That’s not why you did it: not to earn his gratitude, much less his pity. You did it because you still love him, because he’s the only man you’ve ever had in your life, the father of your children. Because you couldn’t afford to lose him, just because he’d made a silly mistake.
Even if the mistake in question was a murder.
After leaving Maione, Ricciardi walked toward police headquarters: only once he was certain that the brigadier could no longer see him did he change direction and head for Largo della Carità.
He couldn’t have pinpointed his reasons for wanting to keep his friend separate from that part of the investigation. Perhaps, he thought, because it was based more on feelings than on concrete facts; or else because of the danger, or else the situations that it might precipitate. Or else because, after the attempted attack on him and Livia, it had now become a personal question.
The thought of Livia brought the memory of the evening he’d spent with her back into his mind, the evening prior to the incident with the four gorillas. He’d enjoyed it, there was no denying the fact. He’d felt, if only for a few hours, free of the burden of solitude that the Deed had placed so squarely upon him. The woman was beautiful, amusing, and intelligent; the pleasure of her company and the unmistakable envy and admiration that washed over him in waves-both from men and women-had also coddled his ego. He wasn’t in love with her: he understood that from a simple comparison between the memory of those moments and the despairing, heartbreaking emotions that he felt in his chest when he thought about Enrica. But maybe that’s the secret, he thought: perhaps, to be happy, it’s important to limit one’s degree of emotional involvement.
He felt like an emotional apprentice. At his age, when most men have already had wives, children, and countless clandestine or frankly commercial sexual encounters, all he knew about love was the snips of monologues spouted by the various cadavers that he’d met. As he was walking in the shaft of light from the setting sun, he thought to himself that love is an infected root that seeks out the best way to survive: a fatal illness with an incredibly long course that causes addiction, making the victim prefer suffering to well-being, grief to tranquility, uncertainty to stability. He thought by free association of the image of the dead woman and her two rings, the ring that had once belonged to the first duchess and the other one, now in the journalist’s possession: two lovers’ troths, forcefully torn from the victim’s fingers, one when she was still alive and one when she was already dead.
Even the place where he was going, and the nocturnal image that he’d glimpsed there, was evidence of the fact. And it seemed indicative to him that he’d witnessed that scene while he was out wandering around aimlessly, in the throes of incoherent depression after glimpsing Enrica and the man he assumed was her new boyfriend. Love was a mirage that, even in the best of cases, only offered scraps of itself, stolen in the still watches of the night.
Like the passionate kiss that he’d witnessed in the doorway before which he was now standing.
Her lips clamped tight as she stood in front of the mirror and buttoned her dress to the neck, Rosa was getting ready to leave at a time of day that was unusual for her. It was a hot day, and she would certainly have been happier to stay at home than to be out and about: but for once she felt it was her duty.
She couldn’t stand to see Ricciardi suffering. He’d never had a very cheerful appearance, and she’d never once heard him laugh, at least not since he became an adult; he was silent and shy, but at any time of the day or night, she knew, or thought she knew, how he felt and what his mood was. For the past few days, though, her boy, the boy she had promised to protect, a solemn oath sworn to his mother on her deathbed, was suffering terribly. He never ate, he’d go out in the middle of the night and come home just before dawn, he’d sit there at night and listen to the radio in the dark for hours: and all this began the night he’d rushed breathless into her room to peer across the vicolo at the window across the way.
Once she was done with the row of buttons and had firmly fixed her hat in place with two hatpins, Rosa went over to the little window in the broom closet, at the end of the hallway; from there she could just get a narrow glimpse into a small bedroom in the Colombos’ apartment, specifically the room where the oldest daughter slept. She could just make out the headboard of the bed, with a wooden cross hanging on the wall, the nightstand with a water glass and two books, and the pillow upon which the girl’s head rested, facedown. From the movement of her shoulders, clearly visible from a distance of fifteen feet, Rosa saw evidence of what she’d expected: Enrica Colombo was crying.
She nodded with satisfaction and did what all the women in that quarter did whenever they needed to gather some information: she went to the hairdresser.
XXXIV
The street door was open and the doorman, who had pointed out the Fascist Party offices to him, wasn’t there. Ricciardi decided that anyone could go in: after all, it was just an association of citizens.
In fact the four flights of stairs that led up to the top floor were bustling with people, men climbing and descending the steps, in pairs or small groups, chatting and laughing. Ricciardi sensed the usual arrogant excitement, the noisy, slightly forced cheerfulness of the largely male assemblies. On the landing there was a double door, both panels swung wide open, and through it could be seen a large atrium filled with people; their clothing was varied, ranging from the sober elegance of light-colored suits and bowties to mortar-spattered workers’ smocks and overalls. Through the gap of a door swinging ajar, he glimpsed a man polishing a rifle, singing a love song in dialect.
At first no one paid any attention to Ricciardi, and he was forced to walk around a knot of four men, braying with laughter at a dirty joke; as soon as he walked into the room, however, a man with a ferocious expression came up to him and asked him roughly who he was and what he wanted. Silence fell immediately, even though the man hadn’t spoken in an especially loud voice.
Ricciardi clearly sensed the wave of hostility that washed over him from everyone in the room, but he didn’t take his eyes off the face of his questioner: he looked at him fixedly for a long time, until the man finally lowered his eyes. There was a burst of nervous coughing from somewhere out on the landing. In a firm, low voice, he said:
“I’m Commissario Ricciardi, from police headquarters. But I imagine you already know that.”
From a small knot of men at the far end of the room a man broke away; Ricciardi recognized him immediately: it was the guy who had threatened him the night before.
“So what? You are who you are, but you’re still not welcome here so you’d better get out. Just because things went your way once doesn’t mean they will again. Take my advice, leave on your own two feet while you can still walk, it’s good advice.”
The atmosphere had turned grim and tense: silence was absolute, you couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. On the far side of the room the man with the rifle had stopped singing and now he was standing up menacingly from his stool, striding to the doorway with his gun leveled. Everyone was looking at Ricciardi, who hadn’t shifted his gaze away from the man who’d first asked him who he was. He now slowly turned toward his old nocturnal acquaintance and stared at him, expressionless, his eyes empty and transparent; the squadrista stepped back almost imperceptibly and jutted his chin, arms akimbo, hands on hips, in an unconscious imitation of the one figure that made him feel confident.