The general hospital of the royal university of Naples was at the center of a dense welter of narrow vicoli. It had been built on the grounds of an ancient monastery, on the same grid, and it occupied a fairly vast area.
It loomed up unexpectedly, with its high gates, right after a tight curve that, like all the others, seemed to lead into an innocuous little piazzetta which was no doubt going to lead to another narrow lane which would run until it hit another piazzetta and so on, ad infinitum. Ricciardi thought to himself that that’s just the way the city had been planned, senselessly, one vicolo after another and one piazza after another, as construction spread from the sea toward the hills; then he would find himself face-to-face with one of those aristocratic palazzos, with flower beds arrayed behind an imposing front gate. As he did, it dawned on him that everything had a purpose after all.
Outside the gate stood a small, silent knot of people held back by two custodians. Maione’s stature and uniform ensured that the assembly parted widely enough to allow them to pass. The older custodian, a heavyset man with a large mustache and a work shirt a couple of sizes too small, greeted them and without another word turned and started off, waving for them to follow.
They walked down a tree-lined lane that was relatively cool. The flower beds were well tended and the grass had recently been mown. Ricciardi and Maione looked around: the structure consisted of a number of buildings all the same height, four stories plus a mezzanine, in good shape. There were people looking out the windows, some men in white lab coats, several female nurses with white caps. There was a distinctly expectant air, the kind that could only be shattered by the arrival of the police. It was as if their irruption were the signal for the beginning of a theatrical production of sorts, to the enormous relief of the spectators.
Near one of the pavilions, several people were gathered in a circle. Not far away, a single automobile with a black-and-cream paint job stood parked sideways. Maione recognized the officers he’d sent ahead, and summoned one of them over.
“Well, Cesara’, here we are. So, what have we got?”
The man walked toward him and snapped a sharp salute: “Someone seems to have fallen. From up there, apparently.”
He waved vaguely in the direction of the building. Maione snorted in disgust and said, parroting his subordinate: “Someone seems to have fallen. From up there, apparently. Always sharp as a steel trap, aren’t you? Get out of here, go on. Let me find out who I need to talk to if I want any information around here.”
They drew closer and saw what lay at the center of the small knot of people. The corpse, facedown, of a man no longer young, to judge from what was possible to see at a glance. He didn’t have a jacket on, his shirt was torn at the bottom, and one of his suspenders was unclipped. One of his shoes had come off, and a slightly hiked-up pant leg revealed a beige sock held up by a black garter. Ricciardi nodded his head toward Maione, and the brigadier told Camarda, the other officer, to phone headquarters immediately and tell them to send over the photographer, and to have Dr. Modo come over, if he was on duty, from Pellegrini Hospital.
The people closest to the corpse were two female nurses, one of them in tears, a laborer with a rake in one hand and boots on his feet, a custodian wearing the same kind of work shirt as the man who had walked them over, and a man in a white lab coat. Maione asked them to step back, and moved away with them a short distance: he knew that in the first phase of the on-site investigation, Ricciardi always wanted to be left alone at the scene of the death.
The commissario noted that the position of the corpse was compatible with a fall, probably from the highest possible elevation: the window on the top floor was open and at least seventy feet from the ground. The man must have also taken a bit of a running start, because he’d sailed out past the bushes that lined the edge of the path directly beneath the building’s wall. He’d jumped or he’d been thrown. Ricciardi concentrated, then swiveled around sharply.
Off to one side with respect to the location of the corpse from which it had originated, sheltered by the scanty shade thrown by the trees on the far side of the narrow lane, Ricciardi recognized the image of the dead man, standing upright. The torso was askew, twisted away from the pelvis, as if the body had been cut in two; the same impression of a split prevailed as he examined the figure vertically, because one half of the head was virtually intact, while the other half was ravaged by its impact with the ground. The commissario did a preliminary physical inspection of his own, prior to the arrival of the medical examiner. He noted the fractured spinal cord and skull. On the phantom’s forehead there was a large wound from which gushed a fountain of bright red blood, bathing the right side of the face, which was crumpled and deformed: the cheekbone was stove in, and instead of a mouth there was a black hole. There was no trace of the eye. The left side of the face, however, displayed a dreamy, almost tender expression: the eyelids were half-closed, the lips parted in a half smile. The incongruity of the thing made for a ghastly effect.
Ricciardi noted that the head was pressed against the ground on its right side; that was caused by the direction of the fall. He shifted his attention back to the image, and for the thousandth time was wounded by the pain of others. The corpse was repeating gently, in a voice little more than a whisper: Sisinella and love, love and Sisinella, Sisinella and love, love and Sisinella. The absurd last thought at the end of his fall and the beginning of his death. The commissario ran a hand over his face, which was covered in a veil of sweat, and in spite of the heat was unable to control a shiver.
He went back to Maione, who had in the meantime collected the particulars of the people who had been standing around the corpse a moment earlier. The brigadier made the introductions: “This is Commissario Ricciardi, officer of public safety, and I’m Brigadier Raffaele Maione.”
The man with the rake snapped to attention, holding the rake straight at his side as if it were a rifle: “Corporal Vitale Pollio, Signor Commissario. Reporting for duty!”
Maione looked him up and down with a smile: “At ease, corporal! That’s just crazy, this guy thinks he’s still at the front! Signor Pollio, here, is the gardener. He’s the one who found the body.”
Pollio turned to the brigadier with a look of confusion.
“Forgive me, Brigadie’, but once you’ve been a soldier, a part of you stays one. I went to war, you know, and life at the front weighs on you like an overcoat. Yes, I was tending to the flower beds over there. I saw what at first I took for a heap of rags. I thought to myself: what are they doing in the middle of the lane, those dirty clothes? Then I went over, and I had my rake with me, just to see if it was something I needed to pick up and haul away. That’s when I saw it was a corpse. You know, Commissa’, when I was at the front, I had to climb out of the trench to recover them, the dead bodies, so I’ve seen plenty. I remember one time, after an Austrian attack, at . . .”
Maione broke in firmly: “Yes, Pollio, that’s fine, we understand. And once you’d deduced that it wasn’t a pile of dirty rags, what did you do?”
The gardener blinked.
“Excuse me, Brigadie’. I called the custodian immediately, Signor Gustavo, here. And I didn’t touch a thing.”
Ricciardi spoke to the man in the workshirt, a lean and wiry fellow who kept looking around him, as if he feared the imminent arrival of the enemy troops evoked by Pollio.
“And you intervened, Signor . . .”
“Gustavo Scuotto, at your service, Commissa’. I went outside and saw . . . I saw what had happened. So I went to get someone in the clinic. But rest assured, I never touched a thing either. I thought that maybe . . . that there was a possibility that something could still be done for him.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“Who did you call?”
The older of the two nurses stepped forward, a corpulent woman of about forty with a brusque demeanor.
“He called me is who he called. Ada Coppola, Commissa’, the ward charge nurse. They always call me for everything, so they called me this time too.” She glared at the custodian, who lowered his eyes.
A forceful woman, thought Ricciardi.
“So what did you do, Signora?”
Coppola flexed her muscular arms beneath her ample bosom.
“I went downstairs, I saw this shattered wreck of a body, and it was clear that nothing could be done for him, and that he’d been dead for some time. At that point I reported upstairs.”
Maione broke in: “What do you mean, he’d been dead for some time? Who did you report to upstairs? And where upstairs?”
The woman turned on him, speaking harshly: “Don’t you see that he’s stopped breathing and the blood is dry? I went upstairs and made a phone call from the room he fell from, his office, on the fifth floor.”
“From his office? Then you know who he is.”
The younger nurse, who hadn’t stopped sobbing the whole time, now wailed loudly, earning an angry glare from Coppola, who told Ricciardi: “Forgive me, Commissa’, my colleague is still in shock. She’s still pretty tenderhearted.”
The young woman snapped through her tears: “What does that have to do with it? It’s one thing to care for a sick person in a bed, but this . . . this thing here is quite another matter. My name is Maria Rosaria Zupo, Commissa’. I am . . . or I was the nurse assigned to the director. Now I have no idea who I’m assigned to.”
The man in the lab coat spoke up, with a sad smile. His features were sharp, his hair was slicked back, and he had a narrow mustache; he was no longer especially young.
“Don’t worry, Zupo, we’ll find something for you to do. Buongiorno, Commissario, I’m Dr. Renato Rispoli, the head assistant of the chair of gynecology in this university. I came to work early, it was still dark out, and I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t notice a thing. I came straight in on the ward side.”
Ricciardi motioned with his head.
“Do you know who the dead man is?”
Rispoli turned his melancholy eyes toward the little heap of rags and bones that lay on the ground.
“Certainly, Commissario. That is, or rather was, Professor Tullio Iovine del Castello, the director of the chair of gynecology.”