Ponte looked down the hallway with such intensity that Ricciardi wondered if he too could see the images of the dead cop and dead thief.
“No, what are you saying, Commissario, that would never even occur to the Dottore. He knows that there’s no one like you in the place. He just wants to hear from you.”
“And he’ll hear from me. Have a good evening.”
Ricciardi was climbing the steep street that led home; even after sunset the heat continued to lay siege to the city. Via Toledo on a Sunday night and in the summer took on a different appearance: the families emerged from their ground floor hovel apartments, the bassi, where the temperature spiked to intolerable peaks; in order to keep from dying of suffocation they took to the streets. The older residents sat on chairs they’d carried outside, the younger ones perched on wooden crates employed as benches, and they all chatted or played cards to kill time, until late at night. From open windows on the higher floors came dance music from the radio, along with the laughter of children and, here and there, a loud fight.
Ricciardi thought about how impossible it was in a setting like that to preserve one’s right to privacy. And how, in that churning maelstrom of love, passion, wealth, and poverty, envy and jealousy sprang up like weeds-and with them, murder.
As he walked, he realized that wherever he passed he brought with him silence and discomfort, like a chilly gust of wind; he was the Other, an unfamiliar, unsettling figure, viewed as inherently dangerous.
He didn’t really mind it, as he strolled uphill, bare-headed, hands in his pockets, the sound of footsteps echoing off the stone paving slabs; he wouldn’t have wanted to feel part of all those emotions, which mingled with the thoughts of the dead whom he could glimpse here and there, wherever they’d been stabbed to death or sliced in two by the wheels of trolley cars or horse-drawn carriages. All that regretful yearning for life, the pain of letting the world go and the grief over a sudden death, wasn’t really all that different from the passions of the living and their thousandfold busy little businesses.
Hunger, love; the desire to own things, the lust for power, falsehood, faithlessness. The murders to which Ricciardi was a daily witness were generally the product of all this. His mind drifted back to the duchess’s repeated phrase:
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
Who had she been speaking to? To her murderer, in all likelihood. But all too often he’d heard phrases that had been addressed to third parties, whether present or absent. Which ring? The one on her middle finger, torn off after her death? With her last breath, had she seen whoever it was that would later take it from her? Or was it the ring on her ring finger, with the bruise that served as evidence that the woman was still alive when it was taken from her?
Whether one or the other, the ring must have had some special meaning because no other valuables, and there were plenty available, had been taken. Something told Ricciardi that if he could find the ring, he’d find the murderer. Which meant it was a crime of passion, then. A crime of love.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ricciardi glimpsed a young woman leading a man by the hand through the door of a building. Love. His thoughts flew to Enrica. For more than a year she’d been nothing but a picture glimpsed through a window, nothing more or less than a painting by Vermeer, a piece of the normal life, so close at hand but so unattainable, that he’d always be denied. Seeing her embroider, wash dishes, the slow and precise gestures of her left-handed activities was a nightly spectacle that he’d never willingly give up, and he was glad to leave things as they were: she was safe from him and from the Deed, sheltered by the two panes of glass.
Then, that spring, while interviewing witnesses in the course of an investigation, he’d found her sitting across from him. And the distant picture, the faraway glimpse of normality, the painting by Vermeer suddenly became a flesh-and-blood human being, a woman with a scent, a skin, and a pair of eyes that he’d remember. He couldn’t say whether it was better before: certainly, when Enrica was simply a name and a portrait of someone else’s life, his loneliness had a different hue. Now, when he greeted her every night with a wave of the hand, and she responded to him with a slight tip of the head, he felt as if he were standing on the brink of cliff from which he might tumble at any moment.
But he certainly wouldn’t live without it.
Today, moreover, his memory had played a trick on him: he’d remembered Livia. He almost smiled to himself: a whole lifetime spent bearing the cross of a nature that forced him into a life of solitude and contemplation. And then, in the same year, in fact, over the course of just a few months, he’d found himself confronted with emotions that he’d never expected to experience himself. Livia, too, had disturbed him in some fashion, unmistakably conveying to him that she wanted to get to know him better, for the man that he was.
He couldn’t deny that for a lengthy, extended moment he had been torn: unlike Enrica, Livia had provoked in him a whirlwind of sensations from the very beginning, with her spicy perfume, her soft skin, her full lips, her feline gait, and when they had said goodbye, the hot and womanly tears that streaked her face in the rain.
As he climbed the stairs in his building, Ricciardi had three women in his heart and in his mind: one was closeby, one he believed, at least, was very far away, and one was dead.
IX
Today was a different awakening for you. After all these years, finally, a new awakening.
Not that anything has changed, to all appearances. You saw day dawning from your bed, as always; as always, the pillow beside you was untouched. You looked at that pillow, your heart crushed by the usual sorrow; as always, you were the first to get up, and you moved through the silence of an apartment that was so different from the way you like to remember it, when the children were little and they laughed and quarreled and ran, and your husband looked up at you and he smiled.
You make breakfast, a breakfast that someone may or may not eat. There are times when you put dishes and utensils away and throw away whole meals, untouched. You say nothing, you don’t complain. You wouldn’t even know how, you’ve never complained in your life.
Is it a crime to no longer have the strength to cry? To shout out your shame, your fatally wounded pride? Is is a crime to look away, to see your happiness slipping through your fingers like sand?
You believed it, when you swore that it was for always, on a luminous spring morning. It’s been a hundred years since then. You can see pity in the eyes of your neighbors, your relatives, your friends. You know that along with that compassion there is also a certain derision, for your silence, for the way you bow your head and look away. Sweetness turns into cowardice. If I were in your place, they all say. You feel as if you can hear them.
The sun starts to filter through the kitchen window. The heat never subsided, all night long. You think of him. And you think that by now he’s heard the news.
With slumped shoulders, facing the wall by the kitchen sink and waiting for your children to wake up, you laugh. Softly, you laugh.
Ricciardi looked around at Monday morning, on his way into police headquarters. In the summer, the beginning of the week seemed to be more of a day of regret, as if Sunday were a missed opportunity; as if people still needed an extra dollop of rest or enjoyment.
The commissario sensed it when he saw the barefoot, half-naked street urchins, their skin roasted by the hot sun, pouring out of the vicoli and chasing after the first, early morning trolley cars to hang on for the ride, the dangerous ride down to the sea on the Via Caracciolo. He sensed it when he saw that the earliest opening shops were still shut, the same shops that he normally found open for business on his morning walk; instead, now he saw only a few sleepy stock boys still wrestling open the heavy wooden shutters and setting out the display merchandise under the cover of the thick canvas awnings.