Usually Maione took the long way round when he went to see Bambinella.
It demanded a lot more effort, entailing a few extra uphill climbs, but such discretion was necessary to ensure that prying eyes didn’t notice the brigadier’s suspiciously frequent visits to the femminiello. Not that there would have been any reason for surprise, after all, policemen were men too, and a foible could be tolerated; if anything, a sign of weakness was welcomed in the vicoli and backstreets of that city, making the enforcers of the law a little more human, a little closer to the common folk. Nonetheless, Maione didn’t want to give anyone a chance to guess at the real reason he went to call on the femminiello.
This time, though, he was too angry to worry about anyone else’s safety. The idea that his Lucia might be secretly making her way to an apartment house that numbered among its tenants an unrepentant bachelor who lived on a private income and whiled away the hours doing nothing but enjoying himself, had a series of effects on him that he was having difficulty controlling. His stomach had shriveled to the size of a prune, and his heart insisted on imitating the beat of a furiously shaken tambourine in the midst of a tarantella.
Where could Lucia have met this Pianese? She never left their neighborhood, except to go to the market. Maybe that’s where they’d first come into contact. He could just see Pianese strolling among the vendors’ stalls, whistling, in search of other people’s wives to importune. He pictured him handsome, young, and well-dressed, with a fashionably narrow mustache, an immaculate white suit, and a red carnation in his buttonhole; then he pictured himself, old, hirsute, out for a stroll down Via Toledo on Sunday morning with his family, wearing a suit that looked as if it had been worn for two weeks straight, even though he’d just put it on a few minutes ago, freshly ironed.
Lucia, on the other hand, was breathtakingly beautiful. Always, even after a hellish day of heat and hard work, even with six children to look after, even first thing in the morning. And she was dazzling and golden even dressed in the housecoat she wore at home to do her chores.
Without even realizing it, the policeman was walking along emitting a dull roar. The inhabitants of the vicoli were already naturally inclined to avoid the police, and his snarling expression only reinforced that impulse; even the scugnizzi, who would normally tag along after him in small knots, calling out insults and mockery, now pretended they hadn’t seen him. It looked like stormy weather in the two square yards surrounding the brigadier: best to steer clear of him.
Reaching his informant’s apartment was no easy matter even by the most direct route, since Bambinella lived at the high end of a steep vicolo, at the very top of an uphill network of alleys and lanes, and at the summit of a staircase that was, obviously, yet another climb. The perfect route to leave you panting, drenched with sweat, and even more irritated than before, if you were irritated to start with.
Bambinella was waiting for him at the door. Looking up at her from below as he labored up the steps, Maione decided that there was something unsettling about her: her masculine features and her feminine ones overlapped, creating an inevitable sense of disorientation in anyone who looked at her. Bambinella was tall and bony, broad-shouldered, with big hands and a dark five o’clock shadow perennially visible on her fair white skin that seemed unaccustomed to sunlight. But the heavy makeup, the red polish on the well-tended fingernails, the perfectly shaved body, the long black lashes fluttering on the large, liquid eyes, gave a sharp jerk to the initial impression one might gather from a superficial glance.
In a heartfelt voice, the femminiello said: “Madonna santa, Brigadie’, why what’s wrong? Why are you here at this hour? You worry me, just look, I’m all sweaty I’m so upset!”
Maione replied, heaving like a pair of bellows: “Of course, it goes without saying that you already knew I was on my way. Probably someone galloped up here to tell you the minute the thought occurred to me this morning. Some little bird must have whispered to you: listen up, Bambine’, if you ask me Brigadier Maione is going to come see you any minute now. I guessed it from the expression on his face when he got out of bed. Because in this filthy city no one can do anything without everyone else knowing about it before it even happens.”
Bambinella held her hand over her mouth as she laughed: “Why, no, of course not. It’s just that the vicolo gets organized, when we see someone like you go by. If you keep an ear to the ground, you hear it. It’s like a wave in the sea, if you see what I mean. And then there’s the smuggler down on the corner, that is, you wouldn’t see him now because as soon as you showed up, he took his stall and left: but anyway, he’s the one who sells cigarettes and matches. A series of little kids who take up posts at every corner warn him when the police are arriving, so if you take the main street, I know you’re coming more or less fifteen minutes before you get here. Come on, come in and I’ll make you a cup of ersatz coffee. Why is it you didn’t come the back way like usual?”
Maione closed the door behind him, turned down the ersatz coffee with a grimace, and let himself collapse into the wicker chair, which moaned in despair beneath his weight.
“I’m glad you told me about him,” he panted, “this smuggler on the corner. I’ll slap them all in jail, him and his lookout kids, so we can finally start cleaning this city up a little bit. Let’s see if we can turn it back into a normal city, where a miserable cop can try and do his job with a little discretion.”
Bambinella, sitting in a Chinese chair, fanned herself with a large oriental fan; she looked like a parody of Madame Butterfly.
“Oooh, mamma mia, Brigadie’, how irritable we are, and first thing in the morning too. In any case, don’t you worry, no one bothers about who comes to see me and why, or anyway they can guess for themselves. I have a very select, top-flight clientele, if I do say so myself. Only now, for example, the man who just left—he’s the son of the owner of at least four shoe stores in Chiaia, I’m proud to say. He’s the nicest boy you’d ever care to meet, I could even fall in love with him if he weren’t a shade perverse. Just think, he likes it when I dress up in a pair of . . .”
“Bambine’, take it from me: today of all days, I’m in no mood to sit here listening to you describe your profession. I’m going through a very difficult time, and I wouldn’t mind having a chance to let off a little steam by strangling you. In fact, as soon as I catch my breath, I might just choke you to pass the time. After all, with the gang of crooks that come through here, I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a stooge to set up for the crime.”
Bambinella emitted a sound very much like a horse whinnying, which was how she laughed.
“Why, what a sweetheart you are, Brigadie’. But I know that you have a soft spot for me and you do your best to fight it: still, it’s only a matter of time before you give in to my charms. I’m used to it: the men’s men, they fall passionately in love with me. It’s my cross to bear, what can I do, it’s the way I was born: fascinating.”
Maione put his hand on the pistol he wore on his belt.
“No, I’m not going to choke you. Too much work. I’ll just shoot you from over here, straightaway, not as much fun and not as clean, but at least I won’t break into a sweat again.”
“No, no, Brigadie’, you know that dingus scares the wits out of me. What’s more, the day you decide to assult me with something you carry in your pocket, I hope it won’t be a pistol. But get down to business, to what do I owe the honor?”
Maione decided to ignore the ribald double entendre; he knew very well that Bambinella’s propensity for digressions, if given free rein, could make a conversation last for hours.
“The only reason I don’t shoot you is that I need you alive, remember that. The day I decide I no longer need you, I’ll scratch that off my list, trust me. Now then, I’m here because . . .”
Bambinella lifted one hand to interrupt: “By the way, Brigadie’, before I forget: so someone threw the professor out the window at the polyclinic, isn’t that right? He didn’t jump. What an odd turn of events though.”
Maione gaped in surprise: “No, now I have to ask you to explain this to me! Who told you that someone threw Iovine out the window? Absolutely no one knows about that, not yet, anyway, so how could you possibly have found out? Tell me the truth, Bambine’, are you somehow implicated in this thing? Because this time there’s nothing I can do to help you, after all, this is murder, and . . .”
Bambinella whinnied again: “No, what are you talking about, Brigadie’! I learned about it completely by accident. There’s a sweet young friend of mine who hooks it in a house at the corner by the Pellegrini Hospital, and she has a number of customers who are nurses and doctors. Yesterday she noticed you walking with the handsome commissario, the one with the green eyes who’s jinxed. You went into the morgue with Dr. Modo, the nice doctor who frequents all the finest bordellos in the city. My little girlfriend asked one of her customers, who works as a morgue attendant, such a good boy but he has a teeny-weeny little thingie so he’s embarrassed to go with whores, and so this boy made friends with her because she’s so tolerant and understanding. He told her that the only fresh corpse they had at the moment belonged to the professor.”
“I don’t understand why the Fascists waste all that time and money assembling a network of confidential informants that reports to the secret police: they’d only really need to pay a little attention to you and they’d know everything they want to know and a good deal more in the bargain.”
The femminiello made a delicate gesture, as if shooing away a fly: “You’re too kind, as always, Brigadie’. Anyway, the professor’s death has been the talk of the town, you can just imagine, he was a prominent figure in this city. Some have only good things to say about him, others have only bad, but everyone has something to say. And so when they saw you and the commissario heading for the morgue, it didn’t take long to put two and two together. So someone pushed him out that window, didn’t they?”
“I don’t even want to answer you. I’m exhausted, believe me. Exhausted. In any case, let’s just say for argument’s sake that someone did throw him out the window, in your opinion who could it have been?”
Bambinella lifted her enameled forefinger to her chin and rolled her mascaraed eyes to the ceiling.
“Well, now, Brigadie’, the only real problem is to narrow down the field of candidates. A physician like him may bring babies into the world, but he kills a lot of people, too. For instance, a month ago there was that thing with the Wolf, you heard about that?”
Maione nodded: “Something, yes, we’ve heard about him. He seems to be a dangerous type, isn’t that right?”
Bambinella adopted a sorrowful expression. She was impressively skilled at accompanying her stories with vivid expressions, almost as if she were performing a skit.
“He’s a beautiful young man, all the girls in the quarter were mooning after him, but he, poor thing, only had eyes for his wife, Rosinella. They’d been together since they were kids. He’s a tough guy, Brigadie’, strong and decisive, and he may have stabbed one or two men in his time, and he may even have a few men on his consience, but he’s a man of honor, and the poor of this city, when they’ve been done wrong, turn to men like him.”
Maione snapped in irritation: “Bambine’, you shouldn’t talk like that! Don’t you understand that we’re in this mess precisely because when people are in trouble, instead of turning to us, whose job it is to make sure the laws are obeyed, they go to the people who obey only the law of the knife and enrich themselves at the expense of others? That’s the curse afflicting this city: that instead of coming to us, people in need of justice go to your men of honor.”
“Don’t you ever wonder why people do that? Well, in any case, the Wolf is a talented young man. And this professor was responsible for his wife’s death in childbirth: when they brought the woman to the hospital that night, because she was giving birth prematurely, he was nowhere to be found.”
“What do you mean, he was nowhere to be found?”
Bambinella put both hands together, impatiently: “Jesus, Brigadie’, it means that instead of being at the hospital, he wasn’t there.”
“Well, who said he always had to be at the hospital? Maybe he was at home, asleep.”
Bambinella snickered: “Oh, no, he wasn’t. They combed the whole city looking for him. The Wolf has a network of men. His line of business is transport, and what with the horsecarts, the carriages, and the trucks, he has a whole army of drivers. You’d say it was the middle of the day from the noise of wheels turning on the cobblestones in vicoli, vicarielli, alleys, lanes, streets, and piazzas. Wherever you turned, there was someone looking for the professor.”
“And did they ever find him?”
“Of course they found him. But it was too late. If they’d only thought to ask me, I could have told them right away where he was. Instead, by the time he got to the operating room there was nothing he could do for poor Rosinella; she never even lived to see her baby.”
Empathizing, with a spectacular immediacy, with the suffering of the dead mother, Bambinella suddenly turned on the waterworks, sobbing and weeping like a fountain. Maione, accustomed to her emotional outbursts, waited irritably for her to stop: he knew there was no way to interrupt.
“I can’t even think about that poor baby girl born without her mother . . . I’m a little orphan girl myself . . . and Rosinella, so pretty and so in love with her husband . . . who knows how badly she wanted that little girl . . . she’d even prepared a layette, she had . . .”
Bambinella went on crying for several minutes, her sobs punctuated by heartrending wails. Then the femminiello blew her nose into an enormous red handkerchief, producing a sound like a trombone’s, and got a grip on herself.
Maione asked: “You said that if they’d bothered to ask you, you could have told them where the professor was . . .”
Bambinella dabbed at her face, twisting her mouth to protect her makeup.
“The professor had a commarella. That is to say, he had an understanding with a young woman. It was a serious thing, practically out in the light of day.”
The brigadier threw both arms wide: “Well, tell me all about it, this light of day. That way we’ll both know what you’re talking about.”
Bambinella once again put her hands together.
“Well then, Brigadie’, a few years ago, maybe it was two, the professor happened to be examining a girl who was working in the Speranzella bordello. You know the place, it’s on the cheap side: students, soldiers, sailors, that kind of clientele; a line stretching down the stairs, the madam at the cash register, and four or five rooms for the whores. This one was very young, not even eighteen, and she came from a neighboring town; she’d been a maid, then she’d been fired because the master of the house had lost his head for her and his wife had figured it out. In short, a girl has to eat, she wasn’t welcome back home, and so she found a position at the bordello.”
Maione laughed: “Sure she did, she found a position, as if they’d hired her at city hall. Well, all right, go on.”
“As you know, in our line of work we run certain health risks, so to speak; in a luxury bordello they provide medical care, in second-rate bordellos, that’s more rare. To make a long story short, she caught an unpleasant disease and went to the hospital. The professor, as I heard from a girlfriend of mine who’d been at boarding school with the girl, noticed her as she was being examined by one of his assistants, and was struck dumb. He insisted on taking over her case and they began seeing each other. Then he took her out of the bordello and set her up in a little apartment all her own in Vomero. He bought an exclusive on her, in other words.”
Maione sighed: it wasn’t an uncommon thing for wealthy men to indulge in that pastime: purchasing the lives of very young girls.
“I want the girl’s given name, surname, and address.”
“Don’t you even want to hear how the story ends? Anyway, the guagliona’s name is Teresa Luongo, but everyone knows her as Sisinella. She lives in Vomero, on a street that crosses Corso Scarlatti, which I happen to know because a customer of mine who sells vegetables in that neighborhood sees her come and go. But now she’ll have to find another special client.”
“You said that there’s more to the story?”
“For the past few months, there’s been a rumor going around that Sisinella has a sweetheart. Another one, that is, aside from the professor. A musician who plays the pianino, you know, the ones who go around town selling sheet music.”
Maione narrowed his eyes: “Were they seen together?”
“No, no, a girl who’s lucky enough to be kept by a rich man doesn’t gamble that away for love, Brigadie’. No one saw them. Still, the young man buzzes around her relentlessly, and he sighs and sings. When someone looks up at a window, sighs, and sings, there’s usually a good reason for it.”
“I see. And what’s the singer’s name?”
“Now let me think . . . his name is Tore. Salvatore Cortese. A handsome young man, from what I hear.”
Maione got to his feet: “All right, you’ve told me enough. But don’t be surprised if I drop by again, because it strikes me that this is one of those cases where you open one door and you find two more.” As he was about to leave, he stopped for a moment and turned around: “One last thing, Bambine’. Do you know a certain Pianese, Ferdinando Pianese, Via Toledo, no. 270?”
Bambinella furrowed her brow: “Why, what does he have to with what happened to the professor? What has Fefè done?”
Maione pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead: “Nothing, he has nothing to do with it. It’s a completely different matter. So, you know him?”
“Why, who doesn’t know Fefè? He’s a mouthpiece, a two-bit lawyer who never has work. He lets himself be kept by a couple of old biddies he flatters, and spends all his money on cards and women. Every once in a while he comes to pay a call on one of us, too, or he invites us out to one of his parties that go on all night long. A guy who likes to have a good time, in other words. But why do you ask, Brigadie’?”
“Nothing, no reason. It’s just a name that came up in another investigation, money that was involved in the numbers racket.”
“Typical of Fefè, some little old lady must have died and until he finds a replacement he’s trying his luck. He’s not a bad-hearted boy, but he does have his weaknesses, and he’s no match for temptation.”
Maione feigned nonchalance: “Weaknesses? What weaknesses?”
“Oh, he likes to drink, for one thing, and he likes to go to the racetrack. But I’m surprised to hear that he might be involved in the numbers racket, it must mean he finally figured out that you can’t get rich betting on the ponies. But his biggest weakness, the one he spends most of his money on, is clothing: he’s a dandy, he certainly doesn’t skimp on fine fabrics. And then there’s his other weakness, the reason he dresses so elegantly in the first place.”
“What reason is that?” Maione asked, immediately regretting the question.
Bambinella replied: “Blonde women. He’s just crazy about blondes.”
And she burst out laughing.