As he walked off the stage, Michele Nespoli knew instantly that it was all over. As soon as he saw the two men standing there motionless, their hands in their pockets, in front of the door, that door, he knew right away.
He was surprised to feel relieved, more so than he would have imagined; he couldn’t live with that constant threat over his head. Maione stepped forwards and touched his arm.
“Are you Michele Nespoli? We have to ask you a few questions. Please, come inside,” he pointed to Vezzi’s dressing room, the door to which had been repaired.
A stunned silence fell around them. The still heavy breathing of those who had just left the set was palpable; those who were near the baritone instinctively moved away and left him alone in the middle of a small imaginary stage.
The three men entered the dressing room. Inside, everything had been cleaned up. There was no trace of the tenor’s blood anymore, except for some damp stains on the carpet. The mirror had been replaced. If it weren’t for Vezzi’s image, which he could still see in the corner of the room, though it was fading by now, Ricciardi would have had a hard time recognizing the crime scene that had appeared to him only two days before. Nespoli, who had not lowered his eyes for a moment, looked around briefly, his intense dark gaze pausing at the window, which like before was open partway.
Maione had finished stating Nespoli’s name and referencing the occasion of the murder, and silence now fell in the dressing room. Ricciardi stared fixedly at the baritone, who met his gaze boldly. It was the Commissario who spoke.
“Who is the woman?”
Nespoli sighed, slowly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ricciardi nodded his head faintly, as if he had somehow expected that reply.
It was Maione, without altering his tone, who stepped in.
“Would you tell us about what happened the night of March the twenty-fifth, the day before yesterday?”
Nespoli exhaled sharply, irritated.
“What do you think happened?”
Ricciardi took a couple of steps and turned again to the baritone, his back to the corner where Vezzi’s image continued spewing out blood.
“We have reason to believe that, for undetermined reasons, you intentionally or unintentionally killed Arnaldo Vezzi; that you killed him on the night of March the twenty-fifth, between seven and nine P.M.”
Nespoli smiled, again only stretching his lips. His eyes were those of a caged animal.
“And on what basis do you have reason to believe such a thing?”
They went on staring at one another. Maione stayed where he was, centred between the two of them. Outside the door a constant murmuring could be heard.
The Brigadier said calmly: “We’re the ones asking the questions.”
The singer did not seem particularly shaken by the accusation.
“Then ask,” he said disdainfully.
“Did you encounter Vezzi on the day and time of the crime?”
“I saw him, yes. I ran into him.”
“Where?”
Nespoli gave a faint sigh, looking around briefly.
“Right here. Or rather, out there; at the door, I mean.”
“At the door?”
“Yes, at the door. I was coming from the stage, on my way back to the dressing room.”
“And you spoke to him?”
“He spoke to me.”
Until that moment, Ricciardi had not intervened in the conversation; he had been staring at Nespoli the entire time, studying his behaviour. Now he spoke, in a low voice.
“Look, Nespoli, you’re in a difficult position. We have our facts and the evidence we need: not being forthcoming will make us waste a little more time, but it will certainly not save you. It will be better for you if you stop pretending you don’t understand what we’re asking you.”
Nespoli turned to the Commissario and smiled.
“If you have this evidence, why are you wasting all this time?”
“Because we have to reconstruct everything that’s happened, that’s why. And because,” here Ricciardi lowered his voice even further, “we have to know if there were accomplices.”
A silence fell. Nespoli and Ricciardi stared at one another. Maione glanced from one to the other, his eyelids half-closed as if he were about to fall asleep: his way of staying focused.
Finally Nespoli said: “Evidence, you say? What evidence could you have?” Restrained like that, his powerful voice sounded like distant thunder.
“We found the shoes you switched so as not to track mud from the gardens on to the stage. You’re the only one who had prop room shoes of that size checked out to you at that time. You have big feet. You’re among the limited number of people who had access to the dressing rooms, the only one who could wear Vezzi’s clothes. And lastly, you were seen re-entering from the stairs and you were recognized.”
Maione gave no sign of being surprised by the small trap that Ricciardi had set for the baritone: they both knew that it was only circumstantial evidence and that don Pierino could never be sure that the individual he had met on the stairs was Nespoli rather than Vezzi or anyone else of that size. But the Brigadier knew that at times their work resembled mullet fishing, which he did on Sundays near the port; and the mullet, this time too, took the bait.
Nespoli swallowed it with a sigh and a smile, shaking his head slightly. “The priest. Damn it.”
He seemed more amused than dejected, as if he had lost a hand at a card game. Ricciardi, his voice still low, said: “What did you have against Vezzi? What had he done to you?”
“He was a bastard. A vile, despicable man. He seduced women. He took liberties with them. He thought he was God. And he wasn’t God, he was a zero.”
“And so you killed him.”
“I certainly didn’t intend to kill him. We argued, got into a fight. I punched him, and he ended up in the mirror. Tall as me, heavier than me, yet as soon as I laid a finger on him he ended up in the mirror. Even in that respect, he was worthless.”
Silence. Ricciardi turned and saw the tears streaming down the clown’s face. He looked at Nespoli again.
“So he didn’t deserve to live, Nespoli? And you thought you were God and you came here to kill him.”
The baritone gave a start.
“No, I’m not God. But as far as I’m concerned, good is good, and bad is bad. And Vezzi was bad. He didn’t even make an attempt to appear good. With that poor Pelosi, for instance, at the rehearsal. I had gone to watch, you can’t imagine how he treated him. Pelosi is a good man; he drinks, but he’s a decent person who never harms anyone. Vezzi called him an incompetent old drunk, that’s what he called him. Heartless.”
“And women? You mentioned women.”
“Yes, women. He got too familiar with them, he was free with his hands, he demanded their attentions by force, owing to the power he had, because he was important, because he was the famous Vezzi. And now he’s nothing.”
Nespoli spoke calmly, in a normal, conversational tone. There was no sign of emotion in his voice. But his eyes—his eyes flashed with a savage fury. Ricciardi thought curiously that he would have made a magnificent movie actor, not the new talkies, but the silent films: his expressions wouldn’t require captions, the music would be enough.
“Tell us how it happened, exactly.”
Nespoli shrugged briefly.
“What can I tell you? I was going back to the dressing room, I had finished my first scene, I had about ten minutes. He had his door open, he looked at me and made a sarcastic comment: ‘The amateur, bravo! You sounded like a singer, almost!’ I saw red. I gave him a shove, he fell backwards. He got up and said to me: ‘You’re finished. After this you’ll never sing again.’ I stepped inside, I closed the door behind me. I tried to apologize, but he repeated: ‘After this you’ll never sing again.’ So I stopped thinking and I punched him.”
“How did you punch him? Where?”
Nespoli simulated a right hook.
“Like this. In the face. I caught him under the eye, I think.”
It corresponded to the blow’s mark on the body.
“And then?”
“Then he fell back into the mirror and it shattered. He started bleeding from his throat, in spurts, a ton of blood. He was wheezing, he sat down in the chair, the blood kept gushing out. The bastard, he was the one who was done singing. With that insincere voice he used to make fun of everybody. With that black soul of his.”
Ricciardi, out of the corner of his eye, glanced at the black soul who, weeping, was still singing and gushing blood. Still, he had a right to live, he thought. No matter how black his soul was.
“And what did you do?”
“I thought quickly. I couldn’t leave through the dressing-room door, someone might see me. But if I went out through the window and then came back in during the performance, dressed in costume, it would have seemed odd. In effect, it would be like confessing. So I took the bastard’s coat, hat and scarf from the armoire and climbed down from the window.”
He pointed with his chin to where he had gone out.
“And what door did you come back in from?”
“The little door, near the entrance to the gardens. It’s always open; we go out there to smoke during rehearsals.”
“And did you meet anyone, coming back?”
“Only the priest; he was towards the top of the stairs. But he was engrossed, he was listening to the intermezzo. I didn’t think he had recognized me. I still had a little time, I thought.”
“What did you do then? Did you go back to your dressing room?”
“No. How could I? Wearing Vezzi’s coat and hat? Besides, even if after the intermezzo there’s the chorus and almost everyone is onstage, there’s always someone in the dressing room. I looked around carefully, and when I saw that there was no one about, I opened the door and tossed the coat, hat and scarf into the room with Vezzi. They were still playing the end of the intermezzo.”
Ricciardi looked at Maione, who nodded. The timing corresponded to what had been clocked that evening.
“Then I locked the dressing-room door and took the utility lift up to the prop room to switch the shoes.”
“And the key?”
Nespoli appeared disoriented for a moment.
“The key? I put it in my pocket and later, when I left, I went to the port and threw it in the sea.”
Ricciardi stared at him, eye to eye. Nespoli held his gaze.
“How did you explain the fact that the shoes were muddy to the prop manager?”
“Campieri? He wasn’t at his post, maybe he had been called away elsewhere or had wandered off somewhere. If he had been there, I would have wiped them off as best I could and gone onstage, running the risk of leaving traces. At that point I had no choice. In any case, there was no more time, I had to go back onstage.”
There was a moment’s silence. The murmuring outside the door was a backdrop to the long look exchanged between the singer and the detective. Maione was breathing heavily. Vezzi’s soul wept and sang and demanded justice, but only Ricciardi heard it.
Nespoli said: “I’m not sorry. I’ll never be sorry.”
Ricciardi went out first, while Maione fastened the cuffs on Nespoli’s wrists. The crowd that had gathered outside the dressing room suddenly fell silent. The theater director made his way through, accompanied by the stage manager: the little Duke was so agitated that he appeared cyanotic.
“This is too much, far, far too much! To come in through the side door during the performance, sneak on to the stage, even! And then into a dressing room! Will you get it through your heads, once and for all, that this is a theater? One of the nation’s greatest?”
While the Duke pirouetted around, unable to pause even to catch his breath, Ricciardi noticed that the murmuring of the assorted crowd of clowns, colombinas, harlequins and wagoners had again gone silent. Turning towards the dressing room, he saw Nespoli come out, followed by Maione. The man’s gaze remained proud, confident and challenging; the people closest to him stepped back, instinctively. Nespoli looked around, just once: and that was when it happened.
The Commissario noticed that for an instant, one brief, single moment, Nespoli’s eyes changed. It was so sudden and fleeting that he doubted whether he had actually seen it; but accustomed as he was to gauging people’s emotions from their eyes, he couldn’t have been mistaken.
In that one instant, Nespoli’s face had become tender and sad, submissive and despairing. The strong, scornful baritone was gone, giving way to a forlorn young man who was nonetheless willing to give up his own life for love. It was an expression of extreme sacrifice.
Ricciardi recalled that, some years before, he had dealt with the murder of a woman by her husband, whom she had wanted to leave for a lover: the man had killed himself, after killing her, with two shots of his army officer’s pistol. The Commissario could still recall the murderer’s image: half his skull had been blown away by the shot. The one remaining eye, however, had precisely the same expression as it shed desperate tears. Giving one’s life for love. The image kept saying, “For you, my love, for you,” while the brain still sizzled from the heat of the gunpowder.
Ricciardi immediately looked around at the crowd, to figure out who the singer had searched out with his eyes. He knew that the key to it all was there, in that look: the real motive for Vezzi’s murder, and Nespoli’s own perdition. He glanced around and, at first, as the theater director went on sputtering and protesting, he could see no possible recipient of such a look. Then, unexpectedly, he recognized the mirror image of the baritone’s eyes. While the singer’s eyes were submissive, adoring and quivering with sacrifice, their counterpart was almost menacing: be careful not to give yourself away, they said, make sure you keep up that pose.
The moment passed, leaving the Commissario confused. This new element, which he did not intend to underestimate, once again changed the perspective and radically so. And yet they had a confession, a full confession, which he couldn’t overlook.
Nespoli’s appearance had had the incidental, though not negligible, effect of silencing the theater director for a moment. But only for a moment.
“But . . . but . . . is this what it seems? Have you arrested the guilty party? Oh, but then I must take it all back! My congratulations! Not that I ever for a moment doubted that justice would triumph, nevertheless this last . . . raid of yours would have led me to take matters up with your superiors again or, if necessary, with Rome, to resolve the issue. But now, of course, if it should turn out that you really found your man . . . ”
Ricciardi, his voice loud enough to be heard throughout the area said: “Yes, Duke. That’s exactly right. We have arrested the perpetrator, so it would seem.”
Everyone had something to say about Ricciardi’s announcement and for a moment there was a babel of confused voices. Only one person, whom the Commissario was watching, did not raise her eyes.