Garzo was finally placated. He smiled and said: Nice job. We did it again. Meritorious action. If it hadn’t been for the deadline I imposed on the case, we’d still be here frittering time away thinking that Serra di Arpaja was the killer. You’re talented, no question about it, but you need direction.
Without looking at him, Ricciardi was able to forestall Maione’s vehement and indignant reaction by laying a hand on his arm and asking permission to head back to his office so he could collect and transcribe Romor’s full confession. Garzo got to his feet gleefully and, amid the scent of fresh flowers, which he always made sure to have on his desk, he went to welcome the Serra di Arpaja family.
“Commissa’, I bring you the best wishes of the two Iodice women. They were in the crowd outside, but I know you don’t like that sort of thing. I told them they should go home rather than sticking around, that you’d be working late. The wife said that you’re a saint, that her husband’s soul sends you benedictions from the afterlife and so on and so forth-the usual things, in other words. The mother sends her wishes for your well-being; she said that in her opinion you’re unwell or perhaps you have some inner pain, that God Almighty helps people like you, if they’re willing to let themselves be helped.”
Ricciardi grimaced, without looking away from his office window.
“Thank you for sparing me another lecture. I think we’ve had quite enough fate for one evening, don’t you agree? Listen to me: fate doesn’t exist. What exists are men and women and the sheer courage it takes to go on living or choose to quit this life, the way Iodice did. And those who live in a sort of dream state, letting the currents carry them where they will. That’s what exists.”
Maione shook his head.
“What a shame, though, Commissa’, to hear you talk like that. Not even solving a case and sending a stinking lunatic to the criminal asylum is enough to bring a smile to your face, is it?”
Ricciardi didn’t turn around.
“Do you know the one thing you can take away from a man who lives on what he sees when he looks out the window? The only thing you can take away from him?”
“No, Commissa’. What’s the one thing?”
A brief sigh.
“The window, Raffaele. You can take away his window.”
Garzo was relieved, and more than just a little, by the demeanor of the professor and his wife. They looked tired, tested by the experience. Witnessing such a violent scene had probably proved to be more harrowing than expected, the deputy chief of police thought to himself. But they’d soon get over it.
Actually, what Garzo wanted first and foremost was to be sure that the influential academic wouldn’t be lodging any complaints with the authorities that he regularly had dealings with. If complaints were likely to ensue, then Garzo would distance himself from Ricciardi’s initiative; otherwise he’d make it his own and take full credit for it himself.
All that Serra di Arpaja wanted, for his part, was to get out of there as quickly as possible and begin forgetting. His wife, in the face of Romor’s violent outburst, had stepped backward into the darkness of the box and she had bumped against him as he stepped forward to protect her. She’d stood alongside him and squeezed his hand. It wasn’t much: just a beginning. He had used the handkerchief that he was pulling out of his pocket to dry her tears.
The same pocket in which he was carrying both his pistol and the weight of the decision he’d come to: if Emma did decide to run away with Romor, he would shoot himself in the head, right in front of her. And then they’d see how easy it was to build a new life together, a life built on the foundation of his blood. This was the desperate last act he’d planned, for when all other avenues had been exhausted and he had nowhere else to turn. He remembered his visit to Calise, to try to persuade her to free Emma from her obsession. He remembered the open door, all the blood spread across the floor, his headlong flight, hoping that no one had seen him go in; the certainty that it was all over now, that there was no more hope.
But now he and Emma were going to have a child; perhaps, for the good of the baby, she’d once again begin to appreciate the security that only he, and their lawful matrimony, could provide her.
His wife’s thoughts were far, far away, mulling over the days she’d spent believing that she couldn’t live without a man who had revealed himself to be a criminal lunatic. She doubted herself, and her judgment. Calise and her son had taught her, with their tragedy, just how much sheer damage motherhood can inflict.
She brushed her belly with one hand, while that idiot functionary whose name she couldn’t even remember yammered on with her husband about some uninteresting acquaintance they had in common. But what if the child inherited its father’s defects? And had the grandmother’s actions been acts of love or extreme selfishness?
She saw it all in a flash. Emma suddenly understood that the old woman’s blood, spilled with such brutal fury, was the same blood as that of the child she now carried in her womb. In a certain sense, blood of her blood.
Perhaps, she mused, her unanswered questions were her punishment, the price she’d have to pay. A life sentence.
LXIV
Once he’d concluded an investigation, a sense of emptiness always lingered in Ricciardi’s heart. For days the thought of the murder, the grief-stricken indignation of the murdered soul, the various possible solutions to the case invaded his thoughts, his every breath. The commissario, without realizing it, never gave up, not even when he was eating or sleeping or washing or having a bowel movement. It was a noise that became the background of one’s very existence, like the wheels of a train or the rhythm of a horse’s hooves; after a while you can’t even hear them anymore.
When the enigma was solved, it left a crater behind, a crater that he circled warily, having lost the thing that allowed him to distract himself from his solitude. That was when he took refuge at the window, watching the everyday miracle of a left-handed embroidery stitch, or that same left hand preparing dinner; dreaming of a different life, fantasizing about a different self, a self that might have waved or even chatted through the open window.
Petrone had come to collect her daughter, a smile on her face, her wits once again dulled, her eyes flat and listless, the customary streamer of drool hanging from her half-open mouth, hand gripping her mother, feet dragging on the sidewalk. He had envied the girl as he watched her go, unaware as she was of the curse that afflicted her. To her eyes, the living and the dead all lived together in one single extraordinary world.
The solution. For the man who watches there is no solution.
As for the case of the fortune-teller, he knew when the solution had come to him. It was when the Petrone told him what Calise had said when she asked what she did with her money: You and I, she’d said to the porter woman who was saving for her daughter’s future, we aren’t so different after all. She too had a child. A message for Ricciardi, delivered through the mouth of her business partner.
As he looked out his office window, trying not to think about the mountain of forms he was going to have to fill out, his thoughts turned to his mother. To the dream he’d had of her, her illness, her incurable nervous condition. What was your disease, Mamma? What did you see out there, in the fields, on the streets? Why did you live locked up in your room, bedridden? What was in your blood, Mamma? What else did you leave me besides these eyes that look like glass?
Ricciardi shuddered in the cool air, a thoughtful gift from the budding spring.
Blood of my blood, he thought to himself.
Maione felt light as air. Which, when you’re a side of beef tipping the scales at 220 pounds, is pretty good. But he’d been given half a day off as a reward, the way he was every time a case was closed with positive results. He felt pretty sure that this half-day would be a very nice one.