After all, the Petrone woman said, what harm were they doing? People came in sad and walked out happy. In a way, really, they were a couple of benefactors.
By now the name of Carmela Calise had gotten around and she had more paying customers than she could handle. The two women had also begun to supplement reality, giving fate a little push every now and then, just to make the oracular responses of the tarot cards that much more believable. A panhandler, a meeting with a man, a minor accident. Negligible things, apparently random incidents that constituted, for those who chose to view them this way, major confirmations. That part was Nunzia’s business, with the occasional paid assistance of chance extras who took the money and asked no questions. Nunzia’s investigations weren’t always necessary; in some cases the old woman excused her from performing this particular duty because, she told her, there were people who supplied her directly with all the information she needed. Sometimes people just needed to get things off their chests.
It was all going splendidly. There was more than enough money to improve their quality of life without attracting too much attention. So much money, in fact, that they both wondered what they were going to do with it all. And in Naples, everyone knows that there’s only one thing to do when you have too much cash: you lend it out at interest.
The carousel had started spinning about a year and a half ago: a woman who needed to put together a trousseau for her daughter, an office clerk whose wife was ill, a merchant who was having business troubles. If any of them had failed to repay the principal and interest due in full, everyone would have heard about it. The backbiting would have left their good names in tatters. It was the most effective form of debt collection imaginable.
A neat, efficient little operation: two complementary lines of business that whirred along beautifully, side by side. There’d never been the slightest problem. Until now.
No, she had no idea what Carmela did with the money. The old woman had always been particularly reticent on that subject and had never confided in her. She herself had put every penny into an account in her daughter’s name, held at the bank on Via Toledo, depositing a little at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. When Nunzia asked her, Carmela had replied, with resignation in her voice, that, in the end, the two women weren’t as different as they might seem.
Nor did she have the faintest idea as to who might have killed her. Carmela, with her tarot cards, constituted a threat to no one. She never hounded her debtors to get her money back. She gave them plenty of time and wiggle room. She was always happy to grant extensions-for a small added fee, of course. She couldn’t think of anyone who could have murdered her. And then, the brutal way she was murdered? Unthinkable.
“Well then,” said Ricciardi, tapping his finger on the cover of the black notebook that lay on the table in front of him, “you’ll be able to provide me with a surname, address, and story to go with all the names that are written down in here, whether they belong to the clients of the tarot card business or victims of your loan-sharking scheme. Names to go with their dreams-dreams that you nursed and tended, cultivated for a fee.”
Nunzia lowered her gaze under the commissario’s moral condemnation.
“Yes. For everyone.”
“All right. So, Maione: you have a seat here with Signora Petrone and take down the addresses and names of everyone the Calise woman saw on her last day, the day before her body was discovered. Tomorrow I want you to have them all come in to see me in my office, one by one, and we’ll check them out. And if that doesn’t give us anything to work with, then we’ll just start working backward. Until we find the right dream, the sick dream we’re looking for. The one that killed this old woman. I’m going home now. I have a headache.”
XXXII
That night, Ricciardi felt more than his usual need for some semblance of a normal life. He yearned for simple, ordinary, measured gestures. Contact with the stuff of everyday life: chairs, tables, utensils, food. Healthy glances, normal expressions.
He’d had his fill that day of weeping, feelings of hatred, death. He couldn’t wait to be at his window.
He reassured Rosa, who wasn’t used to him coming home so early. He told her that he had a grueling day ahead of him, and he just wanted to get a little extra rest.
He ate quickly, read for a while, listened to the radio: grand symphonies that as if by magic restored his peace of mind. With his eyes closed, he imagined cinematic couples in ball gowns and tuxedos twirling over a glistening marble floor, following trajectories known only to them, without ever so much as grazing each other. The ladies with their dazzled eyes lost in the faces of their preux chevaliers; one hand raised, fingers intertwined with those of their partners, the other hand holding their skirts.
As he sat in his dark-red leather easy chair, by the dim, diffuse light of the table lamp, he thought of himself and the lives of other people as a grand ball in which the dancers brush up against each other as they move, alone or as couples, each moving to their own rhythm. Every so often, as they danced, there would be a collision, and someone would fall. And it fell to someone else, someone specially assigned to the task, to help the fallen to their feet and punish whoever had caused the accident. It was an ugly job, but someone had to do it.
At the usual time, perhaps a few minutes early, he found himself standing by the window, in his bedroom illuminated by the yellow light of the old kerosene lamp that had once belonged to his mother. In the dining room of the apartment across the way, the evening meal was coming to an end. The diners were rising from their seats, to return to their own occupations after the interlude of conviviality. A few lingered behind, over coffee, a slice of cake for the little ones.
Ricciardi imagined that genuine love, the kind of love that didn’t pollute the soul, could easily become the driving force of one’s life. As he watched that family, he intuitively understood their feelings for each other. A distracted caress, a smile, an affectionate hair-tousling. Gestures that were normal and, at the same time, extraordinary. In short, a family.
He was capable of articulating in any of a number of ways the grief he felt at losing something he’d never actually possessed. He had only the vaguest of memories when it came to his ailing mother; he couldn’t remember her caresses, or the warmth of her embrace. He could only dream of her.
Across the way, the woman under whose spell he had fallen remained the mistress of the dining room and kitchen, as she was every night. She had started to wash the dishes. He watched her familiar actions the way one listens to a beloved record heard thousands of times before, predicting each move, studying her gait.
In his thoughts, he had become accustomed to calling her “amore mio.” Words that he would never actually utter in her presence; in all likelihood, he would never speak to her. All I could offer you is my grief and pain, he thought: the terrible burden of the cross I bear.
He’d never dare to stand by the front door of her building or ask Rosa to find out about her, much less discuss her with one of the neighborhood gossips. Incredible, considering that he made his living investigating the lives of others.
It didn’t bother him too much, though. He preferred to imagine, dream, and watch from afar. The one time he’d run into her on the street he’d turned and fled; and if the same thing happened again, he’d just turn and run away again.
As he admired the woman’s precise, measured gestures and her luminous normality, Ricciardi thought about Carmela Calise and Nunzia Petrone, peddlers of illusions. What an awful crime it was to trick people into thinking that they could achieve the unachievable. The porter woman had said that people were sad when they came and happy when they left. But what kind of happiness could such a deception bring them? You, with your slow, certain motions, would never let a con artist sully your dreams with her false playacting. Your dreams must be like you: moderate, delicate, and peaceful. You’d never go to a fortune-teller to have them interpreted.