These Dark Things (2 page)

Together they entered the church. Near the altar, he pointed to a door, hardly noticeable. Natalia ducked to avoid hitting her head passing through. “Careful,” he said, turning to her as they felt their way down the dark stairs toward the lantern light below.

“Wait,” she ordered. Someone was coming up the stairs toward them. Natalia drew her pistol as a small man came around a turn in the stairwell.

“Don’t shoot!” he screamed.

“Luca, you idiot. I ought to put you out of your misery. If you’ve disturbed anything—”

“Nothing, Captain. Not ever.”

Natalia holstered her weapon. Luca was an old freelance photographer with a lens for a brain. A nocturnal creature, he lived for a good murder. Half the time, he arrived at the scene before the police or the Carabinieri. Luca pressed past them in the stairwell.

“Monsignor,” he touched his cap. “Captain Monte.”

Natalia glared at him.

“Oh,” he said, stopping. “Where was she killed?”

Natalia pointed upward, saying nothing. Luca scurried toward the surface.

They passed through a large cavernous room, through a long hallway, and into a third room, each decorated with centuries of bones piled onto one another, some organized into categories, some arranged in eerie patterns.

“She’s in here,” the monsignor said. Natalia paused to brush dust from her uniform. Despite the Armani design, it was wrinkled from the long night and now covered with grit. The red bands running down her pant legs were grimy, like her, like the cuffs and collar of her white shirt.

A beautiful girl sat on a stone bench in the center of the room. Ethereal. Pre-Raphaelite. She did look like an angel—a bloody one.

“As you may have gathered,” Father Cirillo said, “this chamber was used several hundred years ago for burials during the plague outbreaks. She’s posed like someone might have been in the seventeenth century. I’ve never seen anything like this except in illustrations.”

He was babbling. Natalia wished he wouldn’t. She stepped closer, examining the ground.

Communing with the dead. Many in Naples still did it. When Natalia was a girl, her mother’s mother—Natalia’s
nonna—
had gone weekly to the crypt where her sister’s bones were displayed. Sometimes she took her granddaughter. Nonna made herself comfortable on a chair provided there. If there were no other visitors, the clicking of her knitting needles was often the only sound.

Such a gloomy city, Natalia thought, but what could you expect in a metropolis where people actually dressed in black so as not to be mistaken by the dead as living souls ripe for haunting? A miracle that anyone got out of bed in the morning at all.

The monsignor was still lecturing. Cirillo was an amateur scholar and led occasional tours of his church and the surrounding neighborhood. Natalia had seen him holding forth outside the church just the past spring.

“You’re too young to remember World War II. Bombs dropped on Naples every day. Twenty thousand people took refuge down here and in passages and cisterns carved by the Romans in the volcanic rock beneath the city.”

“Yes, Monsignor.”

There was not much evidence of blood anywhere in the room. Murdered elsewhere. Maybe choked at the same time, given the marks under her jawline. And seriously stabbed. Twice. The back of the dress was as red with dry blood as the front was pinkish white.

Skulls ringed the victim in a half circle. Lilies rotted near her feet, their scent cloying. A candle burned. The victim was fair with a smattering of freckles, traces of lipstick visible on her mouth. A girl adorned for life’s pleasures.

Natalia walked the perimeter of the room, peering behind stacks of leg bones, wrist bones, finger bones, and skulls. No weapon; only bones and crumbled rock. Something glinted from the rubble. Natalia stepped closer. She slipped her gloves on and picked it up. A small silver heart, untouched by the dust—an ex-voto, a votive offering. Sixteenth-century worshippers had left them as offerings to the saints in gratitude for healing a broken limb, a diseased lung. Clerics as well as laypeople believed in them. Nowadays, most considered them quaint. Most, but not all.

Ex-votos were usually miniature replicas of hands and feet or lungs. A heart was unusual. It suggested someone unsophisticated. Or was that a ruse? Did this poor girl’s death cure someone of heartbreak? A spurned lover? Or a mad person? Maybe both and the same.

“‘The Cult of the Dead,’ the worshippers of the bones were called,” Father Cirillo began.

When Natalia had been a girl, on All Souls’ Night her father would put a bucket of water outside their front door. “So the dead can drink as they enter the house,” he’d say. The next morning, when she would point out that the level of the water was unchanged, her mother had spat to make sure her daughter hadn’t aroused the evil eye.

“They get thirsty,” her mother scolded. “Mix this.” She pushed a bowl of dough to her daughter.

It was to make
fave dei morti
—the broad beans of the dead, the dough molded into the shape of bones. Not a Neapolitan tradition. Natalia’s mother had learned to make the cakes from her cousin Rosalia, married to a carpenter from Tuscany. Long after Cousin Rosalia passed and every November until her own death, her mother continued baking them. To honor Rosalia’s memory, she said. And hedge her bets, Natalia thought.

Before they kneaded the dough or enjoyed the tasty cakes, Natalia’s mother repeated the prayer from the Cult of the Dead: “
Sante Anime del Purgatorio pregate per noi che pregiamo per voi.
”

Holy Saints of Purgatory, we beseech you to pray for us as we pray for you.

2

Sergeant Pino Loriano yawned as he descended the old-fashioned stairs of his apartment house. Great white plaster patches marred the walls, but they were otherwise in good repair. In the foyer, he collected his bicycle and guided it out the door and through the courtyard to the street. On Via Bianchini, he stepped over garbage rotted beyond recognition. The landfills were full, and garbage festered all over the city.

The Camorra, Naples’s local criminal organization, refused to collect it—or allow anyone else to collect it—because the prime minister had vowed to see the state-ofthe-art incinerator at Acerra finished. That would seriously interfere with the Camorra’s business. The prime minister also threatened to force open some of the closed landfills ten kilometers out of town.

The citizens of Cicciano and Marano mounted round-the-clock protests to keep any more refuse from coming into their neighborhoods. Various Camorra-owned garbage-collection companies were warring over who would haul the garbage, if it ever got hauled again. Meanwhile, they were moving toxic industrial wastes, burying them on farm-land. It was a nightmarish mess. Pino dreaded the Carabinieri’s role as environmental protector and did not envy his colleagues mandated to deal with it. A murder in a land-marked church would do him just fine.

He got on his bicycle and pedaled down the broad, empty lanes of Via dei Tribunali toward the crime scene. Widows and clerics navigated the dark streets past high stone walls that encased narrow alleys. A vendor was putting sunflowers out on the flagstones. Slivers of blue water gleamed between the aged buildings; ferries and freighters eased from the Bay of Naples out into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

A standard four-door blue Alfa blocked the alley en route to the crime scene. One uniformed carabiniere stood on the cobblestones, arms folded. The other lay across the hood, half asleep. Pino didn’t recognize either. He flashed his sergeant’s identification, and the conscious one moved out of the way to let him through with his bike. The carabiniere punched his snoring partner, then directed Pino down the alley, toward the Capuchin monastery.

Most nights, drug addicts congregated in the alley. At the moment, it was empty.

Pino squeezed his bicycle through the narrow space between car and wall and entered the worn cobblestone lane. It curved away from Via dei Tribunale. He shouldered the frame and carried the bike down a small flight of stairs. A sleepy resident leaned over her balcony, smoking.

A crowd milled around a street shrine outside the Capuchin monastery. Several votive candles surrounded a large pool of blood. The candles blazed. Catching their flickering light, the pool glistened. The shrine was a crude box nailed together from scrap wood. The collection box was missing.

Pino leaned closer to its cracked glass cover. Inside the box, before a carved figure of the Savior, lay an offering of a cigarette pack and a wrinkled apricot, a prayer card depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the small porcelain figurine of a female saint too weathered to identify. Pressed to the glass, a yellowed photograph of someone’s relative. Left long ago, back when there was still hope. Behind it, a page torn from a magazine. Pino slipped the clipping out. A model’s face scratched over with black marker,
THIEVING BITCH
scrawled beneath it in red. Meaning the dead girl? Pino dropped it into an evidence bag. More police arrived.

Just then, Monsignor Cirillo came out of the church, followed by Captain Monte, Pino’s supervising partner. Her hair was even wilder than usual and her blouse untucked, jacket open, her smoky eyes wide with adrenaline.

“There was a note in the shrine,” Pino announced, holding up the plastic bag. “It may refer to the dead girl.”

“Give it to Dr. Francesca when she gets here. Maybe it has prints.” She turned to the bystanders crowding in. “Who lit all these candles?” she said.

No response.

“This is an investigation area,” she announced. “If you have no information, you need to keep back. Except you,” she said, indicating the elderly bone cleaner, Gina Falcone. Roof lights whirling, Dr. Francesca Agari, Naples’s leading forensic pathologist, made her entrance in one of the department’s vintage Fiats. She was halfway out of the vehicle before it stopped rolling. Despite the hour, her two-toned blond highlights were perfectly smooth, like the mauve-and-gold powder glistening above her eyes.

“Christ,” Francesca Agari said as she took in the scene. “Hey!” she called to her waiting photographer halfway down the alley. “We need you here!”

An aspiring fashion photographer. His worn leather jacket hung open. His thick hair grew to his shoulders.

“The victim,” Natalia informed them, “is in the crypt of Santa Maria del Purgatorio.”

Dr. Francesca nodded and dispatched three forensic criminalists into the church. They looked like spacemen in their puffy suits. Pino accompanied Dr. Francesca and the photographer into the church while Natalia ordered the attending carabinieri to canvass the neighborhood.

A fragment of Chopin drifted from the music school nearby. Natalia turned toward it. Someone practicing this early?

There was more light in the sky now, and swallows.

“If you don’t need me.…” Father Cirillo kicked at broken bottles and syringes not a foot from the pool of blood.

“No, that’s fine,” Natalia said. “You can go. Thank you for your help.”

The monsignor paused to pray over the reservoir of blood and made the sign of the cross, recorded by Luca with one of his three cameras. Natalia approached the bystanders, neighbors who might have overheard the killing if not actually seen it. No one would speak. She circled the puddle of blood, hoping to find a footprint. Nothing. Pino returned from the crypt, slightly flushed from the climb. Natalia took her partner by the arm, turning him away from the onlookers. They conferred for a moment, agreeing to question the bone cleaner together. The elderly woman was consoling a
monachello
, a novice, encouraging him to go back inside the monastery. He was blind, Natalia realized.

Pino and she walked over to them.

“What were you doing in the crypt this morning?” Natalia asked.

“I bring the bones. From the cemetery, like always. Every week, I come. I have a key to the church.” She pointed to Father Cirillo at the end of the alley. “From him. Can I get my cart?”

“Was anyone with you, inside the church? Were you alone in the crypt?” Pino asked.

“Only the angel and me.”

“We found a bowl of oil by the shrine here. For the evil eye. Did you put it there, Signora Falcone?” The bone cleaner reminded him of his Aunt Zia Annunziata, a witch who dispensed amulets and planted such bowls to ward off evil.

“Yes,” Gina said. “I put the bowl there.”

“What do you know about the dead girl?”

“I’m a bone cleaner, not a detective.”

“You put the bowl there to protect her,” Pino said. “What did the water tell you?”

“The girl was dead. Dead. I didn’t do anything wrong.” “What shape did it take?”

“The
jettatori
, so I said a prayer.”

“What witch did she need protection from? Who wished her ill?”

Pino’s Aunt Annunziata had famously spat when an envious neighbor told her that Pino was a dear little boy. Thereafter his
zia
had insisted that he wear his undershirt inside out to block the woman’s evil intent.

“Maybe you saw something that could help us.”

“I saw nothing.”

“If you did, and you’re withholding information, we can take you in.”

“Me, an old woman? I’m over eighty.” Gina Falcone looked away. “She was a good girl.”

“Did you know the deceased?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. No one that young deserves such a death.”

“We need to find her killer.”

“Here.” She dug in her pocket and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. It was an amulet, a twin of the one Zia Annunziata had insisted Pino wear as a boy; his mother had hidden it in her underwear drawer instead.

“You think I need this charm?”

“I am not a fortune teller. I look after souls. You young people think everything is yes or no. Right or wrong.”

“We are sworn to uphold the law,” Pino said.

“The Law!” Gina spat. “Yesterday the Law was Mussolini. Today you want to put an old woman in jail.”

“You may leave,” Natalia said, “but we will talk again.”

The bone cleaner retrieved her cart and clanked away.

“The men found the victim’s purse,” Pino said, holding up a bright red handbag. “It was by the shrine. And these were next to it.”