: “That’s why you came here. To find out what had become of the money.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“That’s right. I wanted to make sure. We learned about your wife, even though you were almost able to get everyone to forget about her very existence, while still coming to see her every day. But you live a very private life and you don’t seem to have any bad habits: neither gambling nor women. The money had to be going somewhere.”
Taliercio was biting his lower lip, both eyes fixed on Ricciardi. The commissario knew that look very well. The man was evaluating his various ways out.
“You don’t have a thing on me. Not a thing. Suppositions are one thing, but it’s quite another matter to prove that I killed my brother-in-law. I got along fine with Costantino, I had no reason on earth to want to kill him. And for that matter, I’m not a violent man.”
This was the
moment to release the trap. If Taliercio had felt obliged to slip the wad of cash out of Irace’s trousers and pocket a portion of the money for himself, only to replace the bulk of it in the overcoat, as a way of allaying suspicions that it had been a simple robbery and point them toward Sannino instead, he must necessarily have first tried to obtain that money with gentler means, though unsucessfully. It was therefore only reasonable to imagine that there had been a discussion, one that could only have taken place in the store, where the money was already available.
“You were overheard arguing with your brother-in-law. You were asking him for money and he didn’t want to give you any. That’s why we started investigating you in the first place.”
Taliercio could easily have denied it. That argument might never have taken place. He might just as likely have asked his sister for the money. Just one of those eventualities, and the castle of cards that Ricciardi had built would have come tumbling down.
Instead the man’s tough expression came apart as if he’d just lost all his energy, as if he felt he was already cornered.
Without turning around, he felt behind him for the back of the chair. He grabbed it and let himself collapse into it, his shoulders bowed. He reached out a hand and took his wife’s inert hand.
“Forino. That stupid idiot. The only one who always stays in the shop after closing hours. It was him, wasn’t it? He’s the one who told you. Yes, I’d asked Costantino for the money. They wanted to kick Ada out into the general ward, together with who knows what dangerous lunatics. They want too much money here, you know that? Just too much. And that damned shylock, that oaf of a fruit-vendor paid me a pittance of a salary. Even though the shop had belonged to my family for three generations, can you believe it? Even though on paper we were full partners. A salary scarcely higher than any of the other sales clerks. In spite of the work I do. Even though he never understood a thing about fabrics, that miserable, wretched, roustabout, that longshoreman.”
He turned his bewildered gaze to the woman at his side, still lost in her own personal hell, and started talking to her as if she were capable of listening to him.
“You understand, Adare’? I used to be the owner, and then I was taking a salary. He gave it to me secretly, so that I could preserve a modicum of authority with the employees. And in the meantime, he went on with his crooked businesses, lending money at unholy rates of interest to half the city, and never even came into the shop. It was just a possession to him. Same as I was, same as the merchandise. As was my sister, Adare’. Do you remember her, Cettina? Living with him, she became a shadow of her former self. It’s as if she were dead, my sister Cettina. He killed her. And now I was going to have to send you into the common ward. But until the day I die, even if they put me behind bars, I’ll only think of you. I swore that in the face of God. In sickness and in health. I’ll look after you, Adare’, never fear.”
He turned back to Ricciardi.
“Life has its twists and turns, Commissa’. I was young, rich, happy, and in love. Then my father ran up those debts and died. The company was collapsing, and to save it my sister was forced to marry that swine, who I only hope is roasting in hell right now. And then my Ada . . . You can’t imagine what a wonderful woman she was, Commissa’. So cheerful, so gentle, so fanciful. You can’t begin to imagine. As long as she was around, I could put up with it. I could move mountains. Only then, little by little, this is what she turned into.”
Unexpectedly, the woman emitted a faint, almost imperceptible moan. Taliercio caressed her arm.
Ricciardi thought of Irace and now he could hear his voice quite distinctly: You, you again, you, you again, once again you, you again.
“Actually, though, it wasn’t you who killed your brother-in-law, was it? You appeared before him at that street corner. You stopped him, but the one who knocked him down, and who hit him hard in the legs was whoever was hidden behind the little column.”
Taliercio turned pale, as if every drop of blood had suddenly flowed into his feet. He opened his mouth to reply, but no voice came out. Then he stammered: “How . . . how did you . . . Was someone watching us? There was no one there, the street was deserted . . . Maybe, out of a window . . . Oh my God, my God . . . ”
Ricciardi’s green eyes scrutinized Taliercio’s tear-filled eyes.
Here’s love, he thought. The other enemy. The violent, desperate one, the enemy that strikes and destroys.
“You just need to tell me the name of who was with you, Taliercio. A name I already know. But you have to tell me, otherwise you know that you’ll never again see your wife, and she will be abandoned to her fate.”
Taliercio intertwined his fingers with Ada’s, who moaned again. Then he uttered the name.
Now Ricciardi had the confirmation he had come there looking for.
He left the room, and as he did, he realized that he had practically been holding his breath the whole time he had been in there.
XLV
Maione understood from Ricciardi’s face that his theories about Irace’s murder had been fully borne out. The commissario seemed more rumpled and miserable than he had early that morning. Along with the circles under his eyes and his general pallor, there was now a tinge of melancholy, as if of some further source of suffering. Human nature, once again, had proven to be even worse than the two policemen, with all their experience, could even begin to imagine.
The brigadier asked whether he ought to send an officer to pick up Taliercio in the police force’s car.
“Yes,” Ricciardi replied, “but have the car wait outside the gate of the clinic. Let’s leave him with his wife for as long as he wishes.”
Now they were going to have to go arrest the real killer, and on this matter Maione brooked no discussion: a person capable of committing such a bloodthirsty murder might perfectly well have a violent reaction. So he was determined to be present as well.
And so they headed off toward their destination in the usual small, grim procession: Ricciardi, his hands in his pockets and bare-headed beneath the chilly rain; Maione a step behind him, the large umbrella tilted slightly forward to protect the commissario; and bringing up the rear, Camarda and Cesarano, cursing under their breath at the foul weather.
As he saw them arrive, the doorman, who had not forgotten their previous unpleasant interactions, stared at them wide-eyed. His eyes ranged from one policeman to the next, and the aplomb that, all things considered, he’d managed to preserve, suddenly crumbled. Maione shot him a chilly glance, informing him that he was not to announce their arrival, whatever else he might be inclined to do, and in spite of the fact that the man had sworn obedience, he gave the same order to Cesarano, the surliest and most menacing of the two uniformed officers, and told him to wait downstairs with the doorman. Just to guard against temptation.
Ricciardi, Maione, and Camarda climbed the two flights of stairs in silence. There wasn’t much to say and very little preparing to be done. Once they were face to face with the plaque that read CAVALIER COSTANTINO IRACE, the brigadier turned the handle of the doorbell.
When the maid answered the door, he shoved her aside without much courtesy and walked through, followed by Ricciardi, who signaled to Camarda to remain at the door. A little bit of bad manners might preserve them from the risk of unwanted reactions.
As they had judged more than likely, Cettina Irace was sitting at the dining room table, and next to her was her cousin, the lawyer Guido Capone. The man was eating with gusto, at least to judge by appearances, while Ricciardi noticed that the woman still hadn’t touched her food. She was pale, her face weary, her appearance mousy, without a speck of makeup.
As soon as he saw them, Capone leapt to his feet. He had a napkin tucked around his neck, the end of it neatly inserted beneath the starched white collar, over his tie.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion? I certainly hope you have some good cause, Commissario: I’ve had enough with this high-handed behavior. If have any further questions, you’
ll have to summon my cousin via official channels.”
Maione walked over to him.
“Be careful, counselor. You might suffocate on a mouthful of macaroni. No questions to ask, this time. This time, we’ll do the talking.”
The brigadier’s tone of voice was as menacing as the rumbling of a thunderstorm drawing closer. Capone blinked rapidly in surprise, and sat down suddenly. Cettina, on the other hand, continued to stare down into her plate, immobile as a wax statue.
It was to her that Ricciardi spoke.
“Buongiorno, Signora. I’m afraid I can’t add buon appetito to that, though. You understand why we’re here, don’t you? You probably always knew that we’d show up, sooner or later.”
Capone attempted a pathetic retort.
“Commissario, you . . . ”
Maione silenced him, placing an enormous hand clad in a black leather glove on his shoulder.
“Counselor, I asked politely. Don’t open your mouth unless we ask you a question.”
Ricciardi went on: “You knew, and unconsciously it was you yourself who put us on the right track. ‘The times that I’ve seen him, I barely spoke to him,’ you told us. Not one time, at the theater, we all knew about that. But the times. So there had to have been at least one other occasion, right?”
Capone exclaimed: “Cettina, for the love of God, don’t speak! They’re laying a trap for you . . . ”
Maione clutched hard at his shoulder and the phrase died out into a squeak. The woman remained inert and Ricciardi went on: “Sannino told us as much when it happened, the day that we went to pick him up. But he wasn’t certain, because he was drunk and he’d passed out, in the front door of the building across the way, next to the place where he had stood the night before to sing you his nameless serenade. You saw him and you went to him; in order to do that, you had to be alone, which meant your husband had already gone out. What time could it have been, five in the morning? It was still dark out, wasn’t it? You kissed him, and he thought he must have dreamed it.”
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 33