Day of the Dead

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2010 by Fandango libri s.r.l.
First publication 2014 by Europa Editions
Translation by Antony Shugaar
Original Title:
Il giorno dei morti. L'autunno del commissario Ricciardi
Translation copyright © 2014 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451943

Maurizio de Giovanni

THE DAY OF THE DEAD

Translated from the Italian
by Antony Shugaar

To Giovanni and Roberto,
for giving me the most marvelous gifts of fear.

As the dawn was beginning to extract the outlines of things from the night and the rain, if someone had happened to pass by the foot of the monumental staircase leading up to Capodimonte, they'd have seen a dog and a child. But they would have had to look very closely; the figures were hard to make out in the uncertain light of early morning.

The dog and the child just sat there, motionless, indifferent to the fat, cold raindrops falling from the sky. They were sitting on the stone bench in the ornamental recess just above the bottom of the staircase. The staircase itself was a rushing torrent, transporting leaves and branches from the wooded palace grounds.

If someone had walked by and stopped to look, they might have wondered why the stream of water and detritus rushing downhill seemed to respect the dog and the child, flowing around them without touching them, save for the occasional splash. The alcove offered some slight shelter and protected them from the rain: only the hair on the dog's back quivered every now and then, like a shiver of wind.

Someone might have wondered what the dog and the child were doing there, sitting motionless in the cold dawn of a rainy fall day.

The little boy was gray, his hair plastered to his head by the rain, hands in his lap and feet dangling an inch or so from the ground, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes lost as if in a dream or in some thought. The dog seemed to be sleeping, its head resting on its paws, fur spotted with sopping wet patches of dark brown, one ear raised, its tail at rest along its side.

Someone might have wondered if the dog and child were waiting for somebody. Or if they were thinking about something that had happened, something that had left its mark in their memories. Or perhaps if they were listening to a sound, some faint music.

Now the rain starts drumming louder, thundering like a revolt against the rising sun; the dog and the child remain motionless, indifferent to the water's fury. From the child's nose and the dog's lifted ear stream icy rivulets.

The dog is waiting.

The child no longer dreams.

 

Monday, October 26, 1931—Year IX

 

The call came in at 6:30
A.M.
, an hour before the end of the night shift.
Ricciardi didn't mind staying overnight at the police station, when he was assigned that shift; for the most part they were quiet hours, time he could devote to reading or a pleasant kind of repose somewhere between waking and sleep on the sofa in the room next to his office. And it was rather rare for his rest or his thoughts to be disturbed by a policeman knocking on the door, requesting his presence.

Murders happen at night, but they're discovered in the morning; so the danger hour was exactly then, just as the light of day was lifting the veil on the depravities of the darkness.

Ricciardi had just finished washing up in the sink at the far end of the hallway when he saw Brigadier Maione dragging himself up the last flight of stairs.

“Commissa', you didn't think they'd let us finish our shift in peace, did you? A phone call's just come in, a gentleman from the Tondo di Capodimonte. He says that there's a milkmaid with a nanny goat who's crying.”

Ricciardi reflected on the matter as he dried his hands.

“So now they're calling us about crying milkmaids? And I'm not sure I understand: who's crying, the milkmaid or the nanny goat?”

Maione threw his arms open wide, still panting after racing up the stairs.

“Commissa', you can joke if you like; meanwhile it's raining buckets out there, and since we've got another hour left in our shift we're going to have to make it all the way to Capodimonte in this downpour. It's serious business: apparently there's a dead boy on the monumental staircase. It was the woman who found him, as she was walking down from a farm on the hill with her little nanny goat to sell milk, she says that this is her route, and she saw him there, motionless, and she gave him a shake but he didn't move. So she went to the nearest building to get help, and this gentleman who rang us up was the only one who had a telephone. Now I ask you, couldn't this have happened a couple of hours from now? Then the one hiking through the rain would be Cozzolino, who's young and eager, whereas the minute I get even a little bit wet, I get a backache so bad I have to walk bent over at the middle.”

Ricciardi had already thrown on his raincoat.

“In other words, you really are getting old. Come on, let's go see what this is all about. It might just be a prank—you know how people love to see cops running around in the rain. Then you can go home and dry off.”

 

The way from the police station to Capodimonte was the same route that Ricciardi took to go home. A long walk that, at a certain point, took on such a steep incline that it left you gasping. You had to walk the length of the Via Toledo, with its imposing aristocratic residences, cross the Largo della Carità and walk past the Spirito Santo building, walk alongside the National Museum: a border line with, on either side of it, uphill and down, the impenetrable narrow alleyways, or
vicoli,
of the Spanish Quarter, the port, and the Sanità neighborhood, bubbling over with life and grief, cheerful energy and poverty.

Ricciardi had the same thought every time he passed this way, every morning and every night, feeling on his skin the suspicious eyes of those who had to conceal the way they earned their living: that street said a lot about the city. It said everything there was to say.

And it always changed, season after season, offering variously a torrid summer picture in which filth baked in the sun, or a fragrant image of spring, with fruit and flower vendors displaying their wares for wealthy passersby, or the artificial wasteland of winter, when all the dodgy dealings retreated into the ground-floor apartments, or
bassi
, lining the street, sheltered from the icy wind that never seemed to die down.

Now, on this damp autumn morning, the long street had as many rivulets running through it as there were
vicoli
intersecting it, carrying garbage and filth from the distant hillside down toward an unreachable sea.

Maione leapt nimbly to avoid the deeper puddles, in a futile attempt to keep his boots dry.

“She'll kill me. Guaranteed. My wife will kill me. Com­missa', you can't imagine what a savage beast she turns into when she has to clean mud and filth off my boots. I tell her, don't worry about it, I'll clean them myself, and she says, now don't talk nonsense, she says, I'm a brigadier's wife and it's my job to clean his boots. In that case, I ask, why all the complaining? And she says, it's my job to clean them, but would it kill you to be a little more careful?”

As they walked, he did his best to ward off the rain with a big black umbrella he held over his and Ricciardi's heads. The commissario, as usual, wore no hat, nor did he seem to be paying any attention to the bad weather. Maione easily changed the subject:

“I don't understand you, Commissa'. I don't mean the umbrella—you might think of carrying one, seeing as it's been raining for three days now, but I can see how a person might get tired of carrying it and decide to leave it at home—but a hat at least, couldn't you try wearing a hat? You may be young but believe me, when you're my age, every single drop of rain turns into a stabbing headache.”

Ricciardi walked briskly, his hands plunged into his raincoat pockets, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him.

“You know I can't stand wearing a hat: it gives me a migraine. Plus I grew up in the mountains, I don't mind the cold and the damp. Don't worry about it; worry about your own health, and about keeping your boots clean.”

They'd reached the part of the walk that Ricciardi especially disliked. This was the bridge that the Bourbon monarchs had built, so they could reach the royal palace, the Palazzo Reale, without having to pass through the Sanità quarter, which had always been one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. For some strange and inexplicable reason, from the day it was built that towering viaduct, that riverless bridge that sank its pillars into the narrow
vicoli
beneath it, had become a favored spot for suicides.

What Ricciardi inwardly referred to as “the Deed,” his grievous curse to perceive the last thoughts of those who had died violent deaths, became an intolerable burden near the bridge. There was always at least one lingering ghostly image, ready to lift its gaze as he passed and speak to him the words with which it had been forced to abandon its existence of flesh, bones, and blood. A farewell message with one recipient alone: him.

On that rainy morning, perfectly visible to the eyes of his soul, there were two adolescents perched precariously, hand in hand, on the parapet. The young man's neck was broken, and his face was looking backward, as if his head had been put on the wrong way around; he was murmuring:
not without you, never without you
.

The girl's chest was crushed and the front of her head had been virtually obliterated by the impact. A thought came to him out of the bloody pulp that had once been her face:
I don't want to die, I'm too young, I don't want to die
.

Ricciardi mused to himself that perhaps love had claimed more victims than war. Actually, he could leave out the “perhaps,” he decided.

Farther on, on the same parapet, a fat old man with a stove-in skull was saying:
I can't pay you back, I can't
. Debt, the commissario thought as he hastened his step, leaving a panting Maione behind him. Another incurable disease. God, he was tired. Nothing ever changed, it was always the same things.

They finally arrived at the Tondo di Capodimonte, where the monumental staircase began. It hadn't been easy to make it all the way up here; the last stretch of road had been a raging river of branches and leaves through which they'd had to fight their way upstream. Maione had finally given up trying to spare his boots, and his face had taken on an expression of grim silence. Ricciardi carried with him the image of the suicides and was grimmer still.

A knot of people had gathered at the foot of the staircase, above the first flight of steps. The mushroom patch of umbrellas hid from view whatever it was that they were looking at. The arrival of Maione and Ricciardi, accompanied by a pair of policemen, immediately scattered the assembled crowd. Maione snickered:

“As usual. The only thing stronger than curiosity is the fear of getting mixed up in some trouble with the law, the second the police show up.”

Ricciardi immediately spotted the little boy, sitting on the stone bench at the foot of the left-hand buttress. He was small, his feet didn't reach the ground, and he was dripping wet. Rain ran down from his hair, drenching his tattered clothes, the clothes of a
scugnizzo
, a street urchin. On his feet were a pair of wooden clogs, the marks of chilblains clearly visible. His lips were purplish, his eyes half-open and staring into empty air.

He was especially struck by the boy's hands, lying fallen in his lap like a pair of dead baby birds. White, much lighter than the complexion of his legs, livid from the cold, they appeared to the commissario as a mark of surrender and misgiving. He instinctively looked around, and saw no trace of ghostly images: the child's death couldn't have been a violent one; perhaps he'd frozen to death, or starved, or succumbed to some disease. Abandoned, he thought: to his own devices, to the elements, to random violence, to loneliness. The child had had no choice in the matter.