He didn’t deserve our help. He doesn’t deserve a thing. But you still love him, even after everything you had to put up with.
I don’t understand.
In spite of himself, Ricciardi was impressed with the ambiguous nature of the boy’s answer. Like mother, like son, he thought. Maione, on the other hand, was watching Capece, his expression; the journalist’s animated face was reflecting contrasting emotions: mortification, sense of guilt, humiliation. But also a certain fierce pride, the last-ditch defense of a powerful feeling that had outlived its object. Once or twice, he’d opened his mouth as if to say something, but then he’d stopped. In some way, it seemed that his wife’s hand, intimately resting on his thigh, was dominating his will.
The commissario started talking again.
“Capece, I’m going to have to ask you a question again that I already asked you once at the newspaper. I warn you that the document I have in my pocket authorizes me to search this apartment, but I believe that you’ll agree with me that it would be best for everyone if that could be avoided. Searching a home is a violation of a family’s privacy; we don’t want to do it, and I assure you that you wouldn’t enjoy having it done. We’re only looking for one thing, so I’ll ask you: do you possess weapons, in this apartment?”
Maione was watching Sofia’s hand, which lay motionless. Capece seemed to come back to earth from the mists of some recollection, his gaze became sharper, more present. After a long hesitation, he said:
“Commissario, I fought in the war. I was an officer. War is a horrible thing, nothing but pain and grief: but I was a young man and I believed in it, in this fatherland that has now become an excuse for every sort of abuse. To remind myself how useless a thing war is, I kept my pistol. But I keep it under lock and key, in my desk drawer, unloaded and without bullets. There are no other weapons in the apartment.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“All right. Let’s take a look at this relic.”
Capece stood up and led the way. His wife followed behind him, tranquil, with a half-smile on her lips as if she was about to show her guests a nice drawing her daughter had done. They reached the study through a single door that separated it from the drawing room. Capece reached up onto a bookshelf, felt his way along it, and found a key; he went around behind the desk and opened the long central drawer under the desktop. He pulled open a metal box without a lock and opened it.
He looked up, his face white, eyes round with astonishment.
“It’s gone! The pistol’s vanished!”
Ricciardi turned to look at Sofia and he saw on her face the same surprise as on her husband’s. If the two of them were playacting, they were very good. Husband and wife stared at each other: they were clearly aghast. Capece said:
“But who could have taken it?”
The woman had lifted a hand to her mouth and was shaking her head very slightly, as if she wanted to deny an unmistakable fact.
“Why. . I don’t know. We hadn’t seen it in years. We’ve had four or five different maids over the years. You can sell a pistol, can’t you? They might very well have stolen it, and we’d have never noticed. I can give you the first and last names of all the maids. . I never touched it, and neither did my husband! And in any case, as my husband told you, it wasn’t loaded. You can’t possibly think. . that’s absurd!”
Maione and Ricciardi looked at one another, then they focused their attention on the Capeces, who were now clearly in the throes of fear. The commissario said:
“All right. We’re leaving for now. But you need to think hard and try to find that revolver, and keep in touch with us about any and all developments in your search.”
Capece shot them his assent in a glance, his brow furrowed by the thousand thoughts that were taking shape. His wife had lost all her confidence and was casting sidelong looks at the journalist. The disappearance of the pistol seemed to have sown doubts in her mind that her role as public defender might have been, at the very least, overhasty.
As they were leaving, as if it were an afterthought, Ricciardi turned and said to the man:
“Ah, Capece, I’d like to ask you a courtesy: the ring, you know the one. The one from the Salone Margherita. Make sure we can have access to it, it’s a part of the investigation.”
And, glimpsing a flash in Sofia’s eyes as he went, he said goodbye and left.
Ricciardi would have preferred to skip going by the scene of the car crash a second time, but he couldn’t suggest a pointless detour to Maione; in part because now the air was even more scalding hot than before, if that was possible. So he had to listen again to the dissonant chorus of the dead family, with the child anticipating an ice cream he’d never enjoy.
He tried to distract himself by thinking back to the Capece family: certain looks, certain equilibriums, certain tensions that might have escaped him just a month ago, now struck him as obvious; but they altered the picture that he’d been building up until then. Maione, who had not stopped mopping his brow with his handkerchief, broke the silence:
“Commissa’, what do you think of all this playacting about the pistol? Everyone looking at everyone else all surprised: ‘Oh, Jesus, whatever happened to our little toy? It was here until just a few years ago, we all remember clearly, but one of those horrible maids must have stolen and sold it off on the black market’?”
Ricciardi, however, wasn’t certain.
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to say that there was no pistol? We wouldn’t have found it in our search and that would have been the end of it. No, I don’t think so. What I think, instead, is that they hadn’t coordinated their stories. Husband and wife glared at each other indignantly, each of them convinced that the other got rid of it. The family is defending Capece, at least, that’s what I think.”
Maione was trying to stick to the shade to limit the damage inflicted by the intense heat. Two large patches of sweat were rapidly spreading under the sleeves of his light-colored jacket.
“The fact remains, Commissa’, that the pistol didn’t emerge and Capece has no alibi: because we know that the Signora is talking nonsense when she says that her husband slept with her on Saturday night. He hasn’t slept with his wife in years, take it from Raffaele Maione. And after all, he told us himself, no? that he made the rounds of the dives and taverns, after going to the theater.”
“That’s true; but now it’s up to us to prove that. If Signora Capece will testify to that effect and her husband decides to accept her help, then we’re back at square one. We have to follow all the leads, the clock is ticking. You go home now and get back in uniform, because I don’t even recognize you dressed like that. I’ll see you back at headquarters.”
“And what are you going to do, Commissa’?”
“I need to go and check something out. See you later.”
You watch him leaning out over the balcony railing, smoking. The way he used to do, a hundred years ago, when you were still a family. Every so often, back then, he’d go out on the balcony, and you’d wonder where he was wandering in his thoughts, what ideals and what thoughts he was chasing. He’s a man, you used to think. He needs his little moments of solitude.
Then solitude ended up being yours. Days and nights spent wondering where he was, and what he was doing. And fearing the answers.
He didn’t say a word, after the two policemen left. You’d prepared all your answers, you were ready to give him another chance; you thought that the fact that you’d defended him, that you’d stood by his side, would strip the veil away from his eyes, the enchanted veil that that witch put on him with a spell, years ago. That he still had a family, after all. A wife. You thought that he’d have reacted by embracing you, in tears, thanking you for what you’d done. Maybe even scolding you for the risk you’d run by helping him. Instead he just went out onto the balcony, turning his back on you without even looking you in the eye. You don’t mind, it’s just the way he reacts.