“From that day on, every so often, I’d pilfer a little something to eat. Not always, Commissa’. Just now and then. I’d slip in, take a little oil, a piece of meat, some bread. A hunk of cheese. That night, in fact, I’d taken a piece of cheese. The child was hungry, she’d asked me a hundred times, and I’d promised her some. Well, I walk out of the pantry and I come face to face with the duchess, with the keys in hand. She took one look at me and said: tomorrow you’re packing your bags and you’re out on the street. All of you. None of your family will ever set foot in this palazzo again. It’s not your place anymore. Do you see, Commissa’? Our place. The cart appeared before my eyes again, the rats, the rain. I thought about my little girl, who’d never lived in the street in her life. And I said to her, Signora Duchessa, take pity on me. And you know what she said? If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to scream. After that, I just lost my mind; outside you could hear the festival, the piazza was still full of people. It would mean humiliation, the worst mortification imaginable. So I grabbed the cushion and put it on her face.”
Ricciardi fell silent, picturing the scene.
“You fought; the duchess lashed out.”
Sciarra looked into the empty air, immersed in the murder he was reliving.
“Like a cat. She fought like a cat. She kicked, she scratched; I was wearing my uniform jacket; if I hadn’t been, she’d have ripped my arms to shreds. But then she stopped moving: she was still breathing, or at least I thought she was. I picked up the keys from the floor and I put them in the drawer, and I left. When I got home, upstairs, I realized I still had the piece of cheese in my hand. My wife started crying, and she’s crying still.”
Ricciardi shook his head; as incredible as it seemed, the true guilty party was hunger. Not some complicated love story, with its countless paths to murder, rage, possessiveness, jealousy; but instead none other than dull, stupid hunger, with its blind shrieking need.
By now the courtyard was almost dark; a muggy evening had fallen over the city. In the half-light, he heard the faint sound of footsteps, and Ricciardi glimpsed Sciarra’s two youngest children as they approached, hand in hand.
“Papa? Mamma wants to know, aren’t you coming up?”
The boy’s voice was worried, clearly by Ricciardi’s presence: what could that grim-faced gentleman want with their father? Sciarra replied:
“Yes, but you go up first. Tell Mamma that. . tell her that I’ll be up as soon as I can.”
The two children went off reluctantly; before turning away, the girl curtsied to Ricciardi.
“They’re beautiful, eh, Commissa’? My children really are beautiful. And they help me, you know. They do all the little chores around the house. And at school, they’re at the head of their classes. Who knows what their place is. Who can say what their place will be now.”
The thunder roared violently, and the wind picked up. Ricciardi shivered. Hunger, he thought. And the Capece family, the boy and the girl left without their mamma, with a father who was now a stranger, a father they’d have to forgive every day, though they could never forgive him entirely. And the duke dying alone in his bed, and Achille and Ettore and their love that could never see the light of day. And Sofia Capece, in the darkness of the room and the madness where she might spend the rest of her life.
How many victims had the duchess’s murder taken? Who’d actually killed her? Perhaps Signora Capece’s gunshot had been enough. Or perhaps the angel of death had done it all on its own.
For the Capece children it was too late; but not for Sciarra’s children. Ricciardi’s conscience was pitted against his sense of justice. He followed his instinct as he spoke.
“Your prison will be your children, Sciarra. If they end up badly, you too will end badly. I won’t forgive you, because that’s not my job: but your children need you, and they come before justice.”
Sciarra hadn’t raised his eyes from the pavement.
“I can never forgive myself, Commissa’. Whether I live here or in prison, I’ll never be able to forgive myself. And I’ll dream about the duchess every night of my life. Now I know where my place is. You’ve told me yourself. My place is close to my children.”
When Ricciardi left, in the first drops of rain, he was still sitting there, staring at the ground.
XLVIII
Rosa’s bones were warning her that the weather would be changing, and had been since the day before. The advantages of age; like wisdom. But she would gladly have done without them. While she was massaging her aching elbow, in front of the sink, she thought-as usual-of Ricciardi.
He’d come home late, damp from the first onset of rain, his face more melancholy than usual. He’d eaten without a word, answering her questions with grunts; God, how hard it was to understand him, he was so closed, so shut off.
Then he’d withdrawn to his room. Rosa glanced out the kitchen window as she washed the dishes. The rain was coming down harder; the air smelled of autumn. The seasons pass, she thought, and they never change; yet each one leaves its mark. On the other side of the vicolo, the Colombos’ drawing room window was dark: no company tonight. That’s a good sign, thought the tata. Everything was going exactly as it ought to.
She wondered why Ricciardi had hidden a book underneath a loose floor tile behind his armoire, thinking she wouldn’t see it. What was it for? Of course, she’d found it that same morning, it was the first place she checked every day; he was so methodical, he never thought to come up with a new hiding place. She’d only been able to read the title, because she knew the big letters, not the little ones. She thought about the woman from up north that the hairdresser had mentioned, quoting Enrica’s words. She couldn’t say why, but the thought of that woman worried her. First of all, her presence ought to have made Ricciardi happy, but she could see he was even gloomier than usual. Then, there was the fact that she’d been described as someone quite different from the kind of woman she’d want her boy to be with. She knew who she wanted. The girl next door, she thought.
She looked out the window again, as it shivered with the impact of an especially strong gust of wind and rain. Who knows, maybe I could invite the Colombo girl over here for a cup of coffee, some afternoon. Now that it’s not so hot, now that the rains have come. From Ricciardi’s bedroom came the sound of a chair pushed along the floor. Rosa smiled as she dried the last dish.
As he walked into his bedroom, he’d immediately noticed that the light was on again in Enrica’s kitchen window. The heavy rain made it impossible to identify the silhouette he could glimpse, sitting in the cone of light, reading or perhaps embroidering. But he needed no confirmation.
Initiative, he thought. Everyone had told him that he needed to take the initiative. An act of will. As if that were so easy. His ears echoed with the words of Modo, Don Pierino, and Ettore Musso; people who were living the lives they’d chosen, despite a thousand obstacles.
He too made certain choices, of course; and they weren’t easy ones, to tell the truth. For instance, he’d just decided to let a murderer go free, just because a little girl had curtseyed gracefully.
Just a few seconds earlier, he had made up his mind to take the man in, since he was as guilty as Sofia Capece, or possibly more so; then he’d decided that it was up to him, not a judge seated behind his bench in the tribunal of Porta Capuana. It was he, Ricciardi, who had to decide whether to sentence four young children to a life of infamy and a man to life imprisonment for a momentary impulse, driven by the rediscovered terror of a return to poverty. And he’d made his decision.
How could that be? he wondered, as he looked out the rain-driven window. How can the same person make a decision like that on the spot, in the blink of an eye, and then sit here helpless, for months, looking out the window and not knowing what to do?