Sciarra shook his head gently, almost as if he were lulling himself. The murmur of Ricciardi’s voice continued:
“There were two clues I didn’t understand, two clues I chose to overlook. There was a partial footstep on the carpet. A strange mark, you could only guess at it. Grit, a little mud, and it hasn’t rained for two months. Where did that mud come from?”
Sciarra lowered his hand and for the first time he looked the commissario in the face. His strange eyes, set apart by his nose, were glistening like the eyes of a fawn. He said nothing.
“Then you told me that you watered the hydrangeas late at night, even though the young master scolded you for it. Water and dirt: that footprint was yours. And the other clue that I missed at first, fool that I was: the chain. The padlock was shut, the duchess would open it when she came home: but this time she came home earlier than expected, because she’d quarreled with Mario Capece, and she found the door open even though she had the keys. Why? Very simple: the hasp ring was missing.”
Ricciardi heard the last lament of Adriana’s dead soul, loud and clear:
“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”
And all the while, he, idiot that he was, wondering which ring she meant, whether it was Capece’s ring or Ettore’s mother’s ring. Instead, it was quite simply the hasp ring, which had been tampered with. With that ring removed, the chain no longer held the gate shut, and Sciarra-who had done the tampering-was able to get into the apartment when she was out and the housekeeper had already retired for the night. It took Don Pierino and the chain binding man and God, shattered by sin, to bring the truth to the surface, to make it emerge from the depths of his subconscious.
Slowly, the little man slipped one hand into his pocket and pulled out something, which he handed to Ricciardi. A circle of burnished metal, open in the middle; it wasn’t steel, but a softer metal painted to look like it, perhaps lead. This was Sciarra’s skeleton key to the apartment of the duke and duchess of Camparino.
Night fell over the palazzo’s courtyard, lengthening the shadows and making the colors fade. At last, Sciarra spoke, and in that whisper his cracking voice seemed more pathetic than comical.
“What’s my place? Do you know that, Commissa’? Can you tell me? Everyone says to me: stay in your place. Don’t try to rise above your place. But no one seems to know my place, my real place. Even I don’t know what my real place should be.”
The goldfinch suddenly stopped singing. Then it started up again, full-throated. And Sciarra, too, went on.
“I’m from Pozzuoli. In my hometown, if you don’t have a fishing boat, you can’t do a thing. I met my wife when I was little more than a boy; we’re simple folk, our dreams are simple ones: we’re not like our masters, here, who all have a thousand things spinning through their heads. We wanted a roof over our heads and enough food to eat, for ourselves and our children. And we wanted to do an honest day’s work. Where I come from, if you don’t have a boat, you have only one choice, if you want to get enough to eat: you have to work for those people, you know the people I mean. And I didn’t want to work for them. So we loaded our few possessions onto a cart and we came to Naples, to the big city.”
Ricciardi knew from personal experience that every murderer is searching for that moment: he yearns to speak, he wants to get it off his chest. He wants to be understood. He wants the person who listens to him to support his reasons, to tell him, “Poor Sciarra, it’s just the way you say it is: you’re the victim, not the guilty party.” The usual story.
“But instead, Commissa’, we found blackest hunger here too. We slept under the cart, one at a time, otherwise the rats would gnaw away at the noses and ears of our babies, I’ve seen it happen, trust me. And when it wasn’t rats, it was people who were even worse off than we are, who wanted to steal our few miserable rags. But then, one morning, when I came to this very piazza to ask the Madonna in the church to intervene on my behalf, I saw Signora Concetta, the housekeeper; she was talking to a shopkeeper and complaining about how it was impossible to find a doorman and a maid, and that she just couldn’t keep the household going all on her own.”
Sciarra’s eyes lit up at the recollection of that divine grace, accorded even before he could ask for it.
“I’ve thanked the Lord God every day, and I thank Him still. A position, a place: I finally had a place of my own. This was it, my place. My children could grow up under a roof, and they’d be able to get enough to eat. You can’t imagine how hungry we were. And what it meant to us to be able to eat, twice in a single day. My children forgot about hunger; the littlest girl never actually experienced it. But not my wife and me, Commissa’; we’ll never forget it. We still wake up at night, terrified, when we dream about going hungry and spending nights under the cart, with rain splashing in everywhere and the noise of chattering teeth. We looked death in the face, Commissa’.”
Looking death in the face: and he said it to him of all people. The duchess, who was dead, was looking him in the face; who knew how many years she would have still had to live.
“I can’t stand it, watching my children go hungry. I can’t even take it when they’re peckish. If my children ask me for food, I give it to them. I’m their father: it’s my duty. And maybe because when they were little they had nothing, now they always seem to be hungry; always, Commissa’. From when they wake up until night falls, they’d eat every second of the day. It’s not that they’re gluttons: it’s just that they’re hungry.”
Ricciardi remembered Sciarra’s two children, fighting over bread and cheese the morning the duchess was found dead.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s in the pantry in this house. No one eats a thing, one person goes there, the other goes here; and the duke, poor old man, lives on thin soups and broths. But from the farms they own, every delicacy imaginable comes pouring in, tons of food. They waste it, they let it go bad, they literally throw it away. It would break your heart to see the things they throw away every week: meat, pasta, fruit. With children dying of hunger in the middle of the street. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is: everyone in their place. But where is everyone’s place? Can you tell me that, Commissa’?”
Ricciardi said:
“Go on. Tell me about that night.”
Sciarra ran his trembling hands over his face again. There was another rumble of thunder, closer this time.
“Signora Concetta, when she retires at night, locks the chain on the gate with the padlock. She goes straight to sleep, she’s a heavy sleeper, and she never wakes up until morning. Much later, never any earlier than two in the morning, the duchess would come home and go to bed; she’d unlock the padlock with her keys, she’d relock it, she’d put the keys in the drawer where Concetta would find them the following morning, and then she’d go to her bed. Sometimes she’d retire with. . with someone else, in other words. But the passages of keys and padlocks were always the same.”
“And so?”
“And so, a year ago, or thereabouts, I thought to myself: who would ever notice if a little piece of meat is missing from the pantry? Sooner or later they always wind up throwing it away, after all. My son, the eldest boy, was very sick. He’d turned white as a sheet, his blood counts were low. And I made a hasp ring, a ring of lead, identical to the ring that anchored the chain to the wall. And I replaced the real hasp ring with the lead ring. And at night, before the duchess came home for the night, I’d pry it open with my hands. I’m strong, you know: nobody’d ever believe just how strong I am.”
Maybe the duchess would believe it now, thought Ricciardi; since she couldn’t break free of your grip, the grip that suffocated her.