He tore his eyes away and stood up from his chair; the heat was growing more intense by the minute, and out on the street he could hear the occasional engine roaring past, heading downhill to the waterfront. He went over to the calendar and tore off the previous day’s sheet. He read the new date: Sunday, August 23, 1931-IX. Year Nine. Of the New Era. The era of black ribbons on hats and high black boots, the era of full-page newspaper photographs of men in shirtsleeves, guiding a plow. The era of enthusiasm and optimism. The era of law and order and clean cities, by government decree.
If only a decree were enough, thought Ricciardi. The world keeps spinning the way it always has, since long before Year One, unfortunately: the same murders, the same corrupt passions. The same blood.
He shot one last look down the hallway, listening to the murmuring thoughts of the dead. He went to shut the door, as if that would be enough to fence his soul off to those emotions, as if he were hearing those words with his ears, not his heart. Before tossing it into the waste bin he once again read the date on the sheet torn off the wall calendar: Year Nine. Yet it’s been twenty-five years for me, since my first scorching August. Twenty-five years today, to be exact.
The Baroness Marta Ricciardi di Malomonte was a petite, elegant, quiet woman. In the small town in the Cilento region that was overlooked by the ancient castle, everyone loved her-but from a distance; there was something strange and remote about those beautiful sad green eyes. Something unsettling.
Fate had not been especially kind to the baron’s child bride; her husband, so much older than her, had died when little Luigi Alfredo was only three years old. She had chosen not to go back to the city and instead led a life of active involvement in the village, aiding the poorest families and teaching the little children to read and write so that they might be good company for her son, who was so very like her. But social distance is hardly a promising foundation for friendship; indeed, Luigi Alfredo chose to spend his time with Rosa, the tata who had been with his family since she was a little girl, and with Mario the overseer, a young man who was a passionate reader of Salgari’s adventure novels and who told the young boy stories of tigers and warriors. The child was a daydreamer and he liked to reenact the stories he’d heard as he played in the castle gardens; surrounded by imaginary comrades and enemies, he battled loneliness with his imagination, brandishing the wooden sword that Mario had made for him by nailing together two sections of board in the shape of a cross.
Luigi Alfredo’s world was an equal blend of reality and imagination; he used reality to fuel his imagination, selecting the most intriguing and fascinating details and inventing new adventures based on them, to while away his long, solitary afternoons. His mother and the help were used to hearing him murmur in the garden, urging invisible troops into battle and beheading sea monsters with a single blow; it fell to a grumbling Rosa each night to treat skinned knees and mend ripped shirts before giving him a rough but consoling hug good night.
But one day the boy ran into the house screaming, in tears, and told his mother and Rosa that he had seen a dead man who spoke to him. The tata had soothed him and that night she’d grimly questioned the housemaids to find out which of them had been stupid enough to tell the child about the murder of the hired laborer, the one who had been stabbed to death in a jealous vendetta the previous winter. The women all protested, swearing that they had never spoken in the presence of young Master Luigi Alfredo about “the Deed.” The boy, who was eavesdropping as usual outside the ground floor window, would later use that term, “the Deed,” to describe the second sight that he possessed, the ability to feel the pain and grief hovering in the air in the aftermath of a violent death. And to see its source.
He had almost forgotten about that encounter, one August morning when his mother told him to get dressed so that they could go out for a walk; he was six years old and time spent with her was the greatest source of pleasure in his life, even though she didn’t have Mario’s gift for telling wonderful stories, nor did she envelop him in rough hugs the way Rosa did. She would look at him with her large green eyes, smile at him with gentle sadness, and caress his forehead, brushing aside the rebellious lock of hair. That was more than enough. That day, however, his mother’s expression was different, tense and distant. Luigi Alfredo decided that she must not feel well, perhaps one of her headaches.
They had walked together along the road that led out of town. Now, all these many years later, Ricciardi could still remember the suffocating heat and the smells of manure and farmland, as they strolled along, leaving the last few houses behind them. He’d asked his mother where they were going, but she had squeezed his hand in hers and said nothing. The boy didn’t sweat much but still the heat drained his strength; he was thirsty and eager to stop walking. But the woman continued along the road. They’d been walking for close to an hour when they reached a house that seemed abandoned. There was a wooden gate hanging askew on its hinges, while weeds and stubble covered what had once been a little lane. From the branch of a great tree, in the center of the courtyard, dangled a rope with a plank, an old swing, now broken. His mother stopped a few yards short of the tree; she looked around her, her brow furrowed, hesitating. The broad brim of her white hat concealed her expression, but Luigi Alfredo could sense her uneasiness. Behind the trunk of the tree, he glimpsed a little girl more or less his age; he hadn’t seen her before because she was standing in the shadows, he supposed. He walked toward her with a smile on his face and asked:
“Do you want to play with me?”
His mother, startled, raised one hand to her mouth. The little girl was pale, her dirt-encrusted hair hung loose over a dress made of rough gray homespun. In his memory, Ricciardi could still see her, as real as the portrait of Mussolini hanging on the wall. The front of her dress was some other color, black, it seemed. Luigi Alfredo walked over to her, and looked more closely: the little girl’s belly had been torn open by a spray of buckshot fired at point-blank range. Her ribs jutted white from the mess of burnt and ravaged flesh. Staring at him with dead eyes she said:
“Mamma, run come see, someone’s knocked down the front gate, run come see!”
Luigi Alfredo took a step backward, astonished. He turned to look at his mother, pointing the little girl out to her.
“Mamma, help her! Can’t you hear what she’s saying?”
Marta didn’t move; she stood there like a statue carved in stone. She looked toward the tree and Ricciardi realized that she couldn’t see the child, though she certainly sensed something. So he headed toward the house: he’d go himself to summon the little girl’s mamma. He’d only gone a short distance when he saw a boy, sitting next to a large stone. At first he thought the boy was asleep, but as he got closer he realized that something was gurgling out of his mouth, like water. He drew closer still until he was able to make out individual words:
“Papa, Papa, the brigands, the brigands have come!”
From a gaping wound in the boy’s throat a bubbling black liquid came pouring forth, unstoppable. Luigi Alfredo, without realizing what he was doing, began to cry. A dull and fathomless sense of grief swept over him, surging intermittently like the boy’s blood, and with every gush he felt filthier and more desperate. From far away he reached out his hand toward his mother, who was still standing motionless next to the tree with a broken swing, her hand covering her mouth. He took a few steps toward the house. At the threshold of the door a kneeling woman, almost hidden by the shadowy interior, was stretching her hand toward the courtyard.
“Lucia, Gaeta’, run!”