Outside, Maione had managed to move almost everyone away. Only the apprentice and the two old women, Amalia and Enza, who had appointed themselves the brigadier’s interlocutors, remained.
Maione spoke to Ricciardi: “Commissa’, so this is Sergio, here, who found him. He’s the young man who worked with Coviello. He shows up around nine, because the master always wants to be left alone for the first hour. Same thing for the last hour at night, when he closes up. That’s what the boy told me.”
Ricciardi questioned the young man, a terrified adolescent whose face was pocked with acne.
“Was there anything unusual about this morning?”
“The door, Commissa’. The door was shut from inside. I had to go back home, that’s where I keep the other key that Mastro Nicola gave me for any emergency; his mother is sick, and a couple of times he couldn’t leave his house and I had to open the workshop.”
“And when you went in, what did you see?”
The boy was trembling, and he kept his gaze turned away from the shop’s open door.
“I saw . . . I saw him right away, Commissa’. And I left, and called for help.”
Enza stepped forward, proudly: “We were the only ones in the vicolo, Amalia and me, Commissa’. We saw ’o guaglione, here, the boy, and heard him shouting, and we came hurrying. Then . . .”
Amalia interrupted her, earning herself a sour glare: “. . . then we went to see Signora Grimaldi, because she has a telephone, and we told the young lady at the switchboard: we want to talk to police headquarters!”
Ricciardi said: “All right. Let’s go in now. No, ladies, not you: just the two of us with the boy. Grazie, if we need you we’ll send for you.”
The two women’s disappointment was enormous. Defeated, they moved away, but not far: just to the threshold of a basso across the way, on the far side of the vicolo, and there they took up their positions on their chairs so they could be sure not to miss a single move the policemen made.
Maione murmured: “Nothing to be done. No one has any business of his own to mind, in this city.”
The young man was reluctant to enter, and once he was inside he kept his eyes on the workbench, the wall, and the chair, making sure not to catch so much as a glimpse of the corpse hanging from the ceiling.
Maione said: “I had the photographer and the medical examiner summoned before we left headquarters, Commissa’. They should be on their way.”
The bottom of your heart, Ricciardi sensed on the hair on the back of his neck, on the hairs standing erect on his forearms, and inside his chest. The bottom of your heart.
He asked the young man: “Did he say anything to you yesterday? Anything strange, I mean.”
The young man shook his head no, eyes on the ground.
Ricciardi insisted: “But did you see him do anything unusual? What sort of mood was he in?”
Sergio shrugged his shoulders. Maione broke in harshly: “Sonny, you’d better answer, and answer fast, or it’s going to go hard for you.”
The boy started, then, in a low voice, he said: “He was . . . contented. Contented. He smiled. He never smiled, but for the past few days he’d been smiling a lot. He even whistled a little tune, and when had he ever done that before? It almost scared me.”
Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a baffled glance. A man planning suicide who whistles a tune and smiles.
“And he didn’t say anything to you? Not even, I don’t know, something about work, or . . .”
The young man shrugged: “Work, I guess that was the one strange thing: he was turning down jobs.”
Maione mopped his brow: “What do you mean?”
“That people would come to have jewelry made, or shopkeepers from Via Toledo, and he wouldn’t even let them in the door. If they insisted, he’d say: no, I can’t right now, I’m busy, come back next month. He’d never done that before; he was capable of staying all night to get more work. But now he was turning people away.”
Ricciardi grew alert: “But what was he doing, instead of working? Did he receive visitors, or go out on calls, or . . .”
“No, no. He kept working, and how. He was making something. Something . . . something for himself. I wasn’t even allowed to see it, he made me stand in the doorway, with my back to him. He paid me just the same, to stand there not doing anything, and to tell people not to come in.”
The photographer arrived, almost at a run, dripping with sweat: “Excuse me . . . Is this the place? Mamma mia, it’s so hot this morning, Brigadie’.”
Maione pointed to the corpse, and the photographer, out of breath, arranged his equipment and set up the tripod.
“I’d like to know where people find the energy in this heat to murder each other.”
Maione hushed him with a brusque gesture, and asked the young man: “And you, this thing he was working on, you have no idea what it was?”
“He kept it wrapped in a piece of dark cloth, in the safe. Only once I was safely standing at the door to keep people out, would he go get it. I . . . I’ve never seen it.”
Ricciardi picked up on the hesitation and swooped in: “And I think you have seen it. Be careful, this is a murder investigation: if you leave anything out you could wind up in some very hot water.”
Sergio was a good boy trying to learn a trade; he was eager, and he’d succeeded in landing a berth with the best craftsman of them all, even if Mastro Nicola had a very particular personality. He didn’t want to get in trouble, and that commissario with the strange eyes made him uneasy.
The photographer’s flashes lit up the workshop at intervals.
The boy made up his mind to answer.
“Once, Donna Concetta, the lady who stays with Mastro Nicola’s mamma . . . you know that the mamma isn’t well, that she’s not right in the head . . . came here to say that there were problems at home. Maestro Nicola was gone for five minutes. He told me: stay here and don’t move, don’t let anyone in. He wrapped his work in the cloth and placed it in the safe, but he was in such a hurry he forgot to lock it, Donna Concetta was yelling, the whole vicolo came out to see what has happening . . . and I . . .”
Maione finished his sentence: “And you went and took a look. Is that right?”
The boy looked at him with a guilty expression: “Yes, Brigadie’. I couldn’t resist. I was too curious, he’d never hidden his work from me before. Never.”
Ricciardi waited; then he asked: “Well? What was it?”
Sergio said, as if speaking to himself: “He was skillful, my old master. The most skillful man around. Sometimes goldsmiths who were more famous than him, late at night, when there was no one around to see, would come here and give him their commissions, and they’d pay him extra not to tell anyone. If you only knew how much of the jewelry now being worn by the finest ladies of the city—women convinced that they’re wearing the handiwork of the grand jewelers of Via Toledo—was actually made right here, in this little workshop, by my master.”
The photographer murmured that he was done, gathered up his equipment, and left. From the Incurabili Hospital a young physician and two morgue attendants arrived. Maione pointed to the corpse and told them to go ahead.
Ricciardi gestured for Sergio to go on.
“But the thing he was best at was traditional objects. They’re done less nowadays, because people don’t have the money, but there was a time, Commissa’, when the borgo made its living from them. And that’s when he learned the profession, when these things were still being made.”
Ricciardi asked: “What do you mean by traditional objects? What sort of things was Coviello best at?”
The young man looked up and met Ricciardi’s gaze; to his surprise, the commissario realized that the apprentice was weeping.
“At ex-votos, Commissa’. Mastro Nicola was making an ex-voto.”