“You weren’t expecting that, were you? The duchess was rearranged, nice and comfortable, so that the bullet hole in her forehead lined up. The autopsy was quite informative, this time. In any case, it all must have happened in quick succession. The woman died between midnight and two in the morning, on the night between Saturday and Sunday. There’s no question about that.”
*
You shouldn’t have laughed. If you hadn’t laughed, I wouldn’t have done it. I loved you, desperately. I’d never have hurt you.
You never understood my pain, my despair. Perhaps I never possessed you; but I always felt that you belonged to me, since the very first time I met you. And I’ll never see anything as beautiful as your smile, your face cradled in my hands; I’ll never feel anything as marvelous as you, breathing in my arms.
I wish I could explain to you how horrible it was to see you catch another man’s eye, trigger his smile. To feel you turning your charm elsewhere to chain one man to you, and then another, and another still. Without respect, without any consideration for me. But I would have put up with anything, as long as I could keep you close to me. Because I loved you.
But you laughed. You laughed right in my face. And I couldn’t take it.
Ricciardi asked:
“Well then, what else have you discovered?”
Modo raised his hand, counting on his fingers.
“One: two broken ribs, not from trauma but from pressure. Someone placed a curved object on her chest, possibly to hold her still. A knee, for instance. Or something else, who can say? Two: four broken fingernails, on both hands. And no trace of skin, which means that she tried to grab a fully dressed body or something else, again, who can say? Three: her left hand, truly in very strange condition. The ring finger with a nice deep cut, bleeding: evidently, someone tore a ring off. Middle finger, sprained, without hematoma. Someone pulled on her finger after she was dead, perhaps trying to take another ring. Or perhaps. .”
Ricciardi concluded, sarcastically:
“. . something else, who knows what. So what else do you have in store for us? I can see from your face that you still have a surprise.”
Modo smiled like a little boy.
“Your client, my dear sad Ricciardi, had a tear on the inside of her left cheek. Someone had beaten her, before killing her.”
XIII
Standing in front of the mirror and knotting his tie, Giulio Colombo was definitely angry. And to make matters worse, he couldn’t really be angry with anyone other than himself.
Upon his return home that evening, when his Enrica, as always, had come to take his hat, his cane, and the usual kiss on her forehead, he hadn’t had the courage to look her in the eye. The whole way home he’d done his best to talk himself into believing that what he’d done had actually been for his daughter’s own good, but instead he couldn’t shake the deeply unpleasant sensation that he’d played a nasty trick on her.
This is the way matters stood: that morning, when his wife had confronted him with grim determination, setting forth the urgent necessity of doing something to protect Enrica from a terrible fate of loneliness and poverty, even though he knew the woman was exaggerating, he’d lacked the strength to push back, and he’d allowed her to talk him into it.
Just a short distance from his shop there was another large establishment, which sold fabrics; the manager of the place was an old friend of his, Luciano Fiore, who worked with his wife Rosanna. The couple, decidedly well-to-do, had an only son, Sebastiano, who at age twenty-eight was still a bachelor. This was due to the fact that to his parents, and especially to his mother, every girl out there seemed inadequate in terms of beauty, health, or property. Actually, Giulio suspected that none of the girls were interested in the young man, who was fatuous and superficial, and who lived far too well at his parents’ expense to have any interest in starting a family of his own. He had confided his suspicions to his wife, who had roundly accused him of lacking the courage to face up to the matter. And so he had given in, and had gone over to Fiore’s store to invite him to dinner, with wife and son, that very night. His friend’s wife had appropriated the situation and had informed him of her enthusiastic approvaclass="underline" actually, she had long thought just how adroit a solution it would be, and was already dreaming of a single, immense shop specializing in hats and fabrics, and run by her son.
Giulio found Rosanna Fiore to be deeply unlikable, and felt the same way about her son, whom he had only met once or twice. Poor Luciano, he thought, was the constant victim of his wife’s personality. Then it occurred to him that he himself might be in the same situation, and that thought only further blackened his already dark mood. It was hot out, very hot, and the idea of putting on jacket and tie even at night, even at home, certainly did nothing to improve the situation.
Once again he asked himself why he’d allowed himself to be talked into organizing this ambush for his poor sweet Enrica.
Maione was walking uphill, following the vicolo that led him home. It had been a long, difficult day, made worse by the terrible heat that persisted, even now, in the dark. He was thinking about what Bambinella had told him about Capece, and about how love leads to passion, and passion to rage, and rage to bloodshed. What Modo had said, concerning the fact that the duchess had been beaten before dying, fit in neatly with the account of what had happened at the theater.
In a certain sense, even the clumsy effort to arrange the duchess as if she were sleeping was an act of posthumous respect; the brigadier had gotten used to accepting the contradictions implicit in crimes of passion, where the murderers first killed without pity and then performed acts of tenderness toward their victims.
As he was mulling over these thoughts, he heard his name being called, and his heart suddenly raced; he remembered all too well that deep, musical voice. He replied: “Buona sera to you, Filomena. How are you?”
The woman was standing at the entrance to the little alley known as Vicolo del Fico, beneath a votive shrine with an ancient image of the Madonna painted on the wall.
“I’m just as the Madonna wishes me to be, Brigadie’. You see, I’m in charge of the flowers and candles; every so often I light one myself, and say a prayer for the well-being of the people who are dear to me. I include you in their number: I haven’t forgotten the help that you gave me.”
She underlined those words with a brief caress of the scarred side of her face, which was turned to the shadows. The other profile, faintly illuminated by the streetlamp, was as Maione remembered it: heartbreakingly beautiful.
“Don’t think twice, Filomena; after all, it’s my duty to help people. And with you it was a pleasure, as you know. In fact, I only wish I could’ve done more. Your son Gaetano, how’s he doing?”
“Fine, thanks. He’s no longer an apprentice, the master mason has hired him, he says he’s good at what he does. He took the place of Rituccia’s father, do you remember her? That little girl who lived nearby, now she lives with us.”
Maione remembered her perfectly: a serious little girl, with a sorrowful, unsettling look in her eyes. One of those encounters that punctuated the events in which he had been embroiled a few months earlier; when, one fine spring morning, he found himself stanching the bloody wound that had forever altered that woman’s face. In a single dizzying instant, the brigadier relived the new and profound emotions that spending time with Filomena had stirred in him.
“Would you care to stay for dinner? I could make you something cool, maybe macaroni with tomato and basil. As I recall, you liked that dish, or am I mistaken?”
Maione could hear his stomach rumble, like distant thunder.