“You’re quite right. We’ll move carefully, at least as carefully as we normally would. Tomorrow we’ll go to the palazzo and talk to the two surviving dukes, and we’ll see what they have to tell us. Among other things, from what you tell me, there seems to have been bad blood between husband and wife, stepmother and stepson.”
Maione scratched his head with the handkerchief.
“Did you get anything from Doctor Modo? I checked the shell against the models that we have in our archives, and it’s just as you expected: a Beretta 7.65 from the war, not the old model but the pistol they issued to officers toward the end, in ’17; there are still thousands of them in circulation. Nothing unusual about it. I sent two policemen to canvas the room from top to bottom, nothing else emerged. The murderer only fired that one shot.”
Ricciardi nodded agreement.
“That extortionist Modo said that he’ll report on the autopsy only if I buy him dinner. Why don’t you come along, it’s the trattoria near here, at Santa Brigida; that way you can hear too.”
Maione turned paler still.
“No, Dotto’, I’m not hungry. If anything, you can tell me about it tomorrow.”
“No, I insist: four ears are better than two. And after all, when have you ever had a problem with eating twice? I don’t want to stay out late tonight either. Let’s hear what Modo has to say and then we’ll go home.”
Maione resigned himself.
“All right, at your orders. But I’m not going to eat anything. I’ll just watch you have dinner, then I’ll eat at home.”
Enrica sensed something strange. Her mother had returned from her walk and seemed excited: she’d brought a bouquet of flowers and had told the housekeeper to get out the fine silverware and polish it. She’d tried to find out the reason for such lavish care for the dining room table on an ordinary day of the week and in response had received nothing more than a nervous giggle and a shrug.
When Maria was like that, there was no point in insisting, as Enrica knew all too well; but she could sense a strange uneasiness. At a certain point she saw the woman who normally came to do her mother’s hair enter the apartment; at that point she asked whether there was some special occasion that she knew nothing about, and she was told that the woman was there for her.
Her eyes opened wide, and before she could say anything in response, she was told:
“And put on your best dress. We’re having guests for dinner tonight.”
Along the short stretch of road from police headquarters to Via Santa Brigida, where they had an appointment to meet Doctor Modo, Maione and Ricciardi encountered only a few living souls and one dead one. The living ones were boisterous young boys on their way back from the beach, their clothing wrapped in dripping bundles, barefoot and wet-haired, who were filling the air with loud laughter and rude bantering. The dead man, whom only Ricciardi could see, of course, was dissolving slowly in the massive heat with his heavy jacket, dating back to the end of winter.
He was a construction worker who’d fallen off the roof of a palazzo, where he’d been repairing a rain gutter. With a back curved right round like an umbrella handle and with blood gushing from his mouth, he kept saying:
“It’ll hold me, the cornice will hold me.”
Famous last words, thought Ricciardi, as he did every time he passed by him, averting his gaze. Maione misinterpreted his superior officer’s expression.
“What is it, Commissa’, do you have a headache, too? My head’s been spinning like a top for the past few days.”
Ricciardi replied:
“In fact, you’ve been looking a little peaked, for a few days now. Are you feeling all right?”
“Sure, sure, I’m feeling fine, but I’m eating less. And in this heat. .”
“I understand, and right you are to do so. But I’m just as hungry as ever, hot or cold. And Modo, as you can see, feels the same way. There he is, waiting for us.”
The doctor was already sitting at one of the small outdoor tables on the sidewalk, beneath the awning that provided shade from the last rays of the setting sun.
“Oh, here comes my dinner now. My dear Brigadier, are you joining us tonight? That must mean the coffee’ll be your treat: I wouldn’t want to do you wrong.”
Maione smiled.
“Buona sera, Dotto’. Sorry, I’m sitting this one out, strictly a spectator. I’ll listen to you talk and watch you eat. No one said anything about paying.”
Ricciardi took a seat; to the proprietor hovering nearby he pointed to the bowl of baked pasta that towered in front of Modo.
“The same for me, if you please. Now then, Bruno; can you talk to me about the duchess or would that ruin your appetite?”
Modo chewed with his mouth full. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing on earth that could ruin my appetite. On the Carso front, I ate under a hail of Austrian shells: it’s a simple matter of survival. So let’s talk about your client: a very lovely woman, who was in excellent shape despite her age, which I’d place at roughly forty or so. Am I right?”
“Forty-two, to be exact. She was born in 1889, on January 15th.”
“She had the body of a young girl, believe me. From what they tell me, she was a woman who drove men crazy. All right then, first let’s talk about the bullet. You saw it, someone shot her through the cushion: there are fragments of cloth and even feathers in her brain, along the trajectory that ends in the sofa’s backrest. Fracture of the frontal bone, occipital bone, etc. And there’s no doubt that her heart was still beating, when she was shot.”
Ricciardi leaned forward, having caught the careful phrasing.
“What do you mean, her heart was still beating?”
Modo snickered, his mouth still full.
“How nice, to have an attentive audience. What I mean to say is that clinically speaking, the lovely duchess was still alive. But only clinically.”
“Which means? What are you saying, clinically?”
“Well then: your murderer, perhaps to keep her from screaming, had pressed a cushion good and hard over her mouth and nose. So the Signora was already dying of suffocation. Practically speaking, she was in her death throes when she was shot.”
Maione was impressed.
“Excuse me, Dotto’, and just how can you tell? I don’t know, from the lungs, the throat. .”
Modo shook his head.
“No, no, Brigadie’, nothing that internal. You can see from the face. The red patches around the mouth and neck, for instance. And certain little spots on the inside of the eyelids, which are known as ‘petechiae.’ Those are veins and capillaries that rupture as the victim struggles to breathe. It’s a typical mark of suffocation.”
It occurred to Ricciardi that the image of the duchess, which kept uttering its phrase about the ring, had a nice round bullet hole in its forehead, so that when she was shot, she must have still been alive. He asked:
“But if she was suffocated, how could it be that she was still clinically alive when the murderer shot her?”
Modo shrugged, without breaking pace as he ingurgitated the baked macaroni.
“Evidently, the murderer wanted to make sure he’d done the job. You can’t always be sure, when you kill someone, that what you’ve done is really irreversible. Perhaps he thought he’d been recognized. Or as long as he was at it, he wanted to make sure the gun worked. In any case, they had quite a struggle.”
Maione was again surprised; struggling to tear his eyes away from the spaghetti sauce that the doctor was mopping off his bowl with a chunk of bread, he said:
“What are you saying, Dotto’? She looked like she was just sleeping, the duchess.”
Modo, who had wiped his bowl completely clean, leaned back in his chair with a broad smile.