Even more than kissing you and holding you in my arms, I’d like to be in your dreams. And I’d like to keep them safe for you.
It was late by the time Maione left the Calise woman’s apartment. He carried with him the list of all those she had seen on the last day of her life. Names, dreams, addresses. Their personal traits, their families, what had driven them to beg the woman for her pronouncements, paying for each word in cold hard cash.
The brigadier didn’t understand. He couldn’t see the point of paying someone such exorbitant fees for reading tarot cards. Were these people rich? Perhaps there were some on that list who earned their money by the sweat of their brow. He walked on, shaking his head: the Petrone woman had rattled off all the information, names and numbers, displaying an extraordinary talent for investigation. If it’d been up to him he would have enlisted her on the spot, with the rank of private first class at the very least. Among the names, there was even one that struck him as important, one he’d make a point of mentioning to the commissario: not the sort of person who would be happy to be summoned to police headquarters. They’d deal with that tomorrow; right now he had other business to take care of.
He walked uphill through the Spanish Quarter, huffing and puffing because he was overweight and it was a steep climb. As he went, the usual dumb show of greetings and cap-doffings, always at a respectful distance. He’d decided to pay a call to someone. He wasn’t thinking of dropping by Filomena’s to see how she was doing or ask if there was anything she needed, though perhaps he would do that the following morning. Nor was he thinking of going home; it was still early and, though he was unwilling to admit it even to himself, the idea didn’t appeal to him.
He clambered up the hill, passing under the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the Bourbon-era road that encircled the old city. Behind Vicolo di San Nicola da Tolentino, at the back of a blind alley that came to an end in the tall dry grasses and shrubs of the countryside, there was a small apartment building. A steep, narrow staircase led up to a garret apartment, its windowsills heaped high with pigeon guano. It was the home of a person who had been very helpful to Maione on more than one occasion.
Panting again, he knocked on the door, which was falling off its hinges. A deep but gracious voice asked who it was, and Maione said his name. The door swung upon.
“Brigadier, what an honor! If I’d known you were coming to pay me a visit, I’d have put on some makeup and changed my underwear!”
Bambinella almost defied description. Her black hair was gathered in a bun, with a few stray locks falling out around her ears. She wore dangly earrings and her face was heavily made up. A garish nightgown parted to reveal a lace negligee underneath. Fishnet stockings, high heels. A faint five o’clock shadow could be seen on her cheeks, under a thick layer of face powder.
“Come on, let me in. It’s taken ten years off my life just to get up here.”
“You can’t be serious. A big strong handsome man like you, all worn out from a little climb? Come right in, make yourself comfortable. Can I offer you a cup of ersatz coffee, a little rosolio cordial?”
“A glass of water. I need to talk to you, and I’m in a hurry.”
Maione had met Bambinella a couple of years ago, when he’d taken part in a raid on a underground bordello in Via San Ferdinando, one of those low-cost operations where older women and country girls peddled their services without proper license or certification. Among the array of homely, handicapped, and elderly “signorinas,” this Latin beauty with her almond-shaped eyes had seemed out of place; and in fact, when the police demanded identification, the “defect” emerged.
Maione was forced to intervene because Bambinella, whose real name could not be ascertained, managed to lure three of his men to her in rapid succession, practically scratching the third man’s eyes out with her claws.
During the night that followed, which Bambinella spent in a cell as a guest of police headquarters, she never stopped sobbing, talking, and shouting in an unbroken stream of abuse. In the end, Maione took it upon himself to order Bambinella’s release. In part because, technically speaking, Bambinella couldn’t be called a “lady” of the evening.
As he listened to Bambinella’s seemingly endless chain of delirium, the policeman came to the conclusion that the lady-boy, or femminiello, to use the Neapolitan term, possessed a great deal of useful information. And that the debt of gratitude he created by releasing her might well be more than amply repaid.
Since then, Maione had cashed in his chips with Bambinella more than once, sparingly but always to good effect. A number of case-cracking details were provided right in the garret where Bambinella continued to run her discreet little business. Maione looked the other way, and Bambinella whispered in his ear.
XXXIII
The sea had started slapping against the rocks off Via Caracciolo around seven o’clock that night. Now the waves, whipped up even higher by the buffeting wind, were splashing so high that the spray could be seen from the balconies along Via Generale Orsini in Santa Lucia.
Ruggero Serra di Arpaja stepped out onto the balcony to feel on his face the first breaths of spring wafting up from the sea. They seemed somehow threatening, and brought him none of the comfort he had hoped for.
It wouldn’t be long now; he knew that. He didn’t have a clear idea of what was going to happen, but at any rate he wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. The newspaper described those details that he knew about, but seemed to have left out others.
He had no particular confidence in the abilities of the state police, nor in the skills of the corps of magistrates; he’d had daily dealings with them both for more years than he cared to remember and he had always pictured them in his mind as a large, ungainly beast, slow-moving and incapable of reaching its objective.
In recent years, moreover, the machinery of justice had been even further hindered by politics, which slowed the grinding of its gears and altered its course to suit its own goals.
But now, everything he had built was teetering on the brink. For the thousandth time he thought through the various potential outcomes with the anguish of a trapped rat. The memory surged up inside him on a wave of nausea that he managed to ward off by shutting his eyes: blood. It was one thing to talk about it dispassionately in his study with the guilty individuals whom he defended, the scum of the earth, no doubt, but wealthy, and willing to pay for their freedom. It was quite another thing to find yourself surrounded by it.
All that blood. He instinctively looked down at his bare feet; it dawned on him that since he’d come home that day and removed his blood-spattered shoes, he’d never put on another pair. He had to get rid of those shoes, and he had to take care of it himself; there was no one else he could trust.
He sighed in the sweet breeze. His greatest anguish, the anguish that clutched at his throat until he was unable to breathe, didn’t stem from the thought of what might happen to him. His anxiety came from the thought of what Emma might do. And if he wanted to know the answer, he would have to screw his courage to the sticking place, leave the apartment, and go to the theater. That very night.
A dog barked somewhere out in the countryside. Bambinella was sitting in a Chinese-style chair and had assumed the pose of a prim young lady, knees together and hands resting in her lap.