By My Hand (12 page)

C
hristmas is an emotion.

It can last for a whole year, in the anticipation of a gift, a kiss from a new love, a pastry to be eaten by the light of red candles.

It has the flavor of almonds and cinnamon, silver sugar dragées and chicken broth.

Christmas is an emotion.

It runs on the light of a thousand tiny bulbs, along electric wires painted black to make them look like so many stars falling from the sky, tossing in the wind.

It's reflected in the countless voices exchanging false affection, forgotten embraces, and season's wishes for all good things.

Christmas is an emotion.

Anticipation, finally, of something new.

Or perhaps simply of a return home, with cardboard suitcases tied up with twine in overcrowded, stinking passenger cars, from the places we work to the places of our age-old loves, which become new again when viewed from so great a distance.

Christmas is an emotion.

It's strong, like the yearning for home in the cold and the wind, and yet faint, like the sound of an accordion in a tavern to someone hurrying past, without any clear destination in mind.

Christmas is an emotion.

You can wait for it day after day, from when the sirocco dies down under the blows of the cold northern wind, but it catches you unprepared all the same, like a runaway horse covered with plumes and bells.

Christmas is an emotion.

It's as strong as a pounding heart, as light as a fluttering eyelash.

But it can be swept away by a gust of wind, and never come at all.

 

Maione, having finished writing his reports, was hurrying down the big staircase of police headquarters, finally heading home. Why hide it? He was a happy man.

Those three years hadn't been easy. In fact, to tell the truth, they'd been the three most painful years of his life.

First of all, losing Luca. The terrible way it all happened, a phone call, a desperate race through the
vicoli
, a thousand eyes watching him pass from the shadows of the doorways, the crevices and alcoves, the lobbies and atriums, and no one on the streets. The usual little knot of people gathered around the entrance to the cellar, where he'd insisted on venturing in alone, poor little stupid beloved son of mine, I wasn't even able to teach you the basic caution that every good policeman needs to have. And the dozens, the hundreds of hands reaching out to restrain Maione, to keep him from going in: Brigadie', let it be, remember him the way he was, alive.

It seemed like just the other day, but it had been more than three years. The clear green eyes of Deputy Officer Ricciardi, whom he'd always avoided because he didn't like his long silences, chatterbox that he was. Deputy Officer Ricciardi, the Jonah, the albatross, the jinx, as everyone said at police headquarters. But that day Ricciardi had come later, at the same time as Maione: Luca had brought his own bad luck. Ricciardi had gone down into the cellar, stayed a few minutes, and then emerged, taking Maione aside and saying: He loved you. He loved his big-belly papa, his
papà panzone
.

Even tonight, as he walked out the front entrance with a wave to the sentinel standing guard, Maione wondered how Ricciardi could have known that Luca, inside the four walls of their apartment and with that off-kilter, loopy laugh of his, always called him that,
papà panzone
, with irreverent affection. And why he'd believed him immediately, why he'd sensed that Luca had chosen Ricciardi to convey the farewell that he hadn't had time to whisper to him with his last breath.

The snow-scented wind slapped at him, but Maione was still reliving the days after the murder in his head, when the only one at his side had been the tireless, unstoppable Ricciardi; their strange friendship, the affection that bound them together, cemented then during the long stakeouts, the interviews, the trail that had gone cold and then heated up again, finally leading them to the murderer. And to send him where he belonged: behind bars.

What Brigadier Maione hadn't known at the time was that the worst was still to come, that it was beginning at that very moment, when his energy and his rage could no longer be channeled into his search for his son's murderer; when he would find himself in an apartment submerged in a new silence, without hope, with a wife on the verge of madness, and he himself, with Luca's five younger brothers and sisters, teetering on the brink of the abyss, staring wide-eyed into the void.

How many times had the slender thread that bound them together been on the verge of snapping. How many times had the ghost of their love been about to dissolve into the dark fog that surrounded his lovely wife, reduced to a phantom, sitting in an armchair and staring out the window at the sky.

Then, that spring, something had happened. The spark of almost forgotten feelings had rekindled a new and wonderful passion, and in the warmth of that revitalized love, their home had reawakened, like a flower buried in the snow. And now, for the first time in ages, Maione could look forward to the coming Christmas as a time of joy and good cheer, instead of as yet another exhumation of his grief and pain.

As he was remembering that he needed to order the fish for Christmas Eve—or else his supplier wouldn't be able to set aside the finest cuts—his heart suddenly lurched.

At first he thought he must be mistaken; his eyes, squinting in the wind, must have mistaken the silhouette, a trick of the light from the wildly swinging streetlamp. But when the man waiting for him at the corner of Vicolo della Tofa, seeing him approach, discarded his cigarette butt and crushed it underfoot, Maione knew it was him.

 

Franco Massa and Raffaele Maione had been inseparable ever since they were boys. They tormented everyone in Piazzetta Concordia and the surrounding area with pranks and hijinks, but they were lovable and all the shopkeepers of the neighborhood were always happy to see the odd pair, one of them as skinny as a rail, with an enormous schnozzola in the middle of his gaunt face, the other a big strapping boy, always ready to burst out laughing, with a noise like a cartful of pots and pans crashing down a staircase. It was hard not to love those two, even though they never got tired of dreaming up mischief.

And inseparable they had remained. Long after they'd stopped running around barefoot, chasing after the Pazzariello or clinging precariously to the outside of the trolley as it rattled over the tracks, on their way out to the seaside, where they would dive off the rocks of Via Caracciolo. They were together as adolescents, waiting for the girls to come out of the Catholic school in Piazza Dante; and as young men, sharing the same ticket to the Salone Margherita, where the dancers hiked their skirts, one of them distracting the usher at the door while the other would crouch down and sneak in among the legs of all the well-to-do boys dressed in tailcoats.

Raffaele Maione, known as
Orso
, the Bear, for his size, and Franco Massa, known as
Cicogna
, the Stork, for his long, skinny legs and a nose that made him tip forward slightly as he walked. One of those friendships that know no bounds, that expand to fill an entire lifetime, with one imitating the other without realizing it, until no one can remember which is the original and which is the copy.

When Lucia came along, the blonde angel who would become the mother of Maione's six children, Franco didn't disappear, as too often happens. He just became Uncle Franco, and the children grew to love him as a second father. Most of all Luca, for whom Franco naturally acted as godfather. The Stork kept a photo from the day of Luca's baptism on his bedside table, with him proudly and awkwardly holding that bundle in his arms, and Raffaele and Lucia, smiling and overcome with emotion, at his side.

He'd been a conscientious and caring godfather. He'd watched Luca closely, sternly monitoring his friendships and activities. Often the boy even asked his father to intercede with Uncle Franco, in order to obtain his permission to stay out late or skip school.

Both friends had chosen to wear the uniform, the Bear as a policeman and the Stork as a prison guard. It was only natural that Luca should make the same choice. Natural and tragic.

Luca's death had been devastating for Raffaele, of course, but it had been every bit as painful for Franco. He had no family of his own, no special love in his life: his desire to be a father had been satisfied by that loudmouthed handsome blond boy, with his eyes the color of the sea and that hee-hawing laugh like his father's. Luca's death had shattered something inside him; it had extinguished a flame that would never be reignited.

After the first few months, it became harder and harder for the two old friends to meet. After a moment of silence, Franco inevitably broke down in tears. He wept silently, without changing expression; big hot tears would streak down his face, as if from some sudden rain.

Little by little, they'd stopped seeing each other. Sometimes they'd meet by chance, exchanging a nod of the head from a distance, but it was a rare occurrence. These days Massa almost never left Poggioreale, where he'd become the head of the guards at the prison there, with special responsibility for security. When Maione thought of him, he felt that vague pain one feels when an important feeling is allowed to wither away through neglect.

And so, when he encountered him on his way home that night, happiness clashed with guilt in Maione's heart, in a strange undertow of emotions. He was preparing for a joyful Christmas, but one without his son and without his best friend in the world.

Franco gave him a hug, full of the same love he'd always felt for him, and let the Bear wrap him in his arms, with Franco patting Maione's broad back, just as they'd embraced when they were little. But then Franco pushed him away and looked him straight in the eye. God, how he's aged, thought Maione. Franco looked at him for a long while, then he said:

“I have to talk to you, Raffae'. It's important. I need you to give me half an hour.”

Maione was pleased and bewildered.

“Of course, Franco. When can we get together? Why don't you come over to our place, Lucia and the children would be happy to see you. I wanted to call you for Christmas; would you come eat with us on Christmas Eve? Lucia is making clams, you know what a cook she is.”

Massa seemed to be thinking about something else.

“Christmas, right. Christmas. No, I need to talk to you right away. Let's go into that tavern, over there; I'll treat you to a glass of wine. Half an hour, no longer.”

And he set off, without waiting for an answer.

F
rom her kitchen window, Rosa Vaglio was scanning the street. The wind was chilly and her bones ached, but she feared neither one nor the other; she was from the high countryside. The mountains of Cilento, wild and treacherous, with snow that fell unexpectedly even on sunny days, clouds lurking behind the peaks, invisible until it was too late.

Once she had seen a wolf.

In the hope of bringing some color to the cheeks of his perennially pale bride, Luigi Alfredo's father, the Baron of Malomonte, had moved his family to a farm he owned in Sanza, at the foot of Mount Cervati. The green-eyed baroness, silent and smiling, had asked Rosa to accompany her on a walk in the surrounding countryside and they had been caught by a sudden rainstorm, cold and stinging. They'd taken shelter in a small shack that was used to store wood, and when it had finally stopped raining and they emerged, they'd found themselves face-to-face with that magnificent specimen, its fur practically black and its eyes a luminous yellow. The beast stood as tall as one of the ponies that the baron bred to race.

Rosa had immediately shooed the baroness back into the shack and turned to face the animal herself, staring it right in the eye, long and hard. She hadn't glimpsed anything savage in its gaze: just intelligence and curiosity, and great loneliness. Then the wolf had turned and trotted off, silently, moving up toward the peak.

Who could say why that memory had returned to her just now, so many years later and so many miles away, as she was looking down into the street from the balcony, high above that city that she'd never really understood, awaiting the return of her young master, late for dinner, as he was every night. Perhaps the animal and the commissario had the same disease in their eyes.

When she'd first held him in her arms, more than thirty years ago, she'd stopped thinking of herself as simply his servant and had begun to love him. She had been the mother that the poor baroness, who died so young and had always been so frail and unhealthy, had never been able to be; but Rosa had never really understood him. Ever since he'd come home from the hospital, after she'd feared for his life, she sensed that he was more painfully alone than ever. It was just a feeling, but she knew she was right.

In her simple, uneducated mind, she understood that her boy was torn, tormented by some inner conflict, and she didn't know what it was.

She guessed that the Colombo girl, the eldest daughter of the haberdasher who lived across the street, had something to do with it. She'd stopped her, she'd spoken to her, she'd even had her over to the apartment when he wasn't there. She'd hoped that Luigi Alfredo's pathological solitude might finally come to an end with her; but then she'd vanished the day of the accident, to be replaced by that strange outsider, that widow who was too aggressive, too beautiful, too sure of herself, too everything.

She didn't like that Livia. She didn't seem right for her boy. “Wives and oxen from your own villages,” the saying went; and if not from Cilento, which would have been ideal, at least a nice young lady from the south, serious and well-mannered, like Enrica had seemed to her. Certainly not that
signora
, a woman who smoked and swiveled her hips so that heads turned everywhere she went.

Rosa squinted into the wind as she saw Ricciardi approach in the distance, hatless as usual, hands in his pockets and his head bowed. She felt the usual tenderness touch her heart, and she decided that sometimes fate needs a little help.