Blood Curse Read online

  “Don’t move, stay right here, Signo’. Did you see anyone leave?”

  Donna Vincenza, still overwrought, shook her head no. On the second story a shutter swung open and slammed hard against the wall, and an elderly man stuck out his head.

  “Vince’, what’s going on? Have you lost your mind, screaming like that so early in the morning? Who’s down there . . .”

  Maione raised his hand in one sharp movement and the man fell silent at the sight of him. His reaction was so prompt in fact that he closed the shutters on his fingers; this was followed by a muffled howl of pain, and then finally by the sound of bolts shooting home. The brigadier detected a flash of satisfaction in the old woman’s eyes. That must have been her husband.

  He stepped onto the threshold and waited a second for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He began to make out the outlines of things: a bed, a sleeping loft, an armoire, a table. Two chairs. One was empty; the other wasn’t. Silence. A noise, or rather, something dripping, slowly. He took another step, and was able to distinguish the profile of the person who occupied the chair. A woman sat there bolt upright, motionless, facing the wall. Something about her posture made the hairs on his back stand on end. Absurdly, he asked: “May I come in?”

  Slowly, the face turned toward him, entering the narrow blade of light that filtered in through the half-open door. He glimpsed a long, white neck, locks of hair as black as night. Temple, ear, forehead, a perfect nose. An eye, calm, steady, not a flutter of the long lashes. Even in the dim half-light, to the unsettling metronome of falling drops, Maione could see that this was no ordinary beauty. The profile was transformed into the full vision of a face caught in the morning light. Maione was breathless. When the woman had completed her movement, the brigadier saw what Donna Vincenza had seen just a few minutes earlier.

  Filomena had been disfigured by a broad slash, running from her temple to her chin, across the right side of her face.

  Another drop of blood fell from the wound onto the red-stained floor.

  Maione let out the breath he’d long been holding, and along with it, a moan.

  Teresa had gotten up early that morning: it was a habit that she had maintained from when she lived in the countryside, before she came to work as a servant in the city. She had often thought about going to see her father and her numerous siblings, who still lived in the single large room that was so icy in the winter and hot in the summer, and which still haunted her dreams. But then laziness won out, along with the faint fear that something or someone might keep her there, making her as poor and miserable as she has been before.

  In order to placate her conscience, therefore, she sent money to her family now and then through a farmer who brought a load of vegetables into the city once a week. She told him to send them her greetings and tell them she was doing well. For the time being, she held tightly on to her job in the distinguished palazzo in Via Santa Lucia, down by the waterfront, in the midst of elegant carriages, fine clothing, and even automobiles, which she could see driving by from the balcony.

  It was a good job. There were no children or elderly people to look after, many of the palazzo’s fifteen bedrooms remained unused and closed off, and she herself, who was theoretically responsible for keeping them clean, entered them no more than twice a year. Moreover, Teresa enjoyed living in close contact with the gentry, watching the life they led. She wondered how it was possible to own all those fine things and not be happy. And yet it was very clear, even to her naïve eyes, that her employers lived in a constant state of misery.

  The signora was much younger than the professor. She was remarkably beautiful, and she reminded Teresa of the Madonna dell’Arco with her jewelry, her dresses, her shoes; and, like the Madonna, she always had a look of sorrow on her face, sad eyes that stared off into the void. Teresa remembered a woman back home in her village who had lost a son to a fever: she had the same eyes as the signora.

  The professor was never home, and when he was, he didn’t say a word; he just sat and read. Teresa was afraid to look at him. He intimidated her with his white hair, tall man that he was, invariably elegant in the stiff collars that she starched for him, his golden cufflinks, his spats, his monocle on a fine gold chain. She’d never heard him speak to his wife. They seemed like strangers; once, she thought she’d overheard them quarreling as she was walking into the green parlor to bring them their coffee, but who could say, it might just have been the radio. They came together for meals, but he read at the table and she would stare into space. Occasionally, in the early hours of the morning, she’d seen the signora come home after spending the whole night out.

  That morning she was doing the laundry. It was still early, and off in the distance the fishermen were hauling their boats onto the beach, shouting loudly one to another. It must have been six, perhaps even earlier. Suddenly, the professor appeared before her, in a state of disarray unlike anything she’d ever seen before: his hair was tousled, his collar was unbuttoned, and there was a shadow of whiskers on his normally impeccably clean-shaven cheeks. His staring eyes rolled frantically, and his monocle dangled from the breast pocket of his jacket like a broken pendant necklace. At this hour he should have still been asleep in his bedroom; he was never up before eight o’clock.

  He walked up to her, grabbed her by the arm, and gripped it tightly.

  “My wife. My wife. Has my wife come home?”

  She shook her head, but the man did not release his grip.

  “Listen to me, pay attention to what I’m telling you, what’s your name, Teresa, right? All right, then, Teresa: my wife will be home before long. You mustn’t say a word, you understand? You keep your mouth shut. I came home last night and you haven’t seen me since. Understood? Keep your mouth shut!”

  She nodded her head yes. She’d have done anything to get her arm free of that man’s grip, that man who looked like a demon out of hell. A fisherman was singing; the slow morning waves murmured gently.

  Still staring at her, the man let her go and, walking backward, exited the laundry room. Teresa’s heart was pounding in her ears. The professor had vanished: perhaps she’d been dreaming; perhaps she’d never seen him. A powerful shiver ran through her body, and she lowered her eyes.

  On the floor she saw the footprint left by the professor’s shoe; it was black, as if from mud, or blood.

  XI

  Maione emerged from the basso door, holding the woman up, pressing his handkerchief, already sopping with blood, against her ravaged face. In less than a minute the usual crowd had gathered, the kind that the poorer quarters of the city bestow upon every event, be it a stroke of good fortune or a catastrophe. When it was the former, one always sensed envy in the air; when it was the latter—a far more common occurrence—there would be a sense of having dodged that bullet, and of chilly commiseration.

  This time, however, Maione read in the eyes of the women lining the little piazza a vein of hostility, throbbing more powerfully than the awful wound he could feel through his handkerchief. The person he’d hauled out of the darkness was certainly not beloved by the quarter. The brigadier looked around him.

  “Serves you right, whore!” he heard someone hiss behind him. He turned around, but he couldn’t say which cruel mouth had uttered those words. The woman’s eyes were stunned and glassy, as if she’d gone blind.

  “What’s your name?” Maione asked, but she didn’t respond.

  “Filomena’s her name,” the old woman he’d first met, the one who had screamed, replied on her behalf.

  “Filomena what?” Maione asked her, giving her a hard cold stare. Her hostility and indifference were unmistakable.

  “Filomena Russo, I think.”

  Had there been time, Maione would have smiled bitterly. In a place where people knew everything about each other, down to the number of hairs on their neighbor’s ass, that “I think” sounded just as ridiculous as a toy horn at the Festa di Piedigrotta.

  “Are any of the signora’s friends here? Anyone
who would be willing to see her to the hospital?”

  Silence. A few of the women standing closest even took a step back. With a look of disgust, Maione pushed through the crowd and walked briskly in the direction of Piazza Carità, toward Pellegrini Hospital. But not before committing to memory several faces, the half-open door, the blood-smeared partial footprint.

  Already gathered in front of the hospital was the usual crowd of fake invalids, those who tried to gain admission by playing on the sympathies of doctors, nurses, and attendants, all for a warm room and perhaps even a bite to eat before being sent back out onto the street. Maione, with his hand wrapped around Filomena’s shoulder and his handkerchief over her face, pushed through the crowd with great determination, making his way toward the main entrance. Outside, the Pignasecca market was teeming with life and the air was full of the shouting of vendors competing for business.

  The brigadier had tossed his overcoat around the woman’s shoulders; she hadn’t spoken a word along the way, nor had she moaned or complained. A couple of times she had winced, when the uneven ground had made Maione press her face a little harder. The pain must have been atrocious. He wondered who could have done such a horrible thing to such a lovely woman; and what motive there could be for her neighbors’ hatred, in a place where one usually found solidarity and consolation.

  The wound was on the side of the face that Maione was covering, so that one or two peddlers from the market snickered when they recognized him, Look, look, the brigadier with the girlfriend. He ignored them; he was starting to worry about all the blood the woman had lost. As he walked into the hospital lobby, he called out to the porter.

  “Is Doctor Modo on duty?”

  “Yes, Brigadie’. His shift is over in an hour. He’s been here all night.”

  “Call him immediately. There’s not a second to waste.”

  Doctor Bruno Modo was a surgeon and a medical examiner. He had trained as a military officer in the north, but as far as he was concerned, it was nothing compared to what he’d seen after that, when he witnessed the things people were capable of doing to each other without the justification of war. That is, granted that war is, in fact, any justification, he thought to himself with a hint of bitterness. It astonished him that he had failed to become jaded, that he still felt on his own skin the pain of the wounds he saw, the gushing blood of the miserable people who passed through his hands from morning till night. And he had failed to make a family of his own; it took too much courage to send a child out into this world. Thus as far as women were concerned, he found what he needed in one corner or another of the ravenously hungry city, then he paid and returned home content.

  He watched the fascist era unfold from a distance, unwilling to tolerate a new power with such violent inclinations. He was unable to accept the idea of doing evil in the name of a greater good, and made no bones about making his opinions known. This had isolated him, depriving him of a social life and of the career that he would have otherwise deserved. But he had earned the respect of the people he worked with, and Ricciardi for one would never have accepted a murder case unless Doctor Modo’s skilled hands had interrogated the victim’s wounds.

  That’s why Maione sought him out, and why the doctor, in spite of having spent a grueling night stitching up heads cracked open in a drunken brawl, promptly forgot his exhaustion.

  “Brigadier, what fair wind brings you my way, so early in the morning? Your boss with you?”

  “No, Dotto’, just me. While I was heading to headquarters I found this . . . this poor thing here.”

  Modo had already uncovered Filomena’s face, turning it toward the light. She had obediently lifted her head from the policeman’s shoulder without complaint.

  “Madonna . . . who on earth could do such a thing . . . what a pity! Okay, Maione. Bring her into my examination room and I’ll see what I can do. Thank you.”

  “No, thank you, Dotto’. Please, do me a favor: don’t let the signora leave. I want to find out who was behind this. I’ll be back later today.”

  Neither man failed to notice a flash in Filomena’s eyes. What was it? Fear, anger. But also a hint of pride.

  XII

  By mid-morning, little by little as the southern wind grew stronger, a vague perfume began to spread; or rather, more than a perfume, it was an aftertaste, a sensation. It contained almond blossoms and peach buds, new grass, and sea foam from distant cliffs.

  No one seemed to notice it, not yet, but some suddenly discovered that their blouse collar was loosened, their shirt cuffs were unbuttoned, or their cap was pushed back to the nape of their neck. And a faint sense of cheerfulness, like when one expects something good to happen but doesn’t know what, or when something nice, however small, has happened to someone else: everyone’s happy, though no one can say exactly why.

  It was the spring: it danced on tiptoe; it pirouetted daintily, still young, full of joy, not yet aware of what it would bring, but eager to mix things up a bit. Without any ulterior motives; just for the fun of shuffling the cards.

  And stirring people’s blood.

  Ricciardi looked up from his desk to regain a sense of reality. The murder of a tenor at the San Carlo opera house, a case he’d investigated the month before, had left him a bequest of miles of ink scrawled over acres of paper, in yellow and white triplicate, the same words and phrases repeated endlessly. He suspected that someone, somewhere, either upstairs or in Rome, was checking to see whether he would slip up and contradict himself. It was like being back in school again.

  He glanced at his wristwatch and saw to his surprise that it had gotten to be mid-morning, already ten thirty, without his realizing it.

  Focusing on particulars now, he realized that there was something missing from the monotonous cadence of his morning, and that was why he hadn’t noticed the time. Maione. The brigadier with the awful ersatz coffee that he forced on him every morning at nine o’clock, marking the beginning of his day; what had become of Maione?

  Before he could even complete the thought, he heard two hasty raps at the door.

  “Avanti!”

  The doorway was filled with the shape of a brigadier giving a loose military salute, with a somewhat frantic demeanor and an unmistakable bloodstain on his jacket’s epaulette.

  “Hey there, Maione. Good to see you. What on earth have you been up to this morning? And what’s that stain? Are you hurt?”

  Ricciardi had risen suddenly to his feet, causing his pen to roll across the form on the desk in front of him. His expression betrayed concern, and Maione felt a surge of pride and fondness; it wasn’t every day that one detected a hint of emotion in his superior’s eyes, as he knew very well.

  “No, no, it’s nothing, Commissa’. I just helped out a woman who . . . had an accident. I took her to the hospital. I’m sorry I’m late, please forgive me. You haven’t had your ersatz coffee.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s nothing going on here. Everything’s fine; the city was safe even without you, as Mascellone would put it.” Mascellone—a jocular reference to Il Duce, or “Thunder Jaw,” as Ricciardi liked to think of him.

  “I’ll go make it for you right away, then; that’ll give me a chance to get cleaned up a little, too. By your leave.”

  As soon as he’d left the room, Ricciardi bent over to resume writing; but the form was destined to remain uncompleted, at least for that day. A mere instant later, in fact, the officer who guarded the entrance appeared at his door to inform the commissario that a body had been found in the Sanità quarter.

  The mobile squad of the Royal Police Headquarters of Naples was mobile in name only. Ricciardi had always appreciated the irony of the unit’s official title, accompanied as it was by the chronic shortage of working vehicles at its disposal.

  Truth be told, they possessed not one but two automobiles: an old Fiat 501 from 1919 and a gleaming, almost new 509 A from 1927. He had personally laid eyes on them no more than twice, in his four years on the job. The former was alw
ays in for repairs, while the latter was assigned, along with its driver, to the crucial and urgent duty of accompanying the police chief’s wife and daughter on their shopping trips.

  And so, whenever something happened in a far-flung quarter of the city, as it just had, the squad became mobile on its own regulation boot-shod feet.

  Ricciardi was among those who believed in the importance of a timely arrival. He knew well how much damage one or more rubberneckers could do to a crime scene, the delays that could be caused by people’s desire to be eyewitnesses, to have something horrible to give an account of. Shoe prints, objects moved from one place to another, windows closed that had been open, or opened if they had been closed, and doors left wide open.

  Thus, if there was one thing the commissario hated, it was to be the last one on the scene of the unfortunate event. Having to elbow his way through the crowd, being forced to answer a stream of pointless questions, dealing with wailing family members: all things that tended to double or triple in number if it was a poor neighborhood, and he knew, as one who lived on the border of the Sanità quarter, that it was a poor neighborhood par excellence. As he strode up the Via Toledo at the head of his squad, with Maione out of breath a step behind him and the two police officers bringing up the rear of the little procession, Ricciardi decided that every minute that passed was a minute wasted, and he picked up the pace, taking the same route he took every night on his way home from work. But this time, it wasn’t dinner and a brightly lit window across the way that awaited him.

  Once they were within sight of the little piazza above Materdei, it became clear to him that there would be no need to ask directions; all he’d have to do was follow the excited children who were running in the same direction. The spectacle must be more or less like it was in the jungle, as described in the books of Emilio Salgari, Italy’s Kipling, with the hyenas and vultures guided by the scent of blood. The crowd swelled in front of a small apartment building. Maione and the two officers formed a human wedge, clearing a path for Ricciardi; though all they really needed to do was raise their voices and the crowd would have scattered. People in this part of town were none too eager to come into contact with the police, even incidentally.