“Can I speak to you, alone, if you please?”
Uh-oh. This meant things were serious.
“Certainly. Marco, you stay at the cash register. I’m going in back.”
Like all the city’s haberdasheries and tailor shops, there was a room in the back where the various items could be adjusted for a better fit. Just then, it was empty because the two employees were on their lunch break.
Maria came right to the point.
“What do you intend to do for Enrica?”
This was a discussion they’d had more than once. The father was very fond of his firstborn daughter, who shared his smiling, orderly character; he didn’t mind keeping her at home for as long as he could. His wife, who had noted this impulse, missed no opportunity to point out to him and especially to Enrica that, at twenty-four, she had amply reached the age when she ought to be thinking about starting a life of her own; all the more so, considering that these were hard times and business wasn’t good enough to let them take care of the needs of a large family, actually two families, since the other daughter, with her husband and infant son, was still living with them. If only she were willing to meet some nice young men, instead of insulting every new suitor who ventured to show a little interest.
The night before, when she had lanched into her usual jeremiad, her husband had cut her off with a gesture of annoyance, begging her just to let him listen to the radio for once. Then and there, Maria had said nothing, but the way she glared at him promised nothing good: and in fact here she comes now, thought Giulio, more determined and combative than ever.
“You don’t understand what a serious matter this is. Your daughter is an old maid, and she’s starting to look like she’s going to be an old maid for the rest of her life. For now, she has us, but we’re not going to live forever; one day, when we’re dead and gone, what will Enrica do, go and live in an old people’s home, without a child to care for her?”
There was no stopping her once she got on her hobbyhorse, and Giulio knew it all too well. Might as well try to be conciliatory.
“But what do you think I can do about it? Should I grab her, put makeup on her, dress her up, and put her out on the street? If she doesn’t want to go out, what can I do about it?”
Maria had been waiting for those exact words.
“If she doesn’t want to meet anyone, then it’s up to us to bring someone into the house. Here’s what I’ve decided to do.”
Maione had met Bambinella a year and a half ago, when he’d been hauled into police headquarters along with four other streetwalkers.
There were a great many prostitutes in business for themselves, and they were openly competing with the city’s officially sanctioned bordellos, with relative impunity; but there was no violating the basic principle that the city had to present at least an apparently clean façade; moreover, the madams of the officially licensed brothels, who were required to pay taxes on their business, often complained to the city officials who frequented their houses of ill repute. From time to time, therefore, the mobile squad would make citywide raids, making a clean sweep of the streetwalkers pitching their wares to passersby, especially in the streets of the city center.
That night Maione, who was on duty, found himself with a complicated situation on his hands: the other girls were waiting patiently for their inevitable release; but the youngest of them all was writhing and fighting and, unexpectedly, bit the hand of a policeman, who in turn slapped her violently in the face. At that point she began to shout and the timbre of her voice unequivocally revealed her true nature. Maione intervened, separating the young man from the other girls, but in the long hours over which he held him in the cell, he was unable to obtain the basic elements of his identity, first and last names, date and place of birth; what did surface however was a complex personality-that of a young man who had learned to accept the fact that he was profoundly different from other young men without, however, resigning himself to hide the fact. Quite the contrary in fact: he felt like a woman and it was as a woman that he wanted to earn a living. The same way that other poor and desperate women were often forced to eke out their existence.
In the months that followed, the brigadier frequently encountered Bambinella, who seemed to have a gift for always being in the midst of social circles where murders ripened and were committed. A strange relationship of reciprocal esteem, if not friendship, developed between the two men, who could not have been any more different. Moreover, and above all, Bambinella had a remarkable network of acquaintances and contacts, and therefore a bottomless wealth of information, which he made available to the brigadier, and to the brigadier alone, without ever actually becoming an informer. It was all gossip with a foundation of fact that more often than not proved to be enormously helpful in this or that investigation. In exchange the mobile squad had unwritten orders to ignore the presence of Bambinella among the prostitutes who plied their trade on the outlying border of the Spanish Quarter, along the Via Toledo. One hand washes the other, as the old saying goes.
Bambinella lived in a ratty attic apartment at the end of a vicolo, not far from Corso Vittorio Emanuele. From his window he could look out on a bit of countryside next to the Vomero hill and, on the other side, a slice of distant blue sea. Maione, as hardly needs to be stated, got there in a puddle of sweat, after a long uphill climb and a hundred or so stairs, hungry as a wolf.
And, as hardly needs to be stated, Bambinella was having something to eat.
XI
Everything has to be normal. Everything has to be the way that it is every day.
You’ve cleaned and tidied the apartment, let it never be said that the children have been neglected or that there’s a spot of dust on the credenza. Let no one say that the curtains are stained, or that the linen is less than spotless.
Now you’ve gone to do the shopping for the day’s meals. You bring home a wrapped package of macaroni, the bread, the tomatoes. You have a fine lunch to make, and then a nice dinner. And tomorrow another lunch, and another dinner. And on and on it goes, because he’ll be coming home, and he’ll sit down across the table, and he’ll smile at you. It’ll all be just the way it used to be, once again. Just the way it was.
It’s hot, and you walk along under the ferocious sun, loaded down with groceries. Your head starts to spin slightly, and no one offers to help.
You go on smiling just the same.
“Why Brigadie’, what an enormous pleasure. Come right in, make yourself comfortable, sit on the pouf, here, next to me. Do you mind if I go on eating? Today of all days I’m dying of hunger, even with this heat. Care for some?”
Maione felt the room spinning around him, and let himself flop down onto the large damasked cushion.
“Oh my goodness, Brigadie’, don’t you feel well? You’re white as a sheet! Come over here, and I’ll give you a little sugar water!”
Maione weakly waved his hand in front of his face.
“No, no, don’t worry, it’s just the heat. But what are you eating, if I may ask?”
“Oh, I just made a bowl of pasta, I know I ought to think about my figure but, I told you before, today for some reason I’m just starving. Maybe it’s because I had a hunch you’d be coming by, a big handsome man like you, and I thought I’d better get something to eat to keep my strength up.”
“Oh, I’ve told you a thousand times, there’s a line I forbid you from crossing, can’t you get that through your head? You know that I don’t even fool around with. . with women like you, much less with you! Now look what you’re making me say. . so come to the point, why is it that you were expecting me? Who told you that I might be coming by?”