Day of the Dead (19 page)

As she read these last lines, Livia felt a mixture of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, indignation at what she found to be an intolerable intrusion into her personal life. How dare those spies decide that it was “probably as a result of this acquaintanceship” that she had made the decision to change cities? What did they know about her loneliness, about the effects of the loss of her baby years ago, and later, of her husband, only the previous winter?

The other emotion was the excitement of learning that she was the only woman in Ricciardi's life. Of course, there was that other woman, the one “in his heart”; but she wasn't in his life, otherwise Falco's phantomlike organization would certainly have found out about her and meticulously revealed her existence in the report, perhaps erasing that red line.

She came to the last sheet of paper, which was handwritten. In the brief note she read: “Pay particular attention to the friendship with Bruno Modo, physician at the Pellegrini hospital, openly dissident, suspected of seditious activity against the Italian state.”

She looked up and her eyes met Falco's; he was staring right at her. The customary cordial expression was gone from his face.

“Signora, my superior specifically asked me to bring you this last note, along with the report. I expressed my doubts about letting you read it, I have to be honest with you; but he insisted. He says that your commissario, whom he has personally met, strikes him as a good person and that he might well be harmed by this . . . acquaintance. Harmed seriously. And so he decided to take the risk and let you know, so that you might be able to do what you can to . . . extract him. Of course, it is your duty to say absolutely nothing to anyone about what you have read in this report, the very fact of its existence, as well as the existence of myself and the organization I work for. Are we agreed on that point?”

Livia was very upset. She nodded and handed back the file. Falco bade her farewell with his usual little nod and turned to go. When he had his hand on the doorknob, he stopped and said:

“Ah, I almost forgot. Your guest list is perfectly fine, Ricciardi included: you may certainly proceed with mailing out the invitations. Remember that there will be two additional attendees, one of them attending as a guest, the other as part of the household staff. They won't cause you any inconvenience.
Arrivederci
, Signora; and forgive me again for intruding on your lunch.”

 

Once she was sure that Ricciardi had left the building, Enrica put on her overcoat and hurried downstairs, precariously balancing her umbrella in one hand and a baking pan wrapped in a cloth napkin in the other. She slipped through the street entrance of the building across the way and, her heart racing, she rushed up the stairs to the third floor landing and knocked on the same apartment door to which she'd accompanied Rosa the previous morning.

The elderly woman peered out through the narrow opening afforded by the door chain, and then opened up with a broad, welcoming smile, planting two loud kisses on the young woman's cheeks, which were now flaming red.

“Signorì, what a pleasure! How are you today? Come in, come in, don't stand out there in the cold. Can you believe the chill in the air this morning? Winter arrived overnight! It's like they say: “Come All Saint's Day, put summer clothes away.'
Prego
, come right in.”

Enrica was pleased with this warm welcome; the two women had taken to each other right away, that much was clear to her, but she hadn't expected such expansiveness.

“Signora, I took the liberty . . . Since my father is very fond of this pastry I make for him, yesterday while I was preparing it I made some extra. That is to say, I didn't make more than I meant to, I made this special, but it was certainly no trouble. But please, I'd like you to sample it first, and then, only if you like it, you could give some to . . . you know, to him.”

Rosa had pulled open the cloth and peeked in at the pastry with a smile.

“Don't be silly! That one eats like a wolf, he'll gobble down anything you set before him, I'm sure he'll like this. It's a
migliaccio
, isn't it? Ricotta and semolina . . . hold on, I'll cut us a slice and we can taste it. Make yourself comfortable, I'll be right in, you know the way, don't you?”

As she was waiting for Rosa to come back with the pastry, she noticed that the door to Ricciardi's bedroom had been left ajar. She glimpsed part of his bed, his writing desk, the window frame. She imagined him standing there, looking across the street at her; or bent over the desk, writing her a letter. The thought of the letter set her heart racing again.

Rosa brought in two generous portions of her pastry.

“I tasted it, Signori'. You're a good cook, truly: most of the time people use too much ricotta, to add to the flavor, but this is the real
migliaccio
. Very well done.”

And they started chatting, like a couple of old friends. It didn't hurt that they happened to share the same favorite topic of conversation.

Without knowing it, Enrica learned from Rosa's lips the exact same things that Livia had read in the chilly bureaucratic language of the detailed secret police report; but the information she learned about Ricciardi's life, family, and past history was tinged with the immense tenderness and love that the
tata
felt for her
signorino
.

Enrica took a long and emotional journey through the childhood of the little boy with large green eyes, condemned to loneliness and solitude first by his noble birth and later by his personality. She was introduced to the two baronesses of Malomonte, the mother, who had taken Rosa from her peasant family, and the daughter-in-law, as slender as a little girl, her eyes filled with sadness. The boy went off to boarding school, years and years of studying without a friend, and then he was standing in the hospital room, holding the thin hand of that white-haired woman who left this life at such a young age. She saw Rosa herself, entrusted with the future of a man she couldn't understand but whom she loved wholeheartedly. She learned of a name as venerable as it was long, and of faraway wealth that would have allowed him to live his life comfortably, with a prominent place in society: all things he had contemptuously turned his back on.

From the folds of this long and heartfelt account emerged a man at once close to and yet so far from the one she had grown accustomed to dreaming of; and her heart swelled with tenderness and the desire to take him by the hand and lead him through life: she, of all people, who knew so little about life herself.

When she looked at the clock and saw that it was late enough that he might be home at any minute, she got up and kissed Rosa good-bye, realizing that she had tears in her own eyes and on her face, and finding several more among the
tata
's wrinkles. She promised to come back, and before leaving, gave the old woman an envelope for him.

 

XXVII

 

 

Ricciardi came to a halt, face-to-face with Maione, who looked like a weeping willow, even though he was big as an oak. The brigadier looked away, scraped one foot on the ground as if he were trying to draw a picture, then heaved a sigh, raised his eyes to meet Ricciardi's, and said:

“
Buon giorno
, Commissa'. How is your vacation going?”

Ricciardi took the question under serious consideration.

“I'm sorry, Raffaele, but you come all the way up here from police headquarters, you're drenched and dripping with gallons of rainwater and you're probably catching pneumonia as we stand here, just so you can ask me how my vacation's going, in the middle of the street, not a full day after we said good-bye for the week? Why don't you come up to my apartment, first of all, and dry off a bit. Then you can tell me what's happened, because you have a look on your face like you were at your own funeral.”

Maione started to object, saying that he didn't want to intrude, but then he sneezed and gave in. Once they got upstairs, he was immediately handed off to Rosa, who seemed to be in a particularly chatty mood. She made him take off his uniform jacket and shirt; since Maione's measurements were closer to the
tata
's than to Ricciardi's, the brigadier, while he was waiting for his clothes to dry at least partially on the cast-iron stove, was forced to suffer the humiliation of wearing a dusty pink dressing gown.

To see him like that, gloomy and sopping wet, with his heavy boots poking out from underneath the hem of the lady's dressing gown decorated with large tone-on-tone flowers, and with a steaming mug in his hands, worried Ricciardi.

“Now then, you want to tell me what happened?”

The brigadier's eyes flashed with anger.

“Commissa', I'm going to strangle him with my own two hands!”

“Who are you going to strangle?”

“Garzo, Commissa'. Him and that infamous lickspittle spy of his, that damned Ponte.”

“Listen, Raffae': if you want me to understand what you're talking about, then you're going to have to start from the beginning. Otherwise I'm lost.”

Maione heaved a long sigh.

“All right then, Commissa'. So this morning I came in to headquarters, so sleepy and dazed that I even forgot you wouldn't be there; I'm not used to you missing work. I even brought a cup of ersatz coffee to your office.”

Ricciardi sighed.

“Well, that's the only piece of good news I've had today, that I was spared a cup of that slop. Go on.”

Maione put on an offended look.

“What do you mean, a cup of that slop? I make the best coffee of anyone at headquarters! So anyway, at a certain point I hear him, Garzo, squawking my name like a brood hen:
Maione
,
Maione!
I pretend I don't hear him, I know the way things work in that building, and sure enough not two minutes go by before Ponte shows up at the door, out of breath. Didn't you hear Signor Garzo calling your name, Brigadie'? No, I said. I didn't hear him; why, do you have something to tell me?”

Ricciardi did his best to steer the conversation back to the main point:

“Raffaele, please: I don't care about Ponte when he's standing right in front of me, much less when he's a mile and a half away. Let's get to the point: What did Garzo want from you?”

“Commissa', you have to let me tell the story my way, otherwise I'm going to lose the thread and leave out something important. So anyhow, Ponte takes me to see Garzo. And let me tell you, I've never seen him in such a state: he was covered with so many red patches that it looked like he had scarlet fever, and the man couldn't speak. I thought to myself, let's leave this in the hands of God: now he'll die of a stroke and we'll all finally get him out from underfoot. Instead, he says: Maione, Maione. What am I going to do with the two of you?”

Ricciardi had lost the thread.

“Was he seeing double?”

Maione looked at him.

“Commissa',
you're
talking nonsense. But
he
wasn't. ‘The two of you' meant you and me: the two of us, is what he meant. I said to him, I don't understand, Dotto'. And he starts waving an envelope under my nose. I thought to myself: if he gets any closer and slaps me in the face with that thing, I'll make him swallow it in a single gulp.”

“And what was in the envelope?”

“He opens it up and reads it to me. To the attention of the esteemed Dottore Angelo Garzo, deputy chief of police et cetera. This letter is to respectfully request that you et cetera. We understand that on the date of et cetera . . . ”

Ricciardi was starting to run out of patience.

“Raffaele, listen to me and listen closely: you're starting to make me anxious, and that's never a good thing. Could you possibly get to the point, please? I'm begging you.”

Maione heaved a long, weary sigh.

“Oh, all right, Commissa'. If that's how you want it, that's how I'll tell it. To make a long story short, it was a letter from the archiepiscopal curia, signed by, if I'm getting this right, a monsignor, the personal secretary of Bishop Ascalesi. They were asking for information regarding an investigation that may or may not have been undertaken into the circumstances of the death of a young guest, that's what they called him, a guest of the parish church of Santa Maria del Soccorso at Santa Teresa. They pointed out that, to the best of their knowledge, the pastor of the parish in question, Don Antonio Mansi, had been questioned repeatedly. And that, if this had actually taken place, it constituted a gross violation of articles thus and such of the Lateran Accords between the Italian state and the Holy See, on some date or other. In other words, an official complaint about our behavior.”

Ricciardi scratched his chin.

“So that's why the priest was surprised to see me this morning: he'd calculated that the letter would already have reached police headquarters and that I'd have been immediately prohibited from going back to see him again. Go on.”

“What am I supposed to go on with, Commissa'? He went nuts. He said that he told you loud and clear that the investigation shouldn't have been started in the first place. He said that he'd never authorized anything, and that this was a clear case of insubordination, and that he'd fix our wagons, the both of us.”

“The both of us? What do you have to do with any of this?”

Maione put on a truculent expression.

“Why, wasn't I there, too, at the first examination of the crime scene? Didn't I go to see the doctor, at the hospital? And when we interviewed the priest, at headquarters? In fact I told him that we didn't do anything other than ask the standard administrative questions, the ones you'd have asked in any case of the kind.”

Ricciardi was worried.

“You don't have anything to do with this matter, and you should have told him so then and there. This is something that doesn't concern you; you stopped when you were told to stop, period.”