The brigadier’s ferocious glare was more than sufficient to rein Bambinella in.
“All right, all right. I’ll tell you what happened. But let me make it clear that the reason I know these things is that a girlfriend of mine is a housekeeper at the Salone Margherita, actually to tell the truth, I hear that they’re going to promote her to the wardrobe deparment. . eh, Brigadie’, don’t lose your temper, what a bear you are! Well, at any rate, at intermission everyone was standing around drinking, smoking, and gossiping because that’s one of the reasons people even go to the theater. Just like that, Capece starts yelling at the duchess, saying that she had no right, that it was always the same thing with her, that he wouldn’t put up with it a second longer.”
“Why, what had the duchess done?”
Bambinella spread his arms wide.
“Who can say? No doubt, she’d said hello to someone, or she’d smiled at someone else. She often did. In any case, he was shouting and she was laughing. Just like that, my girlfriend told me that she threw her head back and was laughing loudly, ha ha ha, ha ha ha, as if he was a comedy skit. And that’s when he did the thing with the ring.”
“What do you mean, the thing with the ring?”
“He grabbed her hand and, shouting into her face that she didn’t deserve to have it, and that he never wanted to see her again, he yanked a ring off her finger.”
Maione wanted to know more.
“What ring? What ring are you talking about?”
Once again, Bambinella shrugged.
“What would I know about it? So she told him: ‘Go ahead and take it, the miserable ring. Why don’t you give it back to that ghost of a wife of yours.’”
“Why, is Capece a widower?”
“No, he’s no widower. It’s just that I’ve heard that Capece’s stopped thinking about his wife entirely and has been ignoring her for years; I hear that she’s all hearth and home and church, the complete opposite of the duchess.”
“And then?”
“And then, in front of everyone, he gave her an open-handed slap that knocked her head right around. A couple of men stepped forward, it’s a disgrace to see a man hit a woman in public. But she gestured to them to stop, dried the blood dripping out of her mouth, straightened her hair, and turned and went back into the theater.”
“And what did Capece do?”
“He left; but first he shouted something.”
Maione leaned in toward Bambinella, aware of his own hesitation.
“What did Capece shout?”
“He shouted: I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
XII
This is the worst time of the day. The time when the sun shows no more respect for those who can’t seek shelter, when the sun is at its most merciless. It is I who must help you all, and I move into the shade those of you that I can, the geraniums, the begonias. The hedges, the jasmines, bougainvilleas, and ivies; all I can do is watch you as you consume your reserves, the water that I gave you this morning. You have to stay there. In your place. Everyone in their place.
And what’s my place? Here, with you. In this empty palazzo, empty room after empty room, silence upon silence. A palazzo filled with ghosts. He too is a ghost. My father. I don’t remember him like this, gasping and wheezing in a bed, fighting a losing battle. I remember him big and strong, laughing happily with Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. What an enchanted word, a word that I utter not with my mouth, but with my heart a thousand times a day.
Mamma, you know. You know that the most important thing is love. It’s love that gives you the place you occupy. You always used to say that to me, that love was your true home, your true country. But you never explained what to do, if that love is somehow wrong.
Now she’s dead. Dead, Mamma. Just like you. Just like my father, even if he’s still there, gasping. And maybe just like me, and my mistaken love.
I open the drawer in the secretary desk, the concealed spring-operated drawer. I take out the ring. Your ring, Mamma. I clean it again, to make sure that there’s no trace of her filthy blood. That it’s just the way it used to be.
When it was on your finger. Mamma.
Ricciardi was thinking how paradoxical it was that the places where the Deed gave him the fewest visions should be hospitals and cemeteries. But then again, it made perfect sense: it was passions and strong emotions that generated violent deaths, not pain; and what inhabited those places was primarily pain.
He’d decided to wait for the results of the autopsy at the entrance to the mortuary, at the rear of the building. The hospital was ashamed of death, and so it did its best to hide it. Death represented a failure, a defeat.
Groups of people in tears, faces ashen with weariness and suffering. Women dressed in black held up by grim-faced boys, turned into grown men in the space of a few hours when confronted with loss. Parents, sons and daughters, wives, husbands. Regrets, words left unspoken. Memories.
Ricciardi stood to one side, unable to avoid being a witness to more pain and grief. He couldn’t have said which was worse, the dull repetition of the departed’s last emotion or the abyss into which the survivors were plunged.
The mortuary door swung open and Doctor Modo emerged, drying his hands on the hem of his stained labcoat.
“Well, look who’s come to bring his sunny smile into this place of suffering. Ciao, Ricciardi: welcome to our little theater. Were you so eager to see me again that you couldn’t resist or do you think that the atmosphere of the morgue suits you better than the one at police headquarters?”
“Sooner or later someone’s going to notice that the atmosphere of police headquarters suits you better than the hospital does. And I’ll have to come get you, and I’ll throw away the key after I do. How did it go, are you done with the duchess?”
Modo smiled broadly.
“Oh, we had a long talk, your client and I. And she gave me lots and lots of information, but it’s all very, very confidential. I’m only authorized to release it if provided with a lavish dinner, your treat.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“At last. Concealing evidence. I knew that would be the charge that would finally allow me to put you away where the sun doesn’t shine. And considering this heat, I’m even doing you a favor. Fine, fine, but we’ll have to meet at the trattoria near police headquarters; I’m waiting for Maione, who has some information of his own. Which he’s giving me free of charge.”
Maione hadn’t managed to pry any other interesting information out of Bambinella; in particular, he’d tried to find out something else about the other residents of the palazzo and their habits, but as far as he could tell there was nothing more that his informant could add to what he’d already told him.
He’d only detected an instant of hesitation when it came to the duke’s son, Ettore; Bambinella knew that the man stayed out very late practically every night, and that sometimes he slept somewhere else, though she had no idea where he might go. Maione had decided that, since the man was a scholar, the circles he frequented were unlikely to have anything in common with Bambinella.
In the terrible afternoon heat, hungrier than ever, Maione decided to go see Ricciardi and apprise him of the results of his investigations. He found the commissario in his office, waiting for him.
They traded accounts of their day: the commissario shared with the brigadier his impressions of the conversation with Garzo; Maione informed Ricciardi of the information he’d gathered in the neighborhood around Palazzo Camparino and from Bambinella. Ricciardi sat there, thoughtfully, fingers knit in front of his mouth.
“So everyone thinks it was Capece who did it. Sometimes, the most obvious solution also happens to be the right one: after all, life isn’t a novel. We’ll have to question him.”
“Yes, Commissa’, but we’ll have to move cautiously. You heard what that ignorant boor Garzo said, no? We’ll wind up putting him on the alert and then he’ll reach out to someone in high places and the next thing you know they’ll put a gag order on us.”