Instead, you do go over to the window. Perhaps she’ll be there, embroidering, as if to greet you unconsciously, to gently ferry you off to your dreamless slumber.
Instead, your gaze runs square into a pair of darkened shutters. No one speaks to you at all.
You step forward into the night and you know that your eyes will search for peace in the darkness but in vain. You were hoping for rest. But that’s not what you got.
He climbs uphill along the vicolo, his step slow and heavy. The weight of the day bears down on his shoulders, the weight of the week, of life. He climbs the vicolo and he feels lonelier than ever, thinking of all these people looking for love and finding hatred, resentment, fury. He climbs the vicolo looking straight ahead; perhaps not even a scream would make him stop this time. Tonight it costs too much to walk. Tonight he wants nothing but peace.
Sea air accompanies him, caresses his shoulders, helps him in the uphill climb. It brings a promise of summer, a promise it may even keep. But who knows how many more deaths, in the meanwhile.
Tomorrow, there will be a guilty man, a man who tonight is still unaware, sleeping peacefully, or perhaps fast asleep deep underground. Perhaps victim and executioner are dancing together in the moonlight, in some enchanted clearing, along with the other dead souls. Perhaps victim and executioner have traded roles: that’s permissible in the world of sleep.
Anguish, loneliness. In the rooms that were once filled with her smile, now all is deserted.
Remembering her, her smile reborn, her hand, her caress, her forgotten touch. Imagining his hand, trembling, as it brushes her face, her blue eyes, the same eyes he saw at the fountain when she was sixteen.
Dinner, him trying to talk, and her upraised finger laid across his lips. And then her hand, leading him to bed. And her opening the door of her body and soul to him. Perhaps a dream, a gift of the night, of the moon, motionless, over the souls of the world. Perhaps the air will keep its promise; perhaps he is being reborn in that perfume.
He falls asleep with his life wrapped in his arms: his life, snuggled against his chest. That breathing at once unknown and familiar.
LX
The light of dawn found Ricciardi and Maione well aware that this day would be a decisive one. For the memory of Tonino Iodice and for the honor of his children; for the peace of Carmela Calise’s soul; for the reputation of the Serra di Arpaja family; for the welfare and perhaps for the career of Attilio Romor, an actor with a bright future and a challenging present; for the surname and fate of Emma’s child.
And for the knowledge that they had solved a mystery in a world where, by official royal decree, there could be no more mysteries, nor blood, nor murder victims.
Maione, on Ricciardi’s orders, went to the Serras’ building just before lunchtime. He waited for the doorman to withdraw into his glass-fronted cubby and then went in after him, moving cautiously in the shadows to make sure no one noticed him from the balconies on the upper stories.
He learned that the signora would be going out to the theater, and without her chauffeur. She had told the doorman to get her new car ready, the odd one with a red finish, and to top off the fuel in the tank. As always, the man had gone into a litany of complaint about how he always had to take care of everything himself, and Maione nodded along patiently, inwardly detesting him. Then, however, he learned another tidbit that struck him as particularly interesting: the professor had also asked the doorman whether he knew the signora’s plans for the evening, and then he had instructed him to alert the chauffeur; he’d be going out that evening as well. To attend the theater, he had added. Wasn’t that ridiculously wasteful? Just two people, the same night, the same theater. In two different automobiles.
When Maione informed him, Ricciardi smirked in amusement. The theater. Once again, real and fictional passions would mingle and blend. Who could say which would make the most noise?
The theater. That was destined to be the place where the mystery would be untangled. All right then. The theater. And we’ll be there, he thought. He told Maione to put together a small team of plainclothes officers: four men in all, to be positioned at various points in the auditorium and at the exits. One man would need to sit next to the professor, incognito, to forestall any sudden moves.
“What about you, Commissa’? What are you going to do?”
Unexpectedly, Ricciardi half-smiled and brushed the lock of hair away from his forehead with a sharp sweep of his hand. His eyes glittered in the low light of the setting sun.
“I’m going to pick up a young lady. I’ll be attending the theater with company this evening. Arrange to have two tickets for me at the box office.”
Nunzia Petrone couldn’t believe her own ears. She was mistrustful by nature, and especially so with policemen. It struck her as a ridiculous request, practically a joke, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in the commissario’s eyes.
“Antonietta? But why? What do you need her for?”
Ricciardi, standing with both hands in his overcoat pockets, his shock of hair dangling over his forehead, looked her in the eye.
“Because she may have been present, when Calise was killed. You told me yourself that she stayed upstairs with her another hour the night that she was murdered. And if the murderer had happened to notice she was there, he probably would have killed her, too. Perhaps, if she looked someone in the face, she might be able to help us identify the killer. Perhaps.”
Petrone looked around her with her small eyes, as if appealing to the cheap objects in her kitchen for help.
“But Antonietta doesn’t understand a thing, Commissa’. She just talks to herself, as if she could see people that we can’t, other children she can play with in her imagination. She’s. . simpleminded, you can see that for yourself. What could you possibly expect from her, the poor little thing?”
Ricciardi shrugged.
“It’s a shot. Just a shot. But I promise you that nothing will happen to her. I’ll stay close to her the whole time. And I’ll bring her back to you, safe and sound. And she might even have fun. An evening at the theater.”
So Ricciardi found himself strolling downhill from the Sanità toward the Teatro dei Fiorentini, walking alongside the girl, who dragged her feet and held her right hand near her mouth, continuing to murmur her singsong. As they went by, people stopped talking and stepped aside.
The shadows of night were gradually swallowing up the street, and the streetlights had not yet flickered on. This was the hour in which dreams materialize.
At the beginning of Via Toledo, Ricciardi cast his usual sidelong glance at the dead. Antonietta smiled and waved at them.
The commissario shuddered when the girl stopped to caress the ghost of a child with its head crushed in, perhaps the result of a streetcar accident, the bloody, naked skin on its chest grooved by the twine suspenders holding up its trousers. Oddly enough, the cap was still perched on top of the child’s head, at least on the half that was intact, while on the other side the cap rested on a shard of white skull and bare, rotting brain matter.
Passersby saw the girl reach her hand out into the empty air and thought nothing of it. Ricciardi on the other hand saw her caress an arm shaking with the final spasms of death, and heard the child’s desperate wail for help that issued from its broken teeth.