By My Hand (19 page)

Sister Veronica remembered perfectly. She replied in her distinctive shrill tone, which was amplified by the echoing corridor.

“And I told you no, that they hadn't confided anything in me. I've thought it over since, yesterday and today, but nothing at all comes to mind.”

Ricciardi decided to explain the reason he was there to see her.

“I understand, but I wanted to ask you, Sister, if I might, for just a few minutes, and in your presence, of course, ask the little girl if she remembers anything or anyone.”

Sister Veronica made a funny face.

“Commissario, I don't know if . . .”

As she was talking, a small boy went racing by behind her, saying:

“Sister Vero', really gotta go.”

Without even turning to look, the nun's hand shot out and seized the child's ear, bringing him to an abrupt, painful stop. Ricciardi was reminded of a reptile's prehensile tongue snapping a flying insect out of the air.

“But first, when we're in front of the painting of the Virgin Mary, what do we do?”

The child fell to his knees, hastily crossing himself. The nun, who still had him firmly by the ear, insisted:

“The reason we call them sacred images is because they're sacred; if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. When you see one, in church or on the street, you must stop and cross yourself, perhaps also reciting a short prayer. How does it go?
Ave Maria, gratia plena
. . .”

The little boy raced through the prayer in a single breath, crossed himself again, and was finally liberated, whereupon he shot down the hall toward the bathroom.

Sister Veronica smiled.

“They're like little animals, but they're innocent souls. All right, Commissario: I'll go call Benedetta. But please, no more than two minutes.”

The little girl resembled her aunt more than she did her mother and father, Ricciardi thought to himself as he watched the nun come down the hall with her niece. The same bouncing gait, the same round, red-cheeked face. The commissario envied the girl her ability to hold Sister Veronica's perennially sweaty hand without disgust; he knew he'd never be able to do it.

The girl wore a serious, conscientious expression, which seemed out of place with her age and the smear of paint on the smock she wore. Ricciardi waited for her to rise from the requisite genuflection before the painting of the Virgin Mary.

“
Buonasera
, Benedetta. I'm a . . . friend of your aunt, and there was something I wanted to ask you.”

The little one sketched out a curtsey, graciously holding the hem of her smock.

“
Buonasera
, Signore. Please, go ahead. My aunt told me to answer any question you might have.”

Ricciardi was relieved to hear that the child's voice was normal, and not piercing like her aunt's.

“In the past few days, do you remember hearing your papa and mamma argue about anything? Did they ever seem worried or upset?”

The girl thought carefully, then shook her head.

“No, Signore. Papa and Mamma are fine,
grazie
. Whenever Papa comes home, Mamma and I kiss him and we sit down at the dinner table straightaway; then he listens to the radio and reads the paper, while Mamma does needlepoint and I draw. Then we all go to bed.”

Ricciardi went along.

“Certainly, of course. Well, by any chance do you happen to remember whether anyone came to visit your parents? Someone unusual, someone you'd never seen before?”

The little girl furrowed her brow, struggling to remember. Ricciardi was reminded of the image of Signora Costanza Garofalo, smiling with her throat cut, and he felt a twinge of sorrow for that mother who would never see her daughter grow up.

“A while ago, though I couldn't tell you just when, a gentleman and a lady dressed in black came to see us. It was when Papa was reading his paper, after we'd finished eating. I didn't like them. They talked loudly, and Papa was talking loudly back to them; my aunt doesn't like it when you talk loudly. Isn't that right, Aunt Veronica?”

Sister Veronica nodded, caressing her niece's head. Ricciardi, who wondered in passing just how Sister Veronica supported her argument in favor of whispering with the voice that God had given her, decided that he should drill in on this new piece of information.

“Do you remember anything about those two people? How they were dressed, or anything that caught your eye? Why didn't you like them?”

“The lady wore a black shawl over her head,” the girl said. “And the reason I didn't like them was they smelled bad. They smelled like fish.”

T
here are some people who are very different from what you might expect judging them based solely on their appearances. Slender, timid young ladies who, once they're onstage, produce voices and aggressive demeanors befitting a lioness; corpulent gentlemen who spin and float as light as gossamer to the notes of waltzes and tangos; coarse, bad-mannered young men who, with a paintbrush in hand, are capable of creating the most delicate arabesques and the most refined landscapes.

Maione, for instance, was a master at stakeouts.

You'd never have thought it to look at him, big strapping man that he was, clumsy and loud, with his deep voice that reverberated indoors and his harsh, powerful laugh, metallic as an empty tin drum rolling down the stairs. And yet he had this talent, and he made constant and discreet use of it.

Perhaps it was because he knew and understood the city; perhaps in any other city he would have been incapable of literally vanishing from sight, merging into the ever-changing backdrop of Naples, endlessly diverse and in perennial movement. But here he could do it, and how.

He had his methods, of course. He showed up early, buzzed around the target location; he took in his surroundings, scouted nooks, vestibules, spots swathed in darkness and others that were bright or well lit. He ran his gaze over the walls, taking in their structure and texture. He'd sniff the air, identifying the lay of the wind, the directions of the drafts and breezes.

He'd pick his target, the things he wanted to see, and he'd look for the best angle, the ideal viewpoint. He'd take in the essence of the place. It was as if he were determining a note and then matching the frequency so he could fade into it and vanish.

It wasn't something you could explain in words; it was something more on the order of an instinct, a little like having an ear for music, that which allows someone who can neither read nor write music to play a complicated melody on an instrument they've never even held in their hands before. He was a born prodigy, the brigadier was, and he'd further honed his gift with professional technique, along with an innate bent for close observation and years and years of experience.

Thus he'd learned to tail a suspect for miles on end in the city, even in neighborhoods that were virtually deserted, without that suspect ever noticing or sensing a thing. Because he knew every dogleg and alley, and made use of shortcuts unknown to most, he could, on foot, tail even people in vehicles and never be left behind. Once, instead of chasing a robber fleeing aboard a horse-drawn carriage, he'd sensed from the man's accent where he was headed and had simply shown up there and waited for him to arrive, without even breaking a sweat.

But what he was best at was stakeouts. He could merge into the shadows of an atrium, the crowd in a café, the darkness of a movie house, becoming to all intents and purposes invisible; and he'd spend hours watching everything that happened in a house or an apartment, in a club or a bar, including the thoughts that swept over the face and through the heart of the person he was spying on.

And that was why Maione had shown up very early that morning on Vico Santi Filippo e Giacomo, in the neighborhood of San Gregorio Armeno.

He'd told Lucia that he had some important work to do; his wife was accustomed to Maione working the predawn hours when he was in the throes of an investigation, and he had already told her about the couple who had been murdered in Mergellina. Still, Lucia had caught a hint of a false note in his voice. It was nothing in particular—a slight hesitation, an unusual word—but it was something. Nothing that she couldn't easily put out of her thoughts, like a bothersome fly, with all the things she had to do to get ready for Christmas with a family of five children. Soon enough, she'd stopped thinking about it entirely, limiting herself to preparing the best ersatz coffee she could whip up an hour earlier than usual, so that her husband could step out into the streets while it was still pitch-black out.

There wasn't a place in all of Naples that was more Christmassy than San Gregorio Armeno. It was the street of the
figurari
, those artisans whose work came close to full-fledged artistry, making the terra-cotta figurines and statuettes that were used in nativity scenes. They fit into every category imaginable, from those who took months to craft a single head and a pair of hands—which, once they had been placed on a wire and cotton batting body and dressed up advantageously with an outfit made by the city's finest tailors, would complete the oldest manger scenes, to the point that the addition was indistinguishable from the original—to those who used molds to produce dozens of terra-cotta shepherds every day, all identical in shape, differing only in the hastily painted colors, sold for a penny apiece, to the delight of the city's poorest children.

Those artisans couldn't know it—and in fact they never would—but the tradition of that street had roots that reached down deep into the mists of time. This was the place where, when the world was so much younger, terra-cotta statuettes were made in honor of Ceres, the goddess of plenty, for whom a celebrated temple had been built; and those statuettes were the souvenirs, treasured and beloved, of long pilgrimages, and they departed for every corner of the earth in the sacks of the faithful as they returned to their fields.

More than a thousand years ago, a church had been built on top of that temple, followed by another. Naples had always been a sedimentary city, a city that laid one stratum on top of another, one for each era, all of them with the same spirit of place. The pre-Christmas industriousness of this street, in any case, was very convenient for Maione, with the steady stream of workers and suppliers coming and going, in the full hum of activity before the sun had even had a chance to rise, along with the occasional underhanded antiquarian waiting for the finest workshops to open in order to purchase beautifully made pieces, which he would then resell as genuine antiques in his exclusive shop back in Chiaia. The more people there were moving around, the better the chances of passing unobserved.

The street numbers went past: 12, 16, 20. He reached number 22 just as the heavy wooden door was swinging open to let someone out of the building.

Maione pulled back into the shadows, quickly and soundlessly. The wall of the building across the way was providentially furnished with a nook, which created a dark corner from which he could watch the street without being seen.

The person who emerged from the street door was a young man, little more than an overgrown boy. A few stray locks of fair hair peeked out from under the cap pressed down on his head, the undersized overcoat barely covered his legs. The young man took a few steps, then stopped and looked up: a dark-haired young woman looked out from a small balcony on the second floor; she was wrapped in a blanket and had something in her arms. The young man waved, and the young woman nodded back. A small arm darted out of the bundle, and a voice said:

“Papà, papà!”
 

The mother, smiling, carefully tucked the baby under the warm blanket, as the young man in the street below laughed and blew a kiss into the air.

That hand, thought Maione, murdered my son.

 

Rosa Vaglio was looking at her left hand. It was shaking.

She'd noticed it a while ago, but not that long, to tell the truth: a matter of months. And as soon as she had, she'd remembered that her father had suffered from the same malady. She'd gone home to see her birth family, after she'd been in service with the baron and baroness of Malomonte for a few years; she'd asked for a little time off, and it had taken a day to walk to the village where she'd been born. The baroness wanted the foreman to take her in his cart, but she'd said no. She was young, back then. She felt like she could walk to the far corners of the earth. Now she got tired walking to the fruit and vegetable stands in the Piazza di Capodimonte.

She found her parents very different from the way she remembered them; the damage inflicted by the passage of time clearly outweighed the advantages afforded by the money she sent them, month after month. Out of her eleven siblings, only three were left—the rest had gone off in search of greener pastures, or were dead.

Her father had that tremor in his hand, as if he were perennially gesturing to say:
mamma mia
, how astounding. In his eyes, however, she read confusion, like a mute cry for help.

When she left she had felt a flood of relief. She promised to come back soon, but she'd never gone back at all. She heard that her father had died a few years later.

And now she sat looking at the tremor in her own hand: slight, barely visible. It didn't resemble her father's yet, at least not the way she remembered it; but it was there, and it was getting worse, little by little, like a spreading weed.

It was a signal, like so many others: her backaches, the struggle involved in sitting down and standing up, the need for her spectacles whenever she needed to do fine handiwork.

I've become an old woman, she told herself. A drab, useless old woman. My body's falling apart, and I can no longer do the things I used to be able to.

But her memory still worked, at least; and her thoughts were clear, crystal clear.

One thought was clearer than all the others: her young master needed to settle down and start a family. She couldn't stand the idea of leaving him alone, a victim of his own ghosts, his incomprehensible sadness, that abyss of solitude from which he seemed unwilling to emerge. Rosa knew that the right woman would bring a smile to that face. She could feel it. All it would take was the warmth of a home, the responsibilities of a family, and Luigi Alfredo would regain control of his life, his standing in society, and the administration of his property: all things he'd always turned his back on.