A Few Drops of Blood (7 page)

“He took up gossip writing.”

“Not right off. He called himself a journalist at first, and then—but you know about the rest already. His star rose when he outed that Berlusconi minister. We went our separate ways, more or less. Eventually I opened a music store. Not so much tear on the body. He and I remained friends.”

“Were you lovers?”

“We shared a room when we attended the ballet academy, but no. Not really.” He looked away. “Do you have any idea who did this vicious thing?”

“Do you?”

“He annoyed many people, obviously. That was the idea of the job really, and he was good at it. Once or twice he became the story when people retaliated. I warned him on occasion. You know what he said?” Pietro Fabretti smiled,
remembering. “ ‘Darling, these celebrities are not the Camorra, they are pussies.’ ”

“Did he ever give you the impression he was blackmailing someone?”

Pietro made a face. “Not his style.”

“Any idea of what particular gossip item he may have been working on most recently that could have provoked something like this?”

Pietro shifted uncomfortably. “Hard to tell.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I like my life. Good wine. Good food. Breathing.”

“If you withhold information in a murder investigation,” Natalia said, “you may find yourself enjoying the good life in the cells of Poggio Reale. Trust me. The wine list isn’t up to your standards. Nor the food.”

“No doubt true. I am not greedy, but I like my luxuries. In fact, if I had been born in another era, born to another fate, I could imagine myself as a worshipper of luxury. I would have belonged to the cult in Naples that copied from Roman customs of excess. But on the other hand, maybe not. Did you know that during the Second World War—and I mean the worst of it—when typhoid and smallpox were rampant, when people could not find even a scrap of food, there were still women of noble birth indulging in milk baths?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Carlo did a column on Prince Pignatelli. When the Allies liberated his
palazzo
, they found cupboards of silk stockings and flagons of Chanel perfume. He’d hoarded them to pay any girl he could lure to his rooms. Quite sordid.”

For the remainder of the interview Pietro Fabretti remained evasive and said nothing substantive. Natalia
showed him out. She was just returning to her desk when a call came in that Angelina picked up.

“This is Officer Cavatelli. How can I help you? Just a minute.” She punched the hold button. “A gentleman wants to talk to you.”

“He have a name?”

Angelina went back on the line. “May I tell her who is calling? Okay. Hold, please. He doesn’t want to give his name. Sounds like a snitch. Want me to run a trace?”

“Don’t bother.” Natalia took the phone. “Officer Monte.”

“It’s about your horsemen,” a voice whispered. “The ones in the garden?”

“What about them?”

“You want to find the murder weapon?” He’d lost the whisper. His voice sounded familiar, but Natalia couldn’t place it.

“You have the gun?”

“I can tell you where to find it.”

“Who is this?” Natalia asked.

He chuckled. “You’re the detective.”

“I don’t have time for games,” she said. “What is it?”

Usually a snitch passed information for money or a favor. But without asking for either, the caller told her outright where: a shop.

The new partners changed into plain clothes. They then left immediately. Natalia had their uniformed driver stop a block from the place so she and Angelina could walk the rest of the way and arrive undetected.

From somewhere a soccer ball landed at Angelina’s feet. She backstopped it.

“
Scuzza
,” a boy called and started over to retrieve his ball. Before he could, Angelina lined up on it and kicked it back.

“Another hidden talent?” Natalia said, as she watched the ball’s flight.

They continued on. An overheated woman dragged a little boy with red curly hair. “Mama,
voglio fare pipi!
” he screeched, insisting he had to pee that instant.

In another block, they reached the shop. On a sidewalk table in front, a crystal rose glimmered among rusted forks and spoons, buttons, ribbons and ancient keys. On the tray alongside it were twine, a porcelain teapot and an ornate deck of cards. The display window was likewise crammed with puppets and lamps, paintings, mirrors, small sculptures, dolls.

Inside, the proprietor berated a French couple for taking his photo without offering payment for the privilege. Natalia recognized him: Ricardo Tulio, small-time junk dealer and Camorra dogsbody. Not the smartest rabbit on the planet but mean enough. Picked up for dealing stolen merchandise three years ago, he was offered a deal but refused to inform. He had served twenty months and was duly rewarded for his loyalty on release and exempted from protection payments. Natalia had interrogated him on more than one occasion, but he seemed not to recognize her out of uniform.

“Fifty euros,” he said, standing too close. His large silver crucifix glinted from its bed of dark chest hair.

“Fifty euros?” Natalia put the rose down.

“Okay, forty.”

“I’ll have to think about it. Perhaps I’ll come by tomorrow.”

“I’m closed tomorrow,” he said, getting irritated.

“Wednesday, then.”

“I may be here. Maybe not.”

Angelina, behind him, nodded at the glass counter. On
a black velvet cloth rested a small double-barreled shotgun. Natalia stepped closer to admire it.

“Nice, huh?” he said. “You don’t come across too many of these. A real antique. This one is handmade. See where it’s carved along the barrels? Compact. Easy to carry hidden.”

“Yes.”

The short barrels would make the shot go wide. Like the wounds on the two men.

“You know weapons?” he said.

“Wherever did you get this?”

“It would be unprofessional to say.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to take this off your hands.” She flipped open her ID.

“Fuck. You looked familiar. I shoulda guessed. How about I give you the rose and I keep the gun? A hundred euros I paid for it, for Christ’s sake.”

“How about I bring you in for dealing in stolen goods? You know the seller?”

“Nah. A young stud.”

“I’ll need a description.”

“Short and muscular, long hair. Maybe twenty-five. Jesus, keep me out of it.” In one motion, Tulio wrapped the shotgun in sheets of yesterday’s newspaper and handed it to Natalia along with the glass rose.

“Bribing an officer is a crime.”

“Give me a break, okay? I’m just a poor man trying to make a living.”

“Right.” Natalia shoved the weapon into her carryall. “We may need you to come in to make an identification.”

She and Angelina left Tulio swearing under his breath and made their way back toward their office on foot. Clusters of pedestrians thickened into crowds that surged
around the railroad terminal. A gypsy couple with a gaggle of children approached a modest café until a tattooed barista shooed them away.

“I’m glad you’re getting the chance to see this,” Natalia said. “Better than reading a guide book.”

Every inch of sidewalk was taken, mostly by Nigerians hawking their wares. The locals were outfitted with folding chairs and umbrellas. The immigrants, more desperate, worked standing in the blazing sun. War and famine continued to churn refugees onto Italy’s shores. The Camorra took advantage of their vulnerability and made a tidy profit from the knock-offs they supplied them, especially Guccis and Rolexes. Bags and watches lay on blankets.

“The police and Carabinieri could work night and day,” Natalia said, “and never even scratch the surface of the labyrinthine criminal system you’re seeing here.”

Many had resisted, no one had triumphed. No prosecutor, judge, policeman, mayor, legislator, no president. The Camorra had subverted and compromised them all.

Her
nonna
had told her stories of Salvatore Carnevale, a socialist hero in the fifties who compelled the gentry to share with their workers the profits from their olive harvest. A real feat, approaching the miraculous. Then Carnevale had set out to organize the quarry workers: Camorra territory. A mystic of sorts, he had declared, “Whoever kills me, kills Christ.”

The mafia came after him on horseback, horse shoes sparking as they struck the flinty ground.
Riding on the stars
, the terrified peasants were quoted as exclaiming. Carnevale, all of thirty-four—dumped in front of his mother’s house like road kill.

Natalia and Angelina turned onto Via Casanova and continued on past the car repair shops that shared the street
with the Carabinieri station. In the foyer, the young officer on desk duty shoved his magazine into a drawer. Natalia clutched her carryall and walked up the two flights of stairs to Brigadier Portero’s office on the top floor.

Portero, the in-house weapons expert, was the longest serving Carabiniere at the station. His dusty room wasn’t much bigger than a kiosk. Walking upstairs, he claimed, kept his weight down, although all five-feet, eight inches of him weighed well over 200 pounds.

If he hadn’t come from a poor family, he might have gone to university and become a historian. Self-taught, he’d collected books since he was a kid. Natalia heard he owned hundreds of them; many were treasures. He even had a cabinet in his office with the overflow. That’s what he chose to do with his modest earnings. He never took a vacation. He never owned a car. If you had a question about their city, chances are he had the answer. Naples during the time of Bourbons—up until now.

So, in a way he’d missed out on his dream. Who hadn’t, Natalia thought as she approached his door. But there were compensations being a Carabiniere: the occasional excitement of the job, the camaraderie, the opportunity to serve the community.

Natalia had given up mourning her own aborted university career, though she liked to think that perhaps Portero would resume his studies when he retired. A solitary sort, he visibly enjoyed the collegiality at the station and his acknowledged expertise. Portero’s door stood open.

“You have a minute, Brigadier?” she asked.

“For you, Captain? Always.”

Natalia exposed the gun, and together they slipped it into a plastic evidence sheath.

“Don’t come across many of these,” he said, studying the
weapon. “From the thirties. Hand crafted. Carvings like these I’ve seen maybe twice. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

A peacock preened on one side of the stock, and the sun fanned out on the other. Vine etchings crept along the barrel.

“I suppose.”

“A real mafia heirloom, trotted out for traditional honor killings and major vengeance. Any prints?”

“Probably clean but we haven’t checked it yet.”

“Figures.”

Such a devastating weapon to shoot a human being. The carvings were lovely, if you could say that about an instrument intended for killing.

“Tulio had it for sale,” she said.

“Ricardo Tulio is back in business?”

“It seems so, with a little help from his friends. Payment for his silence.”

Portero sniffed the barrels. “Recently fired.”

Back downstairs, she reported to Colonel Fabio.

“We’re following a lead in the double murder at the
contessa
’s. Tulio was selling what’s possibly the murder weapon used on Vincente Lattaruzzo. A traditional
lupara
.”

“The bloody shirt, the traditional weapon,” he said. “This has all the markings of a blood feud. Something left unaddressed from a long time ago.”

“So it would seem.”

“A peasant’s shirt?” the colonel observed.

“Smacks of the countryside, yes sir. Why they would display the bodies in the
contessa
’s garden remains a mystery. We’re investigating the victims’ backgrounds … and the
contessa
’s.”

“The
contessa
?” The colonel blinked rapidly, caught off guard.

“I know she’s a personal friend, sir, but nonetheless … She needn’t know about it at this point.”

“I appreciate your discretion. Do what you need to do, obviously. And let me know as soon as you find anything, as soon as she’s in the clear.”

Back in her own office, Natalia rested her head in her hands for a moment, drew a long breath and called it a day. Angelina had already clocked out. Natalia needed an early night. Disrupted sleep was taking its toll.

She walked home, her feet sore and heavy, made it upstairs to her door and undid the double locks. She dropped her keys in the foyer, placed placed her weapon in the top drawer of the hall table and shed her clothes on the way to the bedroom, where she flopped into bed and slept.

She came awake as the upstairs neighbor clacked across the floor. Down in the narrow old street that fronted her building a truck transferred trash from a dumpster, winching it aboard. Metal screeched, then boomed. A toilet flushed upstairs, and the night grew quiet again.

She got out of bed, undressed and slipped on one of Pino’s t-shirts and her pajama bottoms to step out onto the balcony. High clouds faintly haloed the moon. Not one star. She wished Pino were with her.

In some ways, things had improved. The latest garbage strike had been over for months. Neapolitans no longer wore gas masks in the street, and Rome had finally dispatched the militia to help clean up the aftermath and deposit large metal containers around the poorer neighborhoods to accommodate the huge backlog of refuse. But collection continued day and night, often ruining sleep.

Another victory for the Camorra gangsters. They’d
caused the problem in the first place when their Don Aldo Gambini ordered his garbage collectors not to pick up any more trash after the city proposed purchase of an incinerator to cut hauling costs. When Gambini very conveniently was shot dead, Bianca Strozzi’s company won the removal contract from the city—the venture Lola ran for Bianca’s gang.

A scrawny dog moved into the shadows across the courtyard. Then the burning arc of a cigarette tossed aside. Someone there walked quickly away farther into the alley. Afraid suddenly, she retreated back inside, carefully barring the louvered shutters.