By My Hand (32 page)

The new Enrica narrowed her eyes to slits, clenched her jaw, and smiled, catlike. Then she murmured: All right, then. All right.

And she went to bed.

T
he morning of December the twenty-third told the world that there would be no more kidding around: Christmas had arrived.

The sky was the color of lead from the heavy cloud cover hovering in wait, which had pushed down from the north overnight, determined to play some role in the festivities, though for now that role was known only to it.

The air was almost hanging in place, chilly and inhospitable as it ought to be to make it clear to one and all that the proper place for human beings was indoors, bundled up and warm, with the sounds of songs and of laughter, in the warmth of the heating stoves and the fireplaces, and in the light of the thousand lamps and lightbulbs that decorated the banquet halls, opened specially for the occasion.

The streets were crowded with the same pedestrians, but they seemed to be seized by a different anxiety. Time was up: the gifts had to have been purchased by now, or at least selected, the menus decided, the ingredients by now had to be in the pantries, and the decorations all in place. Those who had not yet finished their shopping wandered around grim-faced, in the grip of a vague sense of guilt, resigned to spend more money and get less for it than the farsighted ones who had taken care of things well ahead of time.

And yet the merchandise was still there, luring in shoppers for one last, desperate, seductive struggle.

The shops were competing to outdo each other with displays rich in imagination, offering walls of salamis dangling over mountains of dried figs and dates, adorned with silver and gold tinsel; spilling over onto the sidewalks with sacks of almonds and walnuts and chestnuts, beneath arches of braided fronds and leafy branches.

The butchers, too, were playing their last cards, laying out all their remaining merchandise, so that the backdrop in their shop windows consisted of sides of beef and pork, carefully trimmed and misted with water from time to time to give the impression of freshness and quality, in front of which would be a vanguard of capons, turkeys, hens, and rabbits, with plumes and fur, or else skinned, to terrify little children with their glassy eyes.

The shop windows of the confectioners and pastry shops were especially spectacular, and at the center, enjoying pride of place, was a Christ Child made of spun sugar. Surrounding him was an overabundance of cookies and cakes, small hillsides of
struffoli
, balls of fried dough dripping with honey and colorful candy pellets,
cassata
, along with the traditional pastries and confectioneries that no Christmas in Naples could do without, from the brightly colored almond pastries arranged on specially cut biscuits to the hard almond-dough
taralli
also known as
roccocò
; from the rhomboid-shaped Neapolitan Christmas cookies known as
mustacciuoli
covered with a chocolate glaze to the spicy, aromatic
quaresimali
, or Lenten almond biscuits; from the crescent-shaped, pine-nut-encrusted
pignolate
to the
susamielli
, the delicate S-shaped cinnamon-flavored holiday cookies. And then there were the
raffioli
, or mini-cassatas, and the
sapienze
, covered with whole almonds, and little pastries filled with chestnut and clove cream, all of them desperately seeking one last banqueting table that would be willing to take them in, like their fellow pastries that had been sold by the hundreds of pounds over the last few days.

December twenty-third is the last chance.

The
verdummari
, the fruit and vegetable vendors, know it, sitting with their weary, worried gaze in the center of their elaborate installations. They've stood guard for the past week, taking shifts with their wives and children at night, to make sure that the street urchins, the
scugnizzi
, didn't pilfer any of the merchandise they kept out on display. They've built make-believe Grottoes of the Nativity, weaving together lemon and orange branches from which the fruit still dangles, cunningly mixing the green of the broccoli, the orange of the tangerines, and the yellow of the large Sorrento lemons, flanked by clusters of melons and tomatoes, and crowning the pyramids of pears, prickly pears, and apples.

The chill is welcome, because it wards off the scourge of insects, but what hasn't been sold by the twenty-third runs a serious risk of lying there and rotting; that's why the sales are being called out to the passersby in such pleading tones, in sharp contrast to the triumphant calling of their wares on the past few mornings, when the vendors' voices resounded cheerful and bright, summoning the housewives to make their purchases.

Now they're begging, supplicating: Come buy, come buy. Take pity.

Because December twenty-third is the last chance.

 

Maione and Ricciardi met in the commissario's office, over cups of the brigadier's ersatz coffee, well aware that they had come to a decisive crossroads in their investigation into the deaths of the Garofalos. The information that they had gathered, each on his own, one in the
borgo
, the other in the port, had neither added to nor taken away from the precarious condition of the suspects, just as they'd anticipated.

Maione was the first to speak.

“So all things considered, Commissa', we're back where we started from, just like we were yesterday, and the day before. Lomunno and the Boccias—that is, unless it was some other fisherman who hasn't come to our attention yet, because let's not forget that the only reason we found the Boccias at all is because they went to the Garofalos' apartment a few days before the murder. If the real murderers staked out the building and waited for the doorman to step across the street to the tavern, then they'd have been able to get in without being seen by anyone. How would we ever know?”

Ricciardi was in agreement.

“Quite true. If we were the kind of cops who are determined to throw someone in jail no matter what, just to move a case along, then we could just as easily arrest Lomunno as the Boccias. Lomunno might well have done it in a moment of despair, and the Boccias would have no way to defend themselves because the testimony of the boat crew is not all that credible. But you and I both know that the fact that a person might have committed a murder, and might even have had some excellent motives for doing so, doesn't mean that they really did it; and we're not the kind of cops who toss potentially innocent people in jail, are we? Otherwise, we'd have chosen to be judges, not policemen.”

Otherwise, we'd have chosen to be judges, Maione thought to himself.

“Well then, Commissa', what do we do now? We need something to lure them out, to make them give themselves away. Something unexpected.”

Ricciardi stood there thinking, in his characteristic pose, his hands joined in front of his mouth, his eyes lost on the surface of his desk.

“Something unexpected. You know, Raffaele, last night I went to the theater: Livia practically dragged me there. I saw this one-act play about Christmas, the one with the two brothers and the sister.”

“Of course, Commissa', I know the one you mean, I hear they're really talented, the whole city's talking about them.”

“Well, it's true, they're talented, though I don't know much about theater, as you know. Anyway, at a certain point, they're all together, and that's when the issues boil to the surface. Maybe that's what we need, to bring them together, face-to-face.”

“We should be able to find them all in one place. Today is December twenty-third, the last day of the fish market on Via Santa Brigida.”

“Last day? How so?”

Maione smiled.

“I always forget that you aren't really from Naples and so there are a few city traditions you might not understand. In practical terms, during the Christmas season, for the convenience of the customers and the vendors, fish is sold all on a single street, to be specific, Via Santa Brigida, right near here. They all set up there, with their big wooden basins painted light blue to give the impression of seawater, and people go there to get fish for the Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas lunch. It's a kind of warfare: the vendors want to sell fast and at high prices, while the customers want to wait until the last minute to buy at lower prices, though at the risk of there being nothing left.”

Ricciardi listened.

“Well? Why do you think that they'd come face-to-face?”

“Because everyone who works in the fishing business, including the part-time seasonal workers, will be there. Boccia and his crew will be there, no doubt, to earn extra money by selling their fish directly, and possibly even Lomunno, working for some merchant who needs extra hands.”

Ricciardi nodded.

“In fact, yesterday down at the port I heard one guy say to another that they'd see each other today at the market. So what he meant was this sale on Via Santa Brigida.”

Maione agreed:

“He couldn't be referring to anything else. Let's stroll down there, Commissa', maybe in the early afternoon, when we'll find the most people there; right now we'd run the risk of the fishermen taking advantage of the opportunity to get out on the water one last time. There might even be a squad from the port militia, keeping an eye on the sales.”

Ricciardi briefly scratched his wound, which had finally closed up.

“To tell you the truth, I'm still stuck on the symbolism of Saint Joseph. What on earth could they have meant, by breaking that figurine?”

Maione shook his head.

“We won't know that, Commissa', until someone confesses.”

Ricciardi made a disconsolate face.

“
If
anyone ever confesses.”

I
'm a policeman, Maione thought to himself. A policeman.

That night, in the agitation of incoherent dreams, he remembered his own hands. He remembered that he found himself in a deserted
vicolo
, a place he didn't know; and he traveled the whole length of that twisting alley, uphill and down, only to find himself back at the exact point he'd started from.

And so he started walking again, and as he walked he felt a mortal sense of weariness, and especially a numbness in his hands.

He looked at his hands over and over again in his dream: he couldn't recognize them. They seemed like extraneous body parts, two animals endowed with a life of their own, completely separate from his arms and his will. Anxiety seized him, and he started walking again, in fact running, and Franco Massa was chasing him, calling him
Orso
, Bear, the way he had when they were children, and saying to him: You have to kill him, you have to kill him. It has to be you. It has to happen by your hand. By your hand.

And in the dream, his heart was breaking; he kept seeing the two children and the pretty dark-haired wife, as well as Biagio, but never his face, only his blond hair.

By my hand, he kept saying. By my hand.

But I'm a policeman, he told Massa in his dream. A policeman, not a judge, not a hangman. How can I do it?

And at the far end of the alley, which ended in a downhill slope, he saw the two children, laughing as they came toward him, calling him grandpa. And he ran up to Biagio from behind, and Biagio didn't turn around, and his hands, independent of his will, reached up and began throttling Biagio by the neck. By my hand, the voice in his head kept saying. And Biagio turned around in his death throes, and Maione realized that it was his son Luca, dying a second time, but this time by his hand.

He'd woken up with a jerk, drenched in sweat. Luckily, Lucia was sleeping soundly by his side.

Taking advantage of the fact that he was meeting the commissario in the early afternoon to take a look at the fish market, instead of going home he decided to go once more to San Gregorio Armeno. The shop where the young man worked was closed to the public, but the wooden door stood ajar.

He stuck his head inside and saw that there was no one there but the proprietor.

“Brigadie',
prego
, please come in. It's a pleasure to see you again.”

Maione took a thorough look around.

“Excuse me, I wanted to buy a couple of sheep, but I see you're closed. Why is that? Is something the matter?”

The man heaved a theatrical sigh.

“You can't imagine, we came this close to a genuine tragedy!”

“Why, what happened?”

At this point, the proprietor came around the cash register and took up a stance in the middle of the empty shop.

“Last night, as we were closing up, I was here counting the money from the day's sales, and it was a lot of money, too, because as you know this is a particular time of year, when we have to bring in enough to keep us going all year long. Well, I was standing here, you see, when four masked individuals burst in, with knives in their hands!”

Maione feigned horror at the news, smiling inside at the sudden proliferation of bandits, now wearing handkerchiefs as masks, like in a movie with cowboys and Indians.

“Really, you don't say? And they robbed you?”

The man put on a dramatic air.

“It would have been a tragedy, the receipts of two whole days. I thought it was all over for me. But then Biagio jumped in, you remember him?”

Maione denied all knowledge, with a baffled look.

“No, who's that?”

“What, the young man you said was such a good carver, don't you recall?”

The brigadier pretended he had only just remembered.

“Ah, right, the fair-haired boy.”

The man nodded his head.

“That's right, him. He ran over, right where I'm standing now, between the bandits and the cash register, with the knife he uses in the mornings to carve, and he fought a duel with those criminals, just like on the stage in a melodrama, you know what I mean, in the final scene? Exactly like that.”