The two policemen were surprised by their visit; by rights, they should have been at the hospital, arranging to have the body transported to the cemetery. Perhaps, it occurred to Ricciardi, they were here to request police authorization, but there was really no need for that; the operation performed the previous day left no doubt about the cause of death, so an autopsy would be pointless. He gestured for them to have a seat, but the two women remained standing. He turned to address the wife.
“Signora, I’m so sorry. I understand your pain and, believe me, we are here for you. If there’s anything that we can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Concetta took a step forward and drew a deep breath.
“Commissa’, my mother-in-law and I gave this a lot of thought last night. On one hand, we thought that Tonino. . my husband, that is, should rest in peace. That there should be no more talk about him, especially not under this roof-forgive me, Commissa’. But then, we thought about my children. There are three of them, and they’re young; they have their whole lives ahead of them. And they’ll have to bear this name. And this name musn’t be tarnished.”
Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a glance. Concetta had stopped talking, overwhelmed by emotion. Her mother-in-law, standing one step behind her, laid a bony hand on her shoulder. She heaved a sigh and went on.
“We sometimes say that you can feel things. Things happen, and a person might see them with his own eyes and understand them. Other times someone might tell you about them, so you hear them with your own ears and understand them that way. Then there are other times still when you can see some things and you can’t see others, and yet you still understand it all in your head. But sometimes there are things, Commissa’, that you can’t see and you can’t hear, things you can’t even think in your head, and yet you know them all the same. That’s what happens with people you hold dear in your heart,” and with those words she clutched to her breast a hand reddened by hard work and tears, “and you’re never wrong. You’re never wrong.”
Ricciardi stared straight into the woman’s face and his green eyes were clear and empty. Concetta stared back unwaveringly from the depths of her certainty, her pupils two dark stars swimming in her reddened eyes.
“My husband never killed anyone, Commissa’. Only himself. I know this, his mother knows this. His children know it too.
“So what we want to do is, what’s the word, cooperate. We talked it over between us. You and the brigadier here strike us as two kind and decent men. You’ve offered us help, and we can see that you’re sorry about what happened to my husband. We’re poor people, we don’t even know how we’re going to make ends meet now; we can’t hire a lawyer to defend us. All we can give our children is our name, and it must be untarnished.”
“Signora,” Ricciardi said, “our job is to find out the truth. Whatever that truth might be, whether or not we like it, even if it creates suffering. We’re not on anybody’s side. We’re here for one thing only: to find out what happened. We’re glad that you want to cooperate. But if we happened to discover that. . that your husband were responsible for something bad, something serious, it will only be worse. You understand that, don’t you? If we close the case the way things stand now, there might still be a shadow of a doubt. But if we proceed, then there will be no doubts left. Are you sure this is what you want?”
After a quick glance at her mother-in-law, behind her, Concetta answered.
“Yes, Commissa’. That’s why we came here to see you, with my dead husband still at the hospital, like a man without any family picked up off the street. Did they tell you what he screamed when. . when he did this thing? He screamed: my children! And that’s what we have to do: what’s best for his children. We’re sure, Commissa’.”
XLV
Ruggero was preparing himself to knock on Emma’s door. He was trying to summon the strength. He’d washed, shaved, changed clothes, and considered himself at some length in the mirror. The fact that he’d regained his image, the picture of himself that he was used to, the self that struck fear and respect into others, reassured him and gave him a sense of equilibrium.
But the trial that he had to face was a difficult one: perhaps the hardest of them all.
How long had it been since he’d spoken with his wife? Certainly, brief exchanges of courtesies at the dinner table; simple instructions concerning the management of the domestic help and the running of the house, but real conversation, no. They no longer even looked each other in the eye.
Over time, they had also consolidated their territories. Invisible walls had gone up: the study and the green parlor were his, the bedroom and the boudoir were hers. All they shared were the dining room and their loveless nights. The rest of the rooms were closed off, or else inhabited by the servants.
But now they had to talk. There was no more time for tacit understandings, hidden truths, silences charged with rancor. It was time to talk.
Before everything was irretrievably lost.
Ruggero knocked on Emma’s door.
Ricciardi thought something through and then spoke to Concetta Iodice.
“All right then. I have to ask you a few questions. Let’s start with your restaurant, the pizzeria. How did your husband get it off the ground? Where did he get the money?”
“Part of it came from our own savings and from the sale of his pushcart. The rest of the money was borrowed. From Carmela Calise.”
“What kind of terms was your husband on with Calise?”
“I never went to see her; I don’t even know where she lived. A friend of my husband’s, Simone the carter, told him about her; he said she was different from. . from those other people, the ones who come and break your legs and arms if you don’t pay back every penny. I’m sure you know all about that here. . Anyway, he told him that this one was more, how to put it, more human: if you don’t have all the money, you can bring the rest later; she gives extensions.”
“And did your husband ever have to extend his deadline?”
Concetta looked down at the floor.
“One time. The pizzeria wasn’t doing well. And the other day. . the other day he had gone to see her, to ask for another extension. It had taken him two days to screw up the courage. He thought that I didn’t know, but I could see that he wasn’t sleeping at night. And so I put two and two together.”
“Did he seem desperate to you, at his wits’ end?”
“No. But worried, yes. Before. . before he opened the pizzeria, he used to laugh all the time. Afterward, he stopped laughing. Maybe that’s why people weren’t coming. Why would you go to eat at a place where no one laughs?”
Ricciardi listened carefully.
“Let’s go back to that evening. Did he tell you that he was going to see Calise?”
“No, he didn’t tell us. But we knew.” She shot a fleeting glance at her mother-in-law, who hadn’t taken her arm off her shoulder the entire time, giving her strength. “And he left the pizzeria about nine o’clock, when most of the crowd had gone home. He told me that he had an errand to run, that I should close up and go home. So I closed up, cleaned everything, and waited a little longer just to see if he’d come back. Then I went home, thinking he might be there already. But he wasn’t. We fed the children and we put them to bed. He still wasn’t back. Then the two of us looked out the window, she and I,” and she tilted her head in her mother-in-law’s direction, “saying: ‘He’ll be here any minute.’ But it was past midnight when he came home.”