Maione stayed overnight at police headquarters; he couldn’t bear to look Lucia in the eye after his confrontation with Pianese.
He’d arranged for a phone call to be placed to Signora Ruggiero, the only tenant of the apartment house who had a telephone at home, and got word to his family that he’d have to stay overnight at the office. Not half an hour later Giovanni, his eldest son, arrived at headquarters: he was bringing his father a soup tureen wrapped in a carefully knotted cloth napkin, and inside was an abundant portion of pasta with chunks of tomato and spollichini, the fresh summer green beans that were one of Maione’s favorite things to eat.
“Papà, here’s what mamma told me to tell you: eat every bite of it, but slowly, otherwise it’ll upset your tummy. And she also said: tomorrow, when you come home, don’t forget to bring the soup tureen with you. And make sure you rinse it out, after you’re done eating, or we’ll never be able to get it clean.”
He had responded by giving his son an offhand pat on the head, but the boy hadn’t even noticed the pained expression on his father’s face, intent as he was on taking in everything around him with greedy curiosity, the way he did every time he came to visit headquarters.
Maione didn’t manage to eat at all, and there could be no more eloquent testimonial to his state of despondency. His stomach had simply closed up. He didn’t know what to do, how to behave; with Fefè he’d acted on impulse, according to an instinctive drive, but with Lucia, who knew him well, he couldn’t have successfully put on a show of indifference. Should he just leave, then? And where would he go? And was it right for him to resign himself to his loss like that, without fighting? And what about his children, what would become of them?
He was sitting there, assailed by countless anxieties, when the phone call came in.
The news caught Ricciardi and Maione off guard.
As they walked the short distance from police headquarters to the goldsmiths’ borgo, they’d both been beset by the uncomfortable feeling that their minds had been taken off the investigation by the personal situation each was experiencing, and for policemen as conscientious as they were, that was a grave failing. The call that had come in, and whose contents had, in any case, been unclear, only heightened that perception, making the two policemen even gloomier than before, and during their walk over they were practically silent: Maione limited himself to asking how Rosa was, and Ricciardi said only that there was nothing new. Neither man commented on the tragic news that had summoned them, first thing in the morning, to a dead-end vicolo in the oldest part of town down by the harbor.
There was a crowd of rubberneckers standing outside the workshop. The wooden door stood half open, as if it were uncertain whether it should be thrown wide or remain shamefacedly shut to conceal the horror that lay within. The atmosphere, though, was different from the more customary one of morbid curiosity that the policemen were used to encountering. That sensation carried with it the witnesses’ vague sense of relief that dire misfortune had befallen someone else; this time, there was a diffuse sadness, a sincere melancholy, if not outright grief.
An elderly woman dressed in black came toward them with a wobbly step, her legs stout and her voice hoarse: “Brigadie’, I’d said that it was odd. Mastro Nicola arrived every morning at eight on the dot, you could set your clock by it. This morning it was seven when he showed up. I told my girlfriend Amalia that it was strange, and when I told her, she said the same thing. She told me: ‘Really? That’s strange.’ And that’s when I . . .”
Maione halted the flood of words by raising both hands: “Signo’, Signo’, do me a favor, stop talking for a moment. Who exactly are you? And what are you talking about?”
A second woman had come over, more or less the same age and similarly clad in black, but skinny as a rail and bug-eyed; she started talking as if everyone there were anxiously awaiting what she had to say: “When Enzina here told me, the first thing I thought was: something’s happened. Mastro Nicola was always so punctual, he arrived every morning at 8 and you could set your watch by it, but instead this morning it was seven o’clock, and so I said: Enzi’, why, what a curious thing this is, here’s a man who always comes in at eight o’clock and . . .”
Maione exchanged a discouraged look with Ricciardi, then he turned to the woman who had piped up last: “Signo’, you must be Donna Amalia, I’d imagine. And you,” he said to the first woman, “will be Signora Enza.”
The two women looked at each other in surprise: “Jesus above, Brigadie’, how on earth would you know that? Then it must be true that the police have us all under surveillance and know all about us!”
Maione sighed.
“Well then, apart from the early arrival, will you tell us what happened next?”
It appeared however that both women had lost the urge to talk. They elbowed one another in the ribs, each inviting the other to answer, until Enza took for herself the role of spokeswoman: “We sit right there, you see? At the end of the vicolo. It’s hot, and in the bassi it’s impossible to breathe, we’re old, and we’ve been friends forever. And so, while it’s still night out, we sit down in our chairs and talk.”
The other woman cut in: “Sometimes, if there’s light, we do some knitting, or we stitch.”
Enza shot her a glare, as if to say: are you going to talk or am I? Then she resumed: “Then we take a look around and see what’s happening in the vicolo, and . . .”
“. . . but not to stick our noses into other people’s business, let’s be clear. It’s just because we sit down there and . . .”
Enza raised her voice, making it clear that she wouldn’t put up with any further interruptions: “. . . and then we saw Mastro Nicola arrive. He told us good morning and then he shut himself in.”
Ricciardi asked: “What do you mean, he shut himself in?”
“That’s right, he shut himself in. He closed the door and we didn’t hear anything more out of him.”
Amalia couldn’t resist: “Shut, locked.”
Maione was perplexed: “In that case, who found . . . in other words, who called us?”
A young man stepped forward: “I did, Brigadie’. I’m the apprentice.”
Ricciardi said: “Everyone wait out here. Raffaele, I’m going in.”
Ricciardi waited for his eyesight to become accustomed to the partial darkness of the workshop. Everything was just as it had been on the occasion of the first and only visit he’d paid on the goldsmith, even the oil lamp on the workbench was still lit.
He turned his head, and saw what had changed.
The body of Nicola Coviello, renowned goldsmith and master jeweler, dangled from one of the ceiling rafters by a rope wrapped around his neck. Motionless, his outsized hands dangling at his sides, his legs aligned, his feet a good five inches off the floor.
The commissario concentrated on the spot toward which the hanged man’s face was turned, a corner of the workshop shrouded in darkness; standing, in the same position as the hanging corpse, his simulacrum was revealed to Ricciardi, his tongue sticking out between his teeth, his spectacles askew, one eye half closed, the other staring wide.
Ricciardi could make out the mark left by the rope on his neck, a dark deep groove, and there was a line of reddish drool running down from the corner of his mouth. Ricciardi turned his eyes back to the rope hanging off the rafter, and saw that the slipknot had jammed before reaching the end of its run. So Coviello had died of suffocation. Not even the mercy of a broken neck.
The commissario focused on the image of the corpse in the shadowy corner. The head bent to one side, as unlovely as it had been in life, the short curved body, the long arms and legs. Dead, he looked younger.
Ricciardi listened.
And the corpse told him: the bottom of your heart.