All three of them sat down on the bench, Maione next to Ricciardi and Ricciardi next to the widow Iovine. The brigadier kept glancing at the woman’s veiled profile, practically impossible to see except for the sharp, narrow nose, which projected slightly beyond the silhouette of the commissario’s own, as if it were a shadow. From the first time he’d laid eyes on her, he’d never been able to rid himself of a deep uneasiness: that skinny figure dressed in black, sitting stiffly outside the morgue, alone, reminded him of death itself.
Without turning to look at her, Ricciardi began speaking in a low voice, little more than a whisper: “I should have figured it out right away. All the evidence was there, you know; and I doubt that either you or he made any special effort to conceal it. But you don’t see where you don’t look, and I was distracted by . . . by a number of things. Then at last I saw.”
The woman didn’t seem to be listening. She hadn’t moved by so much as an inch, she hardly appeared to be breathing in the indifferent chorus of the crickets’ chirping.
“The first clue was the most obvious of all. He’d been the last person to see Iovine alive. We listened to what he told us: the shadow in the dark, a gigantic man; but the last person to see the victim alive is always the murderer. He’s the one with the strongest interest in shifting suspicion onto someone else, to give himself time. Not to get away with it, but just get a little more time. The time he needs to finish his work. He knew that suspicion on the other men, the doctor’s son, the gangster with the dead wife, would eventually dissolve. He just wanted a little more time.”
Someone slammed a window shut high above them. Ricciardi continued: “And he himself, when we questioned him a second time, said that he had recommended a style of ring that would go perfectly on slender fingers like yours. And yet, by his and your own admission, he’d never seen you: you told us that you’d learned his name from some of your girlfriends and that then you’d told your husband about him. How could he have known what your fingers were like? Your husband couldn’t have told him, he’d been very brusque, they’d hardly talked at all. And then, when we went to his home, his mother, a poor old woman with a wandering mind, told us that Nicola’s girlfriend from many years ago had returned; a woman who had appeared one night, and stuck her face through the door of the workshop with an enigmatic phrase about steamships departing. The same words that he carved into his workbench, the place where he spent his whole life waiting for you, Signora. Waiting for you to come back. The grace for which he completed the ex-voto to the Virgin Mary, the Madonna whose name you bear.”
Maione sat there, as expressionless as a Buddha in a policeman’s uniform, but deep inside a storm was raging. Ricciardi had explained his hypothesis to him before, but now to hear it in detail, just a few yards from the morgue where the poor goldsmith’s body lay emptied of its innards, and in the presence of that lady in black who could easily have been a mannequin, was pushing him to the edge of madness.
Ricciardi went on: “And it was there, and only there, that I understood. When I went to see the heart in flames, devoured by the fire of an eternal love and an eternal pain, the solid gold heart that probably represents the entire fortune accumulated over years of highly respected craftsmanship. The heart at the bottom of which, engraved with enchanting skill, is your name, Signora. Your name, like a despairing scream. Your name, like a last misbegotten thought.”
The crickets fell silent, as if they’d been listening, suddenly attentive. To the bewildered Maione, that sign seemed at once terrible and simultaneously completely natural.
The commissario said, grimly: “It was Nicola Coviello who threw your husband out the window. It was Nicola Coviello, with his incredibly powerful and skilled hands, who picked him up by his belt and the collar of his shirt and hurled him over the windowsill, easily and promptly. It was Nicola Coviello who put an end to your husband’s life, obeying an order from you, whether explicit or implicit. I can’t prove it and I’m not really interested in doing so; for that matter, given the larger context, it doesn’t really matter all that much to our investigation. But I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what your motivations were. I want to know. And you must tell me. For justice’s sake. To do him justice.”
Once Ricciardi was done speaking, there was an extended silence. Maione shot quick glances at the two backlit profiles, carved and motionless, both oddly sharp, the nose jutting forward, almost as if they were the same person: the commissario with a lock of hair dangling over his forehead, his green eyes chasing after his thoughts in the empty air; the woman in black, straight-backed, skinny and still, her gloved hands clutching the handle of her handbag. Time hung over the edge of an abyss that could have been the inferno, full of the dead screaming in the atrocious heat of eternal flames.
Then Signora Iovine moved her hands.
She raised them to the veil that she lifted over her hat, resting it on the brim and uncovering her face.
Maione had noticed how hard her features were the first time he’d met her; a hardness that had crumbled slightly only when she spoke of her son. This time, the face of Maria Carmela Iovine del Castello was completely devoid of any expression; the wrinkles around her mouth and the corners of her eyes seemed to have been carved in marble. Like Ricciardi, she too was staring into the middle distance, almost as if they were both watching the same performance.
The brigadier felt his heartbeat slowing, but now his stomach was tied in knots; he had an expectant feeling, like when you see lightning and are waiting to hear the thunder.
The woman opened her mouth and then shut it again, twice, in search of the right words.
Then she spoke.