Teresa’s words froze them both in place. The two policemen looked at each other, then they looked at the shoes, and then Teresa. Ricciardi decided to break the spell.
“And . . . ? Who was it?”
In the room, silence. Outside, a truck drove across the piazza, with a festive series of loud, irregular bangs. Maione and Ricciardi knew that Teresa was perched on the edge of the irrevocable. Once she uttered that name, she’d never be able to go back, and nothing would be the way it had been before. She drew a deep breath.
“It was my employer. Ruggero Serra di Arpaja. The professor.”
And she began to tell her story.
It all started more than a year ago. Teresa had just arrived from her country village, with a pressboard suitcase full of things that, over time, she’d thrown out, as the family with which she’d found employment “civilized” her, as the signora had put it. She had the right to take the afternoon off once every fifteen days, but for the first few months of her new job she chose to forego it; she didn’t want to run the risk of being thought a lavativa, a layabout, the worst crime a maid could be accused of.
The first time she left the palazzo, she went to the address that she had for her Aunt Carmela. Her aunt had stood in at her baptism as her godmother, and the family had considered her a disgrace, then a source of pride, and finally a living legend. Carmela had run away from home at a very young age to seek her fortune; she alone had rebelled against the iron law of grueling work and submission that had long subjugated the women of the village. Her name could only be spoken in a whisper, and horrible tales were told about her.
When she finally came face-to-face with that ancient, pain-racked woman, Teresa was at first disappointed, but then, as she sat and listened to her over a cup of hot milk, she discovered that the tales of her village’s rustic mythology had actually understated the case. Her aunt had managed to amass a genuine fortune, and what’s more, she had done it by reading tarot cards! The kind of thing that back home was the province of quacks and mountebanks at the monthly cattle fair.
And just how had she pulled it off? By exploiting the gullibility of the well-to-do, people like her employers. To her, whose image of the couple she worked for verged on celestial, it seemed unbelievable: those illustrious gentlemen and ladies who held the world in the palms of their hands and did with it as they pleased, who possessed automobiles, fine clothing, jewelry, and even had electric lighting; well then, even they were putty in the hands of the fortuneteller, like so many marionettes made to dance by a puppeteer.
Over the course of that unforgettable afternoon, Carmela revealed the entire organization to her niece, including the help she received from Nunzia, the mother of the little mentally handicapped girl who was sitting there listening, with a vacant smile on her face and a streamer of drool hanging from her mouth. Together they laughed at the stupidity of those people, delivering Carmela’s fortune right to her doorstep.
At the end of that afternoon, after telling her aunt about the lives of the Serra di Arpaja family, Teresa bid her aunt good-bye and left with a feeling of contentment, promising to come see her again soon.
That same evening, while she was waiting for the streetcar that would take her back to the palazzo, and during the rest of the week that followed, an idea took shape in Teresa’s mind, eventually transforming itself into a full-fledged plan.
“Putting the Serra di Arpaja family in contact with Carmela Calise,” said Ricciardi.
“Yes sir, that’s exactly right,” Teresa confirmed.
The girl was perceptive and clever, and possessed the gift of being able to go unnoticed, to fade perfectly into the background. By virtue of this talent, she soon managed to penetrate the psychology of the couple she worked for, quickly becoming aware of their incompatibility. The man was old and self-absorbed; the woman was beautiful and emotionally starved.
“At a certain age,” she told the two policemen, “a woman must have children, just like a cow. Otherwise, she goes crazy.”
“The ideal victims of the award-winning enterprise of Calise and Petrone,” Maione put in.
“Yes,” Teresa admitted. But that time, for some reason unknown to Teresa, Calise didn’t want Petrone involved. She asked the girl to keep her informed of just one thing: when the signora was planning to go to the theater, and which theater she would be going to. That was easy; Emma frequented every theater in town with her girlfriends, and she never missed a show.
And so, one week after another, Teresa gave Carmela the information and Carmela gave Teresa a little money. Teresa sent the money home so she could buy a farm where she could live like a noblewoman when she returned to her village.
Very soon Emma started paying calls on Carmela. The trap had snapped shut. Teresa had no idea how her aunt had pulled it off.
The old woman became an obsession for the signora. She went to see her two or three times a day. The chauffeur complained about having to drive the enormous black automobile through the vicoli of the Sanità; then she’d started going there on her own, in her new red convertible. She was so euphoric that she even ventured to talk to Teresa about it, at night, as she was having the maid brush her hair before bed.
Still, there were certain aspects of the operation that the girl had never quite been able to understand: the money, for one. Emma had told her that Carmela refused to take money, and she’d only been able to give a tip now and again to the porter woman. In the signora’s opinion, this was clear evidence of the fortune-teller’s honesty; she was an honest-to-God missionary. And yet, Teresa was regularly paid the amount they’d agreed upon. So what was her aunt getting out of it? Teresa couldn’t puzzle that one out. Nor could she understand why Emma had recently gone from a state of euphoria to one of terrible depression. She described Emma’s bedroom for them: filthy, disorderly. She told them about the wine and the vomit.
It had been two weeks since she’d heard, through the door, a violent argument between man and wife; it had been occasioned by her return home at dawn, something that had been happening more and more frequently. That time the professor had been waiting for her, wide awake, sitting in the front hall, and he’d given his wife an open-palm slap in the face. Emma’s only response was to spit in his face, just like they did back in her village, Teresa told them. Then she had fled to her bedroom. Ruggero had chased her, and managed to get inside and shut the door behind him.
This was followed by a heated dispute, in the course of which he had forbidden his wife from paying a call on “that old witch” ever again, or else “he’d see to shutting that woman’s sewer of a mouth once and for all.” Emma replied that “he wasn’t a real man” and therefore he’d “be too feeble even to knock on her door.” She insulted him for his lack of virility, and her husband fled in tears, passing right by the girl without noticing her. Just as he usually did.
As soon as she could, she’d gone over to warn her aunt; but she had told Teresa not to worry, a smile on her face. She had the situation under control, she’d said. Then, terrified that she might lose her job, Teresa stopped going to see her. Until Emma, her face ravaged by tears, told her she’d learned about the murder from the newspaper.
“But the day before that, Commissa’, the professor came home very late at night; it was practically morning. He looked like a lunatic, his hair was standing straight up, he was shaking and sobbing. He was filthy and disheveled, he who was usually as well groomed as a mannequin on Via Toledo. He hurried to his bedroom and shut the door behind him. It was a long time before he came out. When I went in to clean the room, this is what I found,” and she pointed to the shoes, neatly lined up on Ricciardi’s desk. “If you ask me, that’s blood that they’re covered in. My aunt’s blood. Blood of my blood.”
Ricciardi kept his green eyes fixed on the now silent girl’s face; she was as calm and still as if she’d just finished reciting a rosary. Then she came to with a start, as though waking up from a dream. He looked at Maione, who was standing beside him, mouth agape.
The brigadier looked back at him.
“Now, who’s going to tell Dottor Garzo?”