By My Hand (20 page)

She'd identified the right woman, too, although she had the shortcoming of being even more shy and prickly than he was. Certainly she couldn't give that simpering out-of-towner with her chauffeur a clear shot at him.

Rosa took one hand in the other and held it still. Not yet, she thought. I've still got things to do. I have to give fate a push; if something isn't going to happen of its own accord, then I'm going to have to make it happen myself.

By my hand.

C
hristmas is warm.

From the windows of the apartments overlooking Via Toledo and Via Chiaia come candlelight and the sound of laughter. If you look inside those windows, you see cheerful faces, cheeks bright-red with wine and spumante, even though the actual holiday is still a few days away. There is a general sense of expectation, a swell of suspense. A holiday is coming, and everyone is going to be happy.

Christmas is cold.

The wind howls through the streets of the new quarters, where the poor in their hovels huddle together for comfort and warmth. If you listen carefully, you can just make out the sound of a child crying, but the cries grow ever fainter as the cold and the hunger grow stronger. Who can say which of them will make it through the winter. Who can say which of them will still be breathing, come January.

Christmas is warm.

Mothers smile as they tousle their children's hair, deciding whether to dress them in sailors' costumes like they did last year, or whether they're big enough now to be in the family photograph with everyone else on Christmas Eve, dressed in their first jacket and tie, sober-faced, hair neatly parted.

Christmas is cold.

The man comes home with a chunk of bread, the only food he's been able to find after a day spent looking for work at construction sites. He stole it from a delivery cart, then he ran himself breathless for an hour. There are six mouths to feed, waiting for him at home, and he's hungry, too. He stops, lowers himself to the ground, and eats a piece of it. He weeps in the wind.

Christmas is warm.

Grandpa turns eighty years old, right on Christmas Day. Sitting in front of the ceramic stove, sipping his after-dinner brandy, while his children listen to dance music on the radio and wonder what they can get him, since he already has everything he needs, with all the money he's earned in his career as a respected physician. So they laugh, and decide to buy him a new smoking jacket, just like they did last year. But Grandpa will die, unexpectedly, on December 23, and his smoking jacket will never be taken out of the box.

Christmas is cold.

Under the scaffolding at a construction site down near the waterfront, the old beggar woman draws labored breaths; she's dead to the world. Bronchitis, the cold, and hunger have won out in the end. She dreams she's singing a lullaby. She had sixteen children and they took them away from her, one by one. She doesn't even know if they're alive or dead; she only remembers that she sang a lullaby, once, to one of her children, or to someone else's child. She had sixteen children, and now she's dying alone under the scaffolding at a construction yard. Tomorrow they'll toss her, with her tattered rags, into a ditch in potter's field, full of others like her.

Christmas, warm or cold, brings a shiver.

 

Ricciardi was waiting for Maione, who was late: an unusual thing for him, especially given their unspoken understanding that when they were on a case, they always met very early in the commissario's office to bring each other up-to-date on the general situation and to plan out their day. Still, Ricciardi wasn't overly concerned; Maione had finally regained his emotional equilibrium, and it couldn't have been easy to drag himself away from his warm, welcoming home and go out into the cold and the dark.

Ricciardi was very fond of the brigadier, and Maione's wellbeing mattered deeply to him. In the past three years, the whole time they'd been working together, Riccardi had learned to read Maione's thoughts and emotions. The brigadier was a fair, strong, stubborn man; he wasn't afraid to work hard; and he was still moved at the sight of pain, grief, and suffering, and that gift of empathy was a gift that Ricciardi valued above any other.

He could remember all too clearly the afternoon that the two men had first become fast friends: it was the day Maione's son Luca was murdered.

He'd seen the young man a few times, a recruit who stood out for his energy and his desire to prove himself: fair-haired, blue-eyed, physically imposing. As he'd later see at the funeral, the boy resembled his mother closely.

Ricciardi had responded to the emergency call, getting there even before Maione, who was on duty elsewhere. He'd walked down alone into the cellar where the body had been found. He saw the young man standing there, next to the corpse curled up on the ground. He was leaning against the wall as if trying to hide from sight, even though Ricciardi was the only one who could still see him. A reddish foam oozed from the mouth, the bubbles of his last breath; the knife plunged deep into his back had punctured his lung.

I love you, you big-bellied old man. I love you.
 

That's all Luca's image was saying. Ricciardi understood immediately whom the specter was talking about. When Maione got there, he took him aside and, violating for the first and only time in his life a principle to which he'd always adhered, he told him. He told him the dead boy's words.

The brigadier never asked him how he'd known them, not then, not ever. But he became Ricciardi's human shadow.

The Deed, as Ricciardi called his curse to perceive the last sorrow and pain of the dead, almost never helped him to uncover the way that death took place. It was just an emotion, a simple manifestation of the dying person's suffering upon being removed from this life: the final separation. Like a scream, or a sigh, or a regret. Or all these things together.

Maione rushed breathless into the office.

“Forgive me, Commissa'. I'm a little late this morning.”

“No problem at all, I just got in myself. Sit down, and let's go over everything we did yesterday.”

They exchanged the information they'd gathered on their working Sunday. Ricciardi recounted everything he'd learned from the doctor and Don Pierino concerning the autopsies and the symbolism of the manger scene, as well as what he'd found out from his talk with the Garofalos' daughter.

Maione listened attentively, with his characteristic manner of concentration, his eyes half closed as if he were on the verge of nodding off. Then he told Ricciardi everything that he'd learned from Bambinella.

“So everything would seem to fit together, Commissa'. The visitors that smelled of fish, the broken Saint Joseph that represents the father who works to provide for his family, the two people who stabbed Garofalo.”

Ricciardi looked pensively out the window at the piazza that was slowly beginning to fill up with people. The pane of glass, fogged over from the temperature differential between interior and exterior, shook with every gust of wind.

“You said it: everything would seem to fit together. That doesn't mean it's all true, though. First of all, we've got to figure out what this Lomunno, the militiaman who Garofalo got fired, is up to. And the fact that a couple who smelled of fish went and had an argument with Garofalo doesn't mean that they went back later and killed him and his wife.”

Maione nodded.

“Ah, of course. All these hypotheses need to be checked out, as always. But Commissa'—and this is a solid fact—now there are at least two suspects: Lomunno and the fisherman, Aristide Boccia; and there could be others still, if the victim was extorting more than one fisherman. We can certainly say that our dearly departed pillar of honesty wasn't so honest after all.”

Ricciardi went on looking out the window.

“The hardest thing, Raffae', is understanding such strong emotions. What drives a person, or more than one person—people who might have children, family, friends, a difficult, demanding job—to think: now I'm going to get a good sharp knife, go to Garofalo's apartment, and kill him, and his wife, too.”

Maione said nothing, his eyes downcast. Ricciardi went on.

“It takes tremendous anger, I believe. Or a state of extreme desperation. In any case, pain, grief, sorrow. To decide to murder someone in cold blood, without the burst of madness that comes from an argument or a fight, you must be certain that you have no alternative.”

Maione looked up.

“That's exactly right, Commissa'. It's one thing to kill someone who's standing right in front of you, and quite another to make the decision and then go kill him. You'd have to be truly desperate, without any alternative.”

From the window came a prolonged blast of car horns: something was blocking traffic. Ricciardi sighed and stood up.

“Let's go look this desperation in the face and see what we see.”

T
hey'll come, I know that they'll come. So what?

I've been waiting for them for years, now that I think about it. Ever since that day.

I should have done it then. I should have done it so that the sun would never set on my shame, the sun of that same day. I should have extinguished that false voice, cut the throat that produced all that wickedness.

They'll come, and they'll ask me why. And I'll tell them that there's no difference between doing something and dreaming of doing it.

And if there's no difference, then I've done that same thing a thousand times. A thousand times I've spilled that blood, a thousand times I've seen it spurt from the hundred wounds, a thousand times I've driven the knife in deep.

They'll come, and they'll want to know why. I'll tell them that my mind has never moved from there, from where I saw my life rush headlong into the void. And that I died, too, when my angel took flight.

They'll come, and I'll have to hide the thousands of times that I've dreamed of it happening.

By my hand.

 

E
nrica blinked as she stepped out through the street door. The wind was gusting cold and strong.
Her eyeglasses had fogged over; she had to take them off to wipe the lenses. When she put them back on, emerging from the blurry outlines of her nearsighted world, she found herself face-to-face with Rosa, who held her hat clapped to her head with her right hand while with her left hand she gripped a half-empty shopping bag.

The old woman's expression was determined: lips compressed, eyes narrowed, jaw jutting. She wasn't going to take no for an answer.

“Signori', would you be so good as to come with me to buy a few things for Christmas dinner? I'm an old woman, I need a little help.”

The girl didn't even have the time to look around before a powerful arm hooked itself through hers and she was dragged out into the street.

 

Ricciardi and Maione reached the alley behind San Giovanni a Mare which corresponded to the address they'd been given at the barracks. Maione reread the little scrap of paper for what seemed like the thousandth time.

“This is it, Commissa'. It seems strange to me, but this is definitely it.”

In more ways than one, the place was unsettling. Once they turned the corner, the two policeman left the world of Christmas and entered a no-man's-land of squalor and misery.

The symbols of the holiday, even the cheapest and most miserable, had all vanished. Before Ricciardi and Maione stretched a dirt road lined by hovels tacked together with scraps of wood and rusted sheet metal. A few ragged children were playing, sitting on the ground in the muddy rivulets fed by the lack of a sewer system. The only sound, aside from the wind, came from a shutter banging against a window jamb at regular intervals.

They went up to the oldest child in the group.

“
Guaglio'
, do you happen to know where a certain Lomunno lives around here?”

The boy stood up, walked a short distance, and pointed to the door of one of the shacks. He stood there, motionless, one arm raised like a mannequin.

Maione knocked on the door. After a few moments, a man opened it. With a carving knife in one hand.

The brigadier instinctively took a step back, one hand jumping to his holster. Ricciardi grabbed his arm.

“Easy there, take it easy. He had no way of knowing who was at the door. You there, are you Antonio Lomunno?”

The man looked at them both, then he looked down at the knife he was holding in his hand, as if he'd never seen it before.

“Yes, that's me. Excuse me, I was doing some work at home. You are . . .”

Maione had recovered his self-control, but he kept looking down at the blade.

“Brigadier Maione and Commissario Ricciardi, from the mobile squad. We have a few questions we need to ask you. May we come in?”

 

Rosa stared back at Enrica with a look of resolve from the other side of the small round table in the café near home, where she'd steered her, practically by main force.

After a long, awkward silence, during which the girl had sat looking down at her hands folded in her lap, the
tata
said:

“Well, Signori': if you don't mind my asking, what's happened?”

Enrica blinked her eyes, looking up at the woman.

“What do you mean, Signora? Nothing's happened. I . . .”

Rosa had no intention of being put off that easily.

“Excuse me, but something's happened, and I know it. The last time you came to my home, we spoke, and it seemed to me that you were interested in my young master; there was certainly interest on his part. Then the accident happened. You even came to the hospital, and I remember the fear, the terror in your eyes. And then, when we found out that he was going to be all right, thanks be to God Almighty, instead of coming to see him, you vanished.”