Day of the Dead (3 page)

Impulsively, he called out to Modo, who was walking away with the undertakers.

“Bruno, listen to me, I need you to do me a favor: Don't send him to the cemetery. Have them take him to the hospital, perform an autopsy on him. I want to know exactly what he died of.”

Modo looked at him in surprise.

“What do you mean, what he died of? I told you, cardiac arrest. These children have practically no immune system to speak of; he could have died of anything. Why do you want to subject him to further torture? Besides, you can't imagine how much work I have to do at the hospital! With this weather, two out of five doctors are sick, and people come streaming in with bronchitis, pneumonia, and bruises from falls and accidents.”

Ricciardi laid his hand on the doctor's arm.

“Please, Bruno. I never ask you for anything. Do this for me: as a personal favor.”

Modo grumbled:

“That's not true, that you never ask me for anything. To be exact, you're an unbelievable pain in the ass. But fine, fine. I'll do you this favor. But remember, you owe me one.”

Ricciardi grimaced in a way that was vaguely reminiscent of a smile.

“Fine, I owe you a favor. When the warrant for your arrest finally lands on my desk I'll take the long way around the city when I come for you, that way you'll have time for one last visit to the bordello where you take your pleasures.”

The doctor burst out laughing.

“You know that the whores in this city couldn't live without me, eh?
Guagliu'
, hold up there, there's a change in destination. Take the child to the hospital for me. He's a client of mine, now.”

Once the cart had set off, Maione stepped closer to Ricciardi.

“Commissa', I don't get what you're doing here. Hasn't that poor child suffered enough already? Is it really worth it to inflict more cruelty on him now that he's dead, if there weren't any marks on the body?”

Ricciardi said nothing; he stood watching the dog, which had never once taken its eyes off them and had stayed where it was, even after the cart with the corpse had departed. He shrugged his shoulders.

“What can I tell you, Maione. It just seemed wrong to put him in the ground without even knowing what killed him. Come on, let's head back to headquarters, so that we can finally draw this night shift to a close.”

In a break with his routine, the deputy chief of police Angelo Garzo was already in his office at 8:15. This had thrown special patrolman Ponte, who had been promoted to serve as the official's personal assistant, into a panic.

Was it really a promotion after all? Ponte had serious doubts about the benefits of the new post. Sure, they'd tacked on a few lire to his salary, which didn't hurt when it came to making ends meet; and he no longer had to go out on patrol, which eliminated the discomfort and inconvenience of braving the elements, with all the aches and pains that inevitably resulted, especially on damp days like the ones they'd been having lately. And finally his new position had won him a certain grudging respect from his colleagues, who, well aware that the main reason for Ponte's promotion was his willingness to rat out his fellow officers, steered clear of him.

In exchange, Ponte had to put up with his superior officer's moods, the most unpredictable elements in all creation. Moments of groundless euphoria came on the heels of bouts of depression, during which poor Ponte had to guess what Garzo wanted from the expression on his face. Arrogant benevolence, which might prevail for example after some words of praise from the police chief, would quickly give way to furious dissatisfaction, and at those times it was best for Ponte to make himself scarce, because Garzo invariably took it out on him with memorable tongue-lashings.

But this was by far the worst period he could remember. This is how matters stood: a month earlier, word had come down by telegraphic dispatch from the Ministry of the Interior announcing the Duce's decision to deliver the address to the nation from Naples. Prime Minister Mussolini, accompanied of course by the highest-ranking government officials, would be visiting the city on the third and fourth of November. Local government officials would be expected to provide the maximum cooperation, and the spotlight would be focused first and foremost on the local police and judiciary, of course.

Ponte had been the first to read that dispatch, handed to him by the telegraph operator at police headquarters so that he could take it directly to the chief of police; but since he knew very well that Garzo would skin him alive if he failed to tell him about a matter of such importance before he informed anyone else, Ponte had run headlong to his office.

He wouldn't soon forget his commanding officer's reaction. First Garzo had turned pale, then violet, and then white again, with a few lingering blotches of red on his neck and his forehead. He'd leapt to his feet and the sheet of paper had fallen from his trembling fingers. He'd stared down at it, muttering something incomprehensible, and then he'd dropped back into his chair, waving weakly for Ponte to take the document to the chief.

From that moment on, Garzo had becoming increasingly difficult with each passing day. He locked himself in his office for hours on end, checking and rechecking police reports and depositions from months earlier, terrorized by the possibility of an inspection; or else he'd burst into the sentry post, shrieking in falsetto that the sheer slovenlinesss of the room was unbelievable. And now he was actually showing up at police headquarters shortly after sunrise, when all poor Ponte wanted was to sip a cup of ersatz coffee and smoke his morning cigar in peace. Ponte glanced at the calendar: eight more days of this would really be more than he could bear.

 

Garzo glanced at the calendar for the fourth time in half an hour, and decided that he simply couldn't take eight more days of this tension. Il Duce. Il Duce
in person, the Great Condottiere, the Chief of the Italian Nation, the Man of Destiny to whom the Italian people looked with boundless faith would be here, perhaps in his office, standing right in front of him. He might even smile at him, reach out to shake his hand. For the thousandth time since he first read the telegram from the ministry, he felt faint. The Duce's safety was the responsibility of the army and the secret police; that, at least, wasn't his concern. But the chief of police had stated it in no uncertain terms: the cleanliness and appearance of police headquarters and of the city in general were Garzo's personal responsibility.

In short, it was up to him, and him alone, to ensure that the Duce, the interior minister, and all the functionaries who would be coming down from Rome found Naples to be the perfect Fascist city, free of crime and anything unsightly. And he was determined to make sure that that was exactly the kind of city they would find.

Once again, for what must have been the thousandth time, he opened his pocket mirror and checked his mustache—grown recently at his wife's suggestion—to make sure that not a single hair was out of place. His wife, a woman who was as energetic as she was despotic, had been uncompromising in her view that when it came to a man's career, his physical appearance was an important calling card. And she knew whereof she spoke: her uncle was retired on a prefect's pension, after scaling all the summits of a ministry career.

Garzo knew that he wasn't a particularly astute investigator; he'd always felt a certain disgust for the criminal mentality, and he hated having to dirty his hands by interacting with thugs and hooligans. But he compensated for this with his considerable talent for personal relations, adhering to the tried and tested principle of being firm with the weak and weak with the strong: kissing up and kicking down. This approach had allowed him to free himself of actual duties and take on a series of executive positions, in which he had employed his God-given skills as an organizer. He knew how to see problems coming and prevent them, isolating the causes and carefully removing them.

And what, he mused, could the problems be now? What could possibly come between him and the Duce's praise, the minister's compliments, the chief of police's grateful embrace? His thoughts turned immediately to Ricciardi, and to his usual sardonic expression.

It was a fine time for the Duce's visit. There were no investigations under way, no unsolved cases, no unrest. For once, everything was running smoothly. So why did he feel so uneasy?

Ricciardi was a good detective, no doubt about that. He'd solved complex cases, some of which had been real stumpers; Garzo had once remarked to his wife that if you asked him, Ricciardi owed his successes to the simple fact that deep down he was a criminal himself, so he thought like the people he arrested. This assessment aside—and even Garzo wasn't entirely sure of it—the fact remained that Ricciardi was untamable, elusive, enigmatic. He lived with his aged
tata
, his childhood nanny. He had no bad habits, no friends, no woman in his life. A man without vices, he thought, cannot possess great virtues. And then, those eyes of his: those unsettling green eyes, clear as glass, that never blinked; those eyes that challenged you without challenging you directly, that put you face-to-face with the worst part of yourself, the part you'd rather not know about, the part you didn't know was there. Garzo shuddered.

Recently, moreover, there had been the widow Vezzi. That was another complication. The deputy chief of police couldn't understand why a woman who was so beautiful, wealthy, and well liked, and with friends in such high places (he'd even heard that she was close to the Duce's daughter), should make no secret of the crush she had on a character like Ricciardi.

She would pay him visits at headquarters, unblushingly, brazenly; and the less interest he seemed to show, the more shamelessly she courted him. Her presence, and the ascendant social position she had occupied in Naples's high society since moving there, gave the commissario an added layer of protection. Protection? Garzo asked himself. Yes, protection, he replied inwardly. Because he knew that if it weren't for her, he'd gladly take Ricciardi out of the picture; he'd rid himself of him, sending him off to do his investigating somewhere else, in a small town in the province, far from police headquarters and his own ambitions.

He stood up and started arranging the untouched law tomes that decoratively lined his office bookshelves so that the colors of their covers harmonized properly with the color of his carpet. He just couldn't put his mind at ease: Ricciardi was bound to cause trouble, he could feel it.

Still, come to think of it, the widow Vezzi's courtship of the commissario might prove useful to him. Word had it that the woman planned to hold a soiree in her new Neapolitan home, an exclusive reception in honor of the Duce's visit. Perhaps, he mused, he might be able to use his position to wangle an invitation, and maybe even attract notice. He'd heard that the Duce's daughter, Edda, was his favorite child and that she had considerable influence over her father; perhaps she'd find him charming and put in a good word for him.

He could see himself now: chief of police, in the royal box at the Teatro San Carlo, affably waving to the city's most prominent aristocrats. He smiled at the thought of turning the presence of a pain in the ass like Ricciardi to his own advantage.

Seized by a new wave of euphoria, he shouted: “Ponte!”

Livia Lucani, the widow Vezzi, took pleasure in the way that her new apartment in Naples was coming together; and it corresponded perfectly to the way she'd envisioned it, when she'd first decided to move to the city.

It was the first place she'd lived that she could call entirely her own. She'd moved out of the home of her parents, heirs to a noble and wealthy family in the town of Jesi, to go live with an aunt in Rome and study singing. At the beginning of a promising career as an opera singer, just as her lovely contralto voice was starting to attract notice and critical praise, she'd met Arnaldo, one of the century's greatest tenors, and married him; and so, she realized, this was the first time that she'd chosen and furnished a home just for herself.

But perhaps she wouldn't be alone for long, she thought with a smile as she sipped her coffee. Perhaps someone would come along sooner or later to fill her bed, her home, and her life. Perhaps someone with green eyes.

With effort she turned her thoughts back to the things she'd need to do that day, and to her apartment. She'd chosen a place in the center of town, with a little help from Ricciardi, whose advice she'd sought. As usual, he hadn't wanted to accept any responsibility toward her, and was very careful to avoid entanglements; but she was patient, willing to wait, and certain that sooner or later, as naturally as night follows day, he would realize that she was the right woman for him, the one who could pull him out of that strange quagmire of solitude in which he stubbornly insisted on living.

Instead of the lovely hillside of Posillipo, from which you could see the Gulf of Naples, or the new construction up in Vomero, with its cool air and greenery, she'd decided to move to the neighborhood near Via Toledo, choosing an elegant apartment on Via Sant'Anna dei Lombardi. She liked living downtown, amid the theaters and cafés, so that she could stroll past the chic shops and the ancient churches.

She fell in love with that city even before she fell in love with Ricciardi; she loved its cheerfulness, the way it changed its appearance and its colors according to the season, the swarms of street urchins who clung to the sides of the rattling trollies; she savored its constant music, the fact that at any time of day or night, whatever the occasion, there was always someone singing, either at the top of their lungs or under their breath; she enjoyed its food and its mild climate though she knew the weather could be capricious, as it had been recently, with days of rain. In that city, she was incapable of feeling unhappy.

Her girlfriends in Rome called her on an almost daily basis, asking her just what could be so wonderful in Naples that she had actually decided to go down there to live. Truth was, she thought with a smile, they were just eager to uncover the real reason for her move.