She hadn’t spoken a word to her; she hadn’t asked Teresa about her husband, as she sometimes did. Teresa was relieved. She wasn’t sure that she could have lied, as the professor had ordered her to do, to say that she hadn’t seen him since the night before. Fortunately, Signora Emma had walked right past her without seeing her, as though she were in another dimension. Like a ghost.
Leaving a police officer to guard the door, Maione had responded to Ricciardi’s call and was now searching the apartment with his superior officer. They had a good half hour before they the magistrate and the medical examiner they had summoned would show up.
Not that there was all that much to see. The victim, whose name was Carmela Calise, lived alone; she was unmarried, had no children, no known relatives. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, and the lavatory on the landing, which was shared with three other families. Aside from the dining room where she had died, there was a bedroom with a squalid lining of bright floral wallpaper, from which emanated a strong odor of fresh paste. Maione thought to himself that if they hadn’t killed her, the old woman would surely have died that very same night, asphyxiated in her sleep.
There were only a few simple pieces of furniture: the narrow bed pushed up against the wall, a crucifix, a chest of drawers, atop which stood a statuette of the Madonna with a crown of gilded plaster on her head and a rosary around her neck, a portrait of a man and a woman from bygone times, and a small flickering candle. Perhaps those were the parents, or perhaps a brother and his wife: memories now lost forever. A chair. A bedside rug on the gray-and-black checkerboard floor. They went back to the dining room where the expressionless porter woman was bent over her daughter, stroking her hair. The girl went on singing her lullaby, rocking back and forth, never taking her eyes off what only she and Ricciardi could see in the dark corner. Mechanically, the commissario followed her gaze.
“’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato,” repeated the image with the broken neck and croaking voice. God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. The curtain stirred slightly in the breeze. From the street came the shouts of children playing.
Maione spoke to Nunzia.
“So then, you’re the one who found her.”
The woman looked up from her daughter, straightened up, and gave the commissario a look of fierce pride.
“Yes, that’s what I told you before.”
“So tell me exactly what happened.”
“Every morning, when she wakes up, I bring Antonietta up here to spend the day with Donna Carmela. She’s the only child that she keeps; she says that she keeps her company and isn’t any trouble at all. Antonietta stays close to her and watches her work, and now and then Donna Carmela gives her a cookie or something else to eat. It makes me happy to know she’s here, I got so much work to do. There’s a whole apartment building to run. You have no idea how much work it is. I’m alone. My husband. . in the war, he went north and never came home. The little girl was only one year old.”
“So this morning you brought the girl here.”
“Yes, it was nine thirty. I know because I’d finished up with the stairs and the landings and I hadn’t started cooking yet. Before I went down to the pushcart to get some vegetables for the broth I wanted to make sure that my girl wouldn’t be afraid to be left alone.”
“So, you knocked on the door. .”
“Who said I knocked? Donna Carmela’s door was already open. She opens it first thing in the morning, when she comes home from seven o’clock Mass, and that’s how she leaves it. This whole palazzo is one big family. We all know each other. There’re no locked doors here. It’s all safe as safe can be.”
Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a quick glance, to highlight the unmistakable contradiction between the presence of that bundle and the trail of blood on the floor and the porter woman’s claim.
Nunzia saw it too, and turned as red in the face as if they’d just insulted her.
“The miserable coward who did this isn’t from the neighborhood. Take it from me, that way you’ll save yourselves a lot of pointless work. Much less from this building. Donna Carmela was a saint, a genuine saint, and everyone loved her. She gave everyone a hand, she helped everyone. Damnation and eternal suffering be visited on the swine who did this.”
Teeth clenched, almost in a hiss: the hatred poured out of the woman’s mouth like a spurt of bile. Maione and Ricciardi, if only mentally, instinctively struck the woman off the list of suspects.
The brigadier proceeded with his questioning.
“So you went in.”
“That’s right, I wanted to say good morning to her and tell her I was leaving the girl. And what I found was this. . this thing, on the floor. This act of slaughter, this disgrace.”
“When was the last time that you saw her alive?”
“Late last night, it must have been ten o’clock. We went up, me and my daughter. We closed all the windows, put out the coal fire in the kitchen. It’s what we do every night.”
“And how did the signora seem to you? Nervous, worried. .? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“No, nothing. She said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ I went downstairs, and Antonietta came down about an hour later. That’s all I know.”
“Do you know whether the signora had had any, I don’t know, any disagreements or disputes with anyone, any friction, as of late? Maybe she complained about something, or you overheard fighting. .”
“No-what’re you talking about? I told you once and I’ll say it again, Donna Carmela was a saint and everyone loved her. No one would have dared. Not to mention she had gnarled hands and was very weak. She had that disease old people get. .”
“Arthritis?”
“Yessir, that’s exactly it. She got these pains. We could hear her moaning in her sleep in the summer, through the open window. Well, she’s done suffering now,” she said, looking down at the bundle of rags.
Maione turned to Ricciardi, to see whether he had anything to ask her.
“You said, ‘My daughter stays close to her and watches her work.’ What kind of work did she do, Donna Carmela?”
To their surprise, the woman blushed and looked down, suddenly abandoning the haughty demeanor she’d maintained up until that moment. There was a long silence. Maione broke in.
“Well, did you hear what the commissario asked you? Answer the question!”
The woman slowly looked up and answered the brigadier. Maione realized that throughout the conversation Nunzia had never once looked Ricciardi in the eye. Here we go again, he thought. The usual fear and revulsion.
“Donna Carmela. . she was a saint. She helped her fellow man to work things out.”
Ricciardi spoke in a low voice.
“How? How did Donna Carmela help her fellow man?”
Silence: Nunzia didn’t answer. Sensing tension in the room, Antonietta had stopped her plaintive song, though she continued to rock back and forth, staring at the corner.
From the little piazza below came a joyful burst of noise from the boys; someone had scored a point, whatever game it was they were playing. In the air, a delicate scent of flowers was winning out over the smell of caked blood, but still not over the garlic and the urine.
Nunzia turned slowly to face Ricciardi, looking him straight in his glassy green eyes.
“Donna Carmela read the future. She read cards.”
XVI
Rosa was seventy years old. Her memories stretched back into the distant past, times with other values. In the period in which she grew up-the period in which she still lived, at least in her mind-a woman consecrated herself to a family, even if that family wasn’t her own. She had consecrated herself to the Ricciardi di Malomonte family, after they rescued her from a one-bedroom house in the countryside, where she lived with eleven siblings and parents who couldn’t even remember her name. She had never felt the need for a husband or children of her own. Looking after little Luigi Alfredo satisfied her completely; the Baroness was unwell, and lacked the strength that a mother must possess. That’s what she was there for, the energetic Tata Rosa, who had taken on this trust from her frail friend with the sorrowful green eyes, and she had upheld that responsibility for the rest of her life.