Perhaps the woman, in her madness, had had a point. Those who bring death and damnation really are invisible.
The Colombo family was getting ready for the Sunday lunch, but there was something in the air that didn’t seem right.
It wasn’t the humidity, nor was it the gray daylight that filtered in through the open window: it was, rather, a question of atmosphere. Even the children, who usually talked all at once in a cheerful, deafening cacophony, had fallen silent and exchanged baffled glances. There was a reason.
The reason was Enrica.
Usually the young woman was a smiling, quiet presence in the apartment, and she filled the kitchen with her serene, hard-working sweetness. She was part of the family and, in a very real sense, its true core. But today she loomed like an omen of some impending disaster: her eyes swollen, behind sunglasses, her tangled hair, her reddened cheeks.
It was obvious that she had been crying, shut up in the bedroom she hadn’t left since that morning. Her mother and her sister, both worried by that unusual behavior, had gone to knock on her door, but they’d received only a terse reply; finally they’d resigned themselves to making lunch without her, exchanging bewildered glances without a word.
Giulio, for his part, was clearly glowering with grim discomfort: he was no longer willing to tolerate the fact that his daughter was manifestly suffering, and there was no mistaking the reason. He hadn’t worked his whole life so he could condemn his beloved Enrica to a fate that went against her will; if he had to, he’d support her for all the years she wished, and then leave her enough to live on with all due dignity. And if his wife didn’t agree with him, that would be too bad for her.
Just as he was about to put down his fork and express his thoughts aloud, Enrica beat him to it, speaking in a calm and unruffled voice:
“Mamma,” she said, “I know you only want what’s best for me and you’re worried because at my age I’m still not engaged to be married.”
One of her younger brothers stifled a nervous giggle behind one hand, prompting an angry glare from his father. Enrica went on:
“But I would beg you to consider that, precisely because I am now and have been for some years an adult, I am also capable of deciding what I want from my life. And what I do not want. Mamma, don’t take this the wrong way: but I never want to see that man, Sebastiano Fiore, again as long as I live.”
The phrase tumbled out into the silence of the tomb. A distant rumble of thunder came in through the window, sounding like an airplane going overhead.
Maria shot a fiery glance at her daughter, but the girl looked back with her customary tranquil determination. At that point, the woman tried on a conciliatory tone:
“How on earth can you say such a thing? Has he somehow disrespected you, is there something wrong with him? Do you think you deserve better? Don’t you like his family? Or is it. .”
Enrica raised one hand to stem the rising tide of questions.
“No, Mamma. Nothing like that. It’s simpler than that: I don’t love him.”
“But you could get used to him, in time. Perhaps, a little at a time. .”
“I’m sorry, but you refuse to understand.” Enrica heaved a deep sigh; her whole family was looking at her, no one touched their piping hot bowls of pasta. “I know that I’ll never be able to love him the way a wife must love her husband; the way you love Papà.”
Her mamma sat, waiting, openmouthed: “Why on earth not?”
“For the simplest reason imaginable, Mamma: I’m in love with someone else.”
In the quietest tone of voice on earth. A bomb like that, tossed in the quietest tone of voice on earth. Maria turned to Giulio:
“And you? You’re her father, and you ought to have her best interests at heart; what do you have to say about it?”
Her husband straightened his back and, looking his wife right in the eye, said calmly:
“I say that this ragù looks like it must be delicious. It’s Sunday, it’s lunchtime, and I say: buon appetito.”
And with that, he dug in.
XLVII
In the silence of Sunday afternoon, Ricciardi was looking at Adriana Musso di Camparino’s murderer.
He watched him move lazily in the heat, taking care of minor chores. He watched him look up at the sky, when a distant rumble announced that the weather was finally about to change; the man shook his head, sighed, and went back to pruning dry leaves off the plants.
Ricciardi’s head was no longer spinning. The walk he’d taken all the way from Santa Lucia had cleared his thoughts, and he’d felt the usual miracle take place in his mind: with the new interpretive framework, every individual piece slotted into its place, every element harmonized with the others, and now, at last, they formed a picture that was fully plausible from every point of view. To a certain extent, he’d also forgiven himself: he’d been superficial and careless, he knew that; but deep down he’d also gone on thinking, investigating that murder without ever really stopping. Because he’d never really been convinced that it had gone the way everyone thought.
By the halfway point along his walk, he’d reconstructed all the various events, exactly as they had occurred. Now he needed to know the rest: the motives, the reasons why. The context of the passions, the emotions that had danced around the duchess’s corpse.
He walked over to the murderer and the man saw him. He didn’t seem surprised, nor did he appear to have any thought of running, no sudden impulses. The commissario greeted him with a nod of the head and sat down on a marble bench: Peppino Sciarra, the doorman of Palazzo Camparino, doffed his oversized hat and let himself sink down beside him.
They sat in silence, for a while. Somewhere, from a window not far away, several goldfinches sang sweetly to the dying summer. It was Ricciardi’s turn to speak, and Ricciardi spoke:
“When Signora Capece confessed, I believed her. We all believed her; and we were right, because everything she said was true. But there were a few pieces that didn’t fit, with either Sofia Capece’s account or some of the things that we’d found. Still, Capece confessed, Musso was somewhere else, so was the journalist, and her new lover would have been noticed. So for all of us, it was Signora Capece, end of story. But it wasn’t the end of the story.”
Sciarra looked straight ahead, head bowed as if the weight of his enormous nose were simply too much.
Ricciardi went on:
“There were marks on the duchess’s body: broken ribs, shattered fingernails. And the cushion, the cushion pushed down on her face. The duchess was already dying. Those were her death throes, the last rattles of her respiration: she wasn’t snoring when Sofia Capece shot her.”
The doorman ran a trembling hand over his eyes. Ricciardi didn’t bother to look at him, but went on with his reasoning in a cold, remote voice:
“And she was dying because she’d been suffocated. The bullet hole between the eyes distracted us, kept us from understanding: in fact, when she was shot the duchess’s fate was already sealed. But then, who killed her?”
He turned to look at Sciarra, who was covering his eyes with his hand. He hardly even seemed to be breathing.
“We could have seen it. I could have seen it. I had all the evidence in hand. The murderer’s strength was the strength of desperation; there was no fury, there was no rage. The murderer didn’t take it out on her, he didn’t disfigure her. He was fighting for his life, he was afraid. He fought and he won, the murderer. The only disfigurement was Ettore’s work, when he tore his mother’s ring off the dead finger, dislocating it. And Signora Capece’s gunshot: there was no violence, there was no rage; it was simple madness. Sofia Capece wanted to execute a guilty person. Three different acts of violence inflicted on Adriana’s body. That’s what confused me, threw me off. I didn’t understand that the solution was a simple one: three acts of violence, three guilty parties.”