By My Hand (24 page)

She focused on Raffaele, singing as she diced the lard into neat, compact cubes.

 

Angelina took little Vincenzino's temperature, placing her lips on his forehead. He was burning up. Again.

The sea, crashing just a stone's throw from their home, went on incessantly roaring into the wind, but there was a different smell in the air: the old people had told her that the north wind was going to subside in the next few hours, and the cold would continue to rule alone.

That wasn't good news for Vincenzino. His lungs made a whistling sound at night with every breath, and Angelina listened to it as if it were a death chant. She couldn't sleep anymore.

The doctor had told her what medicines she needed to get, but if he'd asked for gold, myrrh, and frankincense—the gifts carried by the wooden silhouettes with the images of the Three Kings glued onto them—it would have amounted to the same thing.

Medicine is for the rich. Doctors are for the rich. Or else for thieves, like the centurion who had ruined her husband.

She thought about their large, luminous apartment. How warm it was in there, as if the winter were showing respect for those walls, as if the cold were afraid to come inside. All those lights, the glistening silver, the gleaming floors, the soft carpets like sand at the beach in summertime, when you walk on it barefoot and it feels like stepping onto a cloud.

And she thought about Garofalo's wife, her courteous, sarcastic, false smile.
Hat and gloves?
she'd asked. She'd asked them, people who'd never worn gloves in their lives; she'd asked her, who had the same black shawl her mother had worn covering her head; she'd asked Aristide, who was wearing a cap that smelled of salt water and of pain, of a thousand nights spent out on his boat praying for fish.

Suddenly, as she sat thinking about the pair of them, as if their black souls were somehow able to pull strings from down in hell like puppeteers, Alfonso, her eldest son, came in.
Mammà
, he said, excitedly and upset,
Mammà
, they're here. They're here in the piazzetta, asking about us.

Angelina thought about her husband, and about the contemptible dark sea that every night did its best to gobble him down, but which still gave them all enough—just enough!—to eat. She thought about Vincenzino and the way his lungs whistled, and how you could even hear it in the daytime now, and how his forehead was burning up. She thought about her mother and her father, who had taught her to be forthright and honest. She thought about groceries, medicine, carpets, and silver.

For a long moment she thought about doing nothing: about not telling anyone their name, not going out, not opening the door. About pretending that they were all already dead, as they certainly would be if they didn't do something to remedy their horrible situation. She thought about it for a moment.

Then she sighed and stood up. She took her shawl and wrapped it around herself and over her head. She glanced at herself in the mirror on the wall, perhaps the one luxury they had in the twenty by twenty foot room that was her home, and she was shocked at the sight of the old ashen-faced woman she saw reflected there. She ran her eyes over the cold fireplace, the brazier that she kept dangerously close to Vincenzino's bed, in the hopes of saving him from the death whose face was drawing ever closer to his, and the sad little manger scene that Aristide had carved and decorated with dried seaweed, so that even his children would have a little bit of Christmas.

She looked closely, but she saw no hope.

Then she walked out into the wind, to meet the policemen.

T
he road to the borgo from police headquarters wasn't particularly long, but it offered a panoramic view of unparalleled loveliness.

They skirted the Palazzo Reale, the royal palace with the portico of the church of San Francesco that bounded the Piazza del Plebiscito. From there they took Via Cesario Console, which turns downhill toward the sea. On the right were the large, luxurious hotels, with lines of vehicles waiting for fares and drivers standing smoking in the wind, holding their hats in place with one hand and shouting to make themselves heard as they conversed. Straight ahead was the sea, with high plumes of spray that reached the street, so that the cars and horse-drawn carriages leaving the center kept to the middle of the street and the ones traveling in the opposite direction drove right up along the sidewalk.

The massive bulk of the castle rose dark and menacing in the rapidly falling night. In this weather, though, it was less menacing, with its cannons and battlements, than it was protective, forcing the roaring wind away from the little lanes of the
borgo
.

The last fishermen had been moved from Santa Lucia to the low apartment buildings specially built for them here more than a hundred years ago. Many of them had opened small trattorias on the ground floors, which cooked freshly landed seafood in the summer and had even become popular with tourists, drawn there from their luxurious hotel rooms nearby by the mouth-watering aromas from the wood-burning grills. This seasonal diversification aside, the people of the
borgo
made a living the same way their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers had.

There were just a few dozen families, and over the centuries they'd inevitably all become interrelated, deprived of the best and most ambitious of their young, who'd chosen to book passage on the big three-stacked ocean liners that steamed to America, or else opted for the easier money to be found in the soft underbelly of the city. The ones who stayed behind were those who couldn't, or didn't want to, do anything else.

Ricciardi and Maione had walked along the road in silence; the wind was howling, it was hard to hear, and they were both caught up in their own thoughts.

 

There was a storm of confusion in the brigadier's heart. He was thinking about revenge, justice and the law, life and death. In his simple mind, made up of right and wrong, he couldn't allow a murderer—one responsible for the immense pain and sorrow that he carried within him and that for three years had reduced his wife to little more than a vegetable—to escape punishment for the crime he'd committed. That was one thing he was sure of, more than sure of.

But he thought: What, was he the judge? He was a policeman, accustomed to following principles established by others, in laws crafted by men more learned and intelligent than he was, and he wanted only to apply those laws. He apprehended the criminals, and then he handed them over. From that moment onward, and this was a rule to which he'd adhered all his life, it was no longer his place to concern himself with what became of those who had committed the crimes. Nor did he much want to be a judge; he'd always known that his conscience was a tender thing. He'd never be able to sleep at night.

But even he knew perfectly well that, by law, Biagio would get off scot-free. There'd already been a trial, followed by a conviction and a sentence; the dying brother's confession had been obtained fraudulently by Massa, who'd pretended to be a priest. In any case, there was no evidence, no proof.

Maione wondered what Lucia would have wanted. His instincts told him to talk to her, to share that terrible news with her, to ask her advice about what he should do, and how he should do it. Thoughts of his wife consumed him: her terrible suffering, the shadow he could still glimpse in the depths of those sky-blue eyes, her anguish in the days after it first happened. What pity could Lucia take on the one who'd caused her that pain? No, he couldn't revive those feelings in his wife. The responsibility for what he had to do rested on his shoulders alone. In the end, he'd become a judge after all, under circumstances he would never have wished for: in the most important trial of his life, with his own conscience sitting as jury.

 

Ricciardi walked at Maione's side, likewise caught up in a surging tide of thoughts.

Livia's visit had upset him, far more than he'd expected. He'd seen her more than once since the accident: she'd been the first to hurry to the hospital; he'd received visits from her several times at police headquarters, to the delight of the staff gossips and of Garzo, who was always ready to present his fat, smiling face to anyone who he thought could put in a good word for him in Rome. But he'd taken care to make sure he was never alone with her.

This time, however, he hadn't been able to get away. Not out of cowardice; he just couldn't bring himself to hurt her feelings. He knew very well—and things had turned out pretty much as he'd expected—that he'd end up saying exactly what he felt, word for word and letter for letter. He was incapable of verbal acrobatics; diplomacy was not one of his admittedly few virtues.

He doubted he loved Livia, but then he wondered if that was really true. His general disinclination for sentiment, not to mention his want of experience and the lack of any precedents for all this situation, made him dubious. He was gratified by the admiration everyone else seemed to feel for that exotic, feline woman; he liked her scent, a mixture of spices and something slightly wild; and he'd instinctively gone in search of her when his loneliness, fever, and suffering had become intolerable on that rainy November night. But was that love, Ricciardi wondered?

And then, of course, there was Enrica. Her calm gestures, the spark of good humor behind her tortoiseshell eyeglass frames. The strong feelings that the sight of her stirred in him, the sense of peace he felt when he spotted her through the window at night, his despair at seeing that same window shuttered in the past few days. But was that love, on the other hand?

But the question that most obsessed him was this: did he really want love to be part of his life?

After having recognized it as one of mankind's two chief enemies, even more treacherous and incomprehensible than hunger itself; having witnessed on an ongoing, daily basis its baleful effects, the blood, the pain, the sorrow, and the suffering; knowing the weaknesses that it brought in its wake, along with the pain of separation and the melancholy of loss; did he actually want this dangerous thing, love, in his life?

He'd always avoided it, sedulously. He'd always regarded it with mistrust, maintaining a safe distance, handling its effects with gloved hands to avoid potential contamination. And now he was actually trying to parse the distinction between the two emotions that he was feeling—not one, but two—in an attempt to understand their nature.

What the hell is happening to you, Ricciardi? he asked himself. Have you decided to jump out into the void, into the abyss along the rim of which you've always walked? Aren't you afraid anymore?

He tried to focus on the investigation. In a flash, the blood, the corpses, the stab wounds all appeared before his eyes; he heard the words of the Deed, what the dead said to him in their last breath before loosening their grip on life; the awkward caution of the militiamen, caught between the desire to cooperate and the fear that someone, in some secret room either in Rome or here in Naples, might not want them to air their dirty laundry; Lomunno's grief and despair, the misery of a man killed and not yet resuscitated, the sorrow of his children. The serious face of the little girl standing on tiptoe, barefoot, stirring that foul-smelling cookpot, and the grim determination that she'd shown when she picked her little brother up from the floor and carried him off, when rage had begun to seethe into her father's words. Something she was used to, evidently.

Ricciardi couldn't say whether Garofalo's former colleague was guilty of the double homicide. Experience told him that a killer generally chose not to express his regret at
not
having committed a murder. Lomunno seemed genuinely distraught at not having carried out an act of revenge that might very well have brought him a liberatory relief, and he openly said that it was only his love for his children that had kept him from doing it. And he had no solid alibi: a condition that would typically have led to his arrest, for lack of a better candidate, and probably in the end to a guilty verdict. Lomunno had so yearned to commit that murder that perhaps, in the end, he'd even come to believe that he really was the guilty party.

The lines of investigation that they were pursuing, then, had to produce some other—
any
other—hypothesis, otherwise they'd be forced to deprive Lomunno's children of the only parent left to them. Still, the commissario mused, he was clearly an aggressive man, filled with boundless rage and bottomless sorrow. He remembered the knife driven violently into the tabletop. Maybe he really was the killer, after all, he thought.

 

They reached the
borgo
almost without realizing it. Neither of the two, each lost in his own thoughts, noticed that they'd just walked for twenty minutes without exchanging a word.

The sea was howling in the wind.

T
hey realized they'd been seen coming, as they always were. As soon as they rounded the curve in Via Partenope they realized that a messenger had broken off from the crowd of children loitering in front of the hotel in the hopes of receiving alms from the foreign tourists, and had rushed off down into the
borgo
.

Maione wasn't happy. It was like having a trumpeter going ahead and playing fanfares to announce their coming. Not that they really needed their anonymity; they weren't conducting a raid, nor were they planning to arrest anyone, unless it proved necessary. But it would have been at least a minor advantage to catch people off guard, so as to see their instinctive reaction to the visit from the police. But then they had become accustomed to losing that advantage by now.

The spectacle that greeted their eyes surprised them. At the center of a deserted, windswept piazzetta there was no one but a woman wrapped in a black shawl. Behind her stood two children, a little girl clinging to the signora's skirts and a slightly older boy, presumably the woman's daughter and son.