By My Hand (21 page)

Enrica tried to mount a halfhearted defense.

“No, it's not so much that I vanished; it's more that I've just had so many things to do, Christmas is coming, my little nephew . . .”

Rosa swept away these excuses with an impatient wave of her hand.

“Signori', please, don't come tell this nonsense to me. You may be able to pull the wool over a man's eyes, but not another woman's. You even keep your shutters closed at night; that poor man looks out the window and he's denied even the pleasure of a nod in his direction. He's suffering, and I have to watch him suffer. So now I want to know: if you've simply gotten tired of him, if you're no longer interested, just tell me, and we'll be friends like before.”

The young woman leapt up as if spring-loaded.

“What on earth are you saying? How could you even think such a thing? Do you take me for one of those fickle women who change direction with the wind, like a weather vane?”

Rosa leaned back in her chair, finally satisfied.

“No, I don't think you are. That's why I was so baffled. All right, then: tell me what really happened.”

 

“I'd be lying if I said I didn't know why you're here.”

The interior of the hovel mirrored the exterior and spoke to a terrible poverty. A little girl who might have been a little more than ten years old greeted them with a curtsy, and then went back to stirring a pot that was boiling over the fire. A heavy stench of cauliflower left no doubt as to what she was cooking.

Seated on the floor next to the table was a smaller child, a boy, bundled up in a sweater several sizes too large for him. The crystallized mucus on his upper lip told a heartbreaking tale of neglect.

The man had sat down at the table, without inviting the two policemen to take a seat, and so they remained standing. Lomunno had gone back to carving a piece of wood, from which he was extracting with a certain expertise what seemed to be a horse. Behind him, on a rough-hewn table, a handmade manger scene was taking form; it included several shepherds of superior quality. The man followed the commissario's gaze.

“The manger scene. I don't know why the creditors haven't laid their damned mitts on the shepherds in the manger scene. A few of them were lost, and I'm recarving them, making them myself, as you can see. This is the horse of Melchior, one of the three kings. The manger scene is what Christmas is all about, if you have children. You can have Christmas without a mother, but not without the manger scene.”

He laughed a grim laugh, and the smell of soured wine on his breath reached all the way to Maione. The brigadier noticed that the little girl turned her eyes on her father, without the slightest expression.

“If you know why we're here, Lomunno, then tell us what we want to know,” Ricciardi said.

The man gave Ricciardi a long stare. Then he looked down at the wooden horse that was taking shape under his knife blade.

“One day, I went into the office; I was highly regarded, esteemed. A party faithful, among the first to enlist. I was doing work that I loved, everyone respected me; or rather, I should say, that's how I thought things were. And in my office I found my boss, with two policemen and a man in civilian clothes. The man steps forward and says to me, ‘You're a bribe-taking crook.' Then he puts his hand in my jacket and takes my money. The money I'd saved over a lifetime, little by little, squirreling away every raise, every bonus, and hiding it all under the mattress so that someday I'd be able to give my wife what she'd always dreamed of: a home of our own.”

Outside they heard a seagull shriek, flying low, just over the shack.

“There was just one person I'd told this small, useless secret. Just one person who knew that that day I'd be going to get the money from my uncle and aunt, who I'd been giving my savings to every so often for safekeeping, and who were leaving for America. I tried to explain, but they wouldn't even let me talk. Coffee, they said. Coffee and cigarettes. You took money in exchange for letting smugglers bring in contraband merchandise. We have witnesses.”

“What about these witnesses?” Ricciardi asked. “Were you allowed to confront them yourself?”

Lomunno tossed his head back and laughed a doleful laugh. The daughter shot her father another expressionless glance, then went back to stirring the pot.

“Then you don't know how it works, do you? The militia, the political police, the secret police—they don't hold trials; they promise immunity to those who'll testify, and then it's so long, nice knowing you. Lomunno goes to prison, the traitor gets a promotion. One loses, the other wins. Until the next round; but then there is no next round.”

Ricciardi had never taken his eyes off him. The man's eyes glittered in the partial darkness. The stench of cauliflower and filth was intolerable.

“Really? It seems to me that there was a next round, and that Garofalo, in the present moment, is worse off than you.”

Lomunno drove the knife violently into the tabletop, with a dull thunk. Maione took a step forward, his hand on the butt of his pistol. The little girl didn't stop stirring.

“You think so? You really think so, Commissa'? Just take a look around you; what do you see? A poor man, a useless man, dishonored, forced to live off the charity of his onetime friends, friends who are ashamed that they didn't rise to his defense when he needed defending. Two children who've grown old before their time, passed from one neighbor to the next until their father was released from prison, because their mother one fine day decided that she'd rather be dead than wait any longer. And you really think you can say who's better off and who's worse off?”

Ricciardi's tone of voice remained unchanged.

“A little girl has lost her parents. An innocent woman was murdered in her home, and a man—innocent or not—was butchered in his bed. We're the police, and it's our job to find out who did it. So let's return to the reason we're here: Did you do it?”

Silence fell. The girl stopped stirring, picked up her little brother, and hurried outside. Lomunno put his hands over his face and stayed that way. After a few long moments, he lowered them and replied:

“Sure, I did it. A hundred times a day, in my prison cell, in the most atrocious ways imaginable; but it was only him, never his wife, never his daughter, whom I'd seen as a baby and who had nothing to do with any of it. Then I did it a hundred times more, when I heard that my wife had killed herself, and I still had six months to serve and I had no idea what would become of my children. And then another hundred times when I was forced to bring them here to live in this shack, sleeping practically on top of them to ward off bronchitis, staying up all night to protect them from the rats. Sure, I did it. But if you want to know whether I did it outside of my mind, in reality, then the answer is no, I didn't. If my wife were still alive, if I had someone to leave the children to, maybe I'd have climbed those stairs and I'd have used this very knife. But things being the way they are, I might as well have killed them first, and then gone off to Mergellina.”

The seagulls shrieked again. Maione shook himself back into the present.

“Excuse me, Lomunno, I have a question: How do you make a living now?”

“Day by day, Brigadie'. I don't have any skills, I've only ever worked as an official at the port, and after that, as a militiaman. Like I told you, I get a little help from my old comrades, each of them concealing what they do from the others. They come here at night, in civilian clothing, they look around furtively when they get here and when they leave. They're afraid, and I can hardly blame them; it wouldn't take much for them to be arrested as accomplices. In the past few days I've also started reviewing some ledgers for certain offices at the port: working under someone else's name, of course. And I've earned a little money, and for once I've decided not to drink it away at the tavern, but to use it to give my children a little taste of the Christmases they once had.”

“Lomu', this is something we have to ask you: Where were you on the morning of the eighteenth, from seven in the morning until one in the afternoon?”

The man looked up at Maione.

“Out looking for work, Brigadie'. Searching desperately for work, pounding the sidewalks of this city. In the morning, I was down at the port, and I got a few doors slammed in my face, a few others closed more politely, and a few more left open just a crack. I can give you a few addresses, but each of them would only tell you what I was doing for five minutes: nothing that wouldn't have allowed me, in theory—I'll tell you so you don't have to tell me—plenty of time to go murder Garofalo and his wife. I used to be a cop myself, in a certain sense. I know how you have to think.”

Then he took a step forward and laid his hand on Maione's arm.

“Brigadie', listen to me: it wasn't me. I'd have been happy to do it, and maybe I even should have. I'm sorry about the wife and the daughter, but the only thing I'm sorry about when it comes to that bastard is that when he died, it wasn't by my hand. If you have children, though, revenge comes at a price: a very great price. I couldn't possibly afford it.”

W
hen she finally found herself recounting the promise that she'd made to the Madonna of Pompeii, Enrica assumed that she was putting an end to any worth she may have had in Rosa's eyes. A woman of her age, the girl thought, couldn't help but consider a sacred promise like hers to be final and unbreakable. But once again, Rosa surprised her.

“As far as I'm concerned, that promise is invalid,” she decreed.

“What do you mean, it's invalid?”

Rosa counted the reasons off on her fingers.

“First of all, you had no idea what the young master's medical condition really was, and in fact you even said, ‘If you save him, I'll never see him again.' But what was the Madonna supposed to have saved him from, if all he had was a bump on his head? Second, a vow to the Virgin Mary has to be made in a certain way, not the way you made yours, sitting in a chair in a hospital waiting room. You have to go to church, kneel down in front of a sacred painting, and you didn't do that. Third, a person can only renounce something they possess, not something that belongs to someone else. And with this vow, you've deprived him of something very important, too, and he never made any promises.”

Enrica shook her head, again and again.

“But I did, I know that I made that promise. And I can hardly go back on a promise I made to the Madonna. And then . . . then there's that lady, the pretty one from out of town. I've already seen her with him, more than once even, enough times that I guessed that they were . . . that they were seeing each other, practically engaged, in other words. If he didn't like her, he'd tell her to leave him alone, wouldn't he? I just don't know what to do . . .”

Her eyes brimmed over with tears. Rosa shot a glance down at her own hand, which was trembling slightly: she couldn't afford to waste time on this nonsense.

“And that's why I sought you out. Let's speak plainly, Signori': Men are weak creatures. They think that they're the ones who decide, who choose, who make and do, but the truth is that they decide, choose, and make and do no more and no less than we women decide for them. But not all of us women: only the strong ones, only the determined ones. The lady that you're talking about, this signora from out of town—you say that she's pretty, but to me she just looks skinny and unhealthy, frankly—she strikes me as a determined one. So what are we going to do? Are we going to let her do as she likes? Are we going to let her decide, so she can scoop him up and carry him off to some town in northern Italy?”

Enrica's eyes opened wide.

“No, certainly not. No. You know, Signora, there's one thing I know for sure: I'll never love anyone else. No one. It's him or nobody.”

Rosa shifted her substantial derriere in her chair and got more comfortable, adjusting her hat on her head with a bellicose expression.

“Well then, in that case, there are two things we've got to take care of: we need to go see a priest, to get the matter of the vow settled, so that we can put it out of our minds once and for all; and we need to decide what to do to get everything back in order, before that signora from up north starts putting her hands where her hands don't belong.”

Enrica realized that she was no longer alone.

“About the priest—I may have an idea. I may know one who can tell us about the issues in question.”

 

As soon as they turned the corner of the
vicolo
, Ricciardi and Maione found themselves back in the Christmas season, but that wasn't enough to dissipate the sadness from their encounter with Lomunno.

“Commissa', I don't know about you, but that chat with Lomunno made quite an impression on me. But I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what I think about him.”

Commissario Ricciardi was walking with his head pulled down into the lapels of his overcoat, his eyes lost in the empty air.

“That's the way it always is when you see desperation, a life in ruins. He hasn't even started living again, and maybe he's just starting to try. But that doesn't mean it wasn't him who killed the Garofalos. Revenge, as you well know, is an ugly beast. It lurks in the shadows, sometimes for years at a time, then it lunges out and makes a bloody meal.”

Maione thought it over.

“Sure, but what he said was true, too: revenge comes at a price. You have to be able to afford it. What would it have gotten him? Nothing but the complete and, this time, definitive ruin of his children.”

“But revenge isn't rational. Maybe you're sitting there, just like Lomunno, half drunk, one night a week before Christmas; and it suddenly dawns on you how unjust it is that the one you love is dead, and that the guilty party is alive and happy and getting ready to enjoy the holidays. So you decide to take justice into your own hands. You pick up a knife, or a pistol, or what have you, and you set things right.”