Blood Curse Read online

  After all, the Petrone woman said, what harm were they doing? People came in sad and walked out happy. In a way, really, they were a couple of benefactors.

  By now the name of Carmela Calise had gotten around and she had more paying customers than she could handle. The two women had also begun to supplement reality, giving fate a little push every now and then, just to make the oracular responses of the tarot cards that much more believable. A panhandler, a meeting with a man, a minor accident. Negligible things, apparently random incidents that constituted, for those who chose to view them this way, major confirmations. That part was Nunzia’s business, with the occasional paid assistance of chance extras who took the money and asked no questions. Nunzia’s investigations weren’t always necessary; in some cases the old woman excused her from performing this particular duty because, she told her, there were people who supplied her directly with all the information she needed. Sometimes people just needed to get things off their chests.

  It was all going splendidly. There was more than enough money to improve their quality of life without attracting too much attention. So much money, in fact, that they both wondered what they were going to do with it all. And in Naples, everyone knows that there’s only one thing to do when you have too much cash: you lend it out at interest.

  The carousel had started spinning about a year and a half ago: a woman who needed to put together a trousseau for her daughter, an office clerk whose wife was ill, a merchant who was having business troubles. If any of them had failed to repay the principal and interest due in full, everyone would have heard about it. The backbiting would have left their good names in tatters. It was the most effective form of debt collection imaginable.

  A neat, efficient little operation: two complementary lines of business that whirred along beautifully, side by side. There’d never been the slightest problem. Until now.

  No, she had no idea what Carmela did with the money. The old woman had always been particularly reticent on that subject and had never confided in her. She herself had put every penny into an account in her daughter’s name, held at the bank on Via Toledo, depositing a little at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. When Nunzia asked her, Carmela had replied, with resignation in her voice, that, in the end, the two women weren’t as different as they might seem.

  Nor did she have the faintest idea as to who might have killed her. Carmela, with her tarot cards, constituted a threat to no one. She never hounded her debtors to get her money back. She gave them plenty of time and wiggle room. She was always happy to grant extensions—for a small added fee, of course. She couldn’t think of anyone who could have murdered her. And then, the brutal way she was murdered? Unthinkable.

  “Well then,” said Ricciardi, tapping his finger on the cover of the black notebook that lay on the table in front of him, “you’ll be able to provide me with a surname, address, and story to go with all the names that are written down in here, whether they belong to the clients of the tarot card business or victims of your loan-sharking scheme. Names to go with their dreams—dreams that you nursed and tended, cultivated for a fee.”

  Nunzia lowered her gaze under the commissario’s moral condemnation.

  “Yes. For everyone.”

  “All right. So, Maione: you have a seat here with Signora Petrone and take down the addresses and names of everyone the Calise woman saw on her last day, the day before her body was discovered. Tomorrow I want you to have them all come in to see me in my office, one by one, and we’ll check them out. And if that doesn’t give us anything to work with, then we’ll just start working backward. Until we find the right dream, the sick dream we’re looking for. The one that killed this old woman. I’m going home now. I have a headache.”

  XXXII

  That night, Ricciardi felt more than his usual need for some semblance of a normal life. He yearned for simple, ordinary, measured gestures. Contact with the stuff of everyday life: chairs, tables, utensils, food. Healthy glances, normal expressions.

  He’d had his fill that day of weeping, feelings of hatred, death. He couldn’t wait to be at his window.

  He reassured Rosa, who wasn’t used to him coming home so early. He told her that he had a grueling day ahead of him, and he just wanted to get a little extra rest.

  He ate quickly, read for a while, listened to the radio: grand symphonies that as if by magic restored his peace of mind. With his eyes closed, he imagined cinematic couples in ball gowns and tuxedos twirling over a glistening marble floor, following trajectories known only to them, without ever so much as grazing each other. The ladies with their dazzled eyes lost in the faces of their preux chevaliers; one hand raised, fingers intertwined with those of their partners, the other hand holding their skirts.

  As he sat in his dark-red leather easy chair, by the dim, diffuse light of the table lamp, he thought of himself and the lives of other people as a grand ball in which the dancers brush up against each other as they move, alone or as couples, each moving to their own rhythm. Every so often, as they danced, there would be a collision, and someone would fall. And it fell to someone else, someone specially assigned to the task, to help the fallen to their feet and punish whoever had caused the accident. It was an ugly job, but someone had to do it.

  At the usual time, perhaps a few minutes early, he found himself standing by the window, in his bedroom illuminated by the yellow light of the old kerosene lamp that had once belonged to his mother. In the dining room of the apartment across the way, the evening meal was coming to an end. The diners were rising from their seats, to return to their own occupations after the interlude of conviviality. A few lingered behind, over coffee, a slice of cake for the little ones.

  Ricciardi imagined that genuine love, the kind of love that didn’t pollute the soul, could easily become the driving force of one’s life. As he watched that family, he intuitively understood their feelings for each other. A distracted caress, a smile, an affectionate hair-tousling. Gestures that were normal and, at the same time, extraordinary. In short, a family.

  He was capable of articulating in any of a number of ways the grief he felt at losing something he’d never actually possessed. He had only the vaguest of memories when it came to his ailing mother; he couldn’t remember her caresses, or the warmth of her embrace. He could only dream of her.

  Across the way, the woman under whose spell he had fallen remained the mistress of the dining room and kitchen, as she was every night. She had started to wash the dishes. He watched her familiar actions the way one listens to a beloved record heard thousands of times before, predicting each move, studying her gait.

  In his thoughts, he had become accustomed to calling her “amore mio.” Words that he would never actually utter in her presence; in all likelihood, he would never speak to her. All I could offer you is my grief and pain, he thought: the terrible burden of the cross I bear.

  He’d never dare to stand by the front door of her building or ask Rosa to find out about her, much less discuss her with one of the neighborhood gossips. Incredible, considering that he made his living investigating the lives of others.

  It didn’t bother him too much, though. He preferred to imagine, dream, and watch from afar. The one time he’d run into her on the street he’d turned and fled; and if the same thing happened again, he’d just turn and run away again.

  As he admired the woman’s precise, measured gestures and her luminous normality, Ricciardi thought about Carmela Calise and Nunzia Petrone, peddlers of illusions. What an awful crime it was to trick people into thinking that they could achieve the unachievable. The porter woman had said that people were sad when they came and happy when they left. But what kind of happiness could such a deception bring them? You, with your slow, certain motions, would never let a con artist sully your dreams with her false playacting. Your dreams must be like you: moderate, delicate, and peaceful. You’d never go to a fortune-teller to have them interpreted.

  Even more than kissing you and holding you in m
y arms, I’d like to be in your dreams. And I’d like to keep them safe for you.

  It was late by the time Maione left the Calise woman’s apartment. He carried with him the list of all those she had seen on the last day of her life. Names, dreams, addresses. Their personal traits, their families, what had driven them to beg the woman for her pronouncements, paying for each word in cold hard cash.

  The brigadier didn’t understand. He couldn’t see the point of paying someone such exorbitant fees for reading tarot cards. Were these people rich? Perhaps there were some on that list who earned their money by the sweat of their brow. He walked on, shaking his head: the Petrone woman had rattled off all the information, names and numbers, displaying an extraordinary talent for investigation. If it’d been up to him he would have enlisted her on the spot, with the rank of private first class at the very least. Among the names, there was even one that struck him as important, one he’d make a point of mentioning to the commissario: not the sort of person who would be happy to be summoned to police headquarters. They’d deal with that tomorrow; right now he had other business to take care of.

  He walked uphill through the Spanish Quarter, huffing and puffing because he was overweight and it was a steep climb. As he went, the usual dumb show of greetings and cap-doffings, always at a respectful distance. He’d decided to pay a call to someone. He wasn’t thinking of dropping by Filomena’s to see how she was doing or ask if there was anything she needed, though perhaps he would do that the following morning. Nor was he thinking of going home; it was still early and, though he was unwilling to admit it even to himself, the idea didn’t appeal to him.

  He clambered up the hill, passing under the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the Bourbon-era road that encircled the old city. Behind Vicolo di San Nicola da Tolentino, at the back of a blind alley that came to an end in the tall dry grasses and shrubs of the countryside, there was a small apartment building. A steep, narrow staircase led up to a garret apartment, its windowsills heaped high with pigeon guano. It was the home of a person who had been very helpful to Maione on more than one occasion.

  Panting again, he knocked on the door, which was falling off its hinges. A deep but gracious voice asked who it was, and Maione said his name. The door swung upon.

  “Brigadier, what an honor! If I’d known you were coming to pay me a visit, I’d have put on some makeup and changed my underwear!”

  Bambinella almost defied description. Her black hair was gathered in a bun, with a few stray locks falling out around her ears. She wore dangly earrings and her face was heavily made up. A garish nightgown parted to reveal a lace negligee underneath. Fishnet stockings, high heels. A faint five o’clock shadow could be seen on her cheeks, under a thick layer of face powder.

  “Come on, let me in. It’s taken ten years off my life just to get up here.”

  “You can’t be serious. A big strong handsome man like you, all worn out from a little climb? Come right in, make yourself comfortable. Can I offer you a cup of ersatz coffee, a little rosolio cordial?”

  “A glass of water. I need to talk to you, and I’m in a hurry.”

  Maione had met Bambinella a couple of years ago, when he’d taken part in a raid on a underground bordello in Via San Ferdinando, one of those low-cost operations where older women and country girls peddled their services without proper license or certification. Among the array of homely, handicapped, and elderly “signorinas,” this Latin beauty with her almond-shaped eyes had seemed out of place; and in fact, when the police demanded identification, the “defect” emerged.

  Maione was forced to intervene because Bambinella, whose real name could not be ascertained, managed to lure three of his men to her in rapid succession, practically scratching the third man’s eyes out with her claws.

  During the night that followed, which Bambinella spent in a cell as a guest of police headquarters, she never stopped sobbing, talking, and shouting in an unbroken stream of abuse. In the end, Maione took it upon himself to order Bambinella’s release. In part because, technically speaking, Bambinella couldn’t be called a “lady” of the evening.

  As he listened to Bambinella’s seemingly endless chain of delirium, the policeman came to the conclusion that the lady-boy, or femminiello, to use the Neapolitan term, possessed a great deal of useful information. And that the debt of gratitude he created by releasing her might well be more than amply repaid.

  Since then, Maione had cashed in his chips with Bambinella more than once, sparingly but always to good effect. A number of case-cracking details were provided right in the garret where Bambinella continued to run her discreet little business. Maione looked the other way, and Bambinella whispered in his ear.

  XXXIII

  The sea had started slapping against the rocks off Via Caracciolo around seven o’clock that night. Now the waves, whipped up even higher by the buffeting wind, were splashing so high that the spray could be seen from the balconies along Via Generale Orsini in Santa Lucia.

  Ruggero Serra di Arpaja stepped out onto the balcony to feel on his face the first breaths of spring wafting up from the sea. They seemed somehow threatening, and brought him none of the comfort he had hoped for.

  It wouldn’t be long now; he knew that. He didn’t have a clear idea of what was going to happen, but at any rate he wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. The newspaper described those details that he knew about, but seemed to have left out others.

  He had no particular confidence in the abilities of the state police, nor in the skills of the corps of magistrates; he’d had daily dealings with them both for more years than he cared to remember and he had always pictured them in his mind as a large, ungainly beast, slow-moving and incapable of reaching its objective.

  In recent years, moreover, the machinery of justice had been even further hindered by politics, which slowed the grinding of its gears and altered its course to suit its own goals.

  But now, everything he had built was teetering on the brink. For the thousandth time he thought through the various potential outcomes with the anguish of a trapped rat. The memory surged up inside him on a wave of nausea that he managed to ward off by shutting his eyes: blood. It was one thing to talk about it dispassionately in his study with the guilty individuals whom he defended, the scum of the earth, no doubt, but wealthy, and willing to pay for their freedom. It was quite another thing to find yourself surrounded by it.

  All that blood. He instinctively looked down at his bare feet; it dawned on him that since he’d come home that day and removed his blood-spattered shoes, he’d never put on another pair. He had to get rid of those shoes, and he had to take care of it himself; there was no one else he could trust.

  He sighed in the sweet breeze. His greatest anguish, the anguish that clutched at his throat until he was unable to breathe, didn’t stem from the thought of what might happen to him. His anxiety came from the thought of what Emma might do. And if he wanted to know the answer, he would have to screw his courage to the sticking place, leave the apartment, and go to the theater. That very night.

  A dog barked somewhere out in the countryside. Bambinella was sitting in a Chinese-style chair and had assumed the pose of a prim young lady, knees together and hands resting in her lap.

  “Well now, Brigadie’, what brings you here? Have you finally decided to try something different? It goes without saying, for you, it’d be on the house.”

  “Listen, Bambine’, there are still plenty of normal things I haven’t tried yet; so why would I get a yen for ‘something different’? You know I’m here for the usual reason: work.”

  The femminiello let out a refined snort.

  “Oh, Madonna mia, what a bore! Work, work, and more work. Go on and take a half hour off once in a while! A handsome man like you, so masculine, and with all that hair! Oh dear—but you could probably use a little more on your head, couldn’t you?”

  “Hey now, don’t get cute with me or I’ll run you in, all right? My hair’s no business of yours, and
besides, it’s right where it ought to be. Why don’t you worry about your own hair? Your face is turning dark blue.”

  “Eh, I know, Brigadie’, I have the kind of beard that’s always showing. But I still have to make myself up for the night, and you can rest assured that when I’m done you won’t be able to see a thing. So how are things with you? I heard from some of my girlfriends in the Sanità that you’re trying to find out who murdered Donna Carmela, the one who reads the cards, am I right?”

  Maione spread his arms wide.

  “What a city! It makes me sick. Someone sneezes at the train station and someone out at the Vomero says bless you! Yes, we’re looking into it. Do you know anything?”

  “No, Brigadie’, I really can’t help you on that one. Aside from the fact that that’s not my part of town, with all the stinking, penniless lowlifes that live there, I haven’t heard anything about it. All I know is that she was doing a little loan-sharking in her spare time. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, that’s something we already knew. What else can you tell us?”

  “She really was good at reading cards. A little girlfriend and colleague of mine from Via Santa Teresa went to talk to her because she was worried about her boyfriend, who’d told her he was working the night shift on a construction site in Giugliano and couldn’t see her in the evenings The old woman read her cards and told her”—and here Bambinella made her voice even deeper and squinted, as if she were peering into a crystal ball—“‘Check your facts, because that man’s not going to Giugliano. He’s going to a bordello on Viale Elena.’ And sure enough she goes to that very same bordello and she sees him, coming out arm-in-arm with a whore! It took three people to hold her back; she was going at them with a straight razor, ready to slice both their faces. That old woman was good at what she did. But who could have killed her? That’s something I really can’t tell you.”