By My Hand (8 page)

 

Livia Lucani, the widow Vezzi, was thoroughly enjoying the Christmas atmosphere in her new city.

All of the qualities and details that made Naples so unique and interesting multiplied a hundredfold this time of year. Waking up to the calls of the strolling vendors, the noise rising from the streets, the songs. And the smells, the thousands of pots bubbling busily away, the thousands of frying pans sizzling, the pastry shops competing to present their masterpieces. Everyone had dreamed up a calling, a profession; every one of them was trying to eke out a living.

Livia's impression was one of generalized good cheer, but with a strain of sadness running through it. It was as if the citizens of that special place were constantly telling one another, It's hard, terribly terribly hard. But we'll make it all the same.

Just the day before she'd spotted a strange individual from the window of the car, a man wearing a bicorne hat à la Napoléon Bonaparte, a long, loose coat, a thousand chains of all sizes as well as fake medals, and a brightly colored walking stick with bells on the end of it. He was walking along with an eccentric gait, hopping and leaping, followed by the usual procession of barefoot urchins. He was shouting something that Livia couldn't make out.

When she'd asked her driver just who that character might be, he'd replied with a wry laugh:

“Signo', that's the Pazzariello. He's a sort of walking newspaper, a town crier. He goes through every street in the quarter to announce that a new shop has just opened, or maybe that someone's lost their dog and is looking for it, or that a young couple is finally getting married. He announces his news singing and dancing, and dressed the way you see him, so that he's sure to attract attention.”

Livia saw four women dressed in black emerge from a
basso
, one of the dark, dank street-level apartments of the poor; they listened attentively to what the Pazzariello had to say, burst out laughing, and went back inside. Over the door of the
basso
hung a black cloth. The driver didn't miss his passenger's observation.

“Ah, Signora, no one can resist the Pazzariello; even if they're holding a wake for the dead, they come out and listen to what he has to say.”

Livia was falling in love with that city a little more with every day that passed. It was the city where, a little at a time, she'd rediscovered her will to live.

She still received very long phone calls, during which her Roman girlfriends tried to persuade her to return to the capital. When she had she left, four months ago now, she'd told them that she was just going to spend a few days at the seaside; and then she'd never gone back.

These days the idea of the social life she'd led for years in Rome was intolerable to her: false smiles, backbiting, gossip. An endless footrace to earn the favor of the newly powerful, a performance that was alien to her very nature. Precisely because of her indifference to that game, and her basic sincerity, she had become a close friend of Il Duce's rebellious daughter, a young woman who concealed her great emotional fragility behind an exterior of apparent aggressivity and masculine ways.

She was always delighted to receive Edda's phone calls, but not even she had been able to change Livia's mind: she had no intention of moving back to Rome. And since it amused Livia to watch everyone she knew rack their brains to figure out the real reason the Italian capital had lost its most enchanting dinner guest, the life and soul of Roman social life, she was careful to keep it to herself.

Making its way through the armies of strolling vendors and beggars, blasting its horn, Livia's car pulled into the courtyard of police headquarters. The guard at the door saluted deferentially, and the woman nodded. By now she was a habitual guest.

Without signaling to her chauffeur that she wished to get out of the car, she started counting under her breath. When she got to eight, Garzo appeared, panting, having burst through the main door that led to the offices without even an overcoat.

“Signora, why, what an honor, what a pleasure! You're a ray of sunlight in our day. We're certainly very lucky to have you as our visitor.”

Livia took the deputy chief of police's proffered arm.

“
Caro
Dottore, believe me, the pleasure is all mine. And to be welcomed by such a gallant gentleman really is a delight. But do my eyes deceive me? You've grown a mustache! It looks just wonderful on you.”

Garzo seemed embarrassed.

“Well, you know, Signora, as one gets older it's sometimes a good idea to try to look a little more authoritative, don't you think?”

Livia laughed.

“And authority's what you care about most, isn't it?”

“Absolutely right. Those juvenile delinquents who report to me, it's no easy matter to keep them in line. I was just saying so to your friend Ricciardi and his brigadier.”

Livia immediately turned serious.

“Why, is there some problem? He was determined to return to the job such a short time after the accident; he won't listen to anybody but himself.”

“Yes, he's one hard-headed individual,
una bella capa tosta
, as we like to say here in Naples. And in every sense of the phrase, if you follow me. In any case, you won't find him here, he just stepped out with Maione a few minutes ago. He's working on a fairly sensitive investigation. As you may certainly have the opportunity to inform your friends in Rome, if the topic happens to come up, we always pay the closest and most careful attention to anything that concerns Fascist Party members.”

Livia's disappointment at having missed Ricciardi had ruined her mood so suddenly and completely that she hadn't heard a word that Garzo had said.

“Ah, I understand. Well, perhaps you'll do me the courtesy of telling him . . . no, don't tell him a thing. Perhaps I'll come back later.”

Garzo put on his most dazzling smile.

“Why, of course, Signora. He'll no doubt be very happy to see you.”

As she found herself in her car again moving slowly through the crowd, Livia felt her good mood returning. And she decided that the real reason she'd moved down here had to be that man with the sea-green eyes, those eyes so full of despair; that man she'd finally succeeded in holding in her arms just two months earlier.

What would her girlfriends back in Rome say, if they ever found out?

W
hile out on the streets the chaos that preceded Christmas was suffocating and anarchic, inside the port the picture was quite the opposite. The freight traffic and the passenger traffic were kept neatly separated, and thousands of people worked efficiently, moving as if guided by a shrewdly conceived choreography.

The port was the nation's largest and it seemed to be aware of its unrivaled standing. Crews of longshoremen crossed paths with the crews of freighters newly landed or about to ship out, dozens of stevedores were continuously at work loading or unloading immense cargo holds, huge trucks and horse-drawn carts lined up at the exit, the draft horses snorting vapor into the wind as their drivers waited for their loads to be checked. Passengers debarking from the huge ocean liners were greeted by lovely uniformed auxiliaries stationed at the pedestrian exits. Maione thought of the shock they'd have once they left the port and found themselves in the terrifying disorder and noise of the city itself.

Ricciardi walked quickly, hands in his pockets and hair tousled, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him. Aside from the human bustle and activity all around him, other beings appeared to the eyes of his soul.

A young man stood on the wharf, his arm shorn clean off by a whipping cable, the blood pumping out powerfully through the open artery with each heartbeat, murmuring:
Mamma, Mamma, help me, Mamma
. A man sitting on the ground next to a freight-unloading site, currently occupied by a team of stevedores cheerfully singing a popular ditty, had been crushed by a falling crate or something of the like: there was a vast depression in his chest and it was clear from the angle of his head that his spinal cord had been severed. He was muttering:
This last one, I'll just do this last one and then I'll head home
. What a shame, mused the commissario. If the one before had been your last for the day, maybe now you'd be with your children. You just wanted too much. Too bad for you. And maybe too bad for me, too, he thought to himself.

Among the many uniformed men supervising the harbor's operations, it was easy to identify the members of the port militia: the gray-green felt hat, the jacket of the same color with a half-belt in back. Active, precise, energetic. As Ricciardi made his way to the barracks with Maione, he thought that a military organization parallel to the administration of the state but answerable to a political party was potentially dangerous. But then it was also true that the party in question had won the most recent elections with more than ninety percent of the votes, and so it was hard to tell the Fascist party apart from the state itself.

As far as he was concerned, and as he tried to make Dr. Modo understand whenever he tried to pull Ricciardi into one of his angry anti-Fascist tirades, politics was entirely uninteresting. He believed that, when all was said and done, the root of all problems was human nature: and for that there was no remedy.

 

The militia barracks was not centrally located, but it was located strategically, not far from the tracks along which the freight trains ran from the docked ships up to the station. The civilian personnel tended to steer clear of the place, perhaps instinctively. They seemd to prefer to take the long way around rather than walk along the barracks walls, which only added to the sense of its extraneousness from the colorful world of the Naples harbor.

The two policemen walked around the building's perimeter, in search of the main entrance. It was a three-story building, spartan and solid, in keeping with the architecture of the regime. Over the entrance, between the second and third floors, was a large sign:
MUSSOLINI BARRACKS
. Ricciardi remembered the inauguration, years earlier: Il Duce had come to Naples in person, and Garzo had been so anxious that he had almost tipped over into hysteria, as was typical of him on such high-pressure occasions.

The militiaman at the front door asked them to identify themselves, then muttered something into a modern-looking intercom; Maione thought sadly of the miles of stairs and hallways that the officers were forced to walk at police headquarters just to deliver routine messages. A minute later, a junior officer appeared and, raising his arm in a rigid Roman salute, welcomed them and introduced himself.

“First squad leader Catello Precchia. Please, come this way.”

The militiaman headed up the staircase at a run. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance of sympathetic amusement, and followed him at as quick a pace as they could manage; the commissario thought he could hear the brigadier inwardly cursing as he struggled to make it up the steps. On their way up they crossed paths with a large number of soldiers running at the same enthusiastic clip, each of them snapping a sharp Roman salute. Ricciardi spitefully wished that one of them would trip in his eagerness and tumble all the way down to the ground floor. He'd have gladly pulled out his wallet and put cash on the barrelhead to see such a sight.

The first squad leader came to a sudden halt in front of a tall dark hardwood door, where an usher stood at attention next to a desk. The man didn't even have a chair. The militiaman knocked just once at the door and then showed them in.

The office they'd just entered was enormous. The marble floor had no other decoration apart from small tiles of various colors. On one wall hung an outsized painting of the Port of Naples during the Middle Ages and, on the opposite wall, there was a large-format print of a photograph of Il Duce inaugurating the barracks. Behind a massive desk made out of the most magnificent wood hung the two regulation portraits: the head of government and the king. In one corner, next to a large French window that led out to a balcony, stood a gilt flagstaff with an elaborate spear tip, and from it hung the Italian tricolor with the Savoy shield.

No cross in sight; around here, Ricciardi mused, they worship only one god. But he noticed with surprise, and with a hint of disquiet, that partly concealed behind the open curtain there was a painting of Saint Sebastian much like the one at his boarding school, and which he'd been reminded of just the day before, as he stood looking at Garofalo's corpse.

From the far end of the room, an officer walked toward him. The junior officer who had accompanied them performed a synchronized heel-click and Roman salute that was nearly perfect, right down to the hiss of his gloved hand whisking through the air. The officer returned the salute absentmindedly, then turned to speak to Ricciardi and Maione.

“Please, have a seat. I'm Consul Freda di Scanziano, commandant of the second legion of the port militia. Precchia, you may go,
grazie
.”

“Yes sir, Signor Consul. I'll be right outside the door, if you have need of me.”

Another heel-click with whisking hand followed by a second heel-click, about-face, and door-click. Maione decided that the first squad leader would have made an excellent tango dancer if he had chosen to pursue a different career.

The consul looked like an actor out of the moving pictures, the type that's usually cast as a grand duke or the father of the wealthy young noblewoman who falls in love with a rootless but good-hearted young man. All except for his eyes, looking out from under the fez emblazoned with the Fascist lictor's staff, anchor, and crown, which expressed an unmistakable curiosity and intelligence.

The gray-green uniform, with a sky-blue sash hanging diagonally across the chest, was bedecked with a dozen medals.

“Well, gentlemen: what can I do for you?”

Ricciardi and Maione were caught off guard. They'd been ready to work their way through various ranks of officers, from junior to senior, and to be thwarted by a wall of curt sentences and owlish silences. They certainly hadn't expected to be received immediately, and directly by the consul and commandant of the legion himself.