Day of the Dead 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 © 2010 by Fandango libri s.r.l.

  First publication 2014 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Antony Shugaar

  Original Title: Il giorno dei morti. L'autunno 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

  ISBN 9781609451943

  Maurizio de Giovanni

  THE DAY OF THE DEAD

  Translated from the Italian

  by Antony Shugaar

  To Giovanni and Roberto,

  for giving me the most marvelous gifts of fear.

  I

  As the dawn was beginning to extract the outlines of things from the night and the rain, if someone had happened to pass by the foot of the monumental staircase leading up to Capodimonte, they’d have seen a dog and a child. But they would have had to look very closely; the figures were hard to make out in the uncertain light of early morning.

  The dog and the child just sat there, motionless, indifferent to the fat, cold raindrops falling from the sky. They were sitting on the stone bench in the ornamental recess just above the bottom of the staircase. The staircase itself was a rushing torrent, transporting leaves and branches from the wooded palace grounds.

  If someone had walked by and stopped to look, they might have wondered why the stream of water and detritus rushing downhill seemed to respect the dog and the child, flowing around them without touching them, save for the occasional splash. The alcove offered some slight shelter and protected them from the rain: only the hair on the dog’s back quivered every now and then, like a shiver of wind.

  Someone might have wondered what the dog and the child were doing there, sitting motionless in the cold dawn of a rainy fall day.

  The little boy was gray, his hair plastered to his head by the rain, hands in his lap and feet dangling an inch or so from the ground, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes lost as if in a dream or in some thought. The dog seemed to be sleeping, its head resting on its paws, fur spotted with sopping wet patches of dark brown, one ear raised, its tail at rest along its side.

  Someone might have wondered if the dog and child were waiting for somebody. Or if they were thinking about something that had happened, something that had left its mark in their memories. Or perhaps if they were listening to a sound, some faint music.

  Now the rain starts drumming louder, thundering like a revolt against the rising sun; the dog and the child remain motionless, indifferent to the water’s fury. From the child’s nose and the dog’s lifted ear stream icy rivulets.

  The dog is waiting.

  The child no longer dreams.

  II

  Monday, October 26, 1931—Year IX

  The call came in at 6:30 A.M., an hour before the end of the night shift.

  Ricciardi didn’t mind staying overnight at the police station, when he was assigned that shift; for the most part they were quiet hours, time he could devote to reading or a pleasant kind of repose somewhere between waking and sleep on the sofa in the room next to his office. And it was rather rare for his rest or his thoughts to be disturbed by a policeman knocking on the door, requesting his presence.

  Murders happen at night, but they’re discovered in the morning; so the danger hour was exactly then, just as the light of day was lifting the veil on the depravities of the darkness.

  Ricciardi had just finished washing up in the sink at the far end of the hallway when he saw Brigadier Maione dragging himself up the last flight of stairs.

  “Commissa’, you didn’t think they’d let us finish our shift in peace, did you? A phone call’s just come in, a gentleman from the Tondo di Capodimonte. He says that there’s a milkmaid with a nanny goat who’s crying.”

  Ricciardi reflected on the matter as he dried his hands.

  “So now they’re calling us about crying milkmaids? And I’m not sure I understand: who’s crying, the milkmaid or the nanny goat?”

  Maione threw his arms open wide, still panting after racing up the stairs.

  “Commissa’, you can joke if you like; meanwhile it’s raining buckets out there, and since we’ve got another hour left in our shift we’re going to have to make it all the way to Capodimonte in this downpour. It’s serious business: apparently there’s a dead boy on the monumental staircase. It was the woman who found him, as she was walking down from a farm on the hill with her little nanny goat to sell milk, she says that this is her route, and she saw him there, motionless, and she gave him a shake but he didn’t move. So she went to the nearest building to get help, and this gentleman who rang us up was the only one who had a telephone. Now I ask you, couldn’t this have happened a couple of hours from now? Then the one hiking through the rain would be Cozzolino, who’s young and eager, whereas the minute I get even a little bit wet, I get a backache so bad I have to walk bent over at the middle.”

  Ricciardi had already thrown on his raincoat.

  “In other words, you really are getting old. Come on, let’s go see what this is all about. It might just be a prank—you know how people love to see cops running around in the rain. Then you can go home and dry off.”

  The way from the police station to Capodimonte was the same route that Ricciardi took to go home. A long walk that, at a certain point, took on such a steep incline that it left you gasping. You had to walk the length of the Via Toledo, with its imposing aristocratic residences, cross the Largo della Carità and walk past the Spirito Santo building, walk alongside the National Museum: a border line with, on either side of it, uphill and down, the impenetrable narrow alleyways, or vicoli, of the Spanish Quarter, the port, and the Sanità neighborhood, bubbling over with life and grief, cheerful energy and poverty.

  Ricciardi had the same thought every time he passed this way, every morning and every night, feeling on his skin the suspicious eyes of those who had to conceal the way they earned their living: that street said a lot about the city. It said everything there was to say.

  And it always changed, season after season, offering variously a torrid summer picture in which filth baked in the sun, or a fragrant image of spring, with fruit and flower vendors displaying their wares for wealthy passersby, or the artificial wasteland of winter, when all the dodgy dealings retreated into the ground-floor apartments, or bassi, lining the street, sheltered from the icy wind that never seemed to die down.

  Now, on this damp autumn morning, the long street had as many rivulets running through it as there were vicoli intersecting it, carrying garbage and filth from the distant hillside down toward an unreachable sea.

  Maione leapt nimbly to avoid the deeper puddles, in a futile attempt to keep his boots dry.

  “She’ll kill me. Guaranteed. My wife will kill me. Com­missa’, you can’t imagine what a savage beast she turns into when she has to clean mud and filth off my boots. I tell her, don’t worry about it, I’ll clean them myself, and she says, now don’t talk nonsense, she says, I’m a brigadier’s wife and it’s my job to clean his boots. In that case, I ask, why all the complaining? And she says, it’s my job to clean them, but would it kill you to be a little more careful?”

  As they walked, he did his best to ward off the rain with a big black umbrella he
held over his and Ricciardi’s heads. The commissario, as usual, wore no hat, nor did he seem to be paying any attention to the bad weather. Maione easily changed the subject:

  “I don’t understand you, Commissa’. I don’t mean the umbrella—you might think of carrying one, seeing as it’s been raining for three days now, but I can see how a person might get tired of carrying it and decide to leave it at home—but a hat at least, couldn’t you try wearing a hat? You may be young but believe me, when you’re my age, every single drop of rain turns into a stabbing headache.”

  Ricciardi walked briskly, his hands plunged into his raincoat pockets, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him.

  “You know I can’t stand wearing a hat: it gives me a migraine. Plus I grew up in the mountains, I don’t mind the cold and the damp. Don’t worry about it; worry about your own health, and about keeping your boots clean.”

  They’d reached the part of the walk that Ricciardi especially disliked. This was the bridge that the Bourbon monarchs had built, so they could reach the royal palace, the Palazzo Reale, without having to pass through the Sanità quarter, which had always been one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. For some strange and inexplicable reason, from the day it was built that towering viaduct, that riverless bridge that sank its pillars into the narrow vicoli beneath it, had become a favored spot for suicides.

  What Ricciardi inwardly referred to as “the Deed,” his grievous curse to perceive the last thoughts of those who had died violent deaths, became an intolerable burden near the bridge. There was always at least one lingering ghostly image, ready to lift its gaze as he passed and speak to him the words with which it had been forced to abandon its existence of flesh, bones, and blood. A farewell message with one recipient alone: him.

  On that rainy morning, perfectly visible to the eyes of his soul, there were two adolescents perched precariously, hand in hand, on the parapet. The young man’s neck was broken, and his face was looking backward, as if his head had been put on the wrong way around; he was murmuring: not without you, never without you.

  The girl’s chest was crushed and the front of her head had been virtually obliterated by the impact. A thought came to him out of the bloody pulp that had once been her face: I don’t want to die, I’m too young, I don’t want to die.

  Ricciardi mused to himself that perhaps love had claimed more victims than war. Actually, he could leave out the “perhaps,” he decided.

  Farther on, on the same parapet, a fat old man with a stove-in skull was saying: I can’t pay you back, I can’t. Debt, the commissario thought as he hastened his step, leaving a panting Maione behind him. Another incurable disease. God, he was tired. Nothing ever changed, it was always the same things.

  They finally arrived at the Tondo di Capodimonte, where the monumental staircase began. It hadn’t been easy to make it all the way up here; the last stretch of road had been a raging river of branches and leaves through which they’d had to fight their way upstream. Maione had finally given up trying to spare his boots, and his face had taken on an expression of grim silence. Ricciardi carried with him the image of the suicides and was grimmer still.

  A knot of people had gathered at the foot of the staircase, above the first flight of steps. The mushroom patch of umbrellas hid from view whatever it was that they were looking at. The arrival of Maione and Ricciardi, accompanied by a pair of policemen, immediately scattered the assembled crowd. Maione snickered:

  “As usual. The only thing stronger than curiosity is the fear of getting mixed up in some trouble with the law, the second the police show up.”

  Ricciardi immediately spotted the little boy, sitting on the stone bench at the foot of the left-hand buttress. He was small, his feet didn’t reach the ground, and he was dripping wet. Rain ran down from his hair, drenching his tattered clothes, the clothes of a scugnizzo, a street urchin. On his feet were a pair of wooden clogs, the marks of chilblains clearly visible. His lips were purplish, his eyes half-open and staring into empty air.

  He was especially struck by the boy’s hands, lying fallen in his lap like a pair of dead baby birds. White, much lighter than the complexion of his legs, livid from the cold, they appeared to the commissario as a mark of surrender and misgiving. He instinctively looked around, and saw no trace of ghostly images: the child’s death couldn’t have been a violent one; perhaps he’d frozen to death, or starved, or succumbed to some disease. Abandoned, he thought: to his own devices, to the elements, to random violence, to loneliness. The child had had no choice in the matter.

  If there was one thing he hated, it was seeing dead children. The sense of sheer waste, denial, lost opportunities. A people, a civilization is defined by the way it cares for its children, he’d once read in a book, back in his university days. That city certainly didn’t come out looking very good, by those standards.

  Maione roused him from those thoughts:

  “Before leaving headquarters, I gave orders to call the hospital and summon both the medical examiner and the wagon to remove the body; they’ll be here any minute. The milkmaid’s over there, the one with the nanny goat on a rope. Do you want to talk to her? Standing near her is the man with the telephone, that gentleman with the umbrella. I told him we don’t need him and that he’s free to go, but he won’t leave. You want me to bring them both over to talk to you?”

  The milkmaid kept her eyes on the ground. Her lips were quivering, and she had a scarf tied tight around her head. She was quite young, little more than a girl; with one hand she held a piece of rope tied around the nanny goat’s neck, in the other she held a metal milk can. Stuttering with cold, fear, and shyness, she told her story in dribs and drabs, how she had been coming down the staircase to make her rounds selling milk, taking care not to slip and fall, when the nanny goat had leapt to one side. There was a dog, lying on its side at the top of the bottom flight of steps, snarling.

  “There it is, you see it? It moved when I came back from the gentleman’s house, after calling you, and it hasn’t moved since.”

  Ricciardi saw, some sixty feet away, a dog sitting on its haunches, still as a statue, watching them intently. It was a little mutt, the kind you see dozens of every day, its dirty white coat spotted with brown, its muzzle pointed and one ear cocked.

  The young woman went on with her story, telling how, after trying to determine whether the little boy was asleep or was sick, she’d gone running over to the nearest apartment building and summoned her customer the accountant Signore Caputo. The accountant, a dapper middle-aged man, short, with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, took a step forward and tipped his hat.

  “Commissa’, with your permission, I’m the accountant Ferdinando Caputo, at your service. This girl, here, whose name is Caterina, comes by every other day. I can only digest goat milk, cow milk gives me a stomachache and then I’m sick for the rest of the day. In any case, this morning the girl, here, Caterina, runs into the courtyard of my building and starts screaming, hurry, hurry, help, there’s a little boy on the stairs and he’s not responding. I’d only just woken up, I was still in my nightshirt, I rushed from the bed to the window . . . ”

  Maione snorted in annoyance:

  “Okay, okay, Accountant Caputo, let’s get to the point if you don’t mind, no disrespect intended but we really don’t care what you wear to bed. What happened next, did you go downstairs?”

  “No, Brigadie’, what was I going to do, go downstairs in my nightshirt with my nightcap on my head? No, I told the girl, here, whose name is . . . ”

  “ . . . Caterina, we know. The police officer, here, whose name is Antonelli, even wrote it down in his report . . . ”

  The accountant glared at Maione.

  “What is this, Brigadie’, are you making fun of me? I was just trying to be precise, for your benefit. To make a long story short, the girl came up and I called police headquarters. And that’s that.”

 
Ricciardi waved his hand.

  “All right, all right, thanks to you both. The officer has taken down your names and addresses, if we need anything we’ll send for you. Probably not, though. You’re free to go.”

  Once they were alone, they drew near the corpse. Ricciardi wondered why, by that time of day, there was still no sign of a family member or an acquaintance out looking for such a young boy if he hadn’t come home the night before. Maione, squatting, was eyeing the dead body with interest.

  “Commissa’, we’ll have to find out whether this child even has a family. The clothes look like he dug them out of the trash; look here, the trousers are so loose on him that the twine around his waist had to be wrapped around twice just to hold them up. And his shirt is made out of burlap. Look at the clogs, he’s practically barefoot in this weather. This is a scugnizzo, trust me. A kid with no friends and no family.”

  Ricciardi turned to look at the dog, sitting motionless ten feet from them, watching every move the two of them made.

  “Family, maybe not. But he had at least one friend; too bad he can’t tell us anything. Ah, here we are, the health authorities are finally here. Now maybe we’ll learn something about the death of our lonely little boy, here.”

  III

  The public health authorities, on this occasion, were represented by Dr. Bruno Modo, who was leaping from one foot to the other in the water, doing his best—and it was no easy feat—to keep from getting too wet while holding an umbrella, his leather doctor’s bag, and a sheet of paper. As soon as he spotted Ricciardi and Maione he headed straight for them with a bellicose glare.

  “You two, eh? How could I ever have doubted it? A phone call first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve gotten my trousers dry after getting soaked on my way to the hospital, a mile and a half upstream fighting this goddamned river they call Via Nuova Capodimonte, and who do I see? Laughing-boy Ricciardi and his skinny squire, the noble Brigadier Maione. Can we put an end to these special personal requests, Brigadie’? Look, read this: the immediate presence of Dr. Bruno Modo is requested and required. Let me ask you, wouldn’t any other doctor do? Did you really have to call me specifically?”