By My Hand (29 page)

Once they reached the bedroom, at the sight of the large black stain on the sheets, Ferro let himself drop down into a chair with a faint lament.

“Oh, Madonna. Holy Virgin Mary, help us all.”

Ricciardi turned his back on the image of Garofalo repeating:
I don't owe a thing, not a thing
, and spoke to the doorman.

“I wanted you to see it with your own two eyes, Ferro. And now I'm going to ask you whether you have any idea, any idea at all, as to who could have done this.”

The doorman began to weep, softly. He murmured, as he stared at the bloodstain:

“No idea, Commissa'. If I knew anyone who could do this kind of thing, I'd run away from them as fast and as far as I could, believe you me. And that poor little girl, she was so pretty the other day, with her braids . . . and now she'll never see her mamma and papà again as long as she lives. Centurion Garofalo was . . . well, he had a very particular personality, God rest his soul. Maybe not everyone loved him, maybe he could make you angry sometimes, but to kill him like that . . . No one, Commissa'. No one on earth would be capable of it.”

But in fact, evidently, someone on earth had been capable of it, Ricciardi thought.

“Let's take a little walk through the other rooms. That way we can see if they took anything that you remembered but that we couldn't know about.”

The point of this was to see whether the man's reaction betrayed anything. They'd checked everything during the first on-site investigation, and if anything were missing, they'd be able to tell from the empty space on the item of furniture or on the walls.

Ferro seemed relieved to be getting away from the scene of the murders, and he led Maione and Ricciardi through the other rooms in silence, walking robotically. When they walked past the nativity scene in the room next to the bedroom he sighed, but he didn't seem to notice Saint Joseph's absence, or the figurine of the Virgin tipped over against that of the ass.

They finished their tour of the apartment and met up back at the front door. The doorman held his breath at the sight of the marks left behind by the woman's corpse, stepped over them, and walked out onto the landing where he loudly inhaled a chestful of air. He pulled a crumpled cigarette out of his pocket; he tried to light it with a match but couldn't because his hand was trembling too violently. And so he gave up, and finally vomited in a corner of the staircase.

T
hey decided to take the waterfront route. It wasn't any colder there, and there was no wind blowing that the trees in the Villa Nazionale might help to break; they might as well enjoy the sight of the sea, finally placid, embracing the falling darkness.

Ferro's reaction and the few additional bits of information they'd gathered during their interview with the doorman were the subjects of the sporadic phrases that Maione and Ricciardi exchanged along the way.

“Commissa', as far as I could tell, he was truly upset. He really couldn't handle it; you could see he wasn't used to the sight of blood.”

Ricciardi, on the other hand, had some misgivings.

“His reaction seemed a little theatrical, don't you think? And besides, today he was stone-cold sober; the things that happen to you when you're drunk seem different when you revisit them after sobering up. I don't know. But when he walked past the manger scene, he didn't even change his expression.”

“That's right. And he admitted that he'd seen the Boccias when they came to talk with Garofalo. For the moment, that's the one sure thing we have, eh, Commissa'?”

Ricciardi nodded, walking along with his head down.

“True, the visit from the Boccias. And they're a couple, so that would provide an explanation for the two different hands that killed the centurion, except for the fact that the ‘light' hand, the one that inflicted the shallower wounds, was a left hand, according to Modo, and it looked to me like Signora Boccia was right-handed. But that doesn't necessarily rule her out. And Lomunno could have had an accomplice.”

Maione agreed:

“And our friend the doorman, here, could have done something stupid when he was drunk that he can't even remember now. It could mean everything and it could mean nothing.
Mamma mia
, there are times when I get really sick and tired of this job.”

They skirted the beach, with the sea on their right and the road with cars and carriages moving past on their left. The pedestrians were few and far between, and the ones they saw walked hunched over from the cold.

The fishermen who had no fishing boats of their own had gathered in small knots on the sand. It was the time of day when they brought in their nets. This time of year, it was an operation that had to be done twice daily.

Small one-oared dinghies headed out some six hundred feet from shore, leaving one end of the nets onshore and tossing out the large swathes of mesh, which the women repaired early in the morning and at night, stitching up the rips made by the currents. Once the nets had been cast, the dinghies returned to shore, unrolling their cables on the sidewalk that ran along the beach. At this point the men, barefoot and with their trousers rolled up to their knees, hooked the cables of the nets to a canvas shoulder strap and, in groups of four or five per side, began hauling first on the cable and then on the net, walking back into the area reserved for strollers and then advancing gradually as the net came in to shore, bringing with it the hope of another day of survival for all the men's families. As they hauled in, the children would wrap up the cables around large spools on the beach.

At other times of the year, when demand was lower than at Christmas, this grueling task was performed only in the mornings; but now a crowd of potential customers in search of affordable fish—which they knew they could get here because there was no markup for wholesalers and retailers—was waiting on the street, so the additional effort was likely to be worth it.

Maione, slowing his pace, turned toward Ricciardi.

“They certainly put in a hard day's work, these fishermen. And these are the ones who fish off the beach. Look at that, Commissa', as cold as it is, they're barefoot in the water; their legs are black from the chill.”

“Yes, it's tough for them,” Ricciardi agreed. “But even the ones who go out on the water, like Boccia—you've seen what a hellish life they lead. And then someone like Garofalo comes along and eats you alive, and suddenly you can't even make ends meet.”

They'd come even with the
borgo
, in the shadow of the dark and imposing castle. Ricciardi nodded his head in Maione's direction.

“This is where we split up. You see what you can find out from Boccia's fellow fishermen, who at this time of day are probably returning from their day out on the water. I'll go down to the port and ask around about how Lomunno spent his morning on the day of the murder. But you go directly home once you're done; there's no point in dropping by police headquarters again. If we come up with anything new, we can write our reports tomorrow.”

Maione nodded.

“At your orders, Commissa'. Tomorrow's already the day before Christmas Eve. Christmas is upon us.”

“Yes, the holidays are here. And I'm afraid we haven't accomplished much so far. Good luck.”

 

Christmas is upon us.

That thought prompted the usual mix of feelings in Tata Rosa: anxiety about the things she still had to get done around the house, anticipation for the festivities, worry about the year that was coming to an end and the year that was about to arrive in just a matter of days.

She needed to prepare for the Christmas Eve supper, of course; even if it was only the two of them, she was determined to see that the traditions of her homeland be respected. Let some memory of their roots survive, at least, in that higgledy-piggledy city that she would never become entirely used to.

Getting everything taken care of would be no simple matter; the Christmas traditions followed in the Cilento region were fairly strict. On Christmas Eve, the menu was rigorously meatless:
scàmmaro
, homemade spaghetti served with anchovies, olives, capers, and red chili peppers; cauliflower, potatoes, and broccoli as side dishes; and
baccalà alla salernitana
, stockfish breaded, fried, and baked under a cascade of white onions, cherry tomatoes that had been hanging on the balcony for months just waiting for the day, and green olives.

Christmas dinner was quite another matter: for that meal they made fusilli, rolling them out one by one around a square umbrella rod, and then dressed them with a dense meat sauce and covered them with grated aged goat cheese; next, veal flank in broth; and then
scauratielli
, funnel cakes fried in boiling oil, in the shape of little intertwined snakes, which would then be drizzled with honey and eaten on the spot.

It was hard but gratifying work. If things went as well as she hoped with the Colombo girl, she'd be able to teach her every last detail, so that the memory of those things wouldn't be lost in that family.

Food wasn't the only thing, though. Christmas was significant for other reasons. The young baroness, Luigi Alfredo's mother, who'd been dead for many years now, had brought with her from the city a nativity scene; it had once belonged to her family, and included a small set of very old statuettes: the Holy Family, the Three Kings, a few sheep, and a couple of shepherds. Rosa remembered the baroness clearly, the way she would arrange the figurines with her slender, childlike hands on a table a few days before Christmas and then remove them after Epiphany, carefully putting them away in a flowered box. It was an important tradition to her, especially when the young master was small; she used to say that for children certain images represent the holiday, and they carry those images in their hearts for the rest of their lives.

The box covered with painted flowers had come to the city with them, and Rosa made sure that every year when Christmas came it found the Baroness Marta di Malomonte's little manger scene waiting for it, on the side table, like a mother's caress for her son from the afterlife.

Who would see to these things—the Christmas dinner, the manger scene—when she was no longer around? She looked sadly at her right hand, which was trembling slightly. She felt a need to tell her stories, describe, inculcate events, anecdotes, and traditions; otherwise, once she was dead and forgotten, her young master would find himself celebrating Christmas Eve in some barren trattoria, all alone. With nothing left to remember.

She wondered whether the Colombo girl had finally decided to take action and decide her own fate; she certainly hoped so, after the conversation they'd had the previous day. There really wasn't anything more she could do.

She went to get the flowered box. As long as she was around, the traditions were going to be upheld.

All of them.

M
aione headed straight for the
borgo
's little wharf, where the fishermen tied their boats up. It was a narrow wooden pier, anchored to the seabed by heavy rocks.

He settled in for a wait, hiding in the shadow of the warehouse of a neighboring yacht club. He wanted to get a look at Boccia's fellow fishermen, so he could then approach them one by one and compare their stories. Not that he had high hopes: he knew the kind of solidarity he could expect to encounter among fishermen who were trying to protect their friend.

The fishing boats came in, one by one, furling their sails. The brigadier could tell immediately that the day's catch had been a good one: the men sounded cheerful and the big baskets they were unloading were filled to overflowing with fish, many of them clearly still alive, a cascade of silver that glistened in the long low shafts of light from the setting sun.

Boccia's boat was one of the last to dock; clearly he had taken advantage of the good fishing to the last possible minute. The crew unloaded and unrigged the boat, lowering the sail and shipping the oars, then folding away the nets.

Maione waited, noting as he looked on that two of the men were clearly a father and his teenaged son, while the third man aside from Boccia was wiry and dark-complected, so much so that Maione wondered if he was African. Waiting on the pier was Alfonso, Boccia's son, who had come to get his father as he had the previous evening. The man said goodnight to his fellow fishermen and glumly followed the boy; Maione thought that he might be worried about his younger son, but he might just as easily be troubled by the ghosts of his conscience.

The other three parted ways soon afterward: the father and son walked together toward the door of a small building nearby, while the skinny dark-skinned man strolled off smoking a cigarette toward a tavern not far off. Maione decided to go for the two men.

He knocked vigorously at the front door, and the boy came to answer. No fear, no uneasiness: just curiosity, then a flash of realization; Boccia must have told them about his visit from the police.

Maione was invited in; he was offered a glass of wine, which he courteously refused. With the two men was a very old woman, perhaps the younger man's grandmother. Maione explained the reason for his visit, but got the impression that there had been no need.

“Yes, Brigadie', you can be sure of it: Aristide was out with us,” the man told him. “Otherwise we couldn't have gone out at all.”

“Why not?” Maione asked.

The man smoked, holding the cigarette with the tip inside his cupped hand, accustomed as he was to smoking in the wind.

“We use a trawl net. Do you know what that means?”

Maione shrugged his shoulders.

“I'll explain it for you. Now then, a trawl net has two ends: one is lowered into the sea, secured to an anchor so that the net remains in place; the other end stays in the boat, which sails around in a circle, pulling the net along with it. You need two men on each side, and another to keep an eye on the scraps of colored cloth tied to the cables, to make sure everything is going smoothly, otherwise the net will get all tangled up. We make do without this fifth man, because there's not enough to divide it five ways, so one of us, usually Aristide, keeps an eye on the cables while he's holding up his end of the net.”