Maione mopped his brow with his oversized handkerchief, loosened his tie, and made a decision: the time had come to go see Bambinella again.
XXVI
From the kitchen, Maria Colombo watched her daughter in the dining room, tutoring three little boys; two of them were the children of a well-to-do lumber wholesaler, and they were twins; the third, tiny and dark-skinned, with bright dancing eyes, was the concierge’s grandson.
Enrica often talked to her about how extremely intelligent this third little boy had proven to be, how he often did his work twice as fast as the twins, even though he was two years younger. While Enrica received a regular and sizable salary from the children of the lumber wholesaler, from the concierge’s family she received nothing but plentiful smiles and boundless gratitude.
Whenever Maria pointed it out to her, Enrica would reply that you don’t live on bread alone. There, that was exactly what drove Maria crazy about Enrica: her absolute lack of any common sense. On the subject of marriage, too, which they’d discussed endlessly, that was always at the root of their disagreement: practical common sense. Could it be, Maria wondered, that she was the only person in the family who recognized that time was passing, that youth makes way for old age and that it wouldn’t be long before a fresh face would no longer do Enrica any good? Or did she think that she could just wait indefinitely for her Habsburg prince to ride in on his white steed, to turn her into a queen?
Most important of all, her daughter wasn’t such a beauty that she’d capture a man at the first glance: Maria, who was her mother, had the courage to admit it herself. And so she’d finally taken charge of the situation, and she’d forced her husband to invite the Fiores to dinner.
For a whole day she’d waited for Enrica’s inevitable reaction: she knew that behind her sweet and tranquil nature there was a stubborn soul, anything but compliant, and that it certainly would be no easy matter to persuade her to accept this imposition. But it was for her own good, so she’d be able to respond, blow for blow, even at the cost of alienating the girl’s affections for a week or two; then Enrica would understand and even thank her.
That’s what a mamma’s for.
For the second time in three days, Maione knocked at Bambinella’s door.
“Brigadie’, what do you think, can I start to consider you one of my suitors? Next time you come, though, why don’t you bring, oh, I don’t know, a flower, a box of pastries, just anything. I’ll take you to meet mamma and we’ll iron out the details.”
Maione was still panting from the climb, and he was drenched with sweat.
“You’ve got one thing right, I don’t have the breath to breathe, much less to tell you to go straight to you-know-where. I’m a bad man to joke around with, you know that? Better cut it out, or one of these days I’ll come calling on you one last time, and the next thing you know you’ll be sitting in a cell and I’ll be throwing away the key!”
Bambinella flirtatiously raised one hand in front of her mouth and she giggled girlishly.
“Madonna, do you know how much I like a fiery man? All right then, Brigadie’, don’t work yourself up into a rage: it just means that I’ll wait patiently, I know that sooner or later you’ll make up your mind. The important thing is that you remember: for you it’s always free of charge.”
Maione hauled back to throw a slap that Bambinella dodged with a dainty motion. Both of them burst out laughing.
“So the truth is, Bambine’, that this story of the duchess is deep and complicated. Not so much the facts themselves; it’s that we can’t operate freely.”
Bambinella, who, as usual, was wearing her silk kimono, walked toward the table where she’d been sitting before Maione arrived.
“I understand, Brigadie’. You’ve got the press, the nobility, and the authorities to deal with. All of them are people you can’t exactly throw into a cell without thinking twice, like you can with girls like me. It’s less of a headache when they murder poor people, for you cops, eh?”
Maione raised his voice.
“No, it’s not less of a headache. How dare you say such a thing? Why, do you think that Brigadier Raffaele Maione pays less attention to what happens to poor people? Listen, for saying something like that, I won’t just throw you in jail, I’m liable to kick your ass down the stairs!”
Bambinella laughed openly. When she laughed, her womanly affectations and imitations vanished, and she sounded very much like a horse.
“Brigadie’, how little it takes to piss you off! I know, I know: you and your commissario, the handsome one who carries a hex, you treat poor people and rich people just the same. That’s why we respect you. After all, what do you think-if I really thought that, would I be helping you?”
When Bambinella sat back down, Maione noticed that she had an enormous dish of fried anchovies on the table in front of her.
“What is this, a conspiracy? Everyone seems to be eating here, at every hour of the day or night! You must have agreed on this behind my back, all of you: the minute you see me coming you start eating something? Since when do people sit down to eat at three in the afternoon, if I might ask?”
With her mouth full, Bambinella replied:
“No, Brigadie’, it’s just that at lunchtime I wasn’t hungry, so I had only a little hard biscuit and tomatoes-fresella con pomodori. Then Gigino came by, the fishmonger down below who, every so often. . okay, you get it, but truth be told, the man has a wife who is truly revolting. In other words, the man has no money, but he breaks my heart, and so this is how he settles his accounts, a few anchovies, a sea bream or two. The anchovies are nice and fresh, if I didn’t cook them right away in this heat, I’d have had to throw them out. But try some, try some, there must be five pounds here, I can’t possibly eat it all myself. Hold on, I’ll get another plate and a fork.”
Maione let himself drop heavily onto the ramshackle sofa and waggled his forefinger.
“No, no, forget about it. I made a promise and now I can’t break it. But listen here, now: I want you to tell me everything you know about Mario Capece and his family.”
Bambinella’s mascaraed eyes opened wide in a sincere display of astonishment.
“Oh, so now he’s the guilty party? My girlfriend who works at the Salone Margherita told me all about it. .”
Maione raised his hand:
“No, hold up just a minute: that’s not what I said. In fact, I have my doubts that it was him at all, even though he can’t give us an alibi. The thing is, we have to check him out carefully so that we can rule him out as a suspect. So, spare me your personal opinions and just tell me what you know. And swallow first, because if you talk with a mouthful of anchovies, you’ll be even more revolting than usual.”
“Grazie, Brigadie’, you’re always such an exquisite gentleman. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, a girl feels appreciated for what she is. Now then, Capece: all I know I told you the other day. Capece wasn’t someone you saw in the usual social circles, before he struck up this affair with the duchess. He was a journalist, and he was even a good one. Then, five or six years ago, he started seeing her and he became a public figure. Still, I never heard anything about him that didn’t concern the duchess. That is, if people mentioned him, they always mentioned her in the same breath.”
“And just how long had this relationship been going on?”