The light of dawn found Ricciardi and Maione well aware that this day would be a decisive one. For the memory of Tonino Iodice and for the honor of his children; for the peace of Carmela Calise’s soul; for the reputation of the Serra di Arpaja family; for the welfare and perhaps for the career of Attilio Romor, an actor with a bright future and a challenging present; for the surname and fate of Emma’s child.
And for the knowledge that they had solved a mystery in a world where, by official royal decree, there could be no more mysteries, nor blood, nor murder victims.
Maione, on Ricciardi’s orders, went to the Serras’ building just before lunchtime. He waited for the doorman to withdraw into his glass-fronted cubby and then went in after him, moving cautiously in the shadows to make sure no one noticed him from the balconies on the upper stories.
He learned that the signora would be going out to the theater, and without her chauffeur. She had told the doorman to get her new car ready, the odd one with a red finish, and to top off the fuel in the tank. As always, the man had gone into a litany of complaint about how he always had to take care of everything himself, and Maione nodded along patiently, inwardly detesting him. Then, however, he learned another tidbit that struck him as particularly interesting: the professor had also asked the doorman whether he knew the signora’s plans for the evening, and then he had instructed him to alert the chauffeur; he’d be going out that evening as well. To attend the theater, he had added. Wasn’t that ridiculously wasteful? Just two people, the same night, the same theater. In two different automobiles.
When Maione informed him, Ricciardi smirked in amusement. The theater. Once again, real and fictional passions would mingle and blend. Who could say which would make the most noise?
The theater. That was destined to be the place where the mystery would be untangled. All right then. The theater. And we’ll be there, he thought. He told Maione to put together a small team of plainclothes officers: four men in all, to be positioned at various points in the auditorium and at the exits. One man would need to sit next to the professor, incognito, to forestall any sudden moves.
“What about you, Commissa’? What are you going to do?”
Unexpectedly, Ricciardi half-smiled and brushed the lock of hair away from his forehead with a sharp sweep of his hand. His eyes glittered in the low light of the setting sun.
“I’m going to pick up a young lady. I’ll be attending the theater with company this evening. Arrange to have two tickets for me at the box office.”
Nunzia Petrone couldn’t believe her own ears. She was mistrustful by nature, and especially so with policemen. It struck her as a ridiculous request, practically a joke, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in the commissario’s eyes.
“Antonietta? But why? What do you need her for?”
Ricciardi, standing with both hands in his overcoat pockets, his shock of hair dangling over his forehead, looked her in the eye.
“Because she may have been present, when Calise was killed. You told me yourself that she stayed upstairs with her another hour the night that she was murdered. And if the murderer had happened to notice she was there, he probably would have killed her, too. Perhaps, if she looked someone in the face, she might be able to help us identify the killer. Perhaps.”
Petrone looked around her with her small eyes, as if appealing to the cheap objects in her kitchen for help.
“But Antonietta doesn’t understand a thing, Commissa’. She just talks to herself, as if she could see people that we can’t, other children she can play with in her imagination. She’s . . . simpleminded, you can see that for yourself. What could you possibly expect from her, the poor little thing?”
Ricciardi shrugged.
“It’s a shot. Just a shot. But I promise you that nothing will happen to her. I’ll stay close to her the whole time. And I’ll bring her back to you, safe and sound. And she might even have fun. An evening at the theater.”
So Ricciardi found himself strolling downhill from the Sanità toward the Teatro dei Fiorentini, walking alongside the girl, who dragged her feet and held her right hand near her mouth, continuing to murmur her singsong. As they went by, people stopped talking and stepped aside.
The shadows of night were gradually swallowing up the street, and the streetlights had not yet flickered on. This was the hour in which dreams materialize.
At the beginning of Via Toledo, Ricciardi cast his usual sidelong glance at the dead. Antonietta smiled and waved at them.
The commissario shuddered when the girl stopped to caress the ghost of a child with its head crushed in, perhaps the result of a streetcar accident, the bloody, naked skin on its chest grooved by the twine suspenders holding up its trousers. Oddly enough, the cap was still perched on top of the child’s head, at least on the half that was intact, while on the other side the cap rested on a shard of white skull and bare, rotting brain matter.
Passersby saw the girl reach her hand out into the empty air and thought nothing of it. Ricciardi on the other hand saw her caress an arm shaking with the final spasms of death, and heard the child’s desperate wail for help that issued from its broken teeth.
“Help me, Mamma,” Antonietta repeated, dreamily. Ricciardi put his hand on her back and gently pushed her along. She began walking again and didn’t look back.
Farther on, when they got to the construction sites of the new white buildings, one by one, in and among the clerks on their way home and the women returning from grocery shopping, dead construction workers who had died on the job began to appear. Ricciardi kept his head down, while Antonietta cheerfully waved her chubby hand, making no distinction between the living and the dead, although neither one nor the other paid her any attention. But maybe the two of them, invisible to one and all, were the real phantoms.
Antonietta blew a kiss to the boy and the old man who had died together; but when they came face-to-face with a more recently dead man, the one who kept calling the name of a certain Rachele, telling her that they had pushed him to join her, the girl started in fright and hid behind Ricciardi’s back. What did you sense, this time? he wondered. What other emotion? You must be able to sense even more than I do, then. In that moment, he felt a surge of infinite pity for the young girl, and he caressed her face. She smiled at him, and went on walking.
But she kept turning around to look behind her, trembling slightly.