By My Hand Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 by Giulio Einaudi Editore SpA, Torino

  This edition published in arrangement with Grandi & Associati

  First publication 2014 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Antony Shugaar

  Original Title: Per mano mia. Il Natale del commissario Ricciardi

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo © Angelafoto/iStock

  ISBN 9781609452179

  Maurizio de Giovanni

  BY MY HAND

  THE CHRISTMAS

  OF COMMISSARIO RICCIARDI

  Translated from the Italian

  by Antony Shugaar

  Paola

  every beginning

  no end.

  BY MY HAND

  The murderous hands work unhurriedly in the dim light.

  They have no recollection of the blood that was spilled.

  They stir the little pot of glue that is heating over the fire, careful to keep lumps from forming. One hand grips the handle of the pot, the other stirs with the wooden spoon, gently, clockwise; the glue closes up immediately in the spoon’s wake, like a dense sea.

  Now the murderous hands check the wooden structure, testing the joints, proofing its strength. They realize that one corner piece hasn’t been nailed securely; they pick up a hammer and strike, carefully, accurately.

  They go back to the little pot over the fire, tipping it slightly to one side without removing it from the flame. They touch the cork, weighing it, assessing the size of the pieces, the curve of the bark. They know that the way the materials are prepared and the quality of the components are the most important thing, and that they have to get those details right.

  The same hands that have ravaged human flesh with one clean motion now move over the statuettes, lined up neatly on the table; they count them one by one, arrange them in crucial, rigorous order. First the architectural elements, columns, ruined temples, huts, and houses; after them, the various objects, butchers’ counters with meats on display, fish vendors’ stands, carriages, fruit carts and carts of salami, and chairs, furniture of all kinds. Then the animals, sheep of different sizes to give the illusion of distance, horses, cows, hens, roosters, and baby chicks. And also camels, elephants, and ostriches in an incongruous menagerie, drawn from within the boundaries of tales and traditions, not of continents and nations.

  Now the murderous hands arrange the human figures, carefully, painstakingly. Shepherds, shopkeepers, housemaids and slaves, old men playing cards and old women gossiping, confiding secrets. The men on one side, the women on the other.

  The murderous hands run lightly over the contours of the faces and the limbs, searching for chips and cracks in need of repair, identifying in the semidarkness the pieces requiring touching up, a little paint or a dab of terra-cotta. Every so often, one of the murderous hands will brush against the other; as if to underscore a thought, the fingernails of one hand will lightly scratch the back of the other. If not love, these murderous hands at least show respect for each other.

  Just as they have sliced open veins and gushing arteries, just as they have disfigured and slaughtered, the murderous hands now carefully arrange on the table the last missing statuettes. The three kings, in their richly colored attire, with their exotic complexions, their golden crowns. Their mounts, caparisoned in red, double humps on their backs, with leather harnesses and reins. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

  As if awakening from a dream, the murderous hands clap lightly and hurry back to the glue pot, stirring rapidly; then they turn to the straw-lined crate, now almost empty. They pull out a sad-eyed reclining ox and an ass the same size, the long hairy ears painted with fanatical care. The two animals join the others on the table, at the head of the army behind them, like a pair of captains waiting for their generals.

  The murderous hands, which never so much as trembled as they choked off a life in the gurgle of one last blood-spattered gasp, now betray a moment of emotion. As if stalling to put off a momentous decision, they hurry over to stir the glue pot again, then they jump to another shelf to briefly caress the fabrics and colored paper. They smooth the creases, fold down the corners of the blue and yellow sheets of paper that will become sky and stars. They have raised the knife high and brought it down cruelly, stabbing hearts and lungs, extinguishing dreams and thoughts, but now they can’t seem to bring themselves to plunge one last time into the straw that lines the wooden crate.

  At last, the murderous hands, with all of the delicacy of which they are capable, without a thought for the lives they have cut short, pull out a Holy Mother with a sweet and loving face, wrapped in a sky-blue cloak. Both the murderous hands cradle the figurine, though it’s as light as a feather. They set her down in front of all the others, at the center of the table, safe from all harm. In front of her, exactly where her gaze would fall if it were real, they place a Newborn Babe, its sad eyes already looking out upon the world, with a crown upon its head emanating beams of light, rosy cheeks, and a swaddling blanket.

  Last of all, the murderous hands pull out a kneeling man, a staff with a curved crook in his hand, his long beard streaked with gray, wearing a dark brown cloak. After setting the man down next to the woman, one of the hands caresses him gently; the thumb runs over the man’s chest, as if testing its consistency. So perhaps a vague memory of blood may still persist, after all, in these murderous hands.

  Outside, suddenly, a bagpipe moans and a horn emits a long, lamenting wail.

  The murderous hands grip the table’s edge, their knuckles white from the strain.

  I

  Brigadier Raffaele Maione, trudging through the cold, wondered for the thousandth time who could possibly feel like committing a murder just a week before Christmas.

  Not that anyone should ever feel like killing another person, to be clear: murder is madness, the worst thing a human being can do. Still, Maione thought to himself, it was somehow even worse at this time of year, when the children were so eager and excited that they couldn’t sleep, now that people were greeting one another on the street, wreathed in smiles, trying to decide what to make for the Christmas Eve banquet. Now that the shops were decked out for the holidays, now that the churches were all vying to display the most spectacular manger scene, now that every conversation began and ended with best wishes for the season. Who could want to commit murder at a time like this?

  And yet someone had done it. So here I am—the brigadier said to himself—trudging toward Mergellina, in this icy wind that cuts into my bones, running the risk of spending this Christmas in bed with a raging fever.

  Behind him walked the uniformed patrolmen Camarda and Cesarano, their faces buried in the lapels of their overcoats, caps pulled down to cover their reddened ears. The two of them weren’t even ribbing each other the way they almost invariably did, clearly both thinking the same thing as the brigadier. The mobile squad, they call us, thought Maione. Mobile on our feet, mobile in our boots. Two automobiles assigned to police headquarters, and one of them’s always in the repair shop, while the other one’s assigned to His Honor the Chief of Police for official business. And here we are, raising blisters on our feet, hustling back and forth from one end of the city to the oth
er.

  A few steps ahead of him he saw Commissario Ricciardi, his hair tossing in the wind. Hatless as always. How the devil the man managed not to come down with some illness, God only knew.

  Above the commissario’s ear he could see a purplish cut, a shaven area, and a few stitches. Maione remembered the car crash his superior officer had been involved in on the Day of the Dead, nearly two months earlier, and a shiver ran down his spine as he reflected on what a miracle it was that he had survived. The woman who was driving the car that had skidded off the road had been killed on impact, after the car tumbled fifty feet down, and the commissario had emerged with little more than a scratch.

  Walking along behind the commissario through the narrow lanes of the seaside neighborhood of Chiaia, Maione remembered when the man had awakened, in the hospital: the brigadier was sitting by his bedside, determined to watch over him all night long, when Ricciardi had suddenly opened his eyes.

  His gaze was alert: he was completely conscious, and those unsettling, transparent green eyes, in which you could discern neither his thoughts nor his state of mind, were focused on Maione. Then, in a low, worried voice: “Do you see me? Do you see me, Maione? Are you able to see me?” “Of course I can see you, Commissa’,” Maione had replied. “I’m right here, sitting next to you, why on earth wouldn’t I be able to see you?”

  The commissario had sighed. Then he had settled back on his pillow and fallen asleep again.

  Maione saw him again at police headquarters seven days later, his wound bandaged inexpertly. Not that he’d really expected to see Ricciardi stay in bed for the month the doctor had recommended. And now the commissario was striding along ahead of him, heading for Mergellina, where the call had come from earlier that morning. Maione wondered what thoughts were going through that mind of his.

  Ricciardi was thinking about the dead.

  He was thinking that, Christmas or no Christmas, holiday season or no holiday season, goodwill or no goodwill, there was always someone dying, and it fell to him to witness the blood and the devastation.

  When the car had skidded into thin air, he thought that he was about to die, and a part of his soul had almost wished for it: it would mean an end to the dark suffering that had always tormented him. Then he’d be nothing more than a fading image on a rock spur, condemned to utter one mute thought over and over into the wind, heard by no one, unless some other unfortunate man burdened by the same curse happened to be looking out at the sea from Posillipo.

  But instead here I am, he mused. Once again heading out into the breach, as if nothing had happened. As if I hadn’t died just a little more, the way I do every time I discover just how black a human soul can be. As if I were still alive.

  Mergellina was changing: from a fishing village set off from the center of town, it was now primed to become an expensive neighborhood. New apartment buildings, shops here and there, wet nurses and governesses, doormen in livery, but it was a quarter still swathed in the look and the smell of the ways of old, with the odor of fish and stale cabbage, and women wrapped in black shawls mending torn fishnets.

  As a rule, as soon as the platoon of policemen was spotted coming in the distance, a small gang of scugnizzi rushed toward them shouting. These street urchins were at once the sentinels and the Greek chorus accompanying every event, ready to cluster around to celebrate or to protest, to obtain some slight advantage from every situation, the beneficiaries of a tossed coin or a mouthful of food; shoeless, tattered, their skin dark and callused, gap-toothed mouths open in a soundless, perennial scream. The scugnizzi stepped aside for Ricciardi without so much as a wave from him, while Maione and the two patrolmen did their best to swat them away like so many buzzing pests. But they did serve one purpose: they made it easy to find, without having to remember the address, the place where the crime they’d been summoned to investigate had taken place. It was a recently built, somewhat out-of-the-way apartment building; a small knot of rubberneckers were milling around in front of the street door, hiding the entrance from view. There was a strange silence. The wind coming off the salt water was sharp and chilly, but no one seemed disposed to budge from the vantage point they’d conquered.

  As they got closer, a man broke away from the crowd—red-faced, dressed in sloppily buttoned footman’s livery, a hat askew on his head. He approached Maione and took him by the arm.

  “Brigadie’, you’re finally here. It’s a bloodbath, just a bloodbath! You have no idea! I can’t imagine, none of us can imagine who it could have been. They were a distinguished family, such a distinguished family! And now of all times, just as Christmas is approaching, I don’t understand, I just don’t understand . . .”

  Assailed by the smell of rancid wine wafting out of the man’s mouth and irritated by his tone, Maione shoved him away.

  “Calm down, calm down. I’m not following a word you’re saying. Step back, catch your breath, and tell me who you are and what you’re talking about.”

  The man, nonplussed, took a step back and a deep breath.

  “You’re quite right, Brigadie’, forgive me. It’s just that the whole thing has me so upset. My name is Ferro, Beniamino Ferro, at your service, I’m the doorman of this building.”

  The crowd had shifted its attention from the front door of the apartment building to the conversation between Maione and the doorman. Ricciardi walked over to the two men.

  “I’m Commissario Ricciardi from the mobile squad, and this is Brigadier Maione. Tell me what happened.”

  Ferro blinked rapidly, made uneasy by Ricciardi’s gaze and the low voice with which he’d spoken. He grew cautious and whispered:

  “I don’t know what happened, Commissa’. That is, I know, I saw and . . . Madonna mia, there was so much blood . . . but I don’t know how it happened, I mean. That is, I didn’t have anything to do with it, let me make that clear. I went upstairs, when the zampognaro called for me, and I went to see, but I only looked from outside the door—I know that you’re not supposed to touch anything.” He’d referred to a zampognaro, a traditional Christmas bagpiper.

  Ricciardi listened patiently, then said:

  “What did you see from outside the door? What is it you’re not supposed to touch?”

  “I know, because I used to work at a construction site up in Vomero and one time a buddy of mine fell off a balcony, and they told us not to touch anything until they showed up . . . until you all showed up, in other words. The dead, Commissa’. Dead people, lying on the ground—that’s what you’re not supposed to touch.”

  The man’s words fell into the silence like a rock into a deep well. The people at the front of the crowd that had surrounded the interview took a step back. A woman raised her hand to her mouth and her eyes grew round.

  “Dead people, did you say? What dead people?”

  Now Ferro seemed to have lost all interest in talking. He stared back at Ricciardi, wide-eyed, silently muttering those last words over and over again, the dead, the dead, as if he had only now just understood their meaning.

  “Dead. They’re dead. The signora, and the captain, too. They’re dead.”

  He repeated the phrase several times, in a low voice, glancing around. The man’s eyes glittered with the absolute terror and bewilderment that were washing over him; the rubberneckers looked away. From the nearby waterfront came the sound of a wave breaking over the rocks.

  Ricciardi still hadn’t taken his hands out of his overcoat pockets. The wind was tousling the hair that hung down over his forehead, his eyes gazed, almost unblinking. He was trying to piece out how much of the doorman’s agitation was real and how much of it might be camouflaging a lie.

  “What makes you say that this signora and this captain might be dead? Did you see them? Where are they?”

  Ferro seemed to snap out of it.

  “Forgive me, Commissa’ . . . It’s just that I still hadn’t fully realized. I
saw . . . I saw the signora, through the open door. I didn’t go in; I called out for the captain, I called for him over and over but there was no reply. I thought . . . I just thought that if he wasn’t answering, then that must mean that he was dead, too.”

  “And you’re sure that he’s home? He couldn’t have gone out?”

  “No, no . . . he’s home. I always see him leave, for the port, in the afternoon. But at this time of day he’s always at home.”

  Maione intervened.

  “A minute ago, you said that the zampognaro called for you. What do you mean by that?”

  “The two zampognari had gone upstairs to play the novena, for the third day. They came back down right away; one wasn’t talking and he’s still not talking even now. He’s over there, you can see him, sitting in that chair, so pale he looks like a dead man himself. The other one, who’s older, he came to get me, and he said, ‘Signor Doorman, hurry upstairs, something awful has happened.’ I would have believed anything, except that I’d go upstairs and find . . . what I found.”

  Ricciardi nodded, lost in thought. Then he said:

  “All right then. Let’s go take a look. Ferro, you can walk the brigadier and me upstairs. Cesarano, you keep an eye on the two zampognari and don’t move from there; we’ll talk to them afterward. And you, Camarda, I want you to stand guard at the front entrance. I don’t want to see anyone go into the building, not even the people who live here, until I say so. Let’s go.”

  II

  Ferro walked ahead of Ricciardi and Maione, leading the way into the building. The lobby was spacious and clean, reasonably warm and well lit; it was clear that the building aspired to a certain tone, as did many in this new neighborhood growing at the foot of the hill. Ricciardi addressed the man.