While Maione followed his trail made of voices, words, and facial expressions, Ricciardi was working on a different track. He had to find the missing piece that he could no longer hope to acquire through ordinary channels: Antonio Iodice, pizzaiolo, suicide.
Walking briskly through the teeming vicoli of the evening, he headed straight for the pizzeria that had been the root of both that poor man’s dreams and his destruction. He was unwilling to close the books on the case and brand as guilty a man who hadn’t even had a chance to confess, though appearances certainly seemed to suggest that he was responsible for the crime. He wanted to live in his world for a little while, listen to his last thoughts, fully comprehend his dying sorrow. Unless the man was still partially conscious when he arrived at the hospital; in that case, he wouldn’t find anything other than the smell of death.
It was rare for Ricciardi to go willingly in search of the Deed. Every time he encountered it, he was left with a shard of despair inside him: a fragment of the immense suffering involved in letting go, a sort of infection. He accepted the burden silently, as he always had, shutting himself up in a dark, thorny, internal cell.
But he had no choice: Iodice’s wife and mother had talked to him about the man, but the stories they told were distorted by love. He would have to perform his own objective analysis of the expressions of pain and grief. Whether he liked it or not, he alone had this opportunity, and he had to take it.
He found himself standing in front of the usual notice, nailed to the door: the premises had been placed under sequestration by order of the magistrate. He walked into the darkness of the dining room. Overturned chairs, shattered dishes and bowls on the floor, half-eaten food. Flies that had gotten in by way of a slit over the door, through which penetrated a narrow shaft of light.
Everything was arranged just as it had been the moment that Camarda and Cesarano walked through the door, just before the pizzaiolo committed his demented final act. As Ricciardi looked around, he thought he could sense the pandemonium, the shouts, the noise. Against the far wall, beyond the tables and chairs, was the counter where the pizzas were made, right in front of the now cold oven. On the other side of the counter, the hearth, with a few saucepans. There were smells in the air: frying, smoke, sweat. Spoiled food. And blood.
Ricciardi’s footsteps echoed in the silence and the shadows. He’d closed the door behind him; he didn’t need light to see what he’d come here to find. He walked over to the counter; he stopped and stood there, hands in his pants pockets, breathing gently. Then he drew a deeper breath, and walked forward.
Iodice’s specter was seated on the floor, its back leaning against the wall, head lolling on its right shoulder. One leg stretched out, the other folded, the shoe kicked off. Spasming muscles prefer to be rid of all constrictions. One arm lying along the side of the body, the palm of its hand flat on the floor, as if his last impulse had been to get up. Vest unbuttoned, shirt wide open, sleeves rolled up. A white apron covered his trousers. The other hand still gripped the handle of the knife, which jutted from his chest like a fractured bone. Gushing from the wound was the black river of blood which the heart had gone on blindly pumping.
As was often the case, the dead man had one eye open and the other shut, and the expression on his face was twisted by pain. His snarling lips revealed his yellowed, bloodstained teeth. The bottom lip was split open by one last furious bite. A reddish froth dripped from his mouth: his lung, thought Ricciardi. You weren’t even granted one last deep breath.
Ricciardi had been told that Iodice had called out to his children as he died. But the man’s last thought before dissolving into the shadows wasn’t for them; Ricciardi could hear it clearly. From his ravaged mouth, Iodice was saying: You know; you know you were already lying dead on the floor.
They looked at each other for a long time, in the darkness, surrounded by broken dishware and stale odors, the dead man and the live one. Then Ricciardi turned on his heel and went back out into the perfume of springtime and all its false promises.
This time, Maione let his feet do the work.
The beers with the Serra di Arpajas’ doorman had turned into three: the first to loosen the man up, the second to go with the usual resentful servant’s story about his arrogant and oppressive employers, and the third as a token of sympathy and to thank him for the venomous information sprung from his malevolence.
And so by now it was dinnertime, and his conscience had been temporarily silenced. Showing up at Filomena’s house at this time of night, again, would clearly push their moments together beyond the bounds of some hypocritical coincidence and establish a routine that he wasn’t yet willing to consolidate. Not yet. And so he set off for home with an uncertain step, knowing he’d come to a fork in the road where his feet, of their own accord, without bothering to consult his mind, would decide.
As it turned out, he’d never know which way his feet would turn: the crowd of people that he glimpsed at the mouth of Vico del Fico made his heart start racing and his breath catch in his throat. He thought that the mysterious author of her disfigurement might have returned to finish the horrible job he’d begun five days earlier, taking advantage, like a coward, of the absence of anyone who could protect Filomena: someone like him, for instance.
As he was hurrying toward the basso, making his way through the small crowd, he felt as if he were moving the way you do in those dreams where you’re swimming through a mist that makes everything slow down, even your thoughts. And as he ran, he regretted his own hesitancy and the third beer with the Serras’ doorman. It wasn’t until he came even with the little front door of Filomena’s basso that he realized that that wasn’t the destination of the people of the vicolo; rather, it was the basso next door. He saw the open front door and the empty room inside, and he mechanically followed the stream of people.
There was a knot of people crowded tightly around the entrance, but as always his uniform opened up a path for him. Inside, surrounded by four or five black-clad weeping professional mourners, sat an ashen-faced little girl, expressionless, carefully dressed, hair neatly combed. Next to her sat Filomena, her shawl pulled up to shield her bandaged wound from sight, the other side of her face streaked with tears.
In the middle of the room, stretched out on the bed, lay a corpse dressed in work clothes, filthy with mortar and dust: a bricklayer, thought Maione. Standing near the bed were a dozen or so men dressed the same way: in their midst, the brigadier recognized Gaetano, Filomena’s son.
Even though the body had been arranged as neatly as possible, it was immediately clear to Maione that the man had died from a fall: his spine was bent unnaturally, there were traces of caked blood on his mouth, and the back of his neck didn’t leave the impression on the pillow that it should have.
When Filomena saw him, she hurried over to him.
“It’s a tragedy, Raffaele! Poor little Rituccia! Her father was the only parent she had left. Her mamma died when she was little; she was a friend of mine. And now her father’s dead. What a tragedy. She and Gaetano grew up together. And as fate would have it, Gaetano worked with Salvatore, on the same construction site on Via Toledo. My poor boy actually saw him fall; oh, the horror of it, right before his eyes . . .”
Maione looked at Gaetano, standing off in the shadows, not far from the bed. He heard a few comments, muttered under the breath and behind his back: “Now she’s got herself a cop for a friend,” “Did you hear that? She called him by name. They’re on a first-name basis.” For no good reason, he felt a faint flush of shame. And then he felt ashamed of feeling ashamed.
He turned to look at the little girl, who was the target of the noisy wave of compassion emitted by the women of the vicolo, and he was hardly surprised to see that her eyes were dry of tears. He knew how common it was for true grief to lack any outward signs. And, as he watched her, he picked up on a glance exchanged between the girl and Gaetano, the boy she’d grown up with. It was over in an instant: just a hint of a smile. It went completely unnoticed by all, save for Maione. It wasn’t the smile of a little girl. Gaetano remained expressionless, his faced carved out of some dark hardwood.
The brigadier felt a long shiver run down his spine.