“Right here, in the first room. The anteroom, really. On the little sofa.”
“Have you touched anything? Is it all just as you found it?”
The woman furrowed her brow.
“No, I don’t think I did. That is, I touched the duchess, I called her. Then I called Mariuccia, and Mariuccia called Peppino. We tried to wake her up, then we saw. . we realized. . well, now you just come in and you’ll see what we saw.”
Ricciardi looked toward the half-open door. It was one thing to run into the Deed by chance, while walking down the street or by happening to pass by the site of an accident; it was quite another matter to go looking for it intentionally. This was the real sacrifice that he made: choosing to take onto himself all that pain and grief, allowing the last terrible shudder of departing life to coil around him and through him like a bloody mist.
He nodded to Maione; the brigadier was accustomed to the commissario’s working methods, which never varied. He’d enter the scene of the murder alone, he’d stay there for a few minutes, and then he’d emerge. Simple. As for Maione, he needed only to guard the door, and make sure that no one else came into the room.
He’d never be willing to be the first to enter the scene of a murder with the commissario; nothing on earth could persuade him to do it. Maione might be a big, strong brigadier who wasn’t afraid of a thing, and he might be fond of his superior officer, but he’d never have the guts. And that was that.
At the far end of the hall, stretched out in the bed where he’d certainly die before long, Matteo Musso, Duke of Camparino, listened to the silence that was broken only by the rattle of his breathing. It wasn’t normal for there to be all this peace and quiet, not on a Sunday. From the tightly fastened shutters, he should have heard the laughter of the children playing in the piazza, the chattering of the housewives emerging from mass, the shouts of the strolling vendors selling spasso, the blend of walnuts, hazelnuts, and lupini beans that would brighten the dining room tables after Sunday lunch.
In short, he ought to be hearing the sounds of life. The same life that was abandoning him now. Instead: all this silence.
And solitude, of course. But that he was used to. Aside from the nurse who came twice a day, to give him those useless injections: as if you could stop death, instead of just putting off its arrival.
What silence, thought Matteo. The silence of death. Perhaps after all death had come to the house before its time. Perhaps it came in through another doorway: a door that no one expected.
Wheezing and gasping, the elderly duke smiled an obscene smile.
VI
Behind the door was a proper room, not at all the anteroom that the housekeeper had described. It was swathed in dim light, the shutters pulled to, as if to let a sleeper sleep, but the figure that he glimpsed on the sofa wasn’t sleeping.
Ricciardi stepped forward, shutting the door behind him. He could make out the silhouettes of the furniture, the chairs, a writing desk. Paintings on the walls, a soft carpet underfoot. Odors. Lavender, sweet smelling, a sparkling clean house. But also the smell of cordite: gunshots had been fired in that room. Perhaps just once, the smell wasn’t overpowering. And something else: blood. Clotted blood, that characteristic odor, like rusted iron.
The commissario gazed at the form of the corpse, which he’d take the time to examine more closely, later, in the light. He identified the direction of the face, well aware that the Deed would set the image in the place where the victim had last looked: this was the strange physics of his power, one of the rules established only to be broken. There was no exception to the rule that time, however: in the corner exactly opposite the couch on which the dead woman lay, perfectly visible to Ricciardi’s mind’s eye, in spite of the darkness, the Duchess Musso di Camparino went on repeating her last living thought.
She’d been a very beautiful woman: death could not conceal her height, her prosperous shape wrapped in a black silk nightdress. She would have been forty, more or less, but she must have carried her age with all the pride of wealth and the confidence of her resources. The image stared straight ahead, proud and motionless. Ricciardi sensed none of the most common emotions: fear, rage, horror. Instead, he sensed surprise, something approaching curiosity: the woman never thought that she was about to die, right up to the end.
Still, now she was dead; in fact, to be exact, she had been murdered. At the center of her forehead, sharp and precise, above her half-closed eyes, was a round hole: the entry wound, a bullet hole. Her face was reddened, her black tongue protruded from her lips. But her features were also fine, high cheekbones, dark eyes, a mouth with large, very white teeth.
As always, the commissario focused his attention on what the Duchess di Camparino had to tell him, the message that she was leaving; the portion of thought that death had interrupted, the snapped thread.
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
Like a prayer, murmured endlessly, repeated until it could dissolve into the air along with the simulacrum of a mouth that was uttering it. A simple phrase, as clear as if it had been screamed in silence.
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
Ricciardi had no need to memorize it: he’d hear those words, and the suffering that lay behind them, over again many times. Head down, he went to open the shutters and let in shafts of pitiless sunlight.
Maione had stayed outside to sweat with the Sciarras, man and wife, and the housekeeper. Two children had come laughing down the stairs, a boy and a girl, the girl brandishing two large hunks of bread. The brigadier’s love of children was sorely tested by that sight. Sciarra, in a firm voice, hushed them both and halted their progress by seizing each by the nape of the neck, as if they were a couple of puppies. The little boy loudly protested:
“Papà, listen, that Lisetta took my bread, you tell her to. .”
The doorman pried one of the hunks of bread out of his daughter’s fingers and gave it to the boy. The little girl whined:
“Papà, Totonno ate my cheese, we’d made a trade and now he wants to eat the bread too!”
Sciarra smacked them both hard and threatened them: “If the two of you don’t cut it out, I’ll take the bread away from both of you and give it to the brigadier, here, and he’ll gobble it up for himself. Now get out of here, and shut the door behind you!”
Maione inwardly prayed that they’d keep it up, and that, strictly for educational reasons, let that be clear, he’d be forced to eat both pieces of bread. Possibly, to wash them down a little bitter, dipped in a nice tomato sauce. But instead, the two children, duly frightened, shot back up the stairs, each clutching his precious chunk.The brigadier heaved a sigh.
“Sweet. Are they yours?”
“Yes, Brigadie’, two scourges of God. And there are two others upstairs, an older boy and a little girl. But these two are the worst stinkers.”
Mariuccia had started up the stairs after her children, but Maione had halted her with a wave of the hand.
“No, Signo’, you’ll have to wait here until the commissario says otherwise, and allows you to go. And while we’re waiting, tell me something: just how is the duke’s apartment divided up? Are there personal rooms, shared rooms, and how many?”
The housekeeper struck a stance that seemed strangely defensive to Maione.
“No, you understand, Brigadie’, each of the three has his own rooms, they don’t actually see each other much.”
Sciarra grimaced, wrinkling his enormous nose.
“No, for that matter, they never see each other at all. The duke stays in bed and never moves, while young master Ettore is always out on the terrace, him, the flowers, and the plants, and the duchess. .”