It is late afternoon and Ric is sitting in the café La Precchia, halfway down the Corso Vittorio. Couples are strolling and watching. Young girls giggle and blush in the presence of boys, and younger girls push prams and scold dolls.
Commissario Tommaso Talaia sits opposite him, his Homburg the centre piece of the table.
“Did I mention to you the reflections of Giambattista Basile in his novel Il Corvo, The Raven?”
“Not that I recall,” Ric replies.
The little cockerel smiles, “Of course. Perhaps I did not; so much water has passed through the Straits of Messina since that time that I…”
The music of brass instruments, flutes and drums drifts down the cobbled street. The waiter asks, politely of course, if they would mind transferring to a table on the pavement. They do so, immediately if unhurriedly.
The shopkeepers of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele are closing up, shepherding their staff out into the street, and a boy on a scooter is shooed away down a side alley.
First in the column filing down the Corso are the dozen or so musicians of the band; their blue uniforms pressed, their shoes shined. They are playing a Sicilian funeral march. Ric has heard the solemn and foreboding score before, but cannot recall when or where. It is, he decides, appropriately vainglorious.
Maso Talaia glances up at the blue sky and sucks his teeth, loudly.
Ric smiles back. Sure, the march is a shade theatrical, but he reminds himself that in her time La Strega had been something of an actress and, therefore, a little theatre is not to be denied.
The pavements are not as crowded as they were the day Ric arrived and witnessed the funeral cortège of Onofrio Maggiore, but there are still a healthy number who have gathered to pay their respects to the old lady of La Casa dei Sconosciuti.
Behind the band comes the old, green three-wheeled Ape, weighed down by a host of brightly-coloured bouquets.
The clergy precede the shiny black hearse bearing La Strega’s casket. The coffin is plain in design but, like the old Ape, it too is draped in a cascade of many colourful flowers.
Behind the hearse the mourners are led by the barrel-chested sailmaker, his head held high, his eyes cast down. And immediately behind Marcello file the members of his extended family and friends.
Marcello had asked Ric to accompany him at the head of the procession, but in reply Ric had demurred, saying that only those who knew her well were entitled to make up the cortège.
As he passes them, Il Velaccino looks over, bows and nods his head. In turn, Ric and the little Commissario repay the compliment.
Old Nino leans on the arm of Ariana. His progress is stilted and his black suit, dark glasses, wizened features and thin white hair lend him a godfatherly air. Even Sandro has done his best to smarten up.
Once the procession has passed down the Corso and the music has faded away, they retake their seats and the street returns to normal.
Ric is warmed by his memories of Valeria. On his return from his night on Vulcano, he’d gone to La Casa dei Sconosciuti to look for her. When he could not find her, he informed Marcello, who sent a fisherman out to search the shore to the south. The cries of the herring gulls soon led the fisherman to the emerald waters below the cliffs beyond the Punta San Giuseppe.
“For a funeral march, it is perhaps a little melodramatic, no?” Talaia suggests, sighing.
Ric smiles again. The perfect irony that Valeria should consign herself to a fate which her mother was believed to have suffered does not escape him. It saddens him, but in that he decides there is also an element of theatre; a tragedy which, just possibly, completes the circle of Valeria’s life.
Talaia is, evidently, thinking something similar. “Did you know that she was unwell?” he asks.
“I did,” Ric replies.
“Such a shame! She was an extraordinary woman, so…”
“Full of life?”
The little Commissario raises his eyebrow and pouts, “I was going to say righteous in her beliefs. Citizens of good faith are few and far between these days. Bona fides: a dying breed.”
Ric sips his coffee. “I hear she left a note.”
“Oh, yes,” Talaia fiddles with his hat, “very precise instructions regarding her funeral arrangements, which is why we have to sit here and endure La Sollevazione Di Cristo. Most people associate this noise,” he curls his lip, “with the Misteri di Trapani, the Procession of Passion at the end of Holy Week. Trapani, as I am sure you know, lies on the very western tip of Sicily. Your Strega asked for this march to be played as she passed by La Precchia for the last time.” Maso chuckles: “Ah, even in death she is the perfect drama queen!”
“Much else?”
“Not so much; a few details. She asked for the house to be sold and the money to be donated to an orphanage in Bagheria. Everything else she handed to Marcello Maggiore. The gossip in the città bassa is that they were related in some way.” Talaia smirks; a patronising expression that suggests he finds the islanders a touch parochial for his taste. “Of course, only you would know the truth in this story.” He shifts in his seat. “But, I have always thought it is better for people to have something to talk about.”
“Better than what?” Ric asks.
“Oh,” he shrugs, “nothing or perhaps something less attractive. In Sicily we say Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent’anni ‘mpaci: he who is deaf, blind and silent will live a hundred years in peace. People say this is the vow of Omertà, but I like to believe there are many things the ears are better not to hear.”
Ric is faintly amused, “What you’re saying Maso is that whatever Valeria wrote in her last letter, you don’t intend to share it with me.”
He nods, smiling, but reconsiders. “Oh, in her letter, La Signorina Vaccariello asked for forgiveness; but generally, not for any one particular impropriety.”
“Not one in particular?”
Talaia chews his lip.
“Take all the time you need, Commissario. I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that I now have time to spare. Unless of course you think I should be concerned about the price Candela’s men have put on my head?
Ric pauses, but when Talaia doesn’t respond, he continues, “When Marcello took me over to Vulcano, he told me that the latest rumour running round the città bassa was that Palermo had sent someone to decommission me.”
“Oh, you don’t want to believe every little piece of gossip, Ric. Who knows how they start or from where they come?”
Ric pauses again, thinking, “Officer Paolo?”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t Old Nino say his mother lives over at San Calogero?”
The little Commissario does not look up as he replies, “I believe she does.”
Ric shakes his head and chuckles, “Who needs the internet when you’ve got the bush telegraph?”
Talaia still doesn’t look up.
Ric pats the policeman rather affectionately on his shoulder, “Well, Maso, now that Il Velaccino has repaired the Mara and she is back in the water, you don’t seem too interested in when or where I go next. By which I take it that you no longer have any interest in who may have shot Girolamo Candela or who murdered Claudio Maggiore, or even how Ciccio Ferro met his end?”
The little Commissario sighs, “Ah, the poor, unfortunate Ferro Francesco. It seems he was asphyxiated by a cloud of sulphur gas. You know there are signs all the way up to the crater of the Fossa di Vulcano warning people not to get too close to the fumarola. He was careless. What more needs to be said?
“In the case of Signor Maggiore Claudio, we have no corpse therefore there is no crime to investigate. His disappearance will be a matter of conjecture for many years to come. Perhaps it is better for him to be thought of in this fashion. But with regards to Signor Candela?”
He studies his hat for a moment. “You remember me telling you that our forensic laboratory found a curious, oily substance on the Beretta?”
“I do.”
“This substance, they believe, was present on the cloth which the perpetrator used to wipe your gun clean of prints; except of course that whoever wiped it clean was clearly not a professional. We know this because your partial thumbprint was near the muzzle–”
“In your dreams, Maso,” Ric groans.
Talaia smiles, but again doesn’t lift his gaze from the table, “Mm, perhaps so. But, this substance: our forensic department has now had sufficient time to examine it properly and they have ascertained that it is a form of crema di mani: a hand cream. Perhaps more importantly, the type of hand cream a woman would use. To be more exacting, the name of this cream is Ortigia Lime Di Sicilia.”
The name is familiar to Ric and he recalls his first meeting with Old Nino. Ortigia was Valeria’s perfume; it was the scent by which Old Nino recognised her.
“Imagine that,” Talaia says, all too aware Ric is hostage to his thoughts. “A perfume from a company founded by a British woman, named after an island near Syracuse and found on a gun used to commit a murder in Lipari.”
“Yes,” Ric agrees. “Imagine that!”
They sit in silence and observe the townsfolk as they go about their business: Alfredo, in his fish-laden Ape, potters down the Corso as Maurizio, with his array of vegetables on his, potters up.
“I have found, Ric,” Talaia continues, a vague inevitability creeping into his tone, “that when it is possible to avoid forming judgements, it is better not to. As I was beginning to tell you before La Signorina Vaccariello interrupted us, Giambattista Basile, a courtier and soldier of the eighteenth century, wrote a number of fairy tales. Amongst other important works, he was responsible for the original versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella. However, in Il Corvo – The Raven – a story from his collection The Tale of Tales, he observed that all human judgement is false and perverse. There is much truth in this simplicity, don’t you think?”
Ric is taken with the feeling that the little Commissario is gloating, only a little perhaps, but gloating nevertheless.
“And what of your ancestor?” Talaia asks. “What judgement have you reached regarding Antonio Sciacchitano and his empty grave?”
Ric sighs, “My uomo integerrimo? My solid citizen? Well, Maso, I think we’ll let that sleeping dog lie. I know most people think there is nothing but silence to be found in a grave, empty or otherwise, but these past few days I’ve learned they are far from silent. After all, where better to keep secrets than a grave?”