Ricciardi watched as night fell over the city, from his office window.
The sound of the troccole, the clacking wooden noisemakers, penetrating and repetitive, incessantly filled the air, which had once again turned brisk and effervescent. The children waited for the Easter holidays just to pull out those infernal contraptions, originally devised to replace the church bells that had been tied in place and silenced, and used to announce the services of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, only to become wood-and-iron toys, the perfect thing to torment someone who, like him, was just trying to concentrate.
He couldn’t make heads or tails of Viper’s murder.
The more he thought about it, the more every single passion the girl stirred in those around her seemed to him like a more than plausible motive for wanting her dead.
He had always thought that the genesis of every murder could be found in two primary compelling passions: hunger and love. The two passions found endless variants, mixing together infinitely, one becoming the thirst for power, influence, and envy; the other jealousy, loneliness, and despair. And they put weapons in people’s hands, generating a tangled lust for blood and justice, slaked only in death.
Hunger and love also danced around Viper’s corpse, and in every possible form: hunger was what gnawed at Madame Yvonne and her son; hunger engendered by gambling debts, by the fear of losing the greatest of their sources of income; hunger was what tormented the girl’s mother, accustomed to enjoying the money that came to her from a source she held in such bitter contempt, money that Viper herself might well have decided to cut off; hunger, in a certain sense, was what drove Augusto, Ventrone’s son, who feared the destruction of his company because of his father’s reckless squandering; and he’d detected something similar in Caterina, Coppola’s muscular sister, while Giuseppe Coppola in turn was a slave to his love for the girl. And love was what Vincenzo Ventrone had experienced, in a perverse form that was incomprehensible to Ricciardi, and in fact Ventrone had even felt obliged to arrange and pay for the young woman’s strange funeral; and love, perhaps, was what had led Lily, the blond prostitute, to claim she had discovered the dead body, instead of Ventrone. Or was it more about hunger? And who could say how many other emotions, passions, and sentiments had circled Viper like so many wolves, attracted by the scent of her beauty. Emotions, passions, and sentiments of which he had found no trace. At least, not yet.
In his mind he reviewed the room where the murder took place. The contents of the drawers, which revealed nothing; the objects scattered on the bed and floor, the silver of the flasks and the cigarette case. The horn comb, the brush made of inlaid wood with blond hairs that probably belonged to Lily, and the blond hairs on the pillow that probably belonged to Giuseppe Coppola.
The little whip mentioned by the corpse, the little whip which wasn’t there now; if it ever had been.
The Deed, as Ricciardi mentally referred to the set of his perceptions, was all too likely to deceive: it provided only a reflection, a tangled echo of the last fragments of a life on the threshold of death’s darkness, taking one last look back. More often than not the Deed had steered him away from the truth; only rarely had the perceptions that he sensed actually helped him toward it: very rarely indeed. That’s why he always kept that evidence, the words that he heard, subordinate, because only afterward was it explained, only once the full picture had been sketched out, through a combination of hard investigative work and pure chance.
But this time the little whip that came out of Viper’s dead mouth was still more equivocal. Was it a prostitute’s working tool, a nickname addressed to her longtime boyfriend? And even if the latter were the case, was it a loving thought addressed to her executioner or a final appeal before being murdered by someone else’s hand, some last cry for help?
What would you have answered, Viper, to Coppola’s proposal of marriage? Ricciardi asked the window. What were you waiting for, before giving your reply? Could it have been Easter, to celebrate your profane resurrection?
The troccole in the street kept clattering, increasingly annoying, iron against wood. Ricciardi had been told that the sound of that ancient child’s toy was originally intended to chase away evil spirits. He thought bitterly, for the umpteenth time, that not spirits, but the living, were the ones who were truly frightening.
That was something he knew all too well.