From throat to belly, the woman’s body was ravaged with knife wounds; her tattered dress left the dozens of cuts that had been inflicted upon her open to view. A large puddle of blood was spreading across the ground between her legs. Behind her the little boy glimpsed a man, and he too was on his knees; half of his face was gone, eradicated by a close-range shotgun blast. The other half was the very picture of terror. From the one staring eye flowed tears, from the mouth twisted into a grimace poured an incessant mumbling:
“Have pity, have pity, take anything you want, take the girl and the boy, have pity. .”
Luigi Alfredo felt a hand clutching his shoulder and he screamed: it was his mother dragging him away.
He looked at her and saw that she, like him, was crying.
“What did you see? How many, how many of them did you see?”
The boy held up his hand with four fingers extended. He’d never forget the words his mother spoke.
“All of them, then. You see them all. You’re cursed, my poor little boy. Cursed.”
The same suffocating heat enveloped Ricciardi twenty-five years later, in his office in police headquarters. A cop, he thought. And what else could I have done for a living? Infected by pain and grief, lost in the corruption of rotting passions, what other kind of work could I have done? And work that, perhaps, does no good at all, except to put a belated patch on all that suffering.
He had scrupulously kept himself at a safe distance from all passion. He’d walled emotions out of his life, keenly aware as he was of how love could destroy and corrupt. Every grave in every cemetery is full of love, he thought. And so the best thing to do is to remain alone and observe love from a distance; as far away as possible.
And yet for the past few months this distance had been growing narrower, in a worrisome and unexpected fashion. Ricciardi threw open the shutters and let in the sun; the first shaft of light illuminated the heap of documents on his desk, waiting to be filled out. With a sigh, he began writing. Better to work: God bless the Sunday shift.
III
God damn the Sunday shift, thought Brigadier Raffaele Maione with a snort of annoyance as he headed downhill from Piazza Concordia toward police headquarters. The heat was already hellish, and it was only eight in the morning. God damn the summer, too.
The brigadier was furious, and he really shouldn’t have been. But he decided that he had perfectly good reasons. Actually, he was having a good moment, the best in the three years since a thief had stabbed his son Luca to death. This horrible event had not only broken his heart, it had also driven a wedge into his family, separating his wife from him and the other children, and leaving her closed up in a silent, inconsolable grief.
Until the miracle happened that spring, just when he was beginning to despair of ever seeing her enchanting smile again. Man and wife had come together, united again the way they had been so long before, and at age fifty Raffaele had been given another unhoped-for chance at happiness. Once again, the Maione household rang with the bright laughter of mother and children, once again the father good-naturedly allowed himself to be mocked and ridiculed; once again on Sundays Lucia’s legendary spaghetti sauce opened stomachs and hearts to optimism. And so, why was the brigadier striding off with a grim expression of discontent toward his Sunday shift? And above all, why had he intentionally accepted that shift, swapping with a colleague who could hardly believe his ears when Maione proposed the trade?
This is how it happened: a week ago Raffaele had gone out for a stroll, arm in arm with his pretty wife, their five children trailing after them. Just a short distance from their front door they had walked past the shop of Ciruzzo Di Stasio, vendor of fresh fruit and vegetables, one of the brigadier’s old schoolmates and longtime official purveyor to the Maione family. The man had stepped forward, doffed his cap, and had proffered a gallant compliment to Maione’s wife:
“Donna Luci’, you’re simply enchanting. There is gold in your hair and your eyes are the color of seawater. One of these days I’m going to write you a song, you know how much I love to sing. But what are you doing with this burly bear, is what I’d like to know?” And he’d reached out to give an affectionate pat to the jacket of the police uniform, comfortably stretched over the prominent belly.
Lucia had laughed and thanked him. Maione however was hurt, and a stab of jealousy had pierced his heart. He preferred not to show it however, swallowing bitter gall when Lucia commented that Ciruzzo too was holding up well, still thin as a nail at age fifty. Maione, who weighed a corpulent 265 pounds, now felt even worse; actually Lucia’s comment was due only to her concern for her husband’s health. His father, after all, had had the same physique and had died a young man, of a heart attack.
And so it was that, from that day forward, every time he took a bite of food, his mind ran to Ciruzzo and Lucia, which put him in a bad mood. And so he decided to lose weight, and right away; he’d teach that oaf of a grocer to court his wife; he’d show him who was still the luckiest husband in the Spanish Quarter. So there he was now, cursing under his breath and going into the office on a Sunday for a reason he would never have confessed, not even under torture: to avoid eating Lucia’s wonderful spaghetti sauce.
From behind the shutters, already half-shut to ward off the ferocious sun, Lucia was watching her husband leave for the police station. On Sunday. Just when she’d finished cooking the finest pot of beef ragu in the city: nine pieces of meat, nine different varieties, sautéed in lard and then left to simmer for a whole day in tomatoes, onions, and red wine. This was impossible, she knew her husband too well. He’d never give up his ragu. There could be only one explanation: Raffaele had another woman on his mind.
That was the only possible explanation for the silences and unhappiness of the past few days, ever since they’d gone out for that stroll with the children; it was unmistakable, he’d met another woman and it had altered his mood.
Stirring the terra-cotta pot with her wooden spoon, she remembered that her mother used to tell her that the cook’s mood altered the food that she prepared: to cook well, you had to be happy. This ragu would no doubt be bitter as wormwood, she decided.
A sharp stabbing pain in her chest: jealousy. She was not going to let destiny deprive her of someone that she loved so dearly. Biting her lip, Lucia walked away from the window.
Enrica Colombo liked to wake up early on Sundays, so she had plenty of time to prepare the midday meal while the rest of her family lazed away in bed, taking advantage of the fact that it was a holiday. Her methodical personality required order, and order required time. She laid out on the table all of the ingredients for her ragu, and wondered what her parents and her brothers and sisters would have thought if she suddenly burst into song. Certainly not because of the dawning Sunday-considering the heat, already blistering in the early morning-nor because of the family stroll that would come later in the Villa Nazionale, with the traditional purchase of peanuts for the little ones by her father. There was another reason entirely.
Enrica was twenty-four years old and she’d never had a boyfriend. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but you couldn’t call her homely either, because she possessed an utterly feminine grace and kindness as well as fine delicate features. A little too tall, perhaps, and reluctant to open up to strangers; from behind her tortoiseshell rimmed glasses, her eyes were perfectly capable of chilling the ardor of anyone ill advised enough to try to bridge the distance that she put between herself and outsiders. This attitude was a source of great concern to her parents, who were afraid their firstborn might be looking at a future as an old maid; after all, her younger sister had already been married for two years, while she seemed unwilling even to meet anyone. She’d had her suitors, but she’d discouraged them all, turning down invitations courteously but firmly.