By My Hand (25 page)

The figures remained motionless; if it weren't for the billowing of their clothing, they could have been a sculptural group, a statue dedicated to modern motherhood. They stood perfectly still, their faces turned in the policemen's direction. Ricciardi looked around, guessing at the eyes staring at him from behind the closed shutters of the surrounding buildings.

Maione sighed and stepped forward.

“
Buonasera
, Signo'. We are Brigadier Maione and Commis­sario Ricciardi of the mobile squad. We're here to talk to Signor Aristide Boccia. Do you know him?”

The woman stood still, in silence. Maione looked at Ricciardi for instructions. Had she heard him? Did she understand what he was saying? As he was trying to decide whether to repeat the question, the woman said:

“He's my husband. He's out on the water right now. Come with me.”

She turned and headed for the front door of a
basso
, or ground-floor apartment, followed by the two children, Maione and Ricciardi, and many pairs of eyes, watching from behind the shutters.

The room they entered reminded them both of Lomunno and his shack. These people seemed to be living in even more dire poverty, but it was evident that there was a woman here at least. On the table lay a tattered piece of embroidered cloth; a curtain, patched but clean, hung at the hovel's only window; a hand-tinted photograph of a couple from the turn of the century, the woman sitting and the man standing, with a votive candle lit in front of them on a little shelf; and the aroma of fish chowder wafted through the air.

The little boy went running over to a cradle, in the corner of the room that was best sheltered from drafts and winds.

“This is my brother, Vincenzino. He's dying!”

He said it with pride, as if the infant in the cradle were about to perform a memorable deed of some kind. Maione looked down at his fingernails.

“Alfo',” the mother said to the boy, “go wait for Papa and tell him to come right away. Be careful not to get too close to the water. The seas are high tonight.”

Then she turned to Maione.

“I'm sorry, I have nothing to offer you.”

“Don't worry about it, Signo'. We're just here to ask a few questions. Maybe we'll wait for your husband.”

The woman nodded. Ricciardi decided that she seemed much younger up close than he'd thought she was at first.

“Signora, one question: how did you know that we were coming to see your husband?”

The woman met and held the gaze of those strange, transparent eyes.

“Commissa', word travels fast. Policemen hear things, and so you come to talk to my husband. Well, we hear things, too.”

Logical, thought Ricciardi. Logical, but she didn't actually tell me anything.

The door opened and Alfonso, the eldest son, came in, along with a man.

“I'm Aristide Boccia,” the man said. “Were you looking for me?”

They looked at him. He was dressed like any other fisherman, with an oilskin raincoat and a large, shapless hat made of the same material. He was carrying an unlit lantern, and he was dripping water.

“Yes, we're here to talk to you. I'm Brigadier Maione and this is Commissario Ricciardi, from police headquarters. We have a few questions we'd like to ask you.”

Boccia made a face that could have been a tired sneer. His face was square and sunburnt. It was impossible to assign it an age.

“Well, here we are, as you can see. We haven't run off.”

“Why were you expecting us?” Ricciardi inquired. “How did you know that we would come?”

Boccia stared back at him, expressionless.

“Because we went to see the Garofalos, my wife and I. We went two days before someone killed them.”

A whistling sound came from the cradle, and the mother went over, moving something around inside it. The man continued, with an almost apologetic tone of voice.

“My youngest son, Vincenzino. There's something wrong with his chest; for the past few months he hasn't been breathing right, but now he's gotten worse, he has a constant fever. He's only four. I'm carving this manger scene for him. Who knows if he'll live long enough to see it finished.”

Somewhere outside, the sea dramatically underscored what the man had just said with a roar.

There wasn't a hint of drama in Boccia's voice, no self-pity. It was as if he were talking about the conditions out on the water. He went on.

“It was on his account that we went to see Centurion Garofalo last week. If Vincenzino had been well, we'd have kept quiet and just muddled through.”

“I don't understand,” Maione said. “What do you mean?”

Boccia had taken off his oilskin rain poncho and placed it, with the rain hat, on a stool by the door. The boy moved quickly, grabbing the raincoat and depositing it in a cabinet next to the hearth. The well-established routines of an ordinary family.

“What do you know about the work we do? Do you know any fishermen, either of you?”

Maione shook his head no, Ricciardi said nothing.

“You can't make any money. You'd think that in a gulf like this there must be lots and lots of fish, but there aren't. There are times when you spend the whole day on the water and don't catch a thing. We move from place to place, we try different spots, we work together with others. But whatever we do, we barely make a living.”

His wife placed a chair at the table near her husband, and he dropped into it, exhausted.

“I've been out since four. That's more than twelve hours. In heavy seas it's harder still, we shouldn't even go out at all, but then what would I feed my children? In this weather, we run the risk that the waves will carry off our nets. We don't even hoist our sails; we go out with oars. There's four of us, with a single boat.”

Ricciardi listened attentively.

“You haven't told us why you went to see Garofalo the other day.”

The man ran his hand over his face. Maione noticed that there were cuts on his hand, with thin, bloody strips of fabric wrapped around them. Boccia followed his gaze and said, dismissively:

“These are nothing, Brigadie'. They're just the little marks we get from handling the nets, cables, and oars. The worst damage is there, in that cradle.”

The woman walked over and stood by her husband, her eyes leveled on the policemen. The man continued.

“As you know, there are laws for fishing. They're strange laws, and they don't really make all that much sense; still, we have to live with them. On a good day, we bring in four to seven hundred pounds of fish with our boat. On bad days, sometimes we come back completely empty-handed. We can't fish after the first hatching, so that means we can't even go to the areas where the fish lay their eggs in the sea. We can't go into private waters, as if the sea had fences and gates. We can't use explosives, and that's fair, I understand it. We have to have certificates and licenses, and we have to have receipts for all the taxes we pay.”

The man was exhausted, and he spoke almost in a whisper. The room, along with its old, broken-down window and door frame, was illuminated by two lanterns, swaying in the drafts.

“Overseeing all those things is the militia's job. Even if you have everything in perfect order, there's always a little something extra to pay. It's what we've always done, none of us complain about it. As if it were just another tax. But then Garofalo showed up.”

Maione nodded. This information matched what he'd been told by Bambinella.

“And what changed?”

“At first, he seemed better than the others, much better. He called all us boat owners together and told us, ‘From now on, you don't have to give anybody anything. Nothing to no one. You can imagine how happy we were, it was a huge cost off our backs. That lasted almost a year.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then one day he comes here, to the
borgo
. It was summer, we were out on the piazza, playing a little music and dancing. Sometimes we do that when it's been a good day; they can even hear us from the hotels, they lean out the windows and clap along. So he shows up here, alone, in uniform. He calls a few of us aside and says to us, ‘Did you know that you've been fishing in the waters of Duke Thus-and-Such, off Posillipo?' We all look at one another, and we say, ‘Centurio', when on earth? We're always careful where we fish, and we'd never fish there anyway, you can't catch anything.' And he said, ‘You see? How do you know that you can't catch anything there, if you don't fish there?' And he fined us.”

Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance.

“A fine? What's so serious about that?”

Boccia laughed sardonically.

“The fine is nothing. The serious part is that if you get a second fine of the same kind in a single year, then your fishing license is suspended for up to six months. They call it recidivism.”

Maione nodded.

“Which meant you were at his mercy.”

“Exactly, Brigadie'. If you deprive someone like me of his fishing license, then you might as well just take the whole family, put them in a boat, take the boat out to the middle of the sea, and sink it. Better a quick death than to starve.”

“And what did Garofalo want?”

“He'd chosen his victims wisely, Commissa'. The ones who went out most often, the ones with young children. The ones who could never stop working. He'd meet us at the market and take the money directly out of the wholesalers' hands. Ten, sometimes twenty percent. Depending on what kind of a day it had been.”

“And it didn't ever occur to you to report him?”

Boccia laughed again.

“Report him? Our word against the word of a centurion in the militia, a Fascist? They would have thrown us in prison and given him a promotion, let me tell you. They'd have said we were just trying to get him out of the way for own ulterior motives. There was nothing we could do.”

Maione was incredulous.

“So you did nothing? You just accepted the situation, you paid in silence?”

“We're used to it, Brigadie'. That's how it's always been: one time it's this one, another time it's that one, but it's always the same. But Garofalo could never get enough, he always wanted more. And I'd even have kept on paying, except Vincenzino got sick.”

The wife took a step forward, emerging from the shadows.

“I spoke up; I told Aristide to stop. When the doctor left, saying that if Vicenzino didn't get that medicine, he didn't stand a chance, I said, ‘Let's go and talk to him.' I thought, he has a daughter of his own, and he lives near the water; he must know how hard a fisherman's life is. Aristide said no. ‘Don't fool yourself,' he said, ‘what do those people care about Vincenzino and us.' But I insisted, I said that if we looked him in the face, if we talked to each other, maybe he'd leave us be, at least until Vincenzino got a little better. After all, he owed us that much.”

Ricciardi thought back to the image of Garofalo, who kept saying, grim-faced, as he spouted blood from his many wounds:
I don't owe a thing, not a thing
.

“And in the end, you went to see him.”

“That's right, Commissa'. We didn't bring anything with us, because he'd told us a thousand times never to bring anything to his home, since he didn't want his neighbors to think that he was taking graft. We just hoped that his wife, who was a mother like me, might understand and grant us grace, like the Madonna does, to us poor laborers.”

Both Ricciardi and Maione were reminded of the sight of the shattered Saint Joseph and the Madonna tipped over onto the ass.

“What kind of a welcome did they give you?”

“The signora answered the door, with the little girl. As soon as she saw us, the child said, ‘Mamma, these people smell bad.' The mother started laughing, and then he showed up. He didn't even ask us to sit down.”

Her husband broke in.

“I'd prepared a whole speech, about our child and the medicine. A lot of good it did me: they looked at each other and burst out laughing. He said, ‘If you don't get out of here instantly on your own two feet, I'll call some of my militiamen and have them toss you in a cell.' So then my wife spoke to the signora . . .”

“. . . and I said to her, ‘Signo', you're a mother; my son is sick.'”

Maione listened without wanting to.

“And what did she say to you?”

The woman's face was waxen.

“She smiled sweetly at me and said, ‘Money is men's business, don't you know that? We women have to stay out of it. And after all, you have three children and I only have the little girl.' As if, since we have three, I could happily do without Vincenzino.”

The sea thundered again. No more light was filtering in through the blinds; it was night already.

“So then what did you do?” Ricciardi asked.

Husband and wife exchanged a glance. He was the first to look away.

“What could we do? We came back home to await our fate.”

Maione waited, then asked:

“Did you ever go back to the Garofalos' home after that?”

There was a silence that seemed endless, then the woman said:

“No, Brigadie'. We never went back. But when we heard the news that they had both been killed, I'll tell you the truth, it was a liberation for us both. Those weren't respectable people, no. They took no pity on people like us, in our condition. And a mother and father ought to feel pity for others. At least for their children. None of this should touch the children.”

From the cradle came a faint, doleful hiss. The parents exchanged another quick glance. Ricciardi stood up.

“Let's go. Come on, Maione.”

When he reached the door he stopped, then turned to look at the woman.

“Signora, a friend of mine is going to come take a look at your son. He's a doctor, a man with white hair, and he'll have a dog with him. He's the best doctor you'll find anywhere, and if anything can be done, he'll do it; and don't worry about the medicines, he'll take care of them. You're right: none of this should touch the children.”