It had become clear to Ricciardi that nothing useful was going to come of their conversation, only calls for caution.
“All right, Dottore; I’ll keep in mind all this exceedingly useful information you’ve given me. And I’ll keep you informed. Now I’m heading to the morgue; Doctor Modo promised me that he’ll give me advance word on the autopsy findings. If you have no further orders, buon giorno.”
And he left the room, plunging Garzo even further into his sense of insecurity.
X
Looking out from her balcony on the fourth floor of the Hotel du Vésuve, Livia was drinking in the view of the Via Partenope. Stretching out before her eyes, the smooth calm sea was taking in the splashing dives of hundreds of boys and girls from the rocks and from the walls of the castle, which had stood on the water’s edge for countless centuries.
The day before, upon her arrival at the Chiaia station, she’d immediately felt the air ringing with the city’s wholehearted welcome. She’d smiled when at least three men had offered her a lift-and one of them had said that he’d be glad to take her to the ends of the earth;-and she’d been indulgent with the urchins who immediately surrounded her clamoring for a penny, a piece of candy, or a cigarette. She recalled a discussion in a Roman drawing room, a few weeks back, when an arrogant businessman had said how sick and tired he was of these Neapolitan scugnizzi who waited, in swarms, for arriving tourists at the port and the train station; they begged, the man had said, and they slipped their little hands in anywhere, eager to pilfer and steal. She’d broken in, informing him that the true underlying cause of this behavior was the state of poverty and neediness for which the city’s most powerful citizens were ultimately responsible, and that in any case children always brightened her spirits; far more than certain dull conversationalists whom it had been her misfortune to meet in the city of Rome, for instance. She smiled as she recalled the icy silence that had settled over the room; no one there had the nerve to gainsay a woman who, as they all knew well, was a close friend of the Duce’s wife and the Duce’s daughter.
She had hired one of the distinctive red public automobiles, a three-seater with a yellow strip, and told the driver that she wanted to take a spin around the city before going to the hotel. She wanted to regain familiarity with the streets and the piazzas that she remembered swept by winter winds, places that she had experienced at such a sad time in her life. Now she saw sunlight and cheerfulness, strolling vendors shouting their wares, spontaneous would-be singers and smiling women, lovely shop windows and little children playing with rag-balls in improvised fields, darting among and around automobiles and trolley cars. It was a crazy, laughing city, and she liked it.
She couldn’t say how much weight the fact that this was Ricciardi’s city had on her opinion; in any case, she suspected that her memory of the commissario played an important part. She’d decided to let this first day go by, so that she could explore the battlefield before unleashing her first attack. She considered what dress she’d wear, what pert daring little hat.
She smiled at the sea and the sky.
Maione had made the rounds of the merchants of Santa Maria La Nova, in accordance with Ricciardi’s instructions. It hadn’t been easy: not because there was any reluctance or hesitation on their part, but rather because the Musso di Camparino family actually had no direct interactions with the quarter in which it lived.
The duke was held in the highest regard for his humane generosity toward the organizations that assisted the needy, but he’d been bedridden for over a year by a grave pulmonary disease and everyone expected him to die any day now.
Young master Ettore, who was about thirty, practically speaking lived on the terrace, surrounded by the plants that he cultivated with such passion. He wrote articles for newspapers and journals about philosophy, and was a celebrated scholar on the subject. It was said that he sometimes went out at night, but no one ever seemed to see him.
The duchess, on the other hand, was everywhere. There wasn’t a party, a gathering, or a social event that didn’t count her among its inner circle. Lovely and elegant, she put on a display of wealth and opulence on every occasion. She was the duke’s second wife, and had been for ten years now: he married her a year and a half after the death of his first wife, to whom Adriana had ministered as her nurse. Maione detected disapproval from the sausage-maker he was talking to, given the fact that they hadn’t even waited for the end of the second year of mourning.
Regarding the household help, the quarter was a goldmine of information. Concetta Sivo was a tranquil lady who was widely respected, a careful frugal shopper and a skillful manager of her household. She had no relatives in the city, and every couple of months or so she went back to the village where her elderly aunt and her cousins still lived. When they talked about the Sciarras, everyone smiled, amused by his comic turns, her utter simplicity, and the four children’s lively voracity, constantly fighting over the last bite of food or visiting the local shops begging for something to eat.
In other words, these were people who did their work conscientiously, but easy enough to trick if some ill-intentioned individual wished to get into the palazzo. Moreover, the other night the neighborhood festa had been particularly crowded and noisy, and had ended with a burst of especially deafening fireworks that had illuminated the piazza and left everyone’s ears ringing. Maione concluded that no one would have heard cannonfire, much less a gunshot muffled by a cushion.
Nothing especially interesting, in other words; except that every one of those businessmen had offered him something to eat, and he-with death in his heart and especially in his stomach-had been forced to turn down the offer in every case. Sadly shaking his head, he decided to move forward the timing of the visit he had planned to pay on Bambinella: if there was something worth knowing, he’d know it.
The knight of commerce, Cavaliere Giulio Colombo, saw his wife and started worrying. It was hardly an uncommon event for his energetic spouse to come in to inspect the shop; what worried him was the grim expression he’d glimpsed on her face through the plateglass window.
The family’s chief source of income was the handsome hat shop at the corner of the Via Toledo and Piazza Trieste and Trento, near the church of San Ferdinando. In the thirty years they’d been in business, they’d developed a loyal clientele, to whom the Cavalier and the three salesclerks provided meticulous and personal service. One of those salesclerks was the husband of the youngest daughter, a capable young man and a very hard worker; the only headache he gave his father-in-law, a longtime liberal, was his enthusiastic support of the Fascist Party, which Colombo considered to be uncritical and therefore verging on fanaticism.
He was in fact discussing the increasingly common nighttime raids of the enforcement squads that, hiding behind the Fascist flag, committed acts of common brutality, when he saw his wife arriving. Signora Maria had a strong personality, even if she was capable of being a sweet helpmate and a perfect mother: problems arose only when the two roles conflicted, and this was one of those occasions. Cavaliere Giulio immediately guessed, even before the bell on the front door had stopped ringing, what the purpose of her visit was. It was about their daughter, Enrica; and her marriage.
Not that there was any marriage in immediate sight, in fact, to tell the truth, that was exactly the problem: that there was no marriage on the horizon. Maria strode to the cash register, an enormous piece of glistening metal machinery that was the pride of the store and behind which her husband had tried to conceal himself.