IMMA WAS TALL, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL FOR WOMEN IN THESE parts, or for anyone really. She had straight brown hair a shade lighter than mine and huge, curious eyes rimmed with dark eyeliner, though they were often covered in fashionable black sunglasses. With her bob and those sunglasses, she looked a bit like Anna Wintour, but always wore jeans, even in the hottest weather. She smoked Chesterfields and was cool but kind and smart and was always up for adventure, never saying no to a suggestion or request.
Like many of Bernalda’s young adults, Imma lived at home with her parents. To make a living, she edited manuscripts and worked as a deejay in a bar, which she gave up for a month to devote herself solely to me and my research. She was going to be my Girl Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, and any other day of the week I needed her.
Her college thesis had been an analysis of the dialects of Pisticci and Bernalda. She had family in both towns and was a cousin of the historian Dino D’Angella, Professor Tataranno’s counterpart in Pisticci. Imma also knew Tataranno very well, having had his wife, Carmelina, as a teacher in school.
Giuseppe—my other researcher—was also unusually tall. He was Hollywood handsome, with a wide, bright smile, downturned black eyes that sparkled, dark, thick eyebrows, short, neat brown hair, and a raspy voice. He was happily married to a beautiful blond woman named Emanuela, who matched his good looks and even raised them. She resembled a fairy-tale princess and was just as sweet.
Her prince, Giuseppe, was at least a shade or two darker than us all, with a deep tan from working his fields. Even though he was a farmer, he had had a first-rate education because his family had been landowners. His features and his speech were more refined than most residents’ but he moved easily between the locals he had grown up with and the local landowners, who seemed more sophisticated. Like me, he was caught between social classes and the expectations that came with both. I had grown up working class but had moved out of Jersey City long ago. I sometimes felt adrift, without a real tribe to call my own.
Giuseppe was just a few years younger than I was. I noticed that he popped the collar on his polo shirts straight up in a very 1980s way like I had many years ago. (The popped collar was making a comeback in Italy; Giuseppe was ahead of the trend.) His English was impeccable and he was a gentleman, holding doors open for me, explaining anything I was confused about—which was a lot—and always arriving on time, a rare trait in the South. He was so dependable and responsible that he wore a wristwatch, in a world where most people simply checked their phones for the time, if at all.
He was the one who drove me to the post office to pick up money that was being wired by American Express my first afternoon back in Basilicata. We went to Marina di Ginosa, a small, lively seaside village outside Pisticci where he had grown up. He knew everyone there but had moved out years ago to a private farmhouse in Marconia, nearby. It was difficult to live in Marina di Ginosa, he said, because some people resented him for coming from a long line of landowners.
Giuseppe was eager to find the murder, so eager that before I even arrived, he had found a local Grieco family with a soprannome that meant “murderer.” After a few days of digging, he found out one of the ancestors in that Grieco family had simply been a very successful hunter and, because of his vast collection of animal heads, was jokingly called “the murderer.”
Imma, meanwhile, had tried searching in the Bernalda archives but was rebuffed by the awful clerk there, who said she needed my written permission to look into my family records. Which was ridiculous.
The next morning, the three of us met with Professors Tataranno and Salfi in the scented garden at Francesco’s Hotel Giamperduto. We all hugged and sat down at a long table overlooking the fertile Basento Valley. Twisted olive trees filled the property, making it look like the Garden of Gethsemane. Professor Tataranno looked nearly the same as he had ten years earlier, his face only slightly aged, his mind as sharp as ever. He was still chain-smoking. I worried his lungs didn’t look quite as good as he did on the outside. I was happy to see that Professor Salfi was still alive. He didn’t look much older, since he had looked so old to begin with, but he seemed much quieter this time around. I wondered if his hearing had gone.
We talked about the past ten years and about the murder. This time I was prepared. I had brought along copies of the birth certificates I had for Vita and her sons and also her death certificate and handed them around the table, as if shuffling cards in a game of passatella. They agreed to make some inquiries in town and we said our goodbyes, promising to reunite later in the week. But before we scattered, I handed out the baseball hats with “NYC” written on the front. Everyone laughed and put them on, looking like a ragtag team of players with me as their nervous coach. “Team Helene,” Giuseppe said with a laugh.
GIUSEPPE WAS THE ONE WHO DID MOST OF THE DRIVING, SINCE I had a lousy sense of direction. Also, the streets in Bernalda and Pisticci had been built for mules, not for cars, and someone was always scraping the paint job off the side of their car. I didn’t want it to be me. It was also possible I would get a ticket if caught driving without a license, even though I had a Bernalda police report explaining what had happened, safe in my backpack, which I now carried in front of me, like a baby in a BabyBjörn, like the one worn by the gypsy who had stolen my wallet. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for days. Maybe I would lose weight this trip, a first for a visit to Italy.
The rental car company was named Stigliano Motors, the same last name as Vita’s mother. I wondered if we were related, too, and asked the car rental guy about the murder. He had no idea what I was talking about and shrugged. Luckily, he ignored the fact that I had no driver’s license and simply handed me the keys to my boxy brown Lancia. I wouldn’t have to ride a mule after all.
With my Lancia—lance—Giuseppe and I headed out like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in search of enlightenment. (I wasn’t sure who was who.)
Giuseppe turned to me and thanked me for hiring him. “It’s not just the money that’s important,” he said. “Trying to find your family murder is kind of like therapy for me.”
“Really?” I asked. “How?”
“It’s helping me to forget my own family story for a little while.”
“What story?”
“My sister, Sabrina, was murdered a couple of years ago,” he said, very matter-of-fact. I stared at him.
“Oh my God,” was all I could muster.
“She was killed by a stalker who was in love with her. She left behind two kids. Our whole family is still a little bit in shock.”
I gasped. I didn’t gasp often. It took a lot to make me gasp. I hardly knew Giuseppe and wasn’t even sure how to respond to such an awful story. “Jesus,” I said, finally, shaking my head in disbelief. “Did they catch the man who did it?”
“He killed himself,” Giuseppe calmly explained as he drove.
“Oh my God, how awful. I’m so sorry,” I said. I felt like he should pull over. But he lived with this horror story every day. It was only new to me.
“I know,” he said. “It’s a terrible story. But your family murder is helping me to forget my family murder. At least for a little while.” He shrugged and tried to smile.
The murder—Sabrina’s murder—had been big news in Cesena in northern Italy, where it had happened in the spring of 2012. Sabrina was forty-five years old, Giuseppe’s big sister. She was scheduled to take her real estate agent’s exam in a few weeks but was mostly a full-time mother of two. The kind of mother who still sang lullabies to her eight-year-old son.
Her biggest fault, said Giuseppe, was that she was too friendly and kind to those who didn’t deserve her kindness.
She had complained to the police only weeks earlier about the sixty-year-old man from Bari who had become obsessed with her. He was the father of one of her friends.
The stalker had confessed his obsession and desire to kill Sabrina to a doctor, who then told the Bari police. But they did nothing.
The morning of the murder, Sabrina had just dropped her son off at school and was waiting outside her friend’s house to meet her. The stalker, meanwhile, had driven up to Cesena with a pistol, his rental car full of scribbled rantings. He saw Sabrina outside his daughter’s house and walked up to her car from the passenger side, leaning into the window and shooting her twice in the chest.
He sped away to the nearby seaside town of Cervia, where he took refuge in the cathedral there, taking two hostages, including the priest. After hours of negotiations with the police, Sabrina’s killer shot himself in the chest upon the altar. Some said it was suicide. But the police chief told Giuseppe the killer was in the middle of a sentence when the gun went off, that it was an accident. Giuseppe thinks he was too much of a coward to deliberately take his own life.
Sabrina was one of fifty-five Italian women killed that year by men who claimed to love them—husbands, boyfriends, stalkers.
“Most days I wake up and I think it’s some bad dream, some nightmare,” said Giuseppe. “But it’s real.”
Giuseppe seemed like one of those good people to whom bad things happened, like a modern-day Job. Sabrina’s death was the worst. But then his farmhouse had recently been ransacked and robbed while he and his wife were out. He had had cancer, though he was cured. And now he was having financial troubles with his farm in Marconia, which was why he had taken the job helping me.
Part of his apricot harvest was finished, but he still had to harvest his wheat, and the man who was supposed to come with the harvesting machine—the mietitrebbia—kept putting him off day after day after day. Giuseppe was worried the wheat would burn as the June days grew longer and hotter. After a week, he decided to hire another man, but when he arrived, the machine was not big enough. He told me all this as we drove, and not in a complaining way, but in order to let me know his story before we searched for mine.
Giuseppe was the first one to say out loud that maybe there was some sort of curse not just on his head, but on mine. Right after I arrived, Imma dropped her phone in the toilet and had to travel over an hour to Potenza to visit the only Apple Store in the region for repair. It wouldn’t be ready for several days, making it difficult for us to contact one another.
“There is some spirit that does not want you to tell this story maybe,” Giuseppe said. “Do you believe this is true?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I said, trying to laugh about it.
“But we will overcome it,” he said, patting my hand on the car seat. “We will be strong and we will find your murder. You will see.”