“Cesarano!” Maione bellowed. “What did I tell you? No one is to be allowed upstairs!”
The police officer’s response echoed from the street below.
“And nobody went up, Brigadie’!”
“They’re people who live in the building,” the porter cut in.
“There’s nothing to see here. Everyone go back to your apartments.”
Nobody moved. The people at the front of the crowd looked away in a show of innocence.
“Fine, fine, I see how it is; Camarda, please take down the names of the signori and signore, so we know who to call down to headquarters for a chat.”
He hadn’t even finished reciting the magic spell before the crowd had dispersed. The sound of slamming doors boomed in the stairwell and the landing was empty again, with the exception of Nunzia the porter.
Maione turned to Ricciardi.
“Commissa’, should I bring out the signora’s daughter?”
*
The old, well-established procedure: Ricciardi goes in alone for the initial inspection, to relive the scene of the crime. Then Maione enters, making observations with a policeman’s eye: the first survey, the position of the body, the condition of the windows and doors. Then witnesses are tracked down and questioned. Last of all, the magistrate is summoned, a decision is made about whether the revolting mess can be cleaned up, and everyone heads back to headquarters, to begin the hunt.
“No, let her stay. I’ll go in.”
Life is full of surprises, Maione thought to himself. He said yessir and stood aside to let his superior officer by.
Ricciardi pushed the door shut behind him. A small foyer, a coat rack with a hat shelf and a small bench, all hardwood: a piece of furniture that you’d hardly expect to see in a hovel apartment in the Sanità. The moan came from the only door that seemed to lead into a lighted room. Two steps forward: a small dining room.
A sofa and an armchair, upholstered in sky-blue satin with gold thread filigree, the seat cushions worn bare, small pieces of embroidered cloth draped over the place where one’s head would go. A round table, three chairs-one in very poor repair-a carpet. He noticed a hole worn into the weave, at the farthest corner from the point of view of someone entering the room. Perennial anguish, pure pain. Garlic, urine: a place inhabited by the elderly. Daylight, blindingly bright, pouring in from the wide-open French doors leading to the balcony: not a single building blocking the view. A breeze stirred the curtain but did nothing to dissipate the smells. Too bad about that, thought Ricciardi.
The sickly sweet aftertaste: death was calling for attention.
A large fly was diving obstinately against the windowpane. Another step forward: now he could see what the armchair had been concealing. Crouched down on the floor behind the armchair, almost invisible to the eye, a girl was rocking back and forth, emitting a song that consisted of a single note. One or perhaps two yards farther on, just outside the shaft of sunlight that poured in from the balcony and near the fourth, overturned chair, there was a bundle of rags in a dark puddle, now almost dry, which extended from the black-and-white floor tiles to the edge of the carpet. The girl wasn’t looking at the bundle; she was looking at the other corner of the room.
Ricciardi turned to look in the same direction. And he saw.
XIV
Ricciardi and the girl were both looking at the old woman. Not at the corpse; that was a dirty, abandoned thing, like the carpet on which it lay. They observed the image, erect in the shadowy corner, vivid in the colors of her last passion.
The commissario wasn’t surprised. He’d understood right away that the girl had second sight.
It was a paradox: Ricciardi wasn’t afraid of the dead; he was afraid of the Deed and those who had it inside them. Including himself.
Now he was watching the girl as she squatted on the floor: she was rocking back and forth rhythmically, moaning. Her eyes were focused, as if she saw something. Her brow was furrowed, as if she didn’t understand. She was looking at death, not at a dead person. And she was crying, possibly in sorrow, or else in horror.
He focused his own attention on the image of the woman. She was like so many others, the kind of woman you’d see at the market, weighed down by years and suffering. A cotton print dress, the same outfit in summer and winter, a stained shawl. Diminutive, her hands twisted with arthritis, hunched over. Swollen legs, red with varicose veins, blue with bruises.
It was immediately obvious to Ricciardi that the murderer had beaten her to death. A red-hot fury, rather than a cold and calculated violence: a blind, stupid rage. The way her neck bent was unnatural, due to her shattered vertebrae; a profound hollow in her skull, on the right side, her eye crushed, the cheekbone staved in, the ear torn to shreds. A succession of blows, possibly from a club.
The other side of her body also seemed to be crushed in. Ricciardi glanced at the bundle of rags and saw what he had expected: she was lying on her right side. The murderer had taken out his rage on her corpse, perhaps by kicking it repeatedly. That would also explain the extent of the bloodstain across the floor, a trail nearly a yard long. We have a center forward on our hands, he thought. A talented soccer player.
He concentrated, blocking out the girl’s whining lament and the sounds of movement and conversation coming from outside the door. The one intact eye had an almost sweet, tender expression: probably a cataract, a translucent, light-blue film. He cocked his head slightly to one side, to listen more carefully.
He didn’t hear the surprise that almost always accompanied sudden death. He didn’t hear violent hatred, blind rage, or the wrath of privation. He didn’t hear the ripping of one being wrested away. What he heard, instead, was melancholy. And a certain obscene tenderness, a hint of pride. The faint, scratchy whisper from the old broken neck: “’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.
They stayed that way without moving for another minute: an odd little family, bound together by death, pain, and grief. The girl, with her singsong lullaby and her furrowed brow, a trickle of drool sliding out of the corner of her mouth. The man standing motionless, as if made of wax, just inside the dining room door, hands stuck in the pockets of his unbuttoned overcoat, his head tilted at a slight angle, a shock of hair cutting across his bare forehead. The ghost of the old woman with the broken neck, gazing at the consummated death with unusual emotion, repeating with a faint sigh an age-old proverb in dialect.
What finally broke the black enchantment that had made time stand still, slamming shut the gates of hell, was the large, stubborn fly, as it had one final and definitive collision with the balcony window, thus becoming the second corpse in the room.
XV
Teresa was dusting in one of the parlors. She asked herself why it was her daily duty to clean what was already clean, to tidy up what was already tidy, and why that enormous, perpetually closed-off palazzo should have so many drawing rooms and parlors when there were never any guests.
It seemed like the house of the dead; her employers lived their lives elsewhere, outside of it, and then came home to immerse themselves in the silence of the dark rooms and the lightless silver, as unlikely to glitter as if it were buried in a tomb.
The signora had returned from her long night out at about nine in the morning. Teresa had crossed paths with her in the hallway and whispered a buongiorno that went unheeded, as it always did; the dead can’t hear. All the same, in that fleeting instant Teresa had noticed something different: the faint smile that had brightened her lovely features for the past month had disappeared from her face. This time, her expression was one of grief, loss, and resignation. She dragged her feet, her eyes empty, the tracks of tears discernible in her makeup.