Assunta joined Concetta at the window.
“The children are asleep. No sign of him?”
Without turning around, the woman screwed up her mouth and tossed her head. Anxiety gripped her chest, growing stronger by the second. Her mother-in-law placed a hand on her shoulder and she reached up and squeezed it gently. A shared love; a shared fear.
When she saw him turn the corner, she felt a surge of relief rise up inside her-but only for an instant. His dragging step, his slumped shoulders. He looked like an old man. She ran to the door and pulled it open; behind her, in the shadows, Assunta stood wringing her hands. His slow steps coming up the stairs, in the silence of the dark old building. The last flight of steps. Concetta searched the darkness for Tonino’s eyes, both yearning and dreading to look into them.
Ashen, sweaty, his hair plastered to his forehead underneath his cap, Tonino was staring blankly ahead. He walked past his wife, gently squeezing her arm. The woman felt the warmth of his hand on her wrist.
“I don’t feel well. A slight fever, maybe. I’m going to bed.”
Concetta looked at the stretch of floor that her husband had just walked over. He’d left a footprint, as if his shoes were wet.
To look at them, you’d think they were two perfectly ordinary children. Like the children you’d see in the Spanish Quarter or on the streets down by the port, who moved in flocks, like birds, noisy and boisterous, the girls indistinguishable from the boys and all of them equally filthy, dressed in clothes that were equally tattered; not like the city’s other children, insipid, dressed in sailor suits or junior fascist uniforms, marching military-style across Piazza Plebiscito. In contrast, these children had their heads shorn bald to fight lice and went barefoot, a rind tougher than leather on the soles of their feet, purplish and chilblained in winter, bound up crudely with threadbare rags.
Gaetano and Rituccia had grown up together. Even though their bodies were still years from the full bloom of adolescence-he was almost thirteen, she was twelve-it was enough to look into their eyes to guess their ages. Old. They were old because of what they remembered, because of what they had seen and continued to see.
They both had vague memories of a happier time, when his father and her mother were still alive, and they were just two more little birds in the flock that burst into flight every morning among the city vicoli that they called home. But that was a long time ago, when they used to sit absorbed in conversation on the steps of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, occasionally begging coins from the old women hurrying in for the midday Mass. Now, ever since Gaetano had begun his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, they were only rarely able to speak; they didn’t need words, though, having mastered the ability to read new developments in each other’s faces, detecting news from the crease in his furrowed brow or the angles of her downturned mouth. They conducted themselves like those old couples who know each other so well as to communicate only through gestures.
In the evening, before returning home, they sat together on the ground, under the porticoes of the Galleria Umberto Primo, just as they were doing right now. In silence, they tried to summon the courage to go home for the night.
Concetta Iodice had sat there, watching her husband sleep, without being able to get a wink of sleep herself. She was afraid that his fever might spike, that he might be really sick without her realizing it. That was something that had always terrified her; her father had gone that way, during the night, while she and her mother and her siblings were sleeping peacefully. That night he was there and the next morning he wasn’t; he’d left behind that pitiful worn-out dressing gown with one eye half-open and the other shut, his blackish tongue lolling out of his open mouth. Sprawled out on the floor next to the bed; maybe he’d called for help and no one had heard him.
So Concetta sat there on the chair by the bed, watching Tonino Iodice, owner of the pizzeria and restaurant that bore his name, as he laboriously carried on the business of his troubled night’s sleep. He tossed and turned, he moaned, he pulled up the bedclothes and threw them off again. His leaden face, the hair plastered to his sweaty brow, his lips twisted in a grimace. Perhaps he was dreaming. Concetta did her best to make out words, but all she could hear were moans and laments. She sighed and rose to her feet, doing her best not to make a sound. She took Tonino’s jacket to put it away in the clothes cupboard. She smiled unconsciously, thinking of her husband’s habitual messiness, of how often she’d had to pick up the articles of clothing he scattered around the house. A sheet of paper dropped out of one of his pockets. Concetta bent down and picked it up.
She couldn’t read, but she understood that this was a promissory note, signed by Tonino. Standing out boldly, like an inky stamp from the post office, was a large red fingerprint. She snapped her head around toward her sleeping husband and looked with horror at his big hand, the hand of an honest laborer, the fingers dirty with caked blood.
X
Even with the door open, the light was faint. Silence: only the occasional creak of hinges, a window or two left open to let in fresh air. The knife blade glinted in a flash that no one saw, without so much as a moan.
Donna Vincenza went out into the vicolo very early each morning. She didn’t like to keep a full chamber pot in the apartment until late, and she also enjoyed stepping out for a walk. The winter seemed to stretch on forever, and windows still had to remain locked tight to ward off the damp of night that seeped into her bones. She’d been walking with a hunched back for months now, looking even older than she actually was. That drunken lout husband of hers, in contrast, never stirred until the church bell rang; thankfully, it chimed so loud and so close that it made him leap out of bed and start the day with a sonorous oath.
She emerged from the narrow little door, tugging her shawl tight around her head. Chamber pot in hand, she walked past the locked door of Rachele’s basso, and her thoughts ran to the poor woman who had died a year ago, leaving behind such a young orphan girl. Still, better her than me. She trundled along for a few more yards, toward the drain that topped the cesspit. She noticed that the front door of the whore’s basso was ajar. That’s odd, she thought. She knew that the little boy was the first to leave in the morning; he was an apprentice with some relative of theirs who was a builder. Then the whore went off to that shop in the Via Toledo, to ruin who knows what family.
The woman gave in to her curiosity and drew closer to the narrow aperture. She placed one hand on the doorjamb and the door creaked open. She looked inside and as soon as she got her breath back, she started screaming.
Brigadier Maione walked briskly. He wasn’t late for work; in fact, he was early. He liked to take his time, make a pot of ersatz coffee, get the police officers set up, assign the staff their jobs for the day. Still, he walked briskly, because he wasn’t the kind of person who liked to waste time, and because he was heavily built and he was walking downhill.
He didn’t have far to walk. From Piazza Concordia he walked up a long vicolo, the Via Conte di Mola, and that took him straight to Via Toledo, just a minute’s walk from police headquarters and the start of a new day, which he was already fully immersed in mentally. The buzz and bustle around him was that of the city awakening: a shutter or two creaking open, a woman singing, a small child wailing. Then there were the smells: dust, excrement, yesterday’s food, horses.