I Will Have Vengeance (20 page)

Nespoli swallowed it with a sigh and a smile, shaking his head slightly. “The priest. Damn it.”

He seemed more amused than dejected, as if he had lost a hand at a card game. Ricciardi, his voice still low, said: “What did you have against Vezzi? What had he done to you?”

“He was a bastard. A vile, despicable man. He seduced women. He took liberties with them. He thought he was God. And he wasn't God, he was a zero.”

“And so you killed him.”

“I certainly didn't intend to kill him. We argued, got into a fight. I punched him, and he ended up in the mirror. Tall as me, heavier than me, yet as soon as I laid a finger on him he ended up in the mirror. Even in that respect, he was worthless.”

Silence. Ricciardi turned and saw the tears streaming down the clown's face. He looked at Nespoli again.

“So he didn't deserve to live, Nespoli? And you thought you were God and you came here to kill him.”

The baritone gave a start.

“No, I'm not God. But as far as I'm concerned, good is good, and bad is bad. And Vezzi was bad. He didn't even make an attempt to appear good. With that poor Pelosi, for instance, at the rehearsal. I had gone to watch, you can't imagine how he treated him. Pelosi is a good man; he drinks, but he's a decent person who never harms anyone. Vezzi called him an incompetent old drunk, that's what he called him. Heartless.”

“And women? You mentioned women.”

“Yes, women. He got too familiar with them, he was free with his hands, he demanded their attentions by force, owing to the power he had, because he was important, because he was the famous Vezzi. And now he's nothing.”

Nespoli spoke calmly, in a normal, conversational tone. There was no sign of emotion in his voice. But his eyes—his eyes flashed with a savage fury. Ricciardi thought curiously that he would have made a magnificent movie actor, not the new talkies, but the silent films: his expressions wouldn't require captions, the music would be enough.

“Tell us how it happened, exactly.”

Nespoli shrugged briefly.

“What can I tell you? I was going back to the dressing room, I had finished my first scene, I had about ten minutes. He had his door open, he looked at me and made a sarcastic comment: ‘The amateur, bravo! You sounded like a singer, almost!' I saw red. I gave him a shove, he fell backwards. He got up and said to me: ‘You're finished. After this you'll never sing again.' I stepped inside, I closed the door behind me. I tried to apologize, but he repeated: ‘After this you'll never sing again.' So I stopped thinking and I punched him.”

“How did you punch him? Where?”

Nespoli simulated a right hook.

“Like this. In the face. I caught him under the eye, I think.”

It corresponded to the blow's mark on the body.

“And then?”

“Then he fell back into the mirror and it shattered. He started bleeding from his throat, in spurts, a ton of blood. He was wheezing, he sat down in the chair, the blood kept gushing out. The bastard, he was the one who was done singing. With that insincere voice he used to make fun of everybody. With that black soul of his.”

Ricciardi, out of the corner of his eye, glanced at the black soul who, weeping, was still singing and gushing blood. Still, he had a right to live, he thought. No matter how black his soul was.

“And what did you do?”

“I thought quickly. I couldn't leave through the dressing-room door, someone might see me. But if I went out through the window and then came back in during the performance, dressed in costume, it would have seemed odd. In effect, it would be like confessing. So I took the bastard's coat, hat and scarf from the armoire and climbed down from the window.”

He pointed with his chin to where he had gone out.

“And what door did you come back in from?”

“The little door, near the entrance to the gardens. It's always open; we go out there to smoke during rehearsals.”

“And did you meet anyone, coming back?”

“Only the priest; he was towards the top of the stairs. But he was engrossed, he was listening to the intermezzo. I didn't think he had recognized me. I still had a little time, I thought.”

“What did you do then? Did you go back to your dressing room?”

“No. How could I? Wearing Vezzi's coat and hat? Besides, even if after the intermezzo there's the chorus and almost everyone is onstage, there's always someone in the dressing room. I looked around carefully, and when I saw that there was no one about, I opened the door and tossed the coat, hat and scarf into the room with Vezzi. They were still playing the end of the intermezzo.”

Ricciardi looked at Maione, who nodded. The timing corresponded to what had been clocked that evening.

“Then I locked the dressing-room door and took the utility lift up to the prop room to switch the shoes.”

“And the key?”

Nespoli appeared disoriented for a moment.

“The key? I put it in my pocket and later, when I left, I went to the port and threw it in the sea.”

Ricciardi stared at him, eye to eye. Nespoli held his gaze.

“How did you explain the fact that the shoes were muddy to the prop manager?”

“Campieri? He wasn't at his post, maybe he had been called away elsewhere or had wandered off somewhere. If he had been there, I would have wiped them off as best I could and gone onstage, running the risk of leaving traces. At that point I had no choice. In any case, there was no more time, I had to go back onstage.”

There was a moment's silence. The murmuring outside the door was a backdrop to the long look exchanged between the singer and the detective. Maione was breathing heavily. Vezzi's soul wept and sang and demanded justice, but only Ricciardi heard it.

Nespoli said: “I'm not sorry. I'll never be sorry.”

Ricciardi went out first, while Maione fastened the cuffs on Nespoli's wrists. The crowd that had gathered outside the dressing room suddenly fell silent. The theater director made his way through, accompanied by the stage manager: the little Duke was so agitated that he appeared cyanotic.

“This is too much, far, far too much! To come in through the side door during the performance, sneak on to the stage, even! And then into a dressing room! Will you get it through your heads, once and for all, that this is a theater? One of the nation's greatest?”

While the Duke pirouetted around, unable to pause even to catch his breath, Ricciardi noticed that the murmuring of the assorted crowd of clowns, colombinas, harlequins and wagoners had again gone silent. Turning towards the dressing room, he saw Nespoli come out, followed by Maione. The man's gaze remained proud, confident and challenging; the people closest to him stepped back, instinctively. Nespoli looked around, just once: and that was when it happened.

The Commissario noticed that for an instant, one brief, single moment, Nespoli's eyes changed. It was so sudden and fleeting that he doubted whether he had actually seen it; but accustomed as he was to gauging people's emotions from their eyes, he couldn't have been mistaken.

In that one instant, Nespoli's face had become tender and sad, submissive and despairing. The strong, scornful baritone was gone, giving way to a forlorn young man who was nonetheless willing to give up his own life for love. It was an expression of extreme sacrifice.

Ricciardi recalled that, some years before, he had dealt with the murder of a woman by her husband, whom she had wanted to leave for a lover: the man had killed himself, after killing her, with two shots of his army officer's pistol. The Commissario could still recall the murderer's image: half his skull had been blown away by the shot. The one remaining eye, however, had precisely the same expression as it shed desperate tears. Giving one's life for love. The image kept saying, “
For you, my love, for you
,” while the brain still sizzled from the heat of the gunpowder.

Ricciardi immediately looked around at the crowd, to figure out who the singer had searched out with his eyes. He knew that the key to it all was there, in that look: the real motive for Vezzi's murder, and Nespoli's own perdition. He glanced around and, at first, as the theater director went on sputtering and protesting, he could see no possible recipient of such a look. Then, unexpectedly, he recognized the mirror image of the baritone's eyes. While the singer's eyes were submissive, adoring and quivering with sacrifice, their counterpart was almost menacing: be careful not to give yourself away, they said, make sure you keep up that pose.

The moment passed, leaving the Commissario confused. This new element, which he did not intend to underestimate, once again changed the perspective and radically so. And yet they had a confession, a full confession, which he couldn't overlook.

Nespoli's appearance had had the incidental, though not negligible, effect of silencing the theater director for a moment. But only for a moment.

“But . . . but . . . is this what it seems? Have you arrested the guilty party? Oh, but then I must take it all back! My congratulations! Not that I ever for a moment doubted that justice would triumph, nevertheless this last . . . raid of yours would have led me to take matters up with your superiors again or, if necessary, with Rome, to resolve the issue. But now, of course, if it should turn out that you really found your man . . . ”

Ricciardi, his voice loud enough to be heard throughout the area said: “Yes, Duke. That's exactly right. We have arrested the perpetrator, so it would seem.”

Everyone had something to say about Ricciardi's announcement and for a moment there was a babel of confused voices. Only one person, whom the Commissario was watching, did not raise her eyes.

W
hen he caught up with Maione outside the theater, they headed for the Questura. The procedure was irregular, because for safety reasons they should have been accompanied by at least two policemen. However, the man under arrest had such a quiet, submissive attitude that there seemed no danger of being shot in the head. A few hundred yards further on, they ran into Luise, the young reporter from
Il Mattino
, who was out of breath.

“Commissario, hello . . . I was notified by phone . . . who is the man you've arrested? Can you tell me, this time?”

Ricciardi took pity on the young man whom he had treated badly at their first meeting, and didn't want to send him away empty-handed.

“It's one of the singers from
Cavalleria Rusticana
, his name is Michele Nespoli. He's a suspect.”

Nespoli, who had kept his eyes lowered until then, looked up and said scornfully: “What hotshots these cops are! They always catch the offender. Especially when they have an informer.”

Maione placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Speak only when you're questioned.”

Luise tried to ask something about the circumstances of the arrest, but the three men quickly walked away.

Once the detainment procedures were completed and Nespoli had been taken to a holding cell in the Questura, Ricciardi said goodnight to Maione.

“Don't arrange for the transfer to Poggioreale yet. Tomorrow I want to talk to him one more time.”

“Something isn't clear to you, huh,
Commissa'
? I realized it from the questions you asked and by the way you looked at him. Still, he confessed.”

“Yes, he confessed. But tomorrow I want to talk to him again. Goodnight.”

On his way back home, the Commissario went over the sequence of events.

The look, first of all: with handcuffs on his wrists, Nespoli had looked at a person whom Ricciardi would never have expected. The randomness of the act: was it possible for an individual—even one with a disposition as quick-tempered as that of the baritone—to react in such an extreme way, over a simple comment? The timing: was it possible for someone singing in an opera to leave the stage, kill a man, escape through a window, come back in, go up to the fourth floor, switch his shoes, come back down and go onstage to sing—all in just ten minutes, without having planned it? The method: was it possible for a single punch—which moreover had raised the doctor's doubts about its limited effects—to knock a person down so violently as to shatter a heavy mirror and cause him to bleed to death? Possible, of course; he had seen even stranger circumstances. But unlikely, very unlikely. Finally, the Incident: the tears streaming down Vezzi's face. You don't cry during a fight over such senseless reasons.

So then, Ricciardi thought, Nespoli was covering for someone. But who? And why? The woman he had looked at? Was she perhaps cognizant of events, or even an accomplice? And how could he get to the truth, at this point? Did Nespoli have a clear idea of what he was letting himself in for? Besides his career, irreparably ruined, the singer would lose his freedom for many, many years. Even if it wasn't intentional, Vezzi's murder was heinous and had become a focal point for the press and for the powers in Rome. The judges, Ricciardi was well aware, were always eager to please the regime, and the tenor had been their favourite darling. The Commissario was willing to bet that the sentence would be exemplary.

It was around eleven o'clock by the time he got home. His
tata
Rosa, her conscience silenced by the evening snack she had left him, had gone to bed, as evidenced by the deep snoring coming from her room. Ricciardi retired to his room and changed out of his clothes. Just to be sure, he went to the window, opened the curtains, and looked at the window across from him.

Enrica sat sewing by the tenuous light of the lamp. Having set aside her trousseau, she wanted to finish a summer garment for her little nephew who would soon be one year old. It was to be her birthday gift to him. She loved her sister's son very much, and she often wondered if she would love a son of her own that much, or even more, if she were ever to have one. She sighed and instinctively glanced outside. When she saw that the curtains of the window across the way were open at such an odd hour, she started imperceptibly.