By My Hand (2 page)

As they got closer, a man broke away from the crowd—red-faced, dressed in sloppily buttoned footman's livery, a hat askew on his head. He approached Maione and took him by the arm.

“Brigadie', you're finally here. It's a bloodbath, just a bloodbath! You have no idea! I can't imagine, none of us can imagine who it could have been. They were a distinguished family, such a distinguished family! And now of all times, just as Christmas is approaching, I don't understand, I just don't understand . . .”

Assailed by the smell of rancid wine wafting out of the man's mouth and irritated by his tone, Maione shoved him away.

“Calm down, calm down. I'm not following a word you're saying. Step back, catch your breath, and tell me who you are and what you're talking about.”

The man, nonplussed, took a step back and a deep breath.

“You're quite right, Brigadie', forgive me. It's just that the whole thing has me so upset. My name is Ferro, Beniamino Ferro, at your service, I'm the doorman of this building.”

The crowd had shifted its attention from the front door of the apartment building to the conversation between Maione and the doorman. Ricciardi walked over to the two men.

“I'm Commissario Ricciardi from the mobile squad, and this is Brigadier Maione. Tell me what happened.”

Ferro blinked rapidly, made uneasy by Ricciardi's gaze and the low voice with which he'd spoken. He grew cautious and whispered:

“I don't know what happened, Commissa'. That is, I know, I saw and . . .
Madonna mia
, there was so much blood . . . but I don't know how it happened, I mean. That is, I didn't have anything to do with it, let me make that clear. I went upstairs, when the
zampognaro
called for me, and I went to see, but I only looked from outside the door—I know that you're not supposed to touch anything.” He'd referred to a
zampognaro,
a traditional Christmas bagpiper.

Ricciardi listened patiently, then said:

“What did you see from outside the door? What is it you're not supposed to touch?”

“I know, because I used to work at a construction site up in Vomero and one time a buddy of mine fell off a balcony, and they told us not to touch anything until they showed up . . . until you all showed up, in other words. The dead, Commissa'. Dead people, lying on the ground—that's what you're not supposed to touch.”

The man's words fell into the silence like a rock into a deep well. The people at the front of the crowd that had surrounded the interview took a step back. A woman raised her hand to her mouth and her eyes grew round.

“Dead people, did you say? What dead people?”

Now Ferro seemed to have lost all interest in talking. He stared back at Ricciardi, wide-eyed, silently muttering those last words over and over again, the dead, the dead, as if he had only now just understood their meaning.

“Dead. They're dead. The signora, and the captain, too. They're dead.”

He repeated the phrase several times, in a low voice, glancing around. The man's eyes glittered with the absolute terror and bewilderment that were washing over him; the rubberneckers looked away. From the nearby waterfront came the sound of a wave breaking over the rocks.

Ricciardi still hadn't taken his hands out of his overcoat pockets. The wind was tousling the hair that hung down over his forehead, his eyes gazed, almost unblinking. He was trying to piece out how much of the doorman's agitation was real and how much of it might be camouflaging a lie.

“What makes you say that this signora and this captain might be dead? Did you see them? Where are they?”

Ferro seemed to snap out of it.

“Forgive me, Commissa' . . . It's just that I still hadn't fully realized. I saw . . . I saw the signora, through the open door. I didn't go in; I called out for the captain, I called for him over and over but there was no reply. I thought . . . I just thought that if he wasn't answering, then that must mean that he was dead, too.”

“And you're sure that he's home? He couldn't have gone out?”

“No, no . . . he's home. I always see him leave, for the port, in the afternoon. But at this time of day he's always at home.”

Maione intervened.

“A minute ago, you said that the
zampognaro
called for you. What do you mean by that?”

“The two
zampognari
had gone upstairs to play the novena, for the third day. They came back down right away; one wasn't talking and he's still not talking even now. He's over there, you can see him, sitting in that chair, so pale he looks like a dead man himself. The other one, who's older, he came to get me, and he said, ‘Signor Doorman, hurry upstairs, something awful has happened.' I would have believed anything, except that I'd go upstairs and find . . . what I found.”

Ricciardi nodded, lost in thought. Then he said:

“All right then. Let's go take a look. Ferro, you can walk the brigadier and me upstairs. Cesarano, you keep an eye on the two
zampognari
and don't move from there; we'll talk to them afterward. And you, Camarda, I want you to stand guard at the front entrance. I don't want to see anyone go into the building, not even the people who live here, until I say so. Let's go.”

F
erro walked ahead of Ricciardi and Maione, leading the way into the building. The lobby was spacious and clean, reasonably warm and well lit; it was clear that the building aspired to a certain tone, as did many in this new neighborhood growing at the foot of the hill. Ricciardi addressed the man.

“How many people live in this building?”

“There are three families, Commissa'. The Garofalos, the ones . . . well, where I'm taking you now, the Marras, a childless couple who are out at this time of day because they both work, and the accountant Finelli on the top floor, a widower with five children who all go to their grandmother's, not far from here, when he's at the bank where he works.”

Maione puffed as he heaved his 265 pounds up the stairs:

“So in other words, at this time of day there's no one else in the building but the Garofalos, is that it? And they don't have any children?”

“A little girl, Brigadie'. Her name is Benedetta and she's at school with her aunt, who's a nun. The aunt comes to get her every morning. That's lucky: if not, then she, too . . .”

He stopped on the last step, just before the third-floor landing, without turning the corner, his eyes fixed on the large window overlooking the courtyard.

“You'll have to forgive me: I just can't do it. I just can't see all that blood again.”

Ricciardi and Maione walked past him. In the half light, they were able to make out two doors, one closed and the other one left ajar, from which there came a shaft of a white light. They could glimpse a section of wall, flowered wallpaper, half a hanging mirror, a console table with a vase, and a framed photograph. They stopped, then Maione, according to a well-established routine, turned away, facing the stairs. The first encounter with the crime scene was always and exclusively the commissario's prerogative.

Ricciardi took a step forward, opening the door to the apartment a crack more. The light came from inside, the chilly December afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows in the other rooms. At first he saw nothing; then he realized that what he had at first taken for a decorative floral pattern on the wallpaper was actually an array of blood spatters. He leaned forward, taking care as to where he put his feet. On the floor there was a broad dark stain, in the middle of which was the head of a woman whose body lay behind the door.

The commissario understood immediately that all the blood he saw, the blood that had terrified the doorman and spattered and stained the carpet and the wallpaper, had sprayed from the woman's throat when it had been sliced open by a single blow from a razor-sharp blade. He observed the expression on her face, the half-closed eyes, the wide-open mouth. In the puddle of blood, the print of the toe of a heavy boot: someone had come in, but they hadn't ventured any further, probably the
zampognaro
or even the doorman himself.

He took a step forward, being careful not to step on the pool of blood, and half-closed the door behind him. He looked around: from the front hall, spacious and elegantly furnished, he could see a sitting room with two armchairs and a low table. He again looked at the corpse, then followed the trajectory of its dull gaze.

In the opposite corner, some six feet from the woman's dead body, standing in the dying light of the day, the same woman was smiling in his direction, eyes downcast as she welcomed him to her home with the pleasure of a perfect hostess. She was murmuring:
Hat and gloves?
Her hand was slightly extended, as if to take her visitor's articles of outerwear and show him in properly, with grace and pleasure.
Hat and gloves?

Under the smile, from the gaping wound in the throat, sliced open from one ear to the other, blood pumped out in small black waves, dripping unremittingly onto the flowered dress, muddying the woman's chest horribly.
Hat and gloves?
she kept saying. Ricciardi heaved a sigh.

He spotted a few black drops far from the corpse, on the floor; they didn't match up with the direction of the spatters that had hit the wall. Someone had walked away, probably unconcerned about the fact that the weapon used to cut the woman's throat was still dripping with her blood. He started following the tracks, passing through the sitting room and ending up in the bedroom.

The sight that greeted him there was overwhelming. The bed was drenched with blood, a horrifying amount of it: the sheets had turned black, the liquid had oozed onto the bedside rug, the light-colored wood headboard was spattered. At the foot of the bed, two long streaks. The murderer had cleaned the blade before leaving the scene.

At the center of the bed, and of the broad patch of his own blood, lay a man's corpse. His head was just starting to go bald and he had a drooping salt-and-pepper mustache. He might have been forty years old. The mouth gaped open as if trying to take in one last gulp of air; the hands were clenched in fists at his sides. Ricciardi understood, from the quantity of blood and the absence of visible wounds, that the man had been covered up as he lay dying and that he'd gone on bleeding for a good long while.

The commissario glimpsed the image of the man on the bed, sitting beside his corpse and bleeding from a countless array of knife wounds. He was reminded of a painting of Saint Sebastian that hung in one of the classrooms of the high school he'd attended; he remembered how often, during the boring sermons he'd been forced to sit through, he'd counted the arrows piercing the martyr's body, twenty-three to be exact. Judging by the sight of him, Ricciardi felt pretty sure that the man on the bed had rung up a higher total than the Christian martyr.

He was saying over and over:
I don't owe a thing, not a thing
. Grim-faced, eyebrows knit, teeth clenched, glaring furiously:
I don't owe a thing, not a thing
. Ricciardi met the dead man's glare, then turned his back on all that blood and returned to the front door to let Maione in.

 

As always, so as not to run the risk of inadvertently moving some important piece of evidence, they held off on performing an in-depth examination of the crime scene until the medical examiner arrived. Leaving an irritated Cesarano at the front door of the apartment, the commissario and the brigadier went downstairs to interview the doorman and the
zampognari
. They'd tried to persuade the three of them to come back upstairs, but without success: nobody was willing to face that scene of mayhem a second time.

Ferro was having a hard time smoking, his hand was shaking so badly. Ricciardi said to him:

“Well, you were right: the man's dead, too. What were the victims' names?”

“Garofalo was their surname, Commissa'. Captain Emanuele Garofalo, and the signora was Costanza. I don't know what her maiden name was.”

“Captain, you said; was he in the military?”

“Yes . . . uh, no, not exactly. He worked at the harbor, a member of one of those voluntary militias, those new Fascist institutions. He wasn't really a captain; he must have told me a hundred times but I never understood, something else, um, maybe it was a centurion. In the end he gave up and he just said to me, ‘Beniami', let's do this: why don't you call me captain, which is the corresponding rank in the army, and we won't have to discuss it again.'”

Maione commented:

“In fact, our friend here isn't entirely wrong, Commissa'. They create a new one of these militias every few months, and you can't make heads or tails of it. Anyway, if he worked at the harbor it must have been the port milita, the one that's in charge of cargo and fishing.”

“That's right, Brigadie', in charge of fishing, too,” Ferro broke in, “and in fact we'd often have fishermen showing up here with gifts for him, but he'd always turn them away; he said that they were trying to buy his silence with a basket of fish, but that he couldn't let himself be corrupted in any way. He was a model of honesty, a real straight shooter. And now just look what's become of him.”

Ricciardi brought the conversation back to the main topic:

“You didn't leave the building, all morning long?”

“No, Commissa'. Well, that is, I did go over to the trattoria across the way, just for a bit, no more than half an hour, and I kept my eye on the front door the whole time. You feel how cold it is out here, and the wind that's blowing, no? At a certain point a man has a right to get warmed up a little.”

With a shudder Maione remembered the man's breath, reeking with the foul stench of cheap wine.

“Half an hour, eh? And you never took your eye off the front door the whole time. And the whole time, you never saw anyone go in?”