As they walked up the tree-lined lane, Ricciardi wondered what difference there was between the woman walking beside him and the one with slit wrists he saw dying over her son’s tomb, just some fifteen feet away.
They were both alone, both in the depths of despair. Both tied to life only by bonds of obligation that over the course of time had come to seem increasingly meaningless. Love, Ricciardi mused, can tie you to life or evict you from it entirely. Without love, there’s not much difference between living and dying. Carmen had struck him as an empty shell, devoid of any strength. Tettè’s death, the memory of her lost love, the steadily declining condition of her mad husband. No worldly fortune, no amount of money could make up for those losses.
They came to the car, in the cemetery parking area. The woman walked around to the driver’s side.
“I prefer not to have my chauffeur drive me, Commissario. I like not having to depend on anyone else. Tettè liked it too, you know? It was a game we played, to go for a drive, as if I were his own personal driver.”
As they did every time she spoke about the boy, her eyes filled with tears. Ricciardi realized that her lost child could easily become a burden too heavy for her to bear, and that poor Carmen might well have more to fear from herself than from any blackmail her brother-in-law could even dream of. He got into the car and sat beside her.
As the woman shifted the car into gear and pulled away, and as the roar of the engine filled their ears, Ricciardi detected a slight movement directly behind him, in the backseat. He turned around and stopped, openmouthed, horrified by the sight that met his eyes.
Maione stepped out of the trolley, holding Lucia’s arm and followed by their five children. The second of November was a painful recurrence: the only day of the year in which the entire family came together, both the living and the dead.
They’d dressed in silence that morning. No one felt like talking; everyone was busy remembering.
Luca, who’d been Lucia and Raffaele’s firstborn son, was one of those boys who fills the lives of those around them. He was blond and had his mother’s blue eyes, with his father’s sunny, extroverted disposition. He never tired of playing pranks and cheerfully teasing the rest of the family, including his siblings, who worshiped him. He was loved by one and all in their quarter; his funeral was memorable for the sheer number of people who attended. So many of them with tears in their eyes.
Maione let a smile escape him as he approached the cemetery entrance: the brigadiere panzone, the big-bellied brigadier, that’s what Luca used to call him. And Maione would chase the boy through the apartment with a wooden clog in one hand, calling: If I catch you I’ll break your head open and put some good manners in there; and Luca would scream with laughter, and then turn to him with a serious face and say: I’ll grow to be big, you know, Papà. I’ll be bigger and taller than you, and I’ll be a policeman, too.
The brigadier remembered how proud he’d been every time his son said those words; and how many times he’d cursed himself for setting him that example.
It was that example that had resulted in Luca’s death, from a cowardly stab wound in the back, in a cellar where a wanted thief had been hiding out. The grief that he felt today, the third year running that he’d gone to visit his son at the cemetery on the Day of the Dead, was still as shiny and new as a piece of polished silver.
He looked over at his wife and, as always, she sensed his eyes upon her and smiled back at him. How beautiful you are, Luci’, he thought. And how close I came to losing you, too. In the long months of silence, grief and sorrow had taken over their lives, creating an archipelago of islands separated by waves of salt tears. He’d been so close to leaving home, a place where it had almost become impossible to breathe.
But because love exists, and in the long run it can win the age-old struggle against grief, they’d found each other again that spring; and now they were closer than ever, bound together in part by the memory of Luca, and by the constant, aching loss that they both felt.
As always, the thought of Luca took Maione’s mind back to Ricciardi, the only one who had understood that the best and only way to help the brigadier was to catch his son’s murderer. He thought back to how close the two men had been on that occasion, and how close they had remained ever since.
He wondered how his commissario was doing, whether he’d kept his promise to abandon his strange investigation until the two of them could work together again. A search for something that was nonexistent, in the life of a poor orphan boy, in his world of desperation. Maione hadn’t understood and still didn’t understand what Ricciardi was looking for, but what he feared above all else was that he might run unnecessary risks, the kind of risks that it was Maione’s job to protect him from.
Just as these thoughts were going through his mind, he saw a powerful automobile race down the curving road that led away from the cemetery, going just a little too fast. There was a woman driving, and he had the odd sensation that he’d seen her before somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. Seated beside her, incredibly, he saw none other than Ricciardi. He raised his hand to wave, but he realized that the commissario was looking behind him, toward the backseat, which was, however, empty.
He raised his hand to wave, but stopped mid-gesture when he saw the look of absolute horror on Ricciardi’s face. It was over in an instant: the car shot off, leaving a trail of mud and exhaust. Maione felt his heart race furiously in his chest, and he responded to the impulse of the moment. He squeezed Lucia’s arm, murmured that he’d join her afterward at Luca’s grave, and set off at a dead run toward the taxi stand.
There you are, thought Ricciardi. At last, there you are.
For the first time since he’d become aware of the Deed, the name he gave his peculiar ability to perceive the grief of the dead who were killed, he had sought it out instead of fleeing from it.
He’d tried to explain the absence of Tettè from all the places he might reasonably have expected or hoped to find him; he’d walked the same streets the boy frequented, the same dark vicoli and alleys. And now, just when he’d given up the hunt, just when he’d decided to set his soul at rest and stop worrying, here he was, in all the atrocity of a slow, painful death.
The boy was contorted in excruciating convulsions, which forced him to straighten and then fold over at the waist continuously; his eyelids were pulled back and his eyes were showing the white of the corneas; he was grinding his teeth from the tremendous suffering caused by the poison. Yet at the same time, a sweet, loving phrase kept issuing from his lips: thank you for the cookies. I love you, Mamma, you know that: you’re my angel.
As was often the case, the greatest horror of all lay in the contrast between the contortions of the body at its moment of extreme suffering and the dead boy’s last delicate, loving thought. Ricciardi couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Tettè’s ghost, and from the terrible implications of seeing him there of all places, and of the phrase that he continued to repeat.
He turned to look at the woman.
He turned to look at the killer.