Blood Curse Read online

  When they arrived at the front door, the men came to a halt and silence fell over the crowd. Ricciardi looked around to see if anyone had something to say, some preliminary piece of information they cared to volunteer. More silence. Men, women, children: all stood mute. No one lowered their gaze, no one whispered. Heads uncovered, hats in hand; in their eyes, astonishment, curiosity, wonder, even irony—but no fear.

  Ricciardi recognized his age-old enemy, the established authority in this quarter, an alternative to the one he himself represented. These people did not acknowledge his authority over them: they wouldn’t hinder his investigation, but neither would they lift a finger to help him. They simply wanted him out of there, the sooner the better, so that they could go back to their own business, or to mourning their dead.

  From upstairs came a prolonged lament; possibly a woman’s voice. Ricciardi spoke, continuing to stare straight into the eyes of the people at the front of the crowd.

  “Maione, have the officers keep watch at the front door. You come with me. If anyone has something to report, make sure that we get their name: we’ll interview them at headquarters.”

  His words prompted no reaction from the crowd. An old man shuffled along with a slight rustling sound. A small child babbled in its mother’s arms. In the middle of the small piazza, several doves flapped into the air.

  Ricciardi turned, walked through the front entrance hall, and started up the stairs.

  XIII

  Step after step, the acid smell of urine and excrement blended with the sharp odor of garlic, onion, sweat.

  Even before the advent of the Deed, Ricciardi had been made aware of another curse visited upon him: the damned odors. Sometimes they stunned him and other times they distracted him; they tangled up his thoughts the same way that the wind tousled the disobedient shock of hair he was constantly brushing away from his furrowed brow. Issuing from the dark corners of the uneven stairs he could feel unfamiliar eyes watching him. Though he couldn’t quite see them, he sensed them, and he sensed their unfriendly curiosity. Behind him came Maione’s heavy footfalls, confident and protective; Ricciardi considered the brigadier to be something of a human notebook, on which the images and words that they encountered in their investigation would remain impressed. All he needed to do later was leaf through Maione’s memory to pull up sensations, voices, and facial expressions.

  When they got to the third floor, they found an enormous woman standing in front of a half-open door, her greasy hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, her face flushed, her hands clutched together beneath her breasts, her fingers interlocked so tightly that her knuckles were white. She seemed accustomed to dealing with emergencies, but not the situation that had just befallen her. It was Maione who addressed her.

  “And you are?”

  “Nunzia Petrone, the building’s porter. I’m the one who found her.”

  Not a trace of pride, awkwardness, or fear. A simple statement.

  From inside, a ray of morning light cut like a blade through the dark shadows of the landing and Ricciardi clearly heard the lament that had already reached his ears down in the street a few minutes earlier.

  “Who’s in there?”

  “Just my daughter, Antonietta. She’s impaired.”

  That was all she said, as if that explained everything. Maione glanced over at Ricciardi, who nodded without meeting his gaze. Behind them, the usual small crowd had gathered, silently. Their necks craned upward, eyes darting to capture details worth recounting, to be exaggerated if necessary. The choke point of the staircase funneled the crowd into a line.

  “Cesarano!” Maione bellowed. “What did I tell you? No one is to be allowed upstairs!”

  The police officer’s response echoed from the street below.

  “And nobody went up, Brigadie’!”

  “They’re people who live in the building,” the porter cut in.

  “There’s nothing to see here. Everyone go back to your apartments.”

  Nobody moved. The people at the front of the crowd looked away in a show of innocence.

  “Fine, fine, I see how it is; Camarda, please take down the names of the signori and signore, so we know who to call down to headquarters for a chat.”

  He hadn’t even finished reciting the magic spell before the crowd had dispersed. The sound of slamming doors boomed in the stairwell and the landing was empty again, with the exception of Nunzia the porter.

  Maione turned to Ricciardi.

  “Commissa’, should I bring out the signora’s daughter?”

  *

  The old, well-established procedure: Ricciardi goes in alone for the initial inspection, to relive the scene of the crime. Then Maione enters, making observations with a policeman’s eye: the first survey, the position of the body, the condition of the windows and doors. Then witnesses are tracked down and questioned. Last of all, the magistrate is summoned, a decision is made about whether the revolting mess can be cleaned up, and everyone heads back to headquarters, to begin the hunt.

  “No, let her stay. I’ll go in.”

  Life is full of surprises, Maione thought to himself. He said yessir and stood aside to let his superior officer by.

  Ricciardi pushed the door shut behind him. A small foyer, a coat rack with a hat shelf and a small bench, all hardwood: a piece of furniture that you’d hardly expect to see in a hovel apartment in the Sanità. The moan came from the only door that seemed to lead into a lighted room. Two steps forward: a small dining room.

  A sofa and an armchair, upholstered in sky-blue satin with gold thread filigree, the seat cushions worn bare, small pieces of embroidered cloth draped over the place where one’s head would go. A round table, three chairs—one in very poor repair—a carpet. He noticed a hole worn into the weave, at the farthest corner from the point of view of someone entering the room. Perennial anguish, pure pain. Garlic, urine: a place inhabited by the elderly. Daylight, blindingly bright, pouring in from the wide-open French doors leading to the balcony: not a single building blocking the view. A breeze stirred the curtain but did nothing to dissipate the smells. Too bad about that, thought Ricciardi.

  The sickly sweet aftertaste: death was calling for attention.

  A large fly was diving obstinately against the windowpane. Another step forward: now he could see what the armchair had been concealing. Crouched down on the floor behind the armchair, almost invisible to the eye, a girl was rocking back and forth, emitting a song that consisted of a single note. One or perhaps two yards farther on, just outside the shaft of sunlight that poured in from the balcony and near the fourth, overturned chair, there was a bundle of rags in a dark puddle, now almost dry, which extended from the black-and-white floor tiles to the edge of the carpet. The girl wasn’t looking at the bundle; she was looking at the other corner of the room.

  Ricciardi turned to look in the same direction. And he saw.

  XIV

  Ricciardi and the girl were both looking at the old woman. Not at the corpse; that was a dirty, abandoned thing, like the carpet on which it lay. They observed the image, erect in the shadowy corner, vivid in the colors of her last passion.

  The commissario wasn’t surprised. He’d understood right away that the girl had second sight.

  It was a paradox: Ricciardi wasn’t afraid of the dead; he was afraid of the Deed and those who had it inside them. Including himself.

  Now he was watching the girl as she squatted on the floor: she was rocking back and forth rhythmically, moaning. Her eyes were focused, as if she saw something. Her brow was furrowed, as if she didn’t understand. She was looking at death, not at a dead person. And she was crying, possibly in sorrow, or else in horror.

  He focused his own attention on the image of the woman. She was like so many others, the kind of woman you’d see at the market, weighed down by years and suffering. A cotton print dress, the same outfit in summer and winter, a stained shawl. Diminutive, her hands twisted with arthritis, hunched over. Swollen legs,
red with varicose veins, blue with bruises.

  It was immediately obvious to Ricciardi that the murderer had beaten her to death. A red-hot fury, rather than a cold and calculated violence: a blind, stupid rage. The way her neck bent was unnatural, due to her shattered vertebrae; a profound hollow in her skull, on the right side, her eye crushed, the cheekbone staved in, the ear torn to shreds. A succession of blows, possibly from a club.

  The other side of her body also seemed to be crushed in. Ricciardi glanced at the bundle of rags and saw what he had expected: she was lying on her right side. The murderer had taken out his rage on her corpse, perhaps by kicking it repeatedly. That would also explain the extent of the bloodstain across the floor, a trail nearly a yard long. We have a center forward on our hands, he thought. A talented soccer player.

  He concentrated, blocking out the girl’s whining lament and the sounds of movement and conversation coming from outside the door. The one intact eye had an almost sweet, tender expression: probably a cataract, a translucent, light-blue film. He cocked his head slightly to one side, to listen more carefully.

  He didn’t hear the surprise that almost always accompanied sudden death. He didn’t hear violent hatred, blind rage, or the wrath of privation. He didn’t hear the ripping of one being wrested away. What he heard, instead, was melancholy. And a certain obscene tenderness, a hint of pride. The faint, scratchy whisper from the old broken neck: “’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.

  They stayed that way without moving for another minute: an odd little family, bound together by death, pain, and grief. The girl, with her singsong lullaby and her furrowed brow, a trickle of drool sliding out of the corner of her mouth. The man standing motionless, as if made of wax, just inside the dining room door, hands stuck in the pockets of his unbuttoned overcoat, his head tilted at a slight angle, a shock of hair cutting across his bare forehead. The ghost of the old woman with the broken neck, gazing at the consummated death with unusual emotion, repeating with a faint sigh an age-old proverb in dialect.

  What finally broke the black enchantment that had made time stand still, slamming shut the gates of hell, was the large, stubborn fly, as it had one final and definitive collision with the balcony window, thus becoming the second corpse in the room.

  XV

  Teresa was dusting in one of the parlors. She asked herself why it was her daily duty to clean what was already clean, to tidy up what was already tidy, and why that enormous, perpetually closed-off palazzo should have so many drawing rooms and parlors when there were never any guests.

  It seemed like the house of the dead; her employers lived their lives elsewhere, outside of it, and then came home to immerse themselves in the silence of the dark rooms and the lightless silver, as unlikely to glitter as if it were buried in a tomb.

  The signora had returned from her long night out at about nine in the morning. Teresa had crossed paths with her in the hallway and whispered a buongiorno that went unheeded, as it always did; the dead can’t hear. All the same, in that fleeting instant Teresa had noticed something different: the faint smile that had brightened her lovely features for the past month had disappeared from her face. This time, her expression was one of grief, loss, and resignation. She dragged her feet, her eyes empty, the tracks of tears discernible in her makeup.

  She hadn’t spoken a word to her; she hadn’t asked Teresa about her husband, as she sometimes did. Teresa was relieved. She wasn’t sure that she could have lied, as the professor had ordered her to do, to say that she hadn’t seen him since the night before. Fortunately, Signora Emma had walked right past her without seeing her, as though she were in another dimension. Like a ghost.

  Leaving a police officer to guard the door, Maione had responded to Ricciardi’s call and was now searching the apartment with his superior officer. They had a good half hour before they the magistrate and the medical examiner they had summoned would show up.

  Not that there was all that much to see. The victim, whose name was Carmela Calise, lived alone; she was unmarried, had no children, no known relatives. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, and the lavatory on the landing, which was shared with three other families. Aside from the dining room where she had died, there was a bedroom with a squalid lining of bright floral wallpaper, from which emanated a strong odor of fresh paste. Maione thought to himself that if they hadn’t killed her, the old woman would surely have died that very same night, asphyxiated in her sleep.

  There were only a few simple pieces of furniture: the narrow bed pushed up against the wall, a crucifix, a chest of drawers, atop which stood a statuette of the Madonna with a crown of gilded plaster on her head and a rosary around her neck, a portrait of a man and a woman from bygone times, and a small flickering candle. Perhaps those were the parents, or perhaps a brother and his wife: memories now lost forever. A chair. A bedside rug on the gray-and-black checkerboard floor. They went back to the dining room where the expressionless porter woman was bent over her daughter, stroking her hair. The girl went on singing her lullaby, rocking back and forth, never taking her eyes off what only she and Ricciardi could see in the dark corner. Mechanically, the commissario followed her gaze.

  “’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato,” repeated the image with the broken neck and croaking voice. God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. The curtain stirred slightly in the breeze. From the street came the shouts of children playing.

  Maione spoke to Nunzia.

  “So then, you’re the one who found her.”

  The woman looked up from her daughter, straightened up, and gave the commissario a look of fierce pride.

  “Yes, that’s what I told you before.”

  “So tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Every morning, when she wakes up, I bring Antonietta up here to spend the day with Donna Carmela. She’s the only child that she keeps; she says that she keeps her company and isn’t any trouble at all. Antonietta stays close to her and watches her work, and now and then Donna Carmela gives her a cookie or something else to eat. It makes me happy to know she’s here, I got so much work to do. There’s a whole apartment building to run. You have no idea how much work it is. I’m alone. My husband . . . in the war, he went north and never came home. The little girl was only one year old.”

  “So this morning you brought the girl here.”

  “Yes, it was nine thirty. I know because I’d finished up with the stairs and the landings and I hadn’t started cooking yet. Before I went down to the pushcart to get some vegetables for the broth I wanted to make sure that my girl wouldn’t be afraid to be left alone.”

  “So, you knocked on the door . . .”

  “Who said I knocked? Donna Carmela’s door was already open. She opens it first thing in the morning, when she comes home from seven o’clock Mass, and that’s how she leaves it. This whole palazzo is one big family. We all know each other. There’re no locked doors here. It’s all safe as safe can be.”

  Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a quick glance, to highlight the unmistakable contradiction between the presence of that bundle and the trail of blood on the floor and the porter woman’s claim.

  Nunzia saw it too, and turned as red in the face as if they’d just insulted her.

  “The miserable coward who did this isn’t from the neighborhood. Take it from me, that way you’ll save yourselves a lot of pointless work. Much less from this building. Donna Carmela was a saint, a genuine saint, and everyone loved her. She gave everyone a hand, she helped everyone. Damnation and eternal suffering be visited on the swine who did this.”

  Teeth clenched, almost in a hiss: the hatred poured out of the woman’s mouth like a spurt of bile. Maione and Ricciardi, if only mentally, instinctively struck the woman off the list of suspects.

  The brigadier proceeded with his questioning.

  “So you went in.”

  “That’s right, I wante
d to say good morning to her and tell her I was leaving the girl. And what I found was this . . . this thing, on the floor. This act of slaughter, this disgrace.”

  “When was the last time that you saw her alive?”

  “Late last night, it must have been ten o’clock. We went up, me and my daughter. We closed all the windows, put out the coal fire in the kitchen. It’s what we do every night.”

  “And how did the signora seem to you? Nervous, worried . . . ? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing. She said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ I went downstairs, and Antonietta came down about an hour later. That’s all I know.”

  “Do you know whether the signora had had any, I don’t know, any disagreements or disputes with anyone, any friction, as of late? Maybe she complained about something, or you overheard fighting . . .”

  “No—what’re you talking about? I told you once and I’ll say it again, Donna Carmela was a saint and everyone loved her. No one would have dared. Not to mention she had gnarled hands and was very weak. She had that disease old people get . . .”

  “Arthritis?”

  “Yessir, that’s exactly it. She got these pains. We could hear her moaning in her sleep in the summer, through the open window. Well, she’s done suffering now,” she said, looking down at the bundle of rags.