Blood Curse Read online

  VIII

  Ricciardi ate, and Tata Rosa watched him eat.

  The same thing every evening. He would rather have come home to find she’d already retired for the night, since she was seventy years old and had been up since dawn. But she refused to relinquish her fundamental principle: she would not go to bed until she’d seen him eat every last bite. He would gladly have foregone the same narrow selection of dishes. She complained that she didn’t how to cook anything different. All he wanted was to give his brain a rest. She spent the whole day charging the batteries of her complaints and waited for him to walk through the door to unleash them on him. It’s idyllic, no doubt about it, mused Ricciardi as he chewed, without tasting it, a mouthful of spaghetti with basic, routine tomato sauce, the third time in six days it had been on the menu.

  “It’s a sad, miserable life you lead. Just look, you had your hair cut yesterday and you’ve already got your bangs in your eyes again. And look at you, you’re pale, so pale that you look like a ghost.” At this, Ricciardi grimaced wryly. “Tell me, do you ever see daylight? Today, for example, there was a scent in the air that blew down from the forest of Capodimonte, it was just lovely, but did you even think of taking a walk in the gardens in front of police headquarters? No, eh? I knew it. What’s a poor old woman like me supposed to do? Am I supposed to close my eyes once and for all, condemned to the knowledge that I’m leaving you with no one to take care of you? Don’t you want to find yourself a pretty guagliona, so you can put me in a hospice and let me die in peace?”

  Ricciardi gravely nodded in agreement, occasionally looking up from his food to show his full appreciation of the disaster that had befallen his Tata, whose dreadful fate it was to have to look after him. He hadn’t actually heard a single word she’d said. Still, he could have recited her litany word for word; he’d listened to it so many thousands of times over the years. He had other things on his mind, as usual, and he dealt with Tata Rosa the way you deal with the rain: you wait for it to end and do your best to stay dry. If he so much as dared to answer back, he’d have to spend the rest of the evening persuading his Tata that there was no life he’d rather live.

  And besides, he had a date.

  Enrica was washing the dishes. The whole family had moved into the living room, in that cheerful daily migration that carried noise and disorder away from her domain, giving her a chance to look around with a sense of satisfaction.

  She wasn’t pretty; you wouldn’t bother to give her a second glance if you saw her walking down Via Santa Teresa on her way to Mass, or buying greens from the vegetable cart on the corner. Tall and swarthy, she wore myopic eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames. She was twenty-four years old and she’d never had a boyfriend. She wasn’t pretty, it’s true, and she cared nothing about fashion; but there was a gracefulness about her, in the way she smiled, in her slow, careful movements, with her sure way of doing things, her left-handed precision.

  She’d studied to be a schoolteacher, and she spent mornings tutoring children whose parents had given up all hope of keeping them in school; without raising her voice or resorting to punishment, she seemed to be capable of taming even the most feral little beasts. Her father and mother worried about her. They often talked anxiously about her lack of marriage prospects, but they’d given up trying to matchmake with the sons of friends. She had always declined these introductions, courteously but firmly.

  Ricciardi had walked into his bedroom, hairnet on his head, hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket. The old oil lamp on the night table cast a yellow light on the few pieces of furniture: a chair, the small writing desk, the two-door armoire. He was standing next to the bed, his back to the window; his hands were clammy in the pockets, he was short of breath, his racing heartbeat pounded in his temples.

  He heaved a long sigh, turned around, and took two steps forward.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Enrica saw the glowing lamp behind the windowpanes on the opposite side of the narrow lane. Fifteen feet, no more; she’d done the calculation a thousand times. And about three feet higher up, at most. A seemingly infinite distance. She wouldn’t have traded it for any other sensation on earth, that minute of waiting between when he lit the wick and when his silhouette came into view. It was like opening a window and waiting to feel the breeze blowing gently against your face, or being thirsty and lifting a glass of water to your lips. That backlit figure, with his arms folded or else at his sides, or perhaps with his hands in his pockets. Motionless. No gesture, no signal, no attempt to make contact aside from the simple fact that he was there, every night, at nine thirty. She wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world. And slowly, with her own particular slowness, she finished washing up with a series of gentle motions, then sat in the armchair near the kitchen balcony and took her embroidery frame in her lap, or else picked up the book she’d been reading. Enveloped in that gaze, she smiled and waited.

  Ricciardi watched her embroider. As he watched her, he spoke to her, telling her about the things that most troubled him, and she helped help him to untangle his thoughts. It was strange, no question. Through the glass of the two windows, he watched the unhurried gestures he’d fallen in love with, more than a year ago. Her carriage, the way she read, the way she embroidered. Herself. He thought he’d never seen anything in all his life as lovely as the way that girl embroidered. And yet it was more than he could do to approach her; the man who remained impassive in the face of the most horrific crimes was terrorized by the idea. He had inadvertently found himself face-to-face with her a few months earlier at the vegetable vendor’s cart, and he’d taken to his heels in the most undignified fashion, leaving a wake of broccoli behind him. She had watched him, tilting her head to one side in that way he know so well, her eyes half-closed behind her tortoiseshell spectacles. And the man who knew no fear had run for his life.

  If only you knew, my love. If only you could imagine.

  Fifteen feet away, the girl who was so good at waiting embroidered, stitch by stitch; and on the frame, beyond the sheet to be added to an optimistic trousseau, she saw a pair of green eyes, unknown to her and yet so familiar. She thought that if two roads are destined to meet, they will eventually, however many miles it takes. And she also thought back, with a hint of shame, to the visit she’d made just two days earlier at a girlfriend’s insistence, to that strange place, a place she never would have imagined. She remembered the questions she’d asked and the answers she’d been given, without hesitation, as if they came from a book written sometime in a far-off future.

  Embroidering and smiling with her head tilted to one side, Enrica was thinking about something Ricciardi could never have imagined.

  She was thinking about the Knight of Clubs.

  IX

  The stage, the dust, the lights. This is what I want to feel, this is what I want to breathe. When I was small, I was poor, cold, and hungry; but I already knew they would cheer for me, that I would bowl them over, move them to tears. I’ve always been good-looking, I’ve always known how to tell a story, how to charm people with words. There’s no one else like me; that’s what my mother’s always told me.

  How she slaved away, my mother, to make sure that my enthusiasm never flagged, that I was always up for the challenge. I sang and I danced, at parties, at weddings. Surrounded by oafs and bumpkins incapable of appreciating what they were seeing. The magic of words, the magic of movements: those were my passions. The voice is an instrument. I know that I’m handsome. I’ve always been handsome. My mother was the first one to say so, and I’ve had plenty of confirmation since.

  My beauty has also been my downfall, what’s held me back. Women like me, and men seethe with jealousy. Mamma says that life is a theater; in her way, she’s an actress herself. Son, she says to me, you can’t even begin to imagine how many times I’ve pretended. But every time, I provide my own applause; I applaud the money that ends up in my pocket. Do as I do. Money: that’s all the applause you’ll need.

 
That’s what Mamma says, but I have to disagree. The way I see it, if you’re really good, then everyone should applaud for you; there can’t be just one conceited wretch standing between you and the success you deserve. So I’m going to find a way to buy a theater troupe and, if necessary, even an entire theater.

  And then we’ll see.

  Concetta Iodice stood peering out the small window that overlooked the vicolo. It was late, and Tonino should have been home an hour ago. The pizzeria had been closed for quite a while now. He had told her to go ahead and head home, because he had an errand to run. She would never have thought to question her husband’s orders, but it had caused her some anxiety, some concern.

  Precisely because of his cheerful nature, the pizzaiolo was an easy man to read. When something was off, Concetta and her elderly mother-in-law Assunta immediately became aware of it and exchanged a knowing look; for several days now, they’d both been detecting that same discordant note. They knew business wasn’t as good as they’d hoped it would be, and that the loan that had been taken out in order to open the restaurant was sizable; maybe that’s what was stirring trouble in the man’s soul. Tonino no longer sang while he shaved, he trudged rather than walked up the stairs, he greeted his family as if he had something else on his mind, and the day before he’d smacked their eldest boy for calling his name aloud. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

  Assunta joined Concetta at the window.

  “The children are asleep. No sign of him?”

  Without turning around, the woman screwed up her mouth and tossed her head. Anxiety gripped her chest, growing stronger by the second. Her mother-in-law placed a hand on her shoulder and she reached up and squeezed it gently. A shared love; a shared fear.

  When she saw him turn the corner, she felt a surge of relief rise up inside her—but only for an instant. His dragging step, his slumped shoulders. He looked like an old man. She ran to the door and pulled it open; behind her, in the shadows, Assunta stood wringing her hands. His slow steps coming up the stairs, in the silence of the dark old building. The last flight of steps. Concetta searched the darkness for Tonino’s eyes, both yearning and dreading to look into them.

  Ashen, sweaty, his hair plastered to his forehead underneath his cap, Tonino was staring blankly ahead. He walked past his wife, gently squeezing her arm. The woman felt the warmth of his hand on her wrist.

  “I don’t feel well. A slight fever, maybe. I’m going to bed.”

  Concetta looked at the stretch of floor that her husband had just walked over. He’d left a footprint, as if his shoes were wet.

  To look at them, you’d think they were two perfectly ordinary children. Like the children you’d see in the Spanish Quarter or on the streets down by the port, who moved in flocks, like birds, noisy and boisterous, the girls indistinguishable from the boys and all of them equally filthy, dressed in clothes that were equally tattered; not like the city’s other children, insipid, dressed in sailor suits or junior fascist uniforms, marching military-style across Piazza Plebiscito. In contrast, these children had their heads shorn bald to fight lice and went barefoot, a rind tougher than leather on the soles of their feet, purplish and chilblained in winter, bound up crudely with threadbare rags.

  Gaetano and Rituccia had grown up together. Even though their bodies were still years from the full bloom of adolescence—he was almost thirteen, she was twelve—it was enough to look into their eyes to guess their ages. Old. They were old because of what they remembered, because of what they had seen and continued to see.

  They both had vague memories of a happier time, when his father and her mother were still alive, and they were just two more little birds in the flock that burst into flight every morning among the city vicoli that they called home. But that was a long time ago, when they used to sit absorbed in conversation on the steps of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, occasionally begging coins from the old women hurrying in for the midday Mass. Now, ever since Gaetano had begun his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, they were only rarely able to speak; they didn’t need words, though, having mastered the ability to read new developments in each other’s faces, detecting news from the crease in his furrowed brow or the angles of her downturned mouth. They conducted themselves like those old couples who know each other so well as to communicate only through gestures.

  In the evening, before returning home, they sat together on the ground, under the porticoes of the Galleria Umberto Primo, just as they were doing right now. In silence, they tried to summon the courage to go home for the night.

  Concetta Iodice had sat there, watching her husband sleep, without being able to get a wink of sleep herself. She was afraid that his fever might spike, that he might be really sick without her realizing it. That was something that had always terrified her; her father had gone that way, during the night, while she and her mother and her siblings were sleeping peacefully. That night he was there and the next morning he wasn’t; he’d left behind that pitiful worn-out dressing gown with one eye half-open and the other shut, his blackish tongue lolling out of his open mouth. Sprawled out on the floor next to the bed; maybe he’d called for help and no one had heard him.

  So Concetta sat there on the chair by the bed, watching Tonino Iodice, owner of the pizzeria and restaurant that bore his name, as he laboriously carried on the business of his troubled night’s sleep. He tossed and turned, he moaned, he pulled up the bedclothes and threw them off again. His leaden face, the hair plastered to his sweaty brow, his lips twisted in a grimace. Perhaps he was dreaming. Concetta did her best to make out words, but all she could hear were moans and laments. She sighed and rose to her feet, doing her best not to make a sound. She took Tonino’s jacket to put it away in the clothes cupboard. She smiled unconsciously, thinking of her husband’s habitual messiness, of how often she’d had to pick up the articles of clothing he scattered around the house. A sheet of paper dropped out of one of his pockets. Concetta bent down and picked it up.

  She couldn’t read, but she understood that this was a promissory note, signed by Tonino. Standing out boldly, like an inky stamp from the post office, was a large red fingerprint. She snapped her head around toward her sleeping husband and looked with horror at his big hand, the hand of an honest laborer, the fingers dirty with caked blood.

  X

  Even with the door open, the light was faint. Silence: only the occasional creak of hinges, a window or two left open to let in fresh air. The knife blade glinted in a flash that no one saw, without so much as a moan.

  Donna Vincenza went out into the vicolo very early each morning. She didn’t like to keep a full chamber pot in the apartment until late, and she also enjoyed stepping out for a walk. The winter seemed to stretch on forever, and windows still had to remain locked tight to ward off the damp of night that seeped into her bones. She’d been walking with a hunched back for months now, looking even older than she actually was. That drunken lout husband of hers, in contrast, never stirred until the church bell rang; thankfully, it chimed so loud and so close that it made him leap out of bed and start the day with a sonorous oath.

  She emerged from the narrow little door, tugging her shawl tight around her head. Chamber pot in hand, she walked past the locked door of Rachele’s basso, and her thoughts ran to the poor woman who had died a year ago, leaving behind such a young orphan girl. Still, better her than me. She trundled along for a few more yards, toward the drain that topped the cesspit. She noticed that the front door of the whore’s basso was ajar. That’s odd, she thought. She knew that the little boy was the first to leave in the morning; he was an apprentice with some relative of theirs who was a builder. Then the whore went off to that shop in the Via Toledo, to ruin who knows what family.

  The woman gave in to her curiosity and drew closer to the narrow aperture. She placed one hand on the doorjamb and the door creaked open. She looked inside and as soon as she got her breath back, she started screaming.

  Brigadier Maione walked briskly
. He wasn’t late for work; in fact, he was early. He liked to take his time, make a pot of ersatz coffee, get the police officers set up, assign the staff their jobs for the day. Still, he walked briskly, because he wasn’t the kind of person who liked to waste time, and because he was heavily built and he was walking downhill.

  He didn’t have far to walk. From Piazza Concordia he walked up a long vicolo, the Via Conte di Mola, and that took him straight to Via Toledo, just a minute’s walk from police headquarters and the start of a new day, which he was already fully immersed in mentally. The buzz and bustle around him was that of the city awakening: a shutter or two creaking open, a woman singing, a small child wailing. Then there were the smells: dust, excrement, yesterday’s food, horses.

  The scream shattered the air he was breathing, along with every other memory and thought: Maione had a sharp ear, and he knew that that was a scream of terror, not a shout of anger or a roar of despair. The sound reverberated in his ears, and so far no rubberneckers had come out to their balconies. Maione was already racing toward the source of the sound, his hands clenched in fists. A policeman is a policeman. It had never occurred to him to tell himself, Raffae’, just mind your own business.

  It was a woman’s voice, and it was coming from the Vico del Fico. He was the first one to reach the scene, where he found an elderly woman with a shawl on her head and her hand over her mouth, a shattered chamber pot beside rivulets of urine, the front door of a basso halfway open. With his eyes he followed the direction of the old woman’s gaze, trying to register and record as many details as possible: door opened from within, unbolted; silence inside, no sign of movement. A partial footprint, possibly a man’s shoe, between the floor and the street, black. Black: why black? Then he understood.