Ricciardi observed Signora Emma Serra di Arpaja. He’d imagined her as quite unlike the way she had presented herself.
Pallid, circles under her eyes, hollow cheeks. No makeup except for a hint around her eyes, dressed in gray, hair cut fashionably short and tucked behind her ears, leaving her forehead uncovered. Simple shoes with flat heels, sheer stockings.
She kept her eyes lowered, fixed on the small parlor table, with an undecipherable expression on her face, without any apparent emotion. She had greeted them in a low, flat voice. She seemed to be suffering, but from some dull, recondite, distant pain.
Thus far her husband hadn’t looked at her. He was scrutinizing Ricciardi, sizing him up. The tension in the room could have been cut with a knife.
After a long and awkward silence, Ricciardi spoke.
“Signora, please describe your relations with the Signora Calise, Carmela, self-proclaimed fortune teller, found dead in her apartment on April fifteenth.”
Emma didn’t look at him. She answered in a monotone.
“I’d been to see her a few times. A girlfriend of mine took me there.”
“For what purpose?”
“My own amusement.”
“What did the two of you talk about?”
Emma shot a rapid glance at her husband, but her tone of voice remained unchanged.
“She read cards. She told me things.”
“What sort of things?”
Ruggero broke in, unruffled.
“Commissario, I hardly think the details of my wife’s conversations with Calise are pertinent to your investigation. Don’t you agree?”
Ricciardi decided that it was time to establish the boundaries of jurisdiction.
“Professor, as far as our investigation is concerned, kindly let us determine what’s pertinent and what isn’t. Go ahead, please, Signora: what did you talk about?”
When Emma replied, she seemed to be talking about other people in another world.
“I liked her. I didn’t have to think; she cleared up all my doubts for me. My life . . . Commissario, we live with so many uncertainties. Should I do this. Or should I do that instead. She didn’t have doubts about anything. She moved her cards around, she spat on them, and then she made a decision. And she was never wrong.”
Ricciardi looked the woman hard in the face. He had felt a stirring of emotion.
“And lately? Had you been to see her often?”
Ruggero responded, in a decisive tone of voice.
“Commissario, my wife told you that she’d been there a few times. That’s an expression that indicates chance visits, and infrequent ones. Under no circumstances can the word be understood to mean ‘often.’”
Without taking his eyes off the woman, Ricciardi gestured with one hand to Maione, who pulled Calise’s notebook out of his jacket.
“In this notebook,” said the brigadier after clearing his throat, “found in Calise’s apartment, your wife’s name is recorded, either written out or as initials, one hundred and sixteen times over roughly three hundred days of appointments. If you ask me, ‘often’ is a perfectly reasonable term, don’t you think, Professo’?”
Ruggero snorted in annoyance. Emma answered.
“Well, yes, I would go see her. It was a distraction. We all need distractions. Especially when life becomes oppressive.”
She’d said something terrible; Ricciardi and Maione realized it immediately. They both glanced over at Ruggero. He didn’t react, continuing to stare silently into the void in front of him. The commissario went on.
“And what did Calise talk to you about? Did she ever, I don’t know, confide in you, mention any names? Did she ever tell you that she was worried about anything, or did you ever sense that she might be in danger?”
Maione looked over at Ricciardi in surprise. He would have expected the commissario to ask other questions about Signora Serra di Arpaja’s troubles, delve deeper into the cracks in their relationship. Instead, he had returned to the topic of Calise.
“No, Commissario. We talked about other things, like I told you. She read my cards. That’s all. She told what was going to happen, and she was never wrong.”
When the woman had withdrawn from the room, Ruggero saw Maione and Ricciardi to the door.
“You see, Commissario, my wife is like a child. She has her little crazes, her amusements, the silly things she does with her girlfriends. But she was having dinner with me at the home of His Excellency the Prefect the night that Calise was murdered. I read about the mechanics of the murder in the newspaper. Our name is fairly prominent in this city. I’d appreciate it if this conversation was the last we could look forward to. Can I count on that?”
“We want exactly the same thing that you do, Professor: to make sure no innocent person is made to pay for something they didn’t do. You can rest assured, you and your wife. We know how to perform our duty.”
As they were walking out the front door, under the doorman’s resentful glare, Maione reviewed the meeting.
“Commissa’, why didn’t you delve a little deeper into the matter at hand, so to speak? It seemed to me that the signora was reciting a lesson the professor’d taught her, and then she let slip that she was unhappy. Wouldn’t it be worth finding out a little more about that? It wouldn’t be that the signora got started killing little old ladies as a way off fending off her boredom, for example?”
Ricciardi stopped Maione, laying a hand on his arm before stepping into the car.
“You have a point. Listen, Maione, there’s something I want to tell you before we get back in the car, just in case I don’t get out alive: none of this is clear to me. Emma Serra went lots of times to see Calise, who never made use of Nunzia’s services for her. That means that someone else was serving as her informer. So I want you to do some digging into the life of Emma Serra di Arpaja, but be very careful how you go about it. I want to know who she sees, where she goes when her husband’s not around, the names of her friends, and what the domestics have to say. And as soon as you can. I have a feeling that any minute, we’re going to be given a choice: either say Iodice did it, or they’ll take us off the case.”
“Yessir, Commissa’. But this thing you said about not getting out of the car alive, I don’t get it. On the way back you can explain it clearly to me.”