Day of the Dead (29 page)

He coughed, and his throat clutched painfully. Too much rain and too much cold wind: it seemed to be the onset of a head cold. He could feel the weariness in his limbs that always precedes a fever.

It was painfully ironic to think how reassuring it would have been to glimpse the little boy's ghost, possibly in a
vicolo
not far from where he'd died.

Perhaps a man on his way home from work late at night had found the corpse outside his own apartment building, in the rain, and in order to avoid getting involved in a police investigation and having to give answers about something he knew nothing about, he'd picked the little body up, carried it to the monumental staircase, and left it there, after positioning it respectfully and tenderly.

Perhaps a woman had found him dead in the atrium of an apartment building and had lacked the courage to raise the alarm so she chose to put the dead child where the first passerby would be sure to see him.

Perhaps the boys from the parish, his companions in his nightly raids, had brought him there from some distant corner of the city where they'd stolen something. After all, Cristiano had taken Ricciardi straight to the warehouse, without any hesitation.

But the image of the Deed had refused to appear. And it hadn't been in the large room at the parish, nor along the street that ran into the Tondo di Capodimonte, nor anywhere else he'd been in the past few days, as he retraced the steps of Tettè's life.

The thought took him back to that lolling neck and the pain of mingling lonelinesses. Pardoxically, he thought, it would have been comforting to experience once again the extreme anguish of death, to feel the Deed taking hold of him, and to hear the last sorrowful words of the child's departure from this earthly life. Perhaps to see the boy in the throes of the immense burning pain of the poison, the convulsions, the yellowish foam on his lips, his limbs seized in one last terrible spasm. He would watch him, his own eyes locked with the boy's dull, dead ones. He would listen to his last words, as always in keeping with the last moment of a life, once again revealing how, when a person dies, he goes into nothingness looking back at life.

Then at least he'd know; then he'd be able to make peace with it. He'd approach the dog, give it something to eat, and then each would go his own way. Each with his own intolerable memories.

The radio presenter announced that a certain brand of rhubarb liqueur was bringing their listeners the next song,
Polvere di stelle (Stardust)
: and the orchestra struck up a melancholy tune.

He got up from the armchair, his head on fire, his throat on fire, his stomach on fire. Unaware that he was being watched by a pair of curious eyes from the kitchen, he spotted a sealed envelope on the table by the door that he somehow hadn't noticed before. He picked it up hesitantly; he immediately guessed what it was, and was instantly overcome by a fierce wave of fear.

Enrica's answer. She'd written back.

His head spun, and he felt a surge of nausea, but he concealed his queasiness lest Rosa inflict upon him some terrible herbal tea from Cilento that would deal the coup de grâce to his precarious condition. There was still a flimsy chance he could avoid vomiting, and he wasn't taking any risks.

He asked Rosa:

“Who brought this letter? It didn't come by ordinary mail: it isn't postmarked.”

The
tata
, who hadn't missed a single move Ricciardi had made, pretended to be startled.

“
Mamma mia
, you scared the life out of me! I thought you were asleep in the armchair. That letter? How would I know who brought it? I just found it in the mailbox, downstairs in the front hall of the building.”

“Ah, you did, did you? And since when have you been collecting mail from the mailbox?”

Rosa put on the same truculent expression she wore every time she found herself with her back to the wall.

“What, I can't look in the mailbox? What about the bills that come from the village, the invoices and all the other documents that need to be dealt with in order to manage the farmland, who do you think looks at them, the
signorino
, by chance? Don't I take care of those things, even though I'm old and my eyes are shot, and every bone in my body aches?”

Once he realized his misstep, Ricciardi abruptly changed gears:

“For heaven's sake, forget I ever said it. Of course you can look in the mailbox: why shouldn't you? I was just wondering who might have put it here, that's all.”

He entertained the notion of some complicity between Rosa and Enrica, but dismissed the idea immediately. It was inconceivable that his
tata
knew that he watched her from his window, much less that he had written her that letter. He'd been very careful; she couldn't possibly have noticed. He excluded it categorically.

Feigning indifference, he sat back down in the armchair. His hands were trembling, but he didn't want to run the risk of tearing the letter along with the envelope. He waited until he'd calmed down a little to open it. The handwriting immediately stirred a feeling of tenderness in him: it slanted to the wrong side; she wrote with her left hand. Absurdly, he thought about how she'd managed to resist any efforts to correct this aspect of her personality—and, needless to say, he liked it.

He couldn't bring himself to read it. He'd glimpsed the signature at the bottom, which meant she'd only used one side of the paper, and it read: “
Cordially yours, Enrica Colombo
.” Not very long; but for that matter, his hadn't been either. He was afraid: there's nothing quite as concise as a flat refusal.

He'd been turning the sheet of paper over in his hands for more than a minute when Rosa spoke up.

“Well? If I want to know what a letter says, I read it.”

His
tata
's voice was like a rifle shot, and Ricciardi started.

“I'll read it, I'll read it. It's for me, it's something . . . something having to do with work, that's all. Office business, nothing to worry about. Go on, go to sleep, it's late.
Buona notte
.”

His
tata
replied with a gruff “
Buona notte
.”

But she smiled as she headed for her bedroom.

Finally, Ricciardi read the letter, all at once; then he reread it, and when he finished he reread it again, savoring each word, pronouncing them in his own mouth as he read, going over them in silence, like a poem he was trying to learn by heart. In them he found the exact image he'd formed of her: tranquil, sweet, serious, but quick to smile.

Now he knew the most important thing of all: she wasn't engaged; she hadn't promised her heart to anyone else. He knew that she wanted a family one day, and a home of her own, where she could move around, at her ease, calmly, quietly.

That she found him neither annoying nor disgusting, that she was not bothered by his crudeness or the ineptness he knew he suffered from in his personal relations. That she liked his eyes, even though they were accustomed to observing pain and grief and to recognizing their sounds.

Just like every time he thought about it, the rational part of him ordered him to keep his distance, to tear up that leter, close the shutters, and never see her again; to stop dreaming of a future in which the Deed would perhaps be passed on to innocent children, in which he'd have to share his curse with those he loved most.

The other part of him, the one that with each passing day yearned more and more for a normal life, the everyday existence that only he had been denied, pushed him instead to run to the window, throw it open, and call Enrica at the top of his lungs.

Of course, he chose the middle path. He stood up from the armchair, turned off the radio and the overhead light, went into his bedroom, and stepped over to the window; he looked across the street to a window with a light on, as he did every night; he waved slightly with one hand, and in return he received a lovely tilt of the head from the girl with glasses, who was doing needlepoint with her left hand.

He smiled, hesitantly, and held up the sheet of paper with his trembling hand. She blushed and dropped her embroidery to her lap for a moment. Then she picked it up again, with a smile on her face, too.

Ricciardi decided that he definitely had a fever.

 

 

 

 

Saturday, October 31

 

For the past few days, Maione had liked going to work less and less. He thought about it as he walked, doing his best not to slip on the slippery black cobblestones, glistening with rain, along the steep hill down from his home to police headquarters.

First of all, he wasn't used to working without Ricciardi. Not that the commissario was much company, to be clear: not even Maione, the only one there who was fond of him, would have claimed that. But he was still a constant point of reference, a landmark, a center of gravity around which the brigadier's workday revolved.

Then, there was another thing: he didn't like atmosphere that he'd been sensing at police headquarters and throughout the city for the past few days. It was a sort of menacing euphoria, an unrelenting state of feverish excitement over the impending visit of the Duce. With each passing hour, as painted slogans and portraits appeared on the walls of buildings all over the city, as posters were put up singing the praises of Mussolini, and as groups of idlers strolled arm-in-arm through the streets singing anthems and fight songs, Garzo became increasingly hysterical, testing the nerves of the entire headquarters staff. It was not merely annoying, it was also dangerous: in those combustible conditions, all it took was a spark, and in fact in the past few hours there had been brawls at several points around town, with emergency calls and squads of patrolmen summoned to the scene, usually too late to do anything more than tot up the damages and injuries.

Last of all, and no less disagreeable than the other factors, was the weather. It had been raining and raining for almost two weeks, with only rare, brief breaks in the downpour. Hard rain, drizzle, and wind. Water got in everywhere and caused flooding, collapses, bad falls, and car crashes. For a policeman, there was nothing worse than rain.

Caught up in these grim thoughts, and taking care not to slip himself, Maione almost failed to notice the figure waiting for him, standing beneath the overhang of a cornice at the corner of Via della Tofa, some fifteen feet from police headquarters.

“Hey there, Commissa', what are you doing here so early? I was just thinking about you, and here you are before my eyes! How are you? Everything all right?”

In effect, Ricciardi wasn't much to look at: he was pale and his eyes were red. He looked feverish.

“I'm fine,
grazie
. A little bit of a headache, but it'll pass. I wanted to talk to you before you went in to work; could I buy you an espresso?”

Maione shot a quick look around. He wanted to make sure that they were safe from prying eyes, that no one could report their meeting to Garzo. He lacked the patience to let himself be interrogated by the deputy chief of police about just how Ricciardi was spending his time off.

He followed the commissario into a small café already open and serving at that hour of the morning. They sat down and ordered, Maione, as usual, something to eat, and Ricciardi a glass of red wine. The brigadier looked at him in surprise.

“Commissa', I don't think you ought to be out on the street in the rain, if you don't feel well. If you ask me, you have a fever, too, and a glass of wine first thing in the morning isn't enough to set you right.”

“It helps take the chill off. I've got the shivers; this damn water never seems to stop. But why don't
you
tell
me
: Did you find anything out?”

Maione relayed in detail the information he'd received from Bambinella about the junk seller, the priest, and the sexton. Everything fit in with what they'd come to believe about the actual life that the child led, in spite of the rosy pictures painted by those they'd interviewed.

Ricciardi said, thoughtfully:

“All these people are violent individuals. People who might have an outburst of rage, or hurt someone, no doubt about it: but crudely. They may well have been responsible for the marks and bruises on poor Tettè's body–bruises, cuts, even a burn mark on one arm. And no doubt they were. But I can't imagine them committing a premeditated murder. After all, what reason could they have?”

Maione broke in forcefully:

“And in fact, they didn't do it, Commissa'. No one murdered that poor child. You yourself admitted it, no? And the doctor said the same thing, I believe. I still don't quite understand what it is we're looking for.”

Ricciardi decided he needed to tell Maione something; if for no other reason than to motivate him in the investigation he was carrying out on his behalf.

“I have reason to believe, Raffae', that Tettè's corpse was moved. I'm not trying to say that anyone killed him, let that be clear; but I don't think that he died there, where we found him.”

Maione opened his eyes wide. He was truly surprised.

“Really? But what makes you think that? What marks did you see?”

Ricciardi had an answer ready:

“No actual physical marks, which is to say, no evidence; otherwise you'd have seen them yourself or I would have told you about them immediately. But, first and foremost, death from strychnine poisoning causes convulsions–Modo said so–and I don't think that dying of convulsions would leave a person sitting, still and serene, with their legs stretched out straight and their hands in their lap the way we found Tettè, looking sad-eyed into the middle distance. He would have fallen over, wouldn't he? We would have found him sprawled out on the pavement, in the rain. Then there's the problem of the dog.”

Maione was increasingly baffled.