“A cop in springtime, then. And what about your springtime, Ricciardi? Any sign of it?”
“It’s still cold out and you know it. Come on, now, enough chitchat; it’s getting late. Have you finished up with the Calise woman? What can you tell me?”
“What am I supposed to tell you? Why don’t you just tell me what you want to know? You know that I can make the dead sit up and talk. They keep no secrets from me; if they want to tell me something, they just whisper it in my ear. Then it’s up to me to decide whether to report it to you or keep it to myself.”
Maione snickered at the efficacy of that macabre image. Once again, Ricciardi’s expression remained unchanged.
“Are you trying to tell me that the dead speak to you?” he was tempted to say. You have no idea what that even means. You know that every morning two dead men greet me on the staircase down at headquarters? And the corpse that you sliced into tiny pieces this morning? It keeps repeating the same weird proverb to me out of its broken neck. And now you’re trying to tell me that the dead speak to you?
“Take the Calise woman, for example. She was sick; a particularly nasty form of bone cancer. She had maybe six, eight months to live. Your murderer was wasting his strength. He just barely beat Mother Nature to it.”
Six, maybe eight months, Riccciardi thought to himself. And you think that’s so little? Spring, summer, and autumn. Flowers, the scent of new grass, the smell of the sea breaking against the cliffs; the first cool wind from the north, chestnuts roasting on street corners. A few flakes of snow, naked children plunging into the water, or with their noses lifted in the air to see what this or that cloud looks like. Rain on the street, the clang of horseshoes. Street vendors calling their wares. She might have lived to see another Christmas and hear the shepherds playing bagpipes in the piazzas and in people’s houses.
Six, maybe eight months. Wasn’t she entitled-the poor despicable usurer, the lying fortune-teller-to even an extra six, maybe eight minutes, in exchange for the two-bit illusions that she bestowed upon her customers, if life had decided to concede her that time?
“. . and her bones were like paper, like the wood of a worm-eaten piece of furniture. All that force wasn’t even necessary. You know how much the corpse weighed? A hundred pounds.”
“But what about the wounds? What kinds of wounds did you find, Bruno?”
“The wounds, you ask? Right parietal bone, crushed in, with loss of brain matter,” the doctor began enumerating with his fingers, without putting down the cigarette in his hand, which he held cupped a manner uniquely his, “right ear shredded; three fractured vertebrae in the neck; at least two blows to the side of her body. Right cheekbone recessed, while the eye was literally popped. And then there’s the kicking.”
“What do you mean? More wounds?”
“Yes, Brigadie’, numerous wounds. Fortunately by that point the poor thing had already been reduced to a bag of rags, already flown away to wherever it is she is now, into the absolute void, if you ask this old materialist physician. All of her ribs broken, and I mean every last one of them, with her lungs and stomach perforated, her spleen crushed, and so on. Name a traumatic lesion, and she had it. After a while I just got tired of transcribing what I found, if you can believe it. I got sick of the job altogether; so I stitched her up, closed the bag, and went outside to smoke. I needed a breath of fresh air.”
They all sat in silence, looking out the plate glass window. It had suddenly become very pleasant to watch the street urchins running around, the women chatting, and the men ripping each other off, pretending they were making business deals. That was life, as it would be always. And life was preferable to death.
“But leaving aside the laundry list of wounds and fractures, did you come to any conclusions that might prove useful to us? About the mechanics of the thing perhaps?”
Modo scratched his whiskery cheek, with a sorrowful expression.
“Let’s see: the woman died between ten PM and midnight, give or take a minute or two. The fatal blow, the first one, came from above, as you can see from the direction of the cranial fracture. The fact that it’s on the right side could mean one of two things: either the person who dealt the blow was left-handed and was standing face-to-face with the victim, or else they were right-handed and the Calise woman had her back to them. I’d opt for the second hypothesis, because then the first kick fractured her neck and that landed here, at the base of the nape of the neck. Also, even though the bones were fragile for the reason I explained to you earlier, a remarkable amount of force was used. It’s not certain, of course, but I’m inclined to think it was a man. Or else an enraged young woman.”
“Any marks on the wounds? I don’t know-imprints of rings, strange cuts. Sometimes that sort of thing happens.”
“No, nothing like that. They were definitely wearing shoes. The wounds showed abrasions-cowhide, leather, stitched soles. Is my memory failing me or weren’t there some nice clear footprints on the carpet? That’s it,” and he pointed out the window, “you should be looking for someone with stains on their shoes.”
They looked out at the market again. Now, for some reason, the cruel expressions were more vivid than the smiles. As if the world outside were full of murderers seething with hatred, the soles of their shoes black with blood.
“And someone out there, my dear Ricciardi, and my dear Brigadier Maione, was carrying around a good deal of anger, which they vented on the poor little old woman who’s been my guest for the past day or so. They showed no mercy, nor could they have imagined even for an instant that she could have survived. Of course, the unfortunate woman had no idea that she was dying. She can’t have suffered; she just saw stars and then she was gone. Not a scream, not a breath. Whoever hit her must have had the fury of hell inside him. He wanted to get rid of it. He satisfied his urge and then put the thought out of his mind.”
“No, he didn’t just put the thought out of his mind, Bruno. He didn’t. He’ll have to think about what he did, over and over again. And he’ll curse the moment that he decided to satisfy that urge. Trust me.”
Ricciardi spoke in little more than a whisper, barely opening his mouth and staring into the blackness of his untouched demitasse of coffee as he leaned back against his chair, a shock of hair dangling over his forehead, his hands in the pockets of his unbuttoned overcoat. His green eyes were clear and he seemed to see beyond what was visible to others. And in fact, that’s how it was.
As he whispered, the other two men shuddered.
XXIII
Attilio Romor took the stage midway through the first act. He was playing a handsome, superficial man, full of himself and convinced that he was God’s own gift to the world. Aside from the superficiality, in real life he wasn’t very different from the character he was playing, as far as his opinion of himself was concerned.
He made his entrance with a leap, in the middle of an amusing conversation between the male and female leads. He would say, “Here I am, my friends, at your service!” and then doff his hat with a broad gesture and a bright smile. The male lead, who was also the playwright and the director, would pretend to have been caught unawares and in his fright, would lurch forward, knocking over a chair.
Everyone was expected to laugh at this show of clumsiness; and in fact, they usually did. But when the female spectators, the clear majority of the audience, sat gazing in ecstasy at the handsome Attilio as though enchanted, the chair would tumble across the stage into an embarrassing silence. The playwright couldn’t stand to have another actor steal the scene. And he took his revenge. God, how he took his revenge. Attilio felt persecuted at every turn: during rehearsals he made him act out the same silly scene dozens of times, and during the long weekly script meetings he forced him to read the women’s roles, “to teach him the middle tones,” as he liked to say in a high-pitched voice, humiliating him in front of the rest of the troupe.