The Bottom of Your Heart Read online

  “And you intervened, Signor . . .”

  “Gustavo Scuotto, at your service, Commissa’. I went outside and saw . . . I saw what had happened. So I went to get someone in the clinic. But rest assured, I never touched a thing either. I thought that maybe . . . that there was a possibility that something could still be done for him.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “Who did you call?”

  The older of the two nurses stepped forward, a corpulent woman of about forty with a brusque demeanor.

  “He called me is who he called. Ada Coppola, Commissa’, the ward charge nurse. They always call me for everything, so they called me this time too.” She glared at the custodian, who lowered his eyes.

  A forceful woman, thought Ricciardi.

  “So what did you do, Signora?”

  Coppola flexed her muscular arms beneath her ample bosom.

  “I went downstairs, I saw this shattered wreck of a body, and it was clear that nothing could be done for him, and that he’d been dead for some time. At that point I reported upstairs.”

  Maione broke in: “What do you mean, he’d been dead for some time? Who did you report to upstairs? And where upstairs?”

  The woman turned on him, speaking harshly: “Don’t you see that he’s stopped breathing and the blood is dry? I went upstairs and made a phone call from the room he fell from, his office, on the fifth floor.”

  “From his office? Then you know who he is.”

  The younger nurse, who hadn’t stopped sobbing the whole time, now wailed loudly, earning an angry glare from Coppola, who told Ricciardi: “Forgive me, Commissa’, my colleague is still in shock. She’s still pretty tenderhearted.”

  The young woman snapped through her tears: “What does that have to do with it? It’s one thing to care for a sick person in a bed, but this . . . this thing here is quite another matter. My name is Maria Rosaria Zupo, Commissa’. I am . . . or I was the nurse assigned to the director. Now I have no idea who I’m assigned to.”

  The man in the lab coat spoke up, with a sad smile. His features were sharp, his hair was slicked back, and he had a narrow mustache; he was no longer especially young.

  “Don’t worry, Zupo, we’ll find something for you to do. Buongiorno, Commissario, I’m Dr. Renato Rispoli, the head assistant of the chair of gynecology in this university. I came to work early, it was still dark out, and I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t notice a thing. I came straight in on the ward side.”

  Ricciardi motioned with his head.

  “Do you know who the dead man is?”

  Rispoli turned his melancholy eyes toward the little heap of rags and bones that lay on the ground.

  “Certainly, Commissario. That is, or rather was, Professor Tullio Iovine del Castello, the director of the chair of gynecology.”

  VII

  Ricciardi decided to wait for the medical examiner’s arrival before searching the upper floor and the room from which the professor had presumably fallen. He conferred with Maione, who sent Camarda upstairs to prevent anyone from entering and possibly removing some object or altering the scene. Then the brigadier told the nurses and the custodian they were free to go, since they had already told them everything they knew.

  The photographer arrived and began his dance around the corpse. The gardener, Pollio, observed the bursts of light from the magnesium flash and the rapid replacement of bulbs and plates with the ecstatic fascination of a child in an amusement park. Rispoli told him, kindly: “Pollio, you can get back to work, as long as the commissario says it’s all right.”

  Ricciardi nodded and the man delivered a comical military salute, and left.

  The doctor commented: “They’re good people, Pollio, the custodian, and the nurses. They work with the sick and the dead every day, but Zupo’s right: this is quite another matter.”

  Ricciardi waited long enough to give Rispoli’s observation its due, then asked: “What do you think happened here, Doctor? Did he jump? Was it an accident? Or do you think someone pushed him?”

  “I have no idea, Commissario. We worked together for many years, but we weren’t so close that . . . In other words, I doubt that he’d have confided in me if he’d had any reason to do this kind of thing.”

  “Had you noticed any changes in his personality in the past few days? I don’t know, long silences, moodiness . . . any signs of worry?”

  Rispoli gave the questions some thought. Then he said: “No, Commissario. Nothing comes to mind. Tullio was highly respected, a leading light of his profession. He was in charge of the instructional side of one of the most important academic chairs at a medical school that was itself considered top-flight, both in Italy and worldwide. His publications, the research he supervised, they were landmarks in the medical field. He was a successful man, from every point of view.”

  Ricciardi nodded pensively. He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed on his interlocutor’s face. Behind the man’s back, the shade of the corpse went on murmuring his love, over and over, for some woman named Sisinella.

  “I imagine he had a family.”

  Rispoli nodded with a guilty air, as if he’d only just remembered something important: “Certainly, a wife and a daughter. We’ll have to inform them.”

  “Isn’t it odd that he should have been here so early?”

  The doctor shook his head firmly: “No, Commissario. It was normal for Tullio to stay late, or come in at the crack of dawn. Ours isn’t a nine-to-five profession, there are special cases that demand constant close attention. Women, as you know, are unpredictable by nature: and the same holds true in the medical field. Most likely he never even went home last night, that often happens.”

  Well, he won’t be going home now, thought Ricciardi. The Deed, the horrendous phenomenon that poisoned his existence, was a lurking, cowardly enemy. It forced him down twisting, fruitless paths, chasing some last illusory thought that most of the time had nothing at all to do with whoever had helped the deceased along to his death, nor with the instant in which that death had occurred. Tullio Iovine del Castello’s last thought was one of love. People kill themselves for love, people kill others for love. Or perhaps he’d simply fallen over the windowsill, as he leaned out with a sigh to gaze on the first star of the morning.

  The commissario spoke to Rispoli again: “Please supply Brigadier Maione with all useful information. The professor’s address and other essential particulars, his employment history with the university. We’ll take care of informing the family.”

  After Rispoli was gone, Dr. Modo emerged, out of breath, from the lane. His too-long white hair hung down below his hat, and his loosened tie allowed his shirt collar to flutter freely.

  “Ah, here you are,” he panted, relieved. “This time I really was worried. Are you both all right?”

  Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a baffled glance. The brigadier said: “Buongiorno, Dotto’. Excuse me, why shouldn’t we both be all right?”

  “Because your officers don’t know how to do their job, that’s why! A phone call comes in from the switchboard at police headquarters to the switchboard at the hospital. A nurse comes running to call me just as I walk in, as I’m putting on my lab coat, and she says to me: Dr. Modo, you need to run straight over to the general hospital at the royal university, because Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione are there. They need you right away.”

  Maione confirmed: “That’s exactly right. And where are we, in fact? At the general hospital.”

  Modo stared at him, dumbfounded: “And it doesn’t occur to you that if some poor wretch gets a phone call of that sort he might naturally assume that you’d been involved in, I don’t know, a car crash, for instance? Which might after all be a good thing, because then you’d stop calling me all the time. Then I got here, I asked what ward you were in, and they told me: downstairs in Gynecology. And if I wasn’t wo
rried before, I started worrying then.”

  Ricciardi smirked: “Bruno, you even kid around first thing in the morning, and with this heat. We’re here for work. Just like you.”

  Modo mopped his brow: “I suffer from the heat more than you do. Look at you, natty as always. But of course, I was forgetting, you’re a reptile with ice in your veins, you never sweat. To sweat you have to have blood and a heart to pump it. Not you, you just make me run back and forth at all hours. Well, so what have we here?”

  Maione gestured, as he moved to one side, toward the corpse on the ground. The photographer was done and was putting his equipment away in his bag. The doctor knelt down and began his inspection. Once again, as he watched him work, Ricciardi admired the delicacy and respect with which he performed his examination: as if those poor remains, crumpled on the ground, were still a living body deserving of care.

  Suddenly Modo turned around, visibly shocked: he had turned the corpse’s head so that the face was fully in the light.

  “Why, this is . . . this is Iovine, the director of the ward.”

  Ricciardi nodded: “Yes, that’s what they told us. Did you know him?”

  “Of course I knew him. We’re practically the same age, I think he might have been a year or two older than me.”

  Maione commented, under his breath: “Damn, I would have guessed he was younger.”

  Modo shot him a venomous glance.

  “You worry about yourself, Brigadie’, because that gut of yours is going to send you to an early grave, is what it’s going to do. We went to medical school about the same time, and occasionally we’d run into each other when he’d come in to do some consultation at the hospital where I was working. We’d say hello, no personal relationship. He was a . . . well, let’s just say that he struck me as an ambassador, always standing straight as a board, a bit of a know-it-all. It didn’t make me want to be friends with him, is the truth of the matter. Still, poor guy. What an ugly way to go.”

  He continued his examination for a few more minutes, then he stood up, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. Ricciardi walked over to him.

  “Well, Bruno? What can you tell us?”

  Modo pushed his hat back off his head in a typical gesture, and scratched his forehead.

  “Well, it seems pretty clear. He fell from high up, very high up. I’d guess the top floor, if not the roof. He’s broken to bits, even his spinal column, you can see that his pelvis is out of alignment, in at least one place if not two. He landed on his head, and he died on impact. But there is one thing that puzzles me: one of his fingernails is broken. Surgeons take special care of their hands, and in fact his are very nicely groomed. But he has a broken nail, on the ring finger of his right hand. I’ll have to look more closely, I’ll know after the autopsy, but I’d guess that he tried to grab something. Did he jump, or was he pushed?”

  “We still don’t know anything. I wanted to wait for you before going upstairs to look for evidence, maybe a suicide note or signs of a struggle. Could you tell me, broadly speaking, when it might have happened?”

  Modo slipped both thumbs in the belt loops of his trousers. He looked as if he were making up his mind whether or not to go out for a sail in a boat.

  “Well, it’s hot out. Very hot. And it was hot last night, too. Hard to establish the exact time, but I’d say no later than midnight.”

  “So not this morning?”

  “The hypostatic marks on the stomach don’t lie. It must have happened late at night.”

  Ricciardi wondered how a man could fall out a window onto a lane in a general hospital, fail to go home to sleep, and have nobody notice, either at his place of work or in his family.

  He turned to Modo once again: “Please, Bruno, try to get the autopsy done quickly.”

  The doctor snorted.

  “Well, surprise, surprise, you’re in a hurry. Nothing’s ever leisurely with you and the good old brigadier. Fine, I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

  He turned to go, but Ricciardi called after him.

  “Bruno, one last thing, and this one is personal. Rosa, my tata, you know . . . has been suffering from some health problems for a while now. She forgets things, she tends to drop things.”

  “She drops things? Always with the same hand?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure, but that sounds right.”

  “Does she have dizzy spells?”

  Ricciardi tried to remember.

  “Sometimes she has to sit down. She doesn’t tell me much, she doesn’t want me to worry and she refuses to be seen by a doctor.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She recently turned seventy-two. If sometime when you have a minute, you could come see me, some evening . . . pretend you’re just dropping by for a visit and take a look at her, I’d be grateful. You know that you’re the only one I trust.”

  “And that’s my cross to bear, unfortunately. All right, I’ll let you know the minute I have an evening free. From what you tell me, I’d say that your Rosa has some circulatory problem. Not to be taken lightly, especially at her age. And trying to keep up with you, she must be leading a miserable life, the poor woman. Especially now that you’ve started up with the high-society set . . .”

  Modo was referring to a chance encounter at a movie house, when Ricciardi and Livia had turned around to see him sitting in the row behind them, with an irritating smirk on his lips.

  Embarrassed, the commissario shrugged.

  “What high society are you talking about, I had to keep a promise . . . Let’s just say I lost a bet.”

  “Tell me the name of the gambling den where if you lose a bet they force you to go out with a woman like her, and I’ll go lose my whole salary there. The widow Vezzi gets more and more beautiful, and that night on your arm she was radiant. You were the most envied man in the movie theater, including the actors kissing actresses.”

  Ricciardi cut his friend off.

  “All right, I get it, let’s get back to work. The morgue attendants are on their way, and I’ll have them take the corpse to the hospital; and remember, I’ll expect you to come by sometime to take a look at Rosa.” He turned to Maione: “Come on, Raffaele, let’s go upstairs and take a look around.”

  The brigadier sighed: “At your orders, Commissa’. The doctor certainly has a point: with this belly and in this heat, the ideal thing is to climb four flights of stairs.”

  VIII

  Inside the pavilion there was an unnatural silence. As he climbed the broad steps on his way up to the top floor, Ricciardi guessed that the place must normally be much livelier; but that morning the building seemed deserted. The doors lining the hallways were nearly all closed, and you could barely hear the occasional murmur.

  They crossed paths with a nun carrying a metal container; Maione raised his fingers to his cap and the nun replied by bowing her head, but continued hurrying down the stairs. On the last landing, they found Rispoli waiting for them with the young female nurse, who had finally stopped crying, though her eyes were still red.

  Rispoli said: “Unfortunately the news is starting to get around. When something of this sort happens, people get upset, it’s inevitable. Come this way, please. Allow me to lead the way.”

  They turned down a hallway at the end of which stood a desk and a large closed door. The nurse said: “That’s my desk. I greet people and send them in as soon as it’s their turn.”

  Ricciardi pointed at the door: “That’s the professor’s office, right? Has anyone been in here since you arrived?”

  “No, Commissario. I didn’t even go in. It’s too upsetting. I left last night at ten o’clock and the door was shut, and that’s the way I found it when I came in at six this morning, after I saw . . .”

  She was about to start crying again, but mastered the impulse.

  Ricciardi asked her: “Did you say go
odnight, yesterday, before leaving? Did he speak to you? Did he seem agitated to you, or worried, or . . .”

  “No, he was the same as always. The director . . . wasn’t a man who talked a lot, and understandably he didn’t confide in me. I asked him if he needed me, whether he’d be staying much longer, and he told me: No, Maria Rosaria, you can go. I’m expecting someone. And I left.”

  Maione perked up: “Expecting someone? He didn’t say who?”

  “No. That’s all he said: I’m expecting someone.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “So he had an appointment. After ten o’clock, which is the time when you left, Signorina. Was that normal for him, to receive visitors at such a late hour?”

  Zupo seemed uncomfortable; from time to time she’d shoot a glance at Rispoli, who remained impassive.

  “The director worked very hard, you know. Basically he was always here. So yes, sometimes he’d have someone come in very late. And not just for professional matters, friends would come too. When you stay in the office all day, that happens.”

  “I understand. All right, let’s go in.”

  On the other side of the door was a very spacious room; the most noteworthy piece of furniture was the desk, a veritable mahogany catafalque, elaborately inlaid, a venerable antique that emanated power and prestige from every ounce of its bulk. Behind it stood an office chair with a broad backrest; to afford ease of access to the work surface, the chair stood atop a dais. Sitting in front of the desk were two more chairs; behind them was a bookshelf loaded with volumes that occupied the whole wall. Next to it was an examination table that terminated in a pair of stirrups. Ricciardi, pointing to the equipment, asked the nurse: “Did the director examine patients here?”

  The nurse shrugged: “Not usually, there are rooms in the wards downstairs for that; but sometimes, if he wanted to get a quick impression, yes, he might.”

  Facing the desk, against the wall with the office door, were a sofa and two small armchairs and a coffee table. On the remaining wall was the window.