Day of the Dead (15 page)

Counterfeit monks, little match girls and women selling bouquets of flowers, men operating tiny floating casinos that consisted of nothing more than a wooden counter perched on a tripod—they all did their best to carry on their work even in the rain, competing for the best spots under the broad overhangs of stone cornices.

The uncovered street and the sidewalks, on the other hand, enjoyed the temporary expansion of available space; they were now open to speeding automobiles and gleaming wet horses pulling carts and carriages. As these conveyances went past, they sprayed jets of water into the air behind them, to the delight of swarms of
scugnizzi
who reveled in the unexpected cascades of water. The infrequent pedestrians stepped gingerly between the puddles and small ponds that were forming in the streets, doing their best to keep shoes and trouser legs dry and to cover themselves with cloth umbrellas that they'd lovingly waxed the night before with drippings from their candles at home.

Cristiano, like Ricciardi himself for that matter, seemed indifferent to the rain, clopping along in his wooden clogs through puddles of all sizes and depths, triggering the occasional imprecations of those he inundated as he passed. The commissario kept his eyes trained straight ahead, and he accepted the greetings of the dead in much the same way the boy took the greetings of the living: he saw the pair of adolescents and the despairing debtor, the familiar bridge-jumping suicides on the Ponte della Sanità, and he made a new acquaintance, a decorous, elderly woman dressed in black who had been crushed by the poorly secured load of a horse-drawn cart. The broad cavity in her crushed chest and her mangled left arm, still clutching her handbag, left no doubts as to how she had died and why. As Ricciardi walked past, she said:
my grandson hasn't come around for two months now
. I wonder if he came to your funeral, Ricciardi thought as Cristiano was benevolently and jocularly threatened by a strolling fruit and vegetable vendor. Everybody has the friends they deserve, the commissario mused bitterly.

They came even with a heavy wooden door, closed and locked. Cristiano stopped and waited for Ricciardi. They weren't far from the Tondo di Capodimonte, the piazza at the foot of the monumental staircase where Tettè had been found.

Without looking at the commissario, Cristiano said: “We come here to get a little something, now and then. It's a warehouse of good things to eat. We don't come all that often because the owner hides and stands guard; one time he caught one of the twins and pounded him within an inch of his life. He was in bed for the longest time, throwing up blood; we were pretty sure he was going to die.”

Ricciardi observed the heavy bolt and padlock that secured the heavy door.

“But how do you get in here? It looks to me like it's pretty well locked up.”

Cristiano smiled with a superior air and waved for Ricciardi to follow him. He turned the corner and slipped in through a doorway, vanishing from the commissario's view. Ricciardi stood motionless and disoriented in the dim dank half-light, until he heard a hiss and understood that the boy had slipped into a gap in the wall that had escaped his notice. He squeezed in after him and found himself standing in a narrow space between the two buildings, a sort of corridor where one person walking sideways could just barely get through. About ten feet farther in, the space widened into a large room stacked high with sacks and crates. They were inside the warehouse.

Ricciardi looked around in the grayish light that filtered down from the high windows: for the most part, the place was filled with grains and beans, as was clearly marked on the sacks; in one corner, though, he saw metal containers, slabs of dried fish and meat, wheels of cheese, and other foodstuffs. Cristiano seemed frightened: he stood there motionless, ears trained like an animal on the hunt, or a wary creature, potential prey to other larger beasts.

He silently pointed out to Ricciardi a series of small objects arranged in a semicircle on the floor near the goods; to the untrained eye, these were a number of tiny bread rolls. The boy picked one up and handed it to the commissario: a rolled-up ball of bread crumb and bits of cheese, odorless. Cristiano touched the commissario's arm and nodded his head in the direction of a large dead rat in the far corner of the storeroom. Ricciardi felt the weight of the edible ball in his hand: poison. This was what had killed Tettè.

He took a more careful look around, but saw no one: the boy hadn't died in the warehouse. Not that that added up to much, since he could easily have taken something and then run off to eat it elsewhere; but the boy's spectral shade wasn't there now.

Cristiano was increasingly anxious; he tugged at Ricciardi's sleeve, pulling him toward the narrow entryway they'd come in by. The commissario was turning to follow him when a muscular arm reached out of the shadows and grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck.

Before Ricciardi could stop him, the man violently struck Cristiano twice in the face. The boy squawked in fright and tried to squirm free, while the man shouted:

“You damned thief, damn you, I finally caught you. You're done eating at my expense!”

Ricciardi finally recovered from the shock and shouted:

“Halt! Let him go! Police!”

This caused the man to yield momentarily, loosening his grip; Cristiano took advantage of the chance to sink his teeth into the hand that had held him in a vise grip just a second before. The man shouted out an oath and kicked his foot in the boy's direction, but Cristiano was by now well out of range.

Ricciardi stepped forward.

“Stop, I said! Who are you, sir?”

“Who am I? Who are you! If you're with the police, what are you doing in my warehouse? How did you get in, and why didn't you knock at the front door, like honest people do?”

By now, the commissario had regained control of the situation; Cristiano was standing safely behind him, massaging his neck and shooting the owner of the warehouse a defiant glare.

“I apologize for the way in which we entered, but it was necessary. This is a police investigation, and I'm Commissario Ricciardi of the royal police headquarters of Naples. Please be so good as to provide me with your name and surname.”

The man continued to stare angrily at Cristiano and, holding his bleeding hand, he replied:

“Vincenzo Lotti's my name. And this is my warehouse you're in. I battle from morning to night with these shameless marauders: they're worse than rats and cockroaches. They slip in under the doors and steal everything in sight. I've already filed two criminal complaints, right where you work, at police headquarters, and no one even came out to see me, nothing happened, and they just keep on stealing with impunity. They're a scourge, I tell you: a scourge!”

Ricciardi did his best to be conciliatory:

“You're right: I'll show you where they get in, that way at least the boys won't be a problem for you anymore. You'll still have to deal with the rats, though. How do you handle them?”

He pointed to the carcass of the dead rat, midway between foodstuffs and front door. Lotti, a big strapping man in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders, gradually changed his tone of voice as his anger steamed off:

“That would be great, Commissa'. To at least get rid of the problem with the boys, I mean. I understand that they're hungry, I ate constantly at their age, too, but I can't afford to satisfy their appetites. They aren't my children after all, are they? With the rats, now I'm putting down this poison I buy at the pharmacy and, as you can see, it seems like it's starting to work. But the poison's expensive, and the flour and cheese to make the poison bait aren't free, either. I've tried using traps, but you get a couple of them and then the others catch on quick as a blink. Rats,
scugnizzi
, they're the same thing. They learn right away how to steal.”

Rats and
scugnizzi
, both just as bad; they aren't my children: the man's words hit Ricciardi like a slap in the face. The back of Tettè's neck appeared before his eyes again, as thin as the neck of an Easter lamb, as the attendants were carrying him off like a piece of scrap wood to be discarded, and he felt a stab of pain in his stomach.

“I just hope for your sake that all your permits and papers are in order,” he said in a harsh tone of voice. “Licenses, food rations, customs, everything. That the goods have all been purchased on the up and up and that you're issuing the proper receipts for your sales. Criminal complaints, you know, are a two-way street. Did you know that a few hundred feet from here, early Monday morning, at the foot of the Tondo staircase, a little boy was found dead? The investigation has shown that he was poisoned. Exactly what kind of rat poison do you use, in here?”

Lotti stood there openmouthed; his mind was trying to process the information he'd just received as quickly as it could.

“I . . . my permits? My permits are all in order, my brother-in-law, who's an accountant, takes care of them. I'm not so good at reading words, though I'm all right with numbers. And . . . a dead boy, yes, I heard about that, one of the kids from Santa Maria del Soccorso, I think. I was sorry to hear it, too. They may be thieves, but they're still God's creatures, and I have six children, so you can imagine my feelings about it, Commissa'. Poison? I buy it at the pharmacy, and it costs plenty. I don't know what kind of poison it is, but let me go get the receipt from the pharmacist. Just wait here for a moment.”

He left through a door in the back. Ricciardi asked Cristiano how he felt, and the boy shrugged dismissively, as if to say: it takes a lot more than that to scare me.

Lotti came back with a paper envelope, the kind they sell stamps in, and a receipt. He handed it to Ricciardi.

“Take care, Commissa': if the pharmacist told me once, he told me a hundred times to handle this stuff with gloves on. It's deadly poison, as you can see for yourself,” he said, pointing at the dead rat.

The second the commissario laid eyes on the envelope he recognized the word he was looking for: strychnine.

“Where do you put them, the poisoned morsels? Think carefully, Lotti: it's very important for me to know.”

The man shook his head decisively.

“Only in here, Commissa', I swear it. It wouldn't even make any sense to put them outside: they're expensive, and it would just be a waste of money. The only thing I care about is protecting my merchandise. If I keep losing product, I'll have to shut down my business; that's the only reason I would spend all this money on poison, you have to believe me.”

Ricciardi looked him in the face and felt pity for him, too.

“Come on, I'll show you where the kids are getting in. If you hurry up and seal up that entrance, it will help everyone to sleep better: you'll stop losing merchandise, and they'll stop dying like rats.”

By a curious coincidence, less than a mile away from Livia, Enrica, too, was sitting at the desk in her bedroom, staring at the rain beating against her window; by an equally curious coincidence, she was thinking about the same person.

She had decided to take Rosa's advice and answer Ricciardi's letter. And that was an important step forward.

She smiled as she thought back on Ricciardi's
tata
: meeting her had been both an enjoyable and an encouraging experience. It showed her that there were moments in life when it was necessary to take the initiative, show some courage. She had been brave, in a way she would never have expected, and it had paid off.

She felt a shiver at the thought of herself running down the stairs of her building and out into the rain; arriving at Don Gerardo's shop, without needing to buy a thing (what would she have said, if they had asked her what she wanted? She would have had come up with something, she thought); waiting for Rosa to finish ordering; offering to help carry her groceries.

Above all, it struck her as incredible that she had been capable of talking about her feelings with that woman, who was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger.

And yet, thinking back on it now, as she looked through the rain at the window of what she now knew to be Rosa's bedroom, nothing could have seemed more natural than to find herself there, sitting on the sofa in his apartment, drinking a cup of coffee. And to smell his scent all around her, the aroma of his aftershave; to look at the marble tiles on which he walked, the big wooden radio he listened to. Even the door to his bedroom. She hadn't had the nerve to ask to see his window,
the
window; and to imagine herself embroidering, just fifteen feet away.

From now on, those fifteen feet would never be the same; now that she could picture it all in her head, now that she knew for certain what objects and what lines of sight her eyes were exploring. The barrier had been torn down, more by her visit to the apartment than by his letter.

The letter, she thought, dipping her pen for the umpteenth time in the light-blue inkwell. The letter that she now had to answer.

In her mind, she pictured him in the act of opening the envelope containing her reply. She imagined his remote gaze, his nervous hands, the lock of hair dangling over his forehead. What on earth could drive a man like him to live a life of such complete solitude? Why did he share nothing with anyone, ever?

She sensed, as she always had, that behind those silences and behind the wall he'd built around himself there was actually an infinite kindness and gentleness, an unexpected tenderness toward his fellow man. She had no real reason to think this, but she did think it: and her conversation with Rosa had confirmed it for her. If she won his heart, if she were able to get close to him and love him the way she could feel she wanted to, that tenderness would emerge, and he would become a different man.

She smiled at the rain. She'd never been with a man romantically, she'd always been reserved, disinclined to date or court: now she knew, for a certainty, that all her life she'd only really been waiting for a man like him. The time for hesitation and uncertainty was through; it had ended with his letter and with her visit to Rosa.