By My Hand (34 page)

“No, I'm becoming a burden to you. Before long I won't even be able to dress myself, let alone cook, iron, and take care of the apartment. I'm an old invalid woman, and all I do is cause trouble . . .”

Ricciardi kneeled on the floor next to the armchair. He reached out hesitantly with one hand and placed it on the woman's head, as she covered her face in despair, and he gently stroked her gray hair, gathered into a bun.

“Now stop it. You're not useless—if anything, I'm crazy for making you work so hard at your age. You know what we'll do tomorrow? We'll hire a housekeeper, that way she can do all the hard work and you can direct her. What do you say?”

Rosa jerked her head up, staring Ricciardi in the face with a warlike glare.

“Have you lost your senses? An outsider in our home, robbing us blind? It would be more work supervising her than it would be to take care of things myself. Ah, but I almost forgot, you don't care a fig about your own money, and if it weren't for me the peasants back home would have taken the clothes off your back by now.”

At last, the Rosa he knew.

“Whatever you say, Rosa. Maybe we could send for someone from back home, what about that? Then you'd be comfortable with her around, maybe one of your nieces, the daughter of one of your brothers or sisters. Just to lend a hand.”

Rosa waved one hand irritatedly, as if she were shooing away a mosquito.

“We'll see about that later; it's out of the question for now.”

Ricciardi nodded, continuing to stroke her hair all the while. It seemed to have a calming effect on her, and he would have done anything to make her stop crying.

“Well, in any case, will you tell me what the dickens started all this? What happened to make you cry like that, as if your heart was broken?”

Rosa heaved a deep sigh and lifted her clenched fist until it was right in front of Ricciardi's face. She opened it slowly, and he glimpsed shards of something that seemed vaguely familiar.

“Well? What is it?”

Rosa put on a despairing expression.

“You don't even recognize it . . . It's the Baby Jesus that once belonged to your mother, the baroness. And I dropped it, because I can't even hold things in my hands anymore!”

The tears started streaming down her face again, and Ricciardi felt a stab of pity in his heart.

“Please, don't start crying again! It's nothing, just an old piece of porcelain, you'll see, we can fix it. All we need is some glue, no? You had me thinking it was something really serious, and instead it's just a trifle.”

“No, it's not a trifle. I'm really upset, it's an antique, and it was so important to your mother that I put up the manger scene every year!”

Ricciardi felt like smiling, but he didn't want to seem dismissive about something that was clearly important to his old
tata
.

“All right, we'll buy another one. They told me that a real manger scene is like that, you always have to add pieces, one or two every year.”

Rosa said nothing, staring at her hand. Suddenly she held it up and said:

“Look. Just look at this.”

Ricciardi noticed the tremor, with a new stab of concern, this one sharper than the first. For a short time he said nothing. Then he took Rosa's hand and kissed it tenderly.

“Easy there, don't worry about it, calm down. You'll see, it'll turn out to be nothing. And I want you to write a letter back home first thing to send for one of your nieces. I don't want you to be alone anymore, you understand? We can afford it, and that's what I want.”

The woman looked down. Then she murmured under her breath:

“If you had a family of your own, the way nature intended, there wouldn't be any need for a niece.”

Rosa was Rosa; nothing could change her, not even a trembling hand. And that was a good thing.

“Still, it'll be faster to bring your niece up here, trust me. I'm a little slow when it comes to this kind of thing. Now get up, come on; I'm hungry and I have to get back to work.”

 

Antonio Lomunno sat looking at his hands. He thought about how inadequate they were given his new situation.

He'd lulled himself into the belief that he'd spend his life working at a desk, enjoying a steady climb up the rungs of a brilliant career, toward an increasingly prosperous future for himself and his family; but then everything was gone in an instant, and now he wished he knew how to do something that was humble but useful.

When he was a boy he loved carving wood, but he'd never pursued that passion because, his father told him, it distracted him from his studies. He used to carve little armies, and he'd make them fight one another for hours, on rainy Sunday afternoons when he couldn't go out and play in the courtyard. Now that old talent was good for only one thing, carving a manger scene for his children.

He looked at it: an absurd luxury for a shack that lacked everything. His children never complained, not even when that damned cheap wine was blurring his heart and he started shouting at them about some ridiculous trifle. They'd stare back at him, but they wouldn't cry or run away.

He was all they had, and they were all he had, too.

He'd clung to the thought of his children during those long, terrible months in prison; and the love he felt for them had saved him from madness, after the warden informed him of what his wife had done.

His children, no question: and his thirst for revenge.

Two conflicting emotions, equally powerful, equally intense. During the nights he spent staring sleeplessly at the ceiling of his cell, watchful as rough hands reached out for him, as cockroaches scuttled across the floor, those two passions worked together to keep him alive.

But the minute he was released, those two emotions became enemies: if he wanted to provide for his children, if he wished to preserve a shred of hope for them, he'd have to renounce his thirst for revenge.

As he was getting ready to go out for the day of temporary work he'd managed to secure, he thought about the blood that had been shed; and his own blood, which flowed in the veins of those two children who'd become old too soon, who watched as he dressed.

Again, he looked at his hands, and he decided that loading and unloading fish at the market was certainly a job he could do. It wasn't that hard, after all. And anything was respectable that was good for his kids.

He reached his hand out toward the manger scene and picked up Saint Joseph. The original figurine, the one he had owned in the beautiful home he'd lived in in his previous life, had been lost; he'd carved this one out of wood, coloring it with a little paint. You were a father, too, he murmured. A father who had only one thought, to work for his son's good, without a lot of talk, without a lot of philosophizing.

He put the figurine back, amid the others, and smiled sadly. Among the many houses in the manger scene, there was room for little shacks like the one he lived in.

He stood up, gave his children a kiss, and went to the market.

M
aione gaped, opening and then shutting his mouth twice, like a fresh-caught mullet wriggling on the deck of a fishing boat. He was experiencing a sense of bewilderment, as if Lucia had suddenly materialized before him in response to a mystical invocation. As if she'd been transported to the Villa Nazionale on his own thought waves.

He stared at her, her hat fastened to her head with a ribbon, her overcoat with the fur collar, the one he'd bought for her so many years ago and that she kept in perfect condition, her cheeks red from the chilly air, her blue eyes turned in the same direction he'd been gazing until just a few seconds ago.

“Luci', what are you doing here?”

His wife didn't answer; she just looked at him with her lips pressed firmly together and a determined expression on her face. Then she said:

“You're not working. Don't even try to tell me that you're here on a case, that you're tailing some criminal the day before Christmas Eve. Those people aren't fugitives; they're just a normal family, out for a little fresh air in the Villa Nazionale. Don't you dare try to lie to me, Rafe'.”

Maione knew his wife. Joking around at home, back when Luca was still alive, they used to say that she was the real policeman in the family. All the same, he tried lying to her anyway.

“What's that supposed to mean? If you only knew how many people seem normal, harmless, but then it turns out they've done things that you can't even imagine. Believe me, people aren't always what they seem.”

Lucia, without taking her eyes off Biagio's family, replied:

“Nonsense. A minute ago you put your hands on your face; you only do that when you're confused, when you don't know what to do next. And you never have doubts or uncertainties about your work. There's some other problem here, and I want to know what it is.”

Maione didn't know what to say. The woman went on.

“I've been following you for two days now. Ever since you came home that night three days ago, your mood has changed. You've seemed sad, distracted, pensive. You try your best to seem normal, but I know you: you can't pull the wool over my eyes. When an investigation gets under your skin you bring it home with you, but there's always been a limit. This time it's different, and I want to know what it's about.”

Her tone of voice brooked no objections.

“Come here, Luci'. Let's sit down on that bench and I'll tell you all about it.”

A few shafts of sunlight slanted down, making their way fitfully through the thick black clouds, hitting the sea here and there. The bench was cold, but the fact that there was no wind made it tolerable. The strollers were thinning out as lunchtime drew near, but the orchestra played on heroically, keeping the Christmas spirit flying, like the banner of a regiment fighting in the trenches.

“Do you think that certain things can ever end, Luci'? Do you think that it's possible to put an end to certain sorrows, and start living again?”

Signora Maione sat stiffly, her face sunk deep in her fur collar. The brigadier couldn't see her expression. All the better: it would make it easier for him to find the strength to tell her everything.

“I think that pain and joy both leave their marks. And you have to deal with the marks they leave. They never end, no; they leave you a different person. But you have to provide those who depend on you with an explanation of some kind. That's something that took me three years to learn—you know. And we never talked about it; one day I smiled at you, and you wrapped your arms around me. That's what I know, and that's all I want to know.”

Two seagulls shrieked at the winter weather. Candela's wife was telling the children something, and they both listened, spellbound; he sat on the ground, looking out at the sea and smoking a cigarette.

Lucia and Raffaele, sitting just some fifteen feet away from the man and woman and their children, watched them and, beyond them, watched the sea, pierced here and there by shafts of sunlight. Christmas was looming over everyone, midway between a promise and a threat.

“Tell me. Tell me the whole story. I can tell that it's not something that's yours alone, that it concerns me as well. If that's true, and I know it is, then you have to tell me everything.”

It was true, and Maione knew it. His simple mind grasped the fact that he ought to have shared what was happening with Lucia, but his terror at the thought of shattering the fragile equilibrium that they'd only recently managed to recover after Luca's death was overwhelming.

He suddenly realized that he'd crossed that line at the very moment he had learned that that fair-haired young man, so gentle and inoffensive in appearance, who was sitting in the grass mere feet away, was their son's murderer.

Maione heaved a sigh. And he started to tell her the story.

He told her, and his voice sounded like the murmuring of the waves on the deserted beach. He told her, and his hushed words carved a groove as deep as hell itself. He told her, and as he told her he told himself as well, creating order among the vague and rebellious thoughts that had been traveling between his mind and his heart, giving him no peace.

He told her, and it seemed as if a century had passed since that evening just three days ago, when he had found Franco Massa standing on a corner on Via Toledo, ghostlike, waiting for him.

He told her about the scratchy voice pouring out of the broken heart of a father who'd never had children of his own, and through that voice he told her the story of a confession extorted through a last act of deception, and the final truth that had come out of that confession.

He told her about a man who was guilty of many crimes and murders but innocent of one, a man who had died in the belief that he was cleansing his soul in the presence of a priest, and about that fake priest who had decreed the death sentence for a man who was guilty of nothing except that one murder. And how that death sentence had been entrusted to his hands, the hands of a father who'd once had a son but no longer did.

He told her about how he'd climbed all the way up to Bambinella's garret apartment, of a name and address whispered in a setting of silk curtains and dying pigeons. And about the walk to San Gregorio Armeno, in the midst of a Christmas that seemed like an empty collective charade surrounding the song of death that played to him in his heart.

He told her about the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and the way his head spun, when in the light of dawn he'd first laid eyes on that hand, the hand that had changed everything for him, the color of the sun and the very taste of happiness. He told her about the horror he'd felt when he saw the same blond hair, the identical youth of both the murderer and the victim.

Lucia sailed silently over the waves of the story her husband was telling her, as if in a dense fog. She felt as though she were listening to a story that didn't concern her, as she observed from a distance events and characters like those you could watch in a movie house.