Day of the Dead (5 page)

As usual, the window reminded him of Enrica doing her needlepoint; a picture of peace and quiet, one in which he took refuge when he felt anxious and upset. Enrica. And the letter he'd written her.

Even though he knew that he hadn't been overly demonstrative, he was still deeply unsettled. For someone like him, so disinclined to engage in human relationships and displays of affection, it had truly been revolutionary to pick up pen and paper and contact her so directly, especially given the fact that they'd never been properly introduced. He shot a look at the chair in front of his desk, where the young woman had been sitting on that regrettable occasion when they'd first met. What a miserable fool he'd seemed. She must have thought he was an imbecile, an unfortunate idiot.

And what if the letter that I wrote her, he thought, strikes her as an intolerable intrusion into her life? Then I won't even be able to look at her from the window, to observe her simple, slow, serene gestures. Normal. Normality, that strange condition that was unknown to him. He remembered how he'd watched her secretly for months: there was something about the way she embroidered, the unhurried way she moved through her small world, that made the scene such a pleasure to watch that it had become his main reason for coming home at night, after work. Now he was sorry he'd written to her. But there was no taking it back: there was nothing he could do but wait.

In the rain-lashed piazza, he saw cars going by. In the distance he could see a woman holding a little girl by the hand, the two of them standing motionless in the middle of the street, incongruously dressed in light summer clothes. He remembered the accident, which had taken place a month and a half before, during the last whiplash of summer heat: the little girl had dropped something, a toy, perhaps, and she'd made her mother stop just as a Fiat 525 turned the corner and shot onto the piazza; the driver was looking the other way and ran them both over, stopping only after the rear tires had thumped over their bodies. From that distance Ricciardi could see that the woman's legs had been taken off neatly at mid-thigh, while the little girl's head was crushed from the neck up. The woman was still saying:
hurry, they're waiting for us
. Who knows who was waiting for them; whoever it was, they'd wait forever. The little girl was saying:
the top, I lost it, my top
. A wooden toy top. The cause of death was nothing more than a cursed little wooden top.

Even though they'd been bloodied and ravaged by the car's tires, the woman and girl were the only ones who had stayed dry under the driving rain. Death's little privileges, Ricciardi mused ironically. But the privilege of hearing their words even from a distance and watching their corpses dissolve slowly, day by day: now, that was something he had all to himself. That's who I am, Enrica. A man destined to walk surrounded by grief and pain, to be deafened, sickened, and suffocated by it. What can a man like that offer you? What kind of life? What kind of love? What a selfish wretch I was to write you a letter, even a pointless letter like that one.

The little girl and her top made him think back to the corpse that had started his week. The fact that he hadn't seen the boy's specter, and what Modo had said about it being certain he had died of natural causes. But, Ricciardi wondered, how natural could the death of such a young boy really be? Didn't that child have a right to enjoy the thrills, the triumphs, and the sorrows of a full life?

He could still see the back of the boy's neck, rain-streaked, the head dangling in empty air as the morgue attendants carted him off like the carcass of some stray animal. What was the boy's name? What games did he like to play, who were his friends? Was there a mother, were there brothers and sisters weeping in despair at his loss, or was he as alone and abandoned in life as he was now, in death?

Now Ricciardi saw another little boy in his mind's eye, another little boy playing with a wooden spade in a vineyard, twenty-five years earlier; he could hear the steady murmur as the boy described to himself the fantastic world around him, the world of his imagination. And he reflected on the thought that loneliness is a disease that spares not even the wealthy, and that spreads from childhood to adulthood and even old age.

These musings were interrupted by a discreet rap at the door, followed by the entrance of 265 pounds of wet brigadier.

“Nothing yet, Commissa'. We have no reports of a missing boy; it seems no one's noticed that the child's gone. Or at least, no one's thought to call the police about it.”

Maione was cleaning himself off with a small hand towel, examining his mud-caked boots with resignation.

“Nothing, and this filth won't come off; now who's going to calm Lucia down? It's just my luck, right at the end of my shift. Otherwise I'd at least have time to let them dry off a little; instead now I have to go home in this state. I'm sorry, Commissa', were you thinking? Am I interrupting?”

“Why, are there times when you're not thinking? No, I was just wondering about that little boy. Whether he had someone who cared about him, or if he was alone in the world.”

“To judge by his clothing, if you ask me, he was alone. There's not a mother alive that would send her little boy out in this rain in wooden clogs, take it from me: even the poorest mother would at least have wrapped his feet in footcloths. When I was a boy my mother spent half an hour every morning wrapping me and my brothers' feet in the winter. Those footcloths were better than a pair of boots, let me tell you. And she'd wrap them so tight that our feet fell asleep and we'd have pins and needles all day long, I can still remember it. But they never came undone, you can be sure of that.”

“Our little friend, on the other hand, had no footcloths. And his feet were covered with chilblains, did you notice? I'm very curious to know what killed him; what did Modo say, when will he let us know?”

Maione wasn't convinced that the autopsy had been the right choice, and he made no secret of the fact.

“He said that he'd call us, maybe tomorrow even. But Commissa', I have to tell you: this business about having the little boy autopsied, I can't say I was pleased with it. I don't like the idea of putting him in the ground cut up into pieces, after the doctor is done rummaging around in his guts looking for something that's not there. I know that you had only the best intentions, but you know that in this city little children die in the street all the time. It's nothing new, unfortunately.”

Ricciardi turned his back to the window.

“I know. But you, you're a father, and I'd hardly expect to hear you say such a thing. The little boy is dead, that's true. And believe me, I don't like seeing corpses carved up any more than you do. It's just that I can't stand the idea of never even knowing how he died, that's all. A child that young shouldn't be tossed out like some old clothes. We need to give him a first and last name, and the doctor needs to give him a cause of death; at least that way we'll be burying a person, not a thing.”

Maione smiled.

“I understand what you're trying to say. As someone who's lost a son, I know what it means never to see your child come home again. And even if we never talk about it, when Lucia and I look at the children that are left, we always think of Luca, and we'll think about him forever: I know it, and she knows it. And now that the Day of the Dead is almost here, we think about him even more. This rain, this neverending rain, it gets into your bones and makes you feel even sadder . . . And now the office is starting up, too; it's become a living hell!”

“Why? What's happened?”

Maione spread his arms wide.

“Oh right, I always forget that you never talk with a soul in here but me. And you're smart not to, believe me. Well, as you know, Mussolini's coming to town on November 3, and Garzo's going out of his mind. He's been saying that if anything goes wrong, he'll send us all to work as prison guards at Poggioreale; he's been arranging and rearranging the furniture in his office, over and over again; he's been having the stairs mopped several times a day; he sent both the automobiles to the garage for an overhaul, on the off chance that Mussolini wants to go for a drive; he looks at his mustache in the mirror constantly—and he thinks no one notices, but everyone's laughing behind his back. In short, a disaster!”

Ricciardi shook his head.

“How can people be such idiots? So Mussolini's coming; so what? Leaving aside the fact that he won't even end up visiting headquarters, what difference does it make anyway? Won't people go on dying, won't the same horrible things keep happening, out in the streets?”

Maione pounded a fist into the flat of his hand.

“That's exactly the point, Commissa': no, they won't. That is to say, that idiot Garzo is telling everyone that things have to function smoothly in this city, that there can't be any unrest or crime; that this is the ideal Fascist city, where all citizens live in peace and tranquility. In other words, we can't have any unsolved crimes or investigations under way, at least until Thunder Jaw, the
Mascellone
, heads back to Rome, and we'll thank God when he leaves.”

Ricciardi gave him a dirty look.

“If he thinks that we're going to start covering things up or wasting time that we could be using to solve cases just so he can pretend that all's well, then he's really lost his mind. You can even send your friend Ponte to tell him: we're not going to stop doing our work, Mussolini or no Mussolini.”

Maione burst out laughing.

“Fucking hell—my friend Ponte: I'd drop him down a manhole and let him drown in the sewer, that two-faced rat! True, lately he's been Garzo's main victim, and it serves him right; if you could see him running back and forth, he's even more ridiculous than usual . . . Anyway, I knew you'd say that. I was thinking, though: working as a guard at Poggioreale can't be much worse than staying here, right?”

From the autopsy room in the hospital, Dr. Modo could hear the rain beating down on the roof and the windows. The overhead lamps illuminated the marble tables; it was finally evening after a long, difficult day. The wards were filled with every disease imaginable; he asked himself how people survived in the hygienic conditions that prevailed in most of the city.

The rain made matters worse: lungs, throats, and bones all absorbed the dampness like sponges and suffered serious damage. The common folk, accustomed to scraping by and concealing their misery with dignity, only showed up at the hospital when the situation had advanced beyond any remedy and there was nothing left for the physicians to do but try to alleviate their pain.

Modo thought about the torrents of filthy water gushing out of the backed-up city sewers and pouring into the ground-floor
bassi
, carrying waste and dead animals onto the floors where children played. He shook his head and shuddered; it was a miracle that so many people were still alive, to be sure. Often, after his regular shift was over, when he was so exhausted that his eyes refused to close, he'd wander the city's alleyways and
vicoli
, administering medical care to those in need of it. Old women tried to kiss his hands, but he recoiled: he wished there were more he could do. He wished he could give them medicine, but he only managed to pilfer a few doses here and there, when those people needed cartloads of it.

Tonight, for instance, I'd be much more useful out there than in here autopsying a corpse, he thought as he looked down at the little boy spread out naked on the table, bruise-blue in the spectral light, his head resting on a wooden block. But he couldn't bring himself to tell Ricciardi no, and so instead of comforting the living, he found himself digging around inside a dead body.

He mused about the strange nature of his friendship with the commissario. They certainly weren't kindred spirits: Modo was outgoing and overly emphatic, while Ricciardi was reserved and rarely laughed; but in some strange way he felt closer to him than anyone else he knew. Perhaps it was because they were both loners: perhaps it was because they both observed the times they lived in with the same disenchantment and melancholy. Or perhaps it was because they felt the same pity for that teeming city and its desperate populace. Each of them chose different battles, though: the doctor opted for the path of explicit dissidence, the commissario for silent action.

He pulled the pocket watch out of his vest fob: ten o'clock. It had probably been about twenty-four hours since the little boy's death. He checked his surgical tools, clean and arrayed neatly in a metal tray next to the autopsy table. As always they looked ordinary and inoffensive: needle and thread, scissors, knives of various gauges and lengths, a handsaw and a pair of hacksaws, a bone chisel and a hammer. He thought of his father, a skilled carpenter who had worked until he was seventy so that Modo could attend medical school. You see, Papà, we're not all that different in the end. In the end, I saw, hammer, and chisel, too.

Ricciardi, Ricciardi: damn you, and damn your stubbornness. He remembered something from the Great War, on the Carso front, where he'd been the battalion medical officer. He'd met a lieutenant, a Calabrian named Caruso. He was a slight man of few words, swarthy and dark haired, constantly on the move. The two men had hit it off and they spent long evenings together in the trenches, listening to the distant rumble of artillery, swapping stories about women and the faraway cities they called home.

Caruso had a gift: he knew before anyone else what would happen in battle. He'd say: now watch, they're going to move over here, they're going to maneuver in thus-and-such a direction, they're going to try to outflank our machine gun emplacements. And right on schedule, as if Caruso himself were directing the whole operation, the chiefs of staff and the Krauts would do exactly what he'd predicted. But it didn't stop him from taking a bullet right between the eyes, one September night: that was one thing he hadn't seen coming.