Maione was drying his tears with his handkerchief.
“Commissa’, that guy just kills me. Children, he wants children! He’s sixty, she’s sixty-two, and he wants children! That young lady is out of luck; the mother is going to live another hundred years, plus two years for mourning. She’s out of luck, the blushing young fiancée! If you ask me, we’d better keep an eye on Passarelli. Any minute now he’s going to put a pillow over Mammà’s face and that’ll be the end of her. And then the lovebirds can elope!”
Ricciardi shook his head with the half-grimace that on his face constituted a smile.
“People are strange, all right. No one ever seems to see himself the way he really is. All right, who’s next?”
Maione tucked his handkerchief away and picked up his notebook.
“We don’t know much about this one. The young lady is named Signorina Colombo; another girl accompanied her to the appointment, an old client of Calise’s, who hadn’t discussed them with Petrone yet. The girl who accompanied her had seen her about a matter of the heart. . her fiancé was far away. . then, apparently, she got married. So Petrone assumes the other one came for the same kind of problem. Calise usually spent two or three sessions delving into the matter and then she’d tell the porter woman what she’d found out, and Petrone’d start investigating. On the day of the murder, she was just getting started on this one. Shall I show her in?”
Ricciardi felt a strange sense of uneasiness wash over him. He looked around; his office was no different than usual. He passed his hand over his eyes; maybe he was coming down with a slight fever.
“Yes, have her come in.”
And Enrica walked into his office.
When, several months earlier, Ricciardi had found himself face-to-face with this same young woman at the vegetable cart, he had stared at her for a moment. Just a fleeting moment: but in his mind, in his imagination, and in his dreams he had relived that instant countless times.
One of those moments whole lives are built around. One pair of eyes meeting another for the first time.
For normal people. But he knew he had no right to be normal.
After all the time he had spent thinking about that moment, like a man sentenced to life imprisonment or shipwrecked on a desert island, he’d been led to believe that he’d be ready if he ever happened to run into her by chance. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Enrica was just as petrified as he was. The summons to police headquarters had aroused her curiosity but it hadn’t frightened her; she had no reason to be afraid. On her way there, she had run through the events of the past few days in her mind and come to the conclusion that it must have something to do with an episode that she had recently witnessed: four young Blackshirts roughing up an elderly man in the street and calling him a defeatist. Nothing too serious, but these days you could never know what you were dealing with.
And now she was sitting across from the man whose silhouette she glimpsed every night, at the exact same time without fail, the man who haunted all her dreams, her most secret yearnings. Staring once again at those crystal-clear eyes in which her heart seemed to be reflected.
Maione looked up from his notebook and blinked. An unnatural silence had fallen over the office. Even the piazza outside the window was silent. A rare thing at that time of the day.
The springtime went mad with delight. It loved those moments when blood coursed silently through the veins.
The brigadier looked at the two of them as if he were a spectator, waiting for something to happen. Then he let out a cough.
The noise resounded like an explosion. Ricciardi leapt to his feet, his rebellious lock of hair dangling over his forehead, his ears flame red. He opened his mouth, shut it, and opened it again. Finally he said, “Please, have a seat,” only the words didn’t come out. He cleared his throat, loudly, and repeated the invitation.
She said nothing; it was as if she’d fallen under some kind of spell. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She felt like running away but instead she just stood there, with her hands gripping her handbag in front of her chest as if to protect herself, her hat fastened in place by two hatpins, her mid-calf skirt, and her low-heeled shoes. Absurdly, a voice in her head began cursing her for not choosing a different dress, something more modern, and for not wearing makeup.
Ricciardi had remained standing beside his desk, uncertain whether to step forward or back. He also had the impulse to run; he eyed the window appraisingly, seeing as the door was occupied by her. He gazed beseechingly at Maione, who had never seen Ricciardi in such a state.
The brigadier came to his senses and finally intervened, bringing that surreal vignette to life.
“Signorina, prego, take a seat. We’ve just asked you here for some information. This is Commissario Ricciardi. He has some questions he needs to ask you.”
XXXVII
Officers Camarda and Cesarano stopped at the corner of the vicolo. The former once again consulted the sheet of paper he held in his hand and nodded a confirmation to his fellow officer. They turned onto the narrow lane and walked toward their destination: a pizzeria.
They were relaxed. All they were doing was serving a summons to headquarters for an interview, or possibly to serve as a witness-who could say? It was their last assignment of the day, easy as pie, and then their shift would be over and they could go home.
One of them had two children; the other, three.
Now they were both sitting down. Maione towered over them, like a referee in a boxing ring. The physical impasse had been resolved, but not the psychological one. Ricciardi still made no motion to speak, and Enrica was sitting as if she’d just been embalmed. Maione, with his back to the wall, was forced to intervene yet again.
“Now then: Signorina Colombo, Enrica, residing at Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi 103. Is that you?”
Enrica slowly turned her face toward the brigadier.
“Buongiorno, Brigadier. The fact that you delivered the summons into my hands and I signed to confirm receipt must mean something. Yes, that’s me.”
Her tone of voice was a shade icier than she might have liked, but she had every reason to be angry. After waiting all this time for him to approach her, she was stewing over the fact that she was meeting the man of her dreams thanks to a subpoena, a “summons for interview concerning matters referenced,” in the words of the document delivered to her that morning.
Maione had run out of formalities with which to fill the time. He looked over at Ricciardi and waited for him to start asking questions, but the commissario showed no sign of wanting to talk. He just sat there, mute. The brigadier was worried, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask his superior officer whether he was feeling well.
He coughed again. Ricciardi emerged from his reverie and shot him an indecipherable glance.
It was becoming clear to Maione that he would have to conduct the interview himself, even though he had no idea why that should be the case. It was as if the commissario were in the presence of a ghost.
“Signorina, do you know a certain Carmela Calise: a tarot card reader by profession?”
So that was the reason for the summons. Enrica had heard about the murder from her girlfriend and it had horrified her. That poor unfortunate woman. She’d seen her just the day before she was murdered; and what a horrible way to die. But this thought was immediately followed by the feeling that she’d been caught in the act, along with a scalding sense of shame: then, he knew! He knew that she had consulted a tarot card reader; perhaps he thought she was a stupid ignoramus or, even worse, a blasphemous disbeliever, who’d turned to a witch to help her solve her problems.