And yet Enrica couldn’t see that her father and Sebastiano Fiore had anything in common: her father was a dreamer, he had progressive, liberal political ideas, generous impulses, and a deep-rooted sense of honor; the other man thought only of frivolous things, and didn’t strike her as much of a worker, for that matter.
But what alternatives did she have? Instinctively, she looked toward the dark window on the opposite side of the vicolo. A lonely, enigmatic man, with a hard, dangerous job, feared by everyone and perhaps hated too. Probably dating a woman who looked like she’d just stepped down from the silver screen, where she was playing a gangster’s moll.
No, her mother was certainly right: better to just stick with Sebastiano, and think no more about it.
She dried her tears with her sleeve. Damned onions, she thought.
As she chopped onions, Lucia Maione was weeping and smiling. The tears were for the acrid odor that came from the plate, where she kept piling up fine slices; the smile was for her husband.
She’d noticed that now he was being far more attentive to the way he ate, just as she’d asked him to do. She was sure that he’d understood how important it was to her, to keep him in good health for at least another fifty years. She couldn’t live without him, she’d finally understood it. In those years, those long years in which she’d been the high priestess of her grief and sorrow, she’d run the risk of losing him entirely: now she saw him for what he was, a handsome, imposing, captivating man; his honesty, his rectitude would keep him from having an affair on the side. If he ever fell in love with another woman, he’d leave her. And she couldn’t have blamed him: after all, she’d really abandoned him.
But now she was determined to take care of her man. She wouldn’t let anyone take him away from her, not even God Almighty. She added the onions to the vegetable soup she’d made, without meat or pasta, and set the pot on the flame.
Rosa took the pot off the fire. The policeman who had come to tell her that Ricciardi would not be home for dinner that night had just left, raising his fingers to the visor of his cap in a sign of respect.
So where was he going to eat dinner? And what would he eat? Certainly something that was going to make his stomachache even worse. Did he think she hadn’t noticed, that for the past three days he’d constantly been putting his hand on his tummy? She shook her head in concern. By now she’d concluded that Luigi Alfredo’s real problem was Signorina Colombo, the daughter of the haberdasher who lived in the building across the way.
That morning the wife of the butcher that both families frequented had come to fix Rosa’s hair. She’d told her all about how, the very same day that Ricciardi had begun acting so strangely, she’d been summoned urgently to do Enrica’s hair, in preparation for a visitor that she would be seeing later that day.
The mother had told the hairdresser that she’d arranged a dinner without her daughter’s knowledge, and that she was very worried about the girl because at age twenty-five she still wasn’t engaged. The woman had been very accurate, reporting to Rosa word for word.
Shaking her head, she wondered how she could tell her young man that the time to move was now, that he needed to take charge of his life. That life cannot be lived looking out the window.
Wearily, she picked up an onion and started chopping it for tomorrow night’s dinner.
XXIX
When Ricciardi closed his office door behind him, it was already practically dark. In the half-light of the hallway, he could clearly make out the images of the dead cop and thief, luminescent with curdled suffering.
“Maria, Maria, oh, the pain,” the policeman was saying. Exactly, thought Ricciardi. The pain.
He was so tired. As he walked down the steps of police headquarters, in his mind the details of the Camparino murder were floating disconnected and devoid of meaning, like asteroids hurtling through the night sky. The ring taken, he thought, reminded by the voice of the dead man who had just spoken to him. And the traces of gritty dirt on the carpet, the broken ribs, the padlock that hadn’t been forced. The keys in the drawer, the broken fingernails. Details, each of them with a weight of its own: but that only worked if placed into a framework whose principal figure was fully understood.
Ricciardi was frequently sardonic when people told him about the detective movies or yellow-jacketed mystery novels that had come into fashion over the past few years. In the plots of those books and films, everything always fit perfectly, and the detective found only clues that led unerringly to the guilty party.
He didn’t like the movies and he rarely read novels: he didn’t like pretending when it came to murders. He thought there was already plenty of crime out there, without any need to invent more of it. And anyway, reality was quite a different matter: false leads were indistinguishable from real leads, at least until you could get a better idea of the larger picture.
Lost in these thoughts, he jumped when he heard the officer on duty at the main entrance call to him:
“Commissario, buona sera. There’s a lady here to see you.”
He stepped aside, to let Livia come ahead.
As he looked at her, Ricciardi realized that even though he’d only met her recently, she was always more beautiful than he remembered her. She was wearing a silk blouse with broad horizontal stripes and a skirt that sat snug on her hips, slightly flared just below the knees. On her head, with her hair cut short to leave her long neck visible, she wore a cloche hat at a rakish angle. Her long legs, sheathed in transparent stockings with a black stripe up the back, slipped into a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her generous décolleté was adorned by an amber necklace, and it inevitably attracted men’s eyes. Her tapered hands wore black, elbow-length gloves.
She gave the policeman a dazzling smile, and the man was clearly charmed.
“Grazie, officer. It’s been a pleasure to wait with you.”
The policeman snapped a smart salute, though he was apparently still unable to close his mouth. Ricciardi gave him a nasty look, but couldn’t bring himself to upbraid him. Instead, he addressed Livia:
“Good evening, Signora. To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Do you have some information for us?”
The woman quickly guessed that the commissario was ill at ease in the presence of a subordinate, and picked up the lifeline he had thrown her.
“Yes, Commissario. I’m here to report to you on. . on the matter in question. It’ll take some time, though. I don’t think we’ll be finished soon.”
Ricciardi nodded, stone-faced, then he turned to the officer: “Capezzuto, send someone to my apartment; have them say that I won’t be home early, and I’ll get something to eat on my own. Don’t forget, now.”
The policeman snapped his mouth shut loudly and said: “Yessir, Commissa’, don’t give it a second thought. I’ll send someone immediately.”
As soon as they were out the front door and around the corner, Livia burst out laughing as she slipped her arm through Ricciardi’s.
“Did you see that? Wasn’t I subtle? That means I could be a policewoman, doesn’t it?”
The commissario looked at her face; she truly was splendid. Her smile illuminated her features, underlined by a light and skillfully applied makeup; but it wasn’t just that. It was the light that he saw in her eyes whenever she looked at him. Ricciardi remembered the first time they’d met, when her husband had been murdered: her gaze was dimmed with suffering and regret. It was a gaze that he knew well, that he glimpsed regularly in the living and the dead: the gaze of sorrow. Then it had started to change, especially toward him. The veil had slowly slipped away from her eyes and now she looked like a young girl who’d just gotten what she’d always wanted.