A Few Drops of Blood (8 page)

Had she ruffled some felon? Was the mob keeping tabs on her? Was it some errant husband sneaking home? The possibilities were too many. In any event, pissing off the lawless went with the territory and anxiety about it went with the job.

When she and Pino worked together, they had an arrangement: They could summon one another day or night. They were natives born and bred in their dark city. They knew all the Camorra players and shared the sense of being outnumbered, often alone.

After they became lovers, it became even easier to raise the alarm or confide her fears. Almost more than missing him as a lover, Natalia missed him as her partner and protector. She slept better with him around. Ironic, since she was probably the tougher of the two. Nonetheless…

In the corner by Natalia’s bookcase was the broom her grandmother had placed in the doorway of her bedroom when she was an infant to keep away any witches wishing her harm. Should a witch turn up, she’d be forced to count each bristle, her
nonna
said. The task would take all night until the rising sun took away her power.

Natalia collected the broom and carried it to her bedroom, leaned it on the threshold of the balcony and lay down on her bed, then took her five-shot house gun from the drawer in her night table and slipped it under her pillow.

It was the day of Vincente Lattaruzzo’s funeral. Bagnatti remained in Dr. Agari’s custody, so far unclaimed.

After Natalia showered, she surveyed her closet for something to wear. Not much to choose from. Mariel always encouraged her to amplify her wardrobe. Maybe if she had the style sense and the means of her best friend, she might have devoted more time to shopping. Though Natalia argued that she spent a fair amount of time in uniform, Mariel insisted there was no excusing her fashion crimes.

Natalia located a black pleated skirt she hadn’t worn in years. Holding it to the light, she picked off a few pieces of lint, glad her friend wasn’t there to witness it. But even she couldn’t have found fault with the purple silk blouse. It was still in its dry cleaning bag, untouched since the time she dated that violinist. Had it been three years?

After she finished dressing, she slathered styling gel on
her wild wet curls and combed her hair, thinking again how she had to update the antique bathroom fixtures. She was reluctant to leave. Her four-room flat with its high ceilings and glass doorknobs was her refuge from the world, the only thing she owned outright, thanks to her father. Somehow her parents had collected a nest egg for their daughter—amazing, given the paltry salary her father earned as a city sanitation worker. Her mother had augmented it from the small income she earned mending clothes. They’d never traveled, and rarely did they even take in a film. Until Natalia had treated her mother to Florence, she’d never been farther than Potenza. Natalia showed her Dante’s house and explained that Galileo had trained his telescope on the heavens from a spot nearby. That evening, as they walked along the river arm in arm, the moon hung over them like a shiny locket.

Natalia felt grateful every day for her flat, her niche in the world, with its cool marble floors underfoot and thick, protective walls adorned in pale yellow brocade. It always reminded her of them and the love that had brought her into the world.

As she made her way downstairs and past the concierge’s rooms, Madam Luigina’s canary flooded the stairwell with song. Natalia continued down the stone steps to the ground floor of the two-hundred-year-old house. Its baroque aspect never went out of style in Naples: the inner courtyard plain, its balconies and iron banisters no more than ordinary. But on its exterior were several columns topped with decorative ribbon and floral designs that had survived the eons—a lucky happenstance when so many architectural jewels had been destroyed by Allied bombs during the war.

Overhead, bed sheets swayed on a line, awaiting the brief daily intrusion of sunlight into the shadowed space. Natalia
yawned. Queen Ann’s Lace and spindly weeds poked up through the cracks in the worn stone leading to the freshly painted, bright green outer door that she pulled shut with an ancient brass knocker shaped like the head of a lion.

Her motor scooter was where she’d left it, hemmed in now by several other chained
motorinos
. Luckily it wasn’t too far. She could walk. Natalia pushed open the front gate. Via Giudice was nearly empty; Tribunali, quiet.

Hair wild from sleep, Cecilia Bertolli, half owner of the Bertolli fruit stall, swept the walk in front of her shop. Her husband unpacked asparagus, the cigarette in his lips burned to ash.

Natalia greeted them as she stepped into the street to avoid their boxes, then jumped back on the curb as a blue-and-white
latte
truck swayed toward her over the cobblestones, followed by a
motorino
driver with boxes of strawberries lashed to the back of his bike.

On Via Duomo, the trees along the avenue were thick and green. Several homeless people slept in a huddle in front of the cathedral’s massive red doors. A white pug pulled its owner along, the leash taut. For a moment, its mistress lost her balance, her pink leggings and long, blousy top entangling with the lead until it threatened to topple her. Natalia just caught her and held her upright. The woman thanked her and picked up the dog, kissing it repeatedly.

The boutiques hadn’t yet opened. Natalia ignored their window displays, instead looking at the reflected sky, hazy from the night’s rain. A day for witches, Natalia and Mariel would have said when they were children. They’d grown up with stories of witches who came from the mountains of Samio south of Naples and conspired there under the walnut trees. She and Mariel were convinced the hump-backed hag who lived in a ground floor
basso
two doors from her
building was a witch possessed of magical powers to communicate with the dead. Mean boys used her hump as a bull’s eye for spit balls and other missiles. When she screamed at them, Natalia’s mother would rush to the balcony and threaten to call the police on them.

“Shut up,
garola
!” they’d yell and flash their tiny middle fingers.

As could have been predicted, most graduated to petty crime and manual labor, except for Sandro Altra and Benni Torrone, best friends to this day, who had taken up intimidating and killing for the Forcella gang.

Undeterred by the hooligans, the crone predicted the futures of hundreds of Neapolitans and kept herself in wine with their donations.

Natalia’s
nonna
had twice dragged her to the woman for readings without her mother’s knowledge, then hid the prescribed amulets beneath her tiny undershirt. Her grandmother tried to keep it from her, but Natalia knew a violent end is what the old woman had foreseen.

The stormy night had deposited a carpet of pink petals on the streets of the San Carlo all’Arena district outside the Santa Maria Donna Regina church. By its entrance slept young people sprawled every which way, guitar cases and a soggy drum set beside them—giant sleeping caterpillars that, when they played their music, morphed into butterflies. Afternoons and evenings these minstrels performed on the Via San Biagio dei Librai, their songs wafting over the crowds of strollers she and Pino used to join like ordinary citizens.

Natalia couldn’t imagine the lack of privacy the street dwellers endured. Two nuns came out and stepped around them. Someone had deposited a bottle of water. A passerby dropped a pastry on the ratty cloth beside them.

A girl with pink-tufted hair opened her eyes, stretched and curled back up for more sleep. Church bells tolled. A dog—part German shepherd—lay stretched out beside her. It looked clean and well fed, more than could be said for its owners. She counted five kids, two of them boys spooned together. None more than eighteen.

The stone entryway to the church was still damp. Natalia smoothed her curls and opened the small passage cut into the much larger chapel door. Stefano Grappi stood just inside, next to a confessional, eyes brimming and red. His thin wrists protruded from the too-large mourning suit. Greeting Natalia, he thanked her for coming. Either the suit was borrowed or he was losing weight drastically, as the griefstricken often did. Natalia surveyed the crowd, astonished by a young woman in a loud orange dress. Unthinkable to wear such a bright color at such a somber event. In the while since Natalia had attended a funeral, it looked like things had changed. Someone came in behind her. “
Scuzzi
.”

Director Garducci, the consummate gentleman, greeting people, kissing women’s cheeks. He at least was wearing the appropriate black suit for his lover’s funeral and an obsidian and gold earring.

The thick walls kept the interior cool. Vincente Lattaruzzo’s open coffin rested on a wooden bier near the altar. Beside it, his photograph on an easel. Several people gathered around the coffin. A few knelt in the pews, praying quietly. Others milled about, waiting for the mass to begin. Stefano joined an elderly couple in the front pew. Lattaruzzo’s parents? Probably. She checked the sparsely occupied pews but didn’t recognize anyone among the young professionals—no doubt colleagues of the deceased. Most prominent among the mourners were elderly women in black, alone or in pairs, who likely had
never known the deceased but regularly attended everyone’s funeral, lonely women happy to break the solitude of their days. A few were, perhaps, simply ghoulish or seeking distraction. Most attended out of altruism. Their prayers, they believed, helped speed souls out of purgatory. Their prayers for the departed, they hoped, would be reciprocated by others when their time came. The grief displayed raised the family’s standing in the community, and the departed might finally have the respect he deserved in life but hadn’t gained until the moment of his eulogy.

Funerals, like weddings, were important social affairs. The wealthy splurged on lavish caskets. The poor on an “uncle from Rome,” usually an elderly resident of a nearby
rione
or district brought in to pose as a well-off relative from the north. Or a woman who, as the service progressed, would wail and scratch her face bloody. These actors only cost the family of the deceased the rental of a suit or dress, a few euros for their enthusiasm and a glass or two of
marsala
at the wake and a plate of food.

Vincente’s funeral was in no way lavish. Mercifully, the family had not resorted to professional mourners. Vincente Lattaruzzo reclined in a tasteful black casket with silver handles—neither the pine of the indigent nor the gold of the well heeled. Stefano had kept the proceedings tasteful.

Angelina, sitting down beside Natalia, leaned over and whispered. “Do you plan to confront him soon about being the beneficiary of Bagnatti’s will, after Vincente?”

“Yes,” Natalia replied, “but not today.”

The official period of mourning for close family was seven years, during which black was the color traditionally worn. Many widows still observed this, but Natalia couldn’t imagine Stefano would for that long. Unlike Natalia’s
zia
Clementina, who, when her beloved mate passed away, never wore a spot of color until the day she herself died twenty years later.

Camorra widows were another story. Often they were left widows while still young. The black might hold for a year, even two. Then color crept back. Five years later the only vestige of their grief might be a black handkerchief carried dutifully in a Chanel bag.

Old Mother Scavullo stood at the back. What was she doing there? Unlikely she and Lattaruzzo had ever crossed paths. Then again, you never knew. Renata Scavullo managed a modest criminal empire. Did she own artifacts or consult art experts about stolen pieces in the hands of her fences?

Mama Scavullo had on a fancy white dress printed with daisies. Not a trace of mourning black. Hardly funereal. A bouffant hairdo with a real daisy anchored above one ear. She looked to be attending a festive bon voyage gathering, seeing someone off on a happy journey. Or was she there to savor Lattaruzzo’s demise? Gloat over some vengeance?

The priest made his way to the altar. Everyone sat. Natalia glanced back for Renata Scavullo, but the old woman had slipped off. The ceremony proceeded.

An hour later, the coffin was carried out into the intense sunlight and placed in an open hearse bedecked with ten-foot bouquets of palms and orange chrysanthemums. In this heat, the flowers would be as dead as the corpse before the procession reached the graveyard. An official car trailed behind,
Carabinieri
written large in white along its side.

The forensic techies identified a thumbprint on the
lupara
as Ernesto Scavullo’s, head of the DePretis clan and boss of the Vasto and waterfront districts, among others. Natalia
and Angelina changed into their uniforms, gathered up weapons and cuffs and set out. They decided to evade the district’s heavy traffic and walk to the hill train. In minutes they reached the funicular station at the bottom of the steep incline leading up to the Vomero district. As they were both in uniform, the attendant waved them through, and they joined the crowd in the cool of the marble waiting room.

The cable tram whirred down. The exchange of passengers took no more than seconds, with passengers exiting from one side and passengers boarding from the other for the quick trip up in the staggered car, constructed of narrow compartments that were like joined steps which together ascended the hill.

The doors closed, and the car wrenched upward. Minutes later they stepped out at the last stop and followed the other passengers into the ritzy section high above the city.

They exited onto Via Kerbaker. Outside the station it was leafy and breezy cool. A Bengladeshi vendor assembled bouquets of roses and chrysanthemums, wrapping them in pink and orange crepe paper before setting them out to sell.

They crossed Piazza Vitelli, a vast space named, Natalia explained, for the eighteenth-century architect responsible for many of the city’s neoclassical gems, and walked along a boulevard flanked by gracious apartment buildings for the two blocks to their destination. A guard posted outside Scavullo’s grand estate closely examined Natalia and Angelina and said something into his walkie-talkie. Instantly the gates swung open, and he waved them in. Natalia and Angelina followed the driveway up to Scavullo’s split-level villa, a virtual copy of Salvatore “the Beast” Riima’s digs in Palermo, Angelina said, right down to the date palms over the drive.