Truth be told, Enrica was not indifferent to the subject. Quite simply, she was waiting. She was waiting for the man she had slowly fallen in love with over long blustery winter evenings and then during the sweet mild flower-scented nights of springtime, to finally step forward in some fashion.
After waiting for a year, she’d had an opportunity to speak to him. The occasion was hardly what she’d been dreaming of: she’d learned that the man of her dreams was a commissario in the police department, a discovery that had come when he’d questioned her about the murder of a certain fortune-teller she’d been to see a couple of times. The interview hadn’t been particularly friendly, — he sat there in silence and she was furious at how unprepared she’d been for the meeting;-but at least the ice had been broken and now, in the evening, when she sat stitching her embroidery by the kitchen window, she’d tilt her head ever so slightly in his direction, and in return she’d receive a hesitant wave of the hand from him. It might not seem like much, but to her it was a great deal.
Now she had to wait for Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, for that was his name, to find a way to be introduced to her father and ask his permission to pay a call on her. That, too, might take time, but she was certain that he’d manage it; because otherwise why would he come to his window, every night between nine and nine thirty, to watch her embroider? It was only a matter of time.
Enrica Colombo had a quiet, determined personality. And she knew how to wait.
Livia Vezzi, née Lucani, and now widowed, believed that she’d waited long enough. That was why she was now sitting in the central Rome train station waiting for the direttissimo to Naples, where she planned to take an extended holiday. The choice of destination was no accident, of course; and of course it had caused concern and worry among her friends and relatives, becoming a topic for the gossips who inhabited the high society of Italy’s capital.
Livia Vezzi was in fact a prominent personality: she was beautiful, dark, and feline, her buxom figure and symmetrical features embellished by a dimple in her chin and a dazzling smile. Moreover, she had been married to the nation’s most famous tenor, Arnaldo Vezzi, an absolute genius, the leading man in the society pages for a decade; she herself had been an opera singer, endowed with a lovely contralto voice. Her promising career had been interrupted by marriage. Her husband had had plenty of lovers before being murdered in his dressing room at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, just four months ago; and Livia, too, had had fleeting affairs that had left her untouched except perhaps for a deepening of her loneliness. As for her marriage, Livia couldn’t remember it ever being a happy one.
When she was left a widow, there were plenty of men who stepped forward; her beauty aside, she possessed an attractive position in society, and plenty of money, too. There weren’t many women who could boast among their friendships the daughter of the Duce, and she was invariably invited whenever he entertained. But she didn’t seem interested in new relationships; she showed the world a calm and smiling face but kept everyone at arm’s length. It was said that she had other things on her mind.
Putting on a show of indifference to the two men who were trying to strike up a conversation in the train station waiting room, the woman admitted to herself that what they said was true: she had other things on her mind. What she had on her mind was a pair of extraordinary green eyes, whose gaze she had met at an absolutely inappropriate moment, during the investigation into her husband’s murder.
A pair of eyes that had remained indifferent to her allure, which was something she was unaccustomed to; and yet it was no mere whim that had led her to take a train back to the city of blinding lights and deep dark shadows. She’d told her girlfriends, who were eager to determine whether there was a love story behind her apparently macabre decision to return for a holiday right in the city where her husband had been murdered, that her decision was an attempt to exorcize that ghost, once and for all. The truth, however, was that she wanted to understand what lay beneath her uneasy dreams. And if she wanted to understand, she’d have to see those eyes again.
As she watched the direttissimo come puffing into the station, offering a smile to the two men who’d offered to carry her luggage, she decided that she’d waited long enough to understand this thing about herself.
Perhaps she’d waited too long.
IV
The door of Ricciardi’s office swung open and the broad sweaty face of Brigadier Maione appeared.
“Commissa’, buon giorno, and good Sunday to you. You too among the lucky few working today?”
Ricciardi gave him a half-smile.
“Ciao, Maione. Come in, come right in. How is the day shaping up?”
Maione walked in, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, and dropped into a chair.
“Just like yesterday, Commissa’. Hot, a scorcher. It’s still early morning and already you can hardly breathe, and personally I had a lovely night, tossing and turning in my bed like a cutlet being braised. At a certain point, I had to sit down out on the balcony so I could get a breath of air: no matter what I tried, I was awake, and awake I remained. Can you believe it, Commissa’? I couldn’t wait for morning to come so I could get up and come into the office.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“I don’t understand what makes you do it, coming in on a Sunday. You have a lovely family, and for all I know your wife even made ragu today. Shouldn’t you be at home with your children?”
Maione’s face tightened into a grimace.
“Let’s not start talking about food, Dotto’. I’ve decided that I absolutely have to lose weight: the jacket on my summer uniform won’t button and, as you can see, I’ve had to put on my winter jacket and I’m about to faint from the heat. If you want to know the truth, it’s precisely because Lucia made ragu that I’ve decided to take the Sunday shift, otherwise, I know myself, I wouldn’t be able to resist, I’d gobble down three bowls. No, no: better if I stay here. After all, it ought to be a quiet day, don’t you think? Who’s going to have the energy to start trouble in this heat?”
Ricciardi had stood up from his desk and was looking out the window with both hands in his pockets.
“I don’t know about that. You can never say. You see, people are strange: their passions gain energy at the most unexpected times. The heat makes them lose their minds, makes them intolerant; things you’d put up with in the winter or spring irritate you in the summer. Believe me, the craziest things happen in this season.”
Maione gazed tenderly at Ricciardi’s back. He was the only one in police headquarters and, he suspected, in the whole city to be fond of the commissario. He liked the way that Ricciardi took the grief and pain of the victims and their families as his own, but also the way that he could understand, if not justify, the motives behind certain murders, comprehending the emotional turmoil of the guilty parties as well.
There were times when he’d also worried about the commissario’s loneliness and the suffering that he could sense formed a permanent background to his life. He’d even talked about it with Lucia who’d said, with an enigmatic smile, that every type of fruit ripens in its own season. Who knows what she had meant by that.
Well, one thing is certain, he thought to himself, you could say anything about Ricciardi except that he was an optimist.
“Well, what can I tell you, Commissa’: let’s just hope that no one gets worked up today. Let’s hope that instead of killing each other or beating each other up they just go for a nice dip in the sea at Mergellina, and they enjoy a nice bowl of pasta-damn them because they can eat pasta and I can’t-and then fall asleep in the bright sunshine. And that they leave us in peace, the few of us that are in here dripping sweat.”