“Look right here, Commissa’: somebody stepped in the blood. You can see the footprints.”
Ricciardi came over and looked carefully. Maione was right: he made out at least two footprints. One was broad and heavy, the other was fainter. A third footprint, farther back, broad and smeared. Maione went on, pointing to this last one.
“That’s the foot that the bastard who kicked her rested his weight on. And he slipped on the blood, twice, see?” pointing to another spot in the blackish puddle.
“Here, on the other hand, and again right here, it’s as if someone walked up on tiptoe. And neither the porter nor her daughter had any blood on their shoes; I checked myself. What did this guy do, dance a ballet?”
Ricciardi thought it over.
“They could have been made at different times. Someone who came in later, when the victim was already dead.”
“Huh, what a lot of hustle and bustle. . what is this, the central train station? And when would all this have happened, anyway, given that they saw her retire for bed last night and they found her dead at nine thirty this morning?”
From the bedroom came the voice of Cesarano, the other police officer.
“Commissario, Brigadier, come here!”
The policeman was standing next to the chest of drawers, holding a notebook in his hand. It was a school composition book, with a black cover and red deckle edges on the sheets. Ricciardi took it in his hand.
“It was here, under the sheets.”
On every sheet in the notebook there was a number, possibly a date. A list of names, with numbers next to them, almost like a schedule. Also next to the names, in wobbly handwriting and large, slanting letters, were a number of ungrammatical words. Ricciardi read at random:
“9 Polverino, male, yung lover, not much money
10 Ascione
11 Imparato, femail, dead fatther, lots of money
12 Del Giudice, femail, husband beets her
14 La Cava, man, detts to be payd, no money, sausidge-maker
15 Pollio
17 S. di A., meet man of her dreems
18 Cozzolino, femail, poor boy frend, rich old man wants her. Ask for a lott.”
Ricciardi looked over at Maione with a half-smile on his face.
“Good old Cesarano here found the book in which the saint wrote her customers’ futures. Rates included. Let’s go in the other room and see what the doctor has to tell us.”
As they walked toward him, Modo looked at them and shook his head.
“She was definitely already dead after the first blow. Look right here: skull shattered, brain reduced to a pudding. I’ll be able to tell you more once we get her to the hospital, but if you ask me, it shouldn’t even have taken this much force. Osteoporosis had made her bones thin and brittle; even a good hard slap could have killed her. Why on earth are people such monsters?”
Ricciardi said nothing. He went on looking at the bundle of rags, which Modo had straightened as if it were a marionette, a small, roughly dressed mannequin, an old tattered doll.
Maione looked on, frowning slightly, as if he had been personally insulted.
“And after that? What happened after the first blow?”
“More of them followed: at least three, on the head, with the same blunt object, possibly a walking stick, an umbrella, I don’t know. Then, as you’ve seen for yourself, they started kicking her around the room. She has several fractured ribs, possibly a broken spinal column-I don’t know yet, I’ll have to look into it. They really let her have it. I don’t know how many of them there were. I’ll have to determine whether the marks on her body are uniform. I need to take her to the hospital with me. I’ll tell you tomorrow night.”
“You’ll tell me tomorrow morning. I know you. You’re a bloodhound.”
“I can’t get it done by tomorrow morning!” the doctor objected. “I’m not some kind of superman! I need to get at least a little sleep; and if I want to get to sleep after a day like this, I’ll need to get drunk, too. These are things that require time.”
“Go on and protest, protest all you like; you’ll pull it off all the same. You know all too well that the first twenty-four hours are the most crucial.”
“If I’m ever reborn, I’m coming back as a policeman. That way I can bully doctors around, too. . all right, all right, I’ll do what I can. Have her brought to the hospital; I’ll go in myself in a couple of hours, and then we’ll see.”
Still grumbling, Doctor Modo left without saying good-bye to anyone. Maione touched his fingertips to the visor of his cap, and the police officers saluted. Ricciardi smiled wearily and said nothing. He turned toward the image with the broken neck, and she said to him: “’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. And as she said it she made a little gesture that he hadn’t noticed before, a movement of the arm, as if she were moving something.
Ricciardi turned to look at the corpse and tried to reckon its location, before it was moved by Doctor Modo and even before the woman’s attackers began kicking it. And he found himself staring at one side of the carpet, the one a bit farther away from the table and near the dismal old sofa.
He knelt down and scrutinized the floor: under the sofa there was a biscuit tin. He reached out his hand and carefully pulled it toward him; the lid was half-open. The words “Le Marie” were written on top. Maione walked over to him and looked him briefly in the eyes. Using his handkerchief, he opened the tin completely. It was full to the top.
Cash and promissory notes, all covered with caked blood.
XVIII
Along the street that ran from the bowels of the Sanità back to headquarters, walking briskly behind the bowed figure of the commissario, Maione looked around distractedly. He was well aware of the hostility that the good people of the heart of Naples were capable of unleashing, how quickly the complacent benevolence made up of smiles, bows, curtseys, and cap-doffings could transmute into the violence of furtive hands hurling cobblestones retrieved from the pavement at the detested cops.
He guarded Ricciardi, walking three feet behind him: not close enough to be intrusive, but not so far back that he couldn’t get to him in time to shield him with his solid physique.
Usually, while they were walking, he would observe the bare nape of his neck, his tousled, unkempt hair; he mused on Ricciardi’s absurd habit of going hatless, showing a scornful disregard for others, an indifference to his fellow man. In this city, “man without a hat” meant a man without money, like the nameless, family-less beggars who filled the porticoes by night and emptied wallets and handbags by day.
It was not lost on him, though it came as a surprise, that Ricciardi was neither an object of ridicule nor the recipient of sympathy, even from those who saw him but didn’t know him; rather, he tended to fill people with dread, an emotion midway between disgust and outright fear that the brigadier would have had a hard time defining. Maione was a simple man, unable to discern nuances, which he could only vaguely guess at. He loved the commissario; he would have liked to see him less troubled, though he couldn’t possibly imagine him being happy.
As they walked through the fresh breeze that blew down from the Capodimonte forest, leaving a new corpse behind them, Brigadier Raffaele Maione was unable to get the thought of Filomena Russo out of his head: the woman who from that morning on would have two different profiles.
He thought of the half-open door, of the strange silence shrouding the little piazzetta on Vico del Fico; of the pitiless eyes of the people who gathered in front of the basso; of the insult spat at the poor woman’s back. Once again he saw the drop of blood fall in the darkness; the bloodstained half-footprint on the floor; the woman leaning against him on the walk to the hospital, decorously, with dignity, without fear.