By My Hand (17 page)

Modo laughed heartily.

“A fine excuse, to avoid admitting that one has no idea what to do with himself on a Sunday. Now, I'm not complaining: I get to eat a delicious lunch for free, which seems fair and fitting for a poor underpaid doctor. Whereas you, who I've heard tell are fabulously wealthy and notoriously stingy, are going to have to foot the bill.”

Ricciardi laughed in turn.

“Neither fabulously wealthy—at least I don't think I am, and in any case I don't particularly care either way—nor stingy. But the exquisite pleasure of having lunch with you is just one more indication of how accident-prone I really am. Come on, let's order; it's getting late and I have another appointment on this long working Sunday.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Ricciardi saw the dog position itself comfortably not far from the beggar woman, out on the street. It sat down by the wall, where it was sheltered from the wind and able to keep an eye on the front door of the café. Its white coat with dark brown spots seemed shinier than before.

“Yes, I had him washed,” said Modo, following the commissario's gaze. “After all, if I'm taking him into my home, then I can hardly afford the embarrassment of catching something infectious, can I? I'm still a doctor, after all.”

“I'd never have thought it. So you've adopted him after all. You've become a dog owner.”

Modo laughed.

“You don't know him. He's not the kind of dog a person can say he owns; he decides who he wants to live with. It's a temporary partnership that we have. There's no leash on him, and none on me. You don't know it, my solitary friend, but that's how all great loves are: no ball and no chain.”

By the time they were done with their meal, the crowds on the street were starting to thin, in part because a hard, ice-cold rain had begun to fall. The old beggar woman had gotten to her feet with some difficulty and gone to seek shelter in an entryway. Ricciardi saw the image of the boy, with his horrendous smile, still perfectly dry as he went on asking for a couple of pennies for a song that he would never play again.

“So Bruno, tell me, what did you learn from the autopsy of Signore and Signora Garofalo? Did you find out anything new?”

Modo stretched, reclining against the backrest and extending his legs under the table.

“Ah, so now it's time to sing for my supper, I knew this was coming. All right then, the signore and the signora kept themselves in good shape. They were well nourished, in good general states of health, no serious illnesses. The signora had three gold teeth, while he was missing a couple; but he'd lost them long ago, nothing worth mentioning. The man's joints were starting to harden—if he'd been allowed to live another four or five years, then he might have started to complain about his hips or his knees. But overall I'd have to say that they were both in good health.”

Ricciardi was waiting for more.

“Well, to tell the truth, when I saw them, they didn't really look all that healthy. What can you tell me about the way they died?”

“You're right,” Modo agreed, “by that time they were no longer all that healthy. They died that same morning. I did a few tests on the tissues and the organs, and I'd have to guess they were killed a few hours before they were found, maybe at eight, nine o'clock. The signora died of blood loss. It couldn't have taken more than a few seconds: a severed carotid artery is always fatal. I can confirm that my initial impression from my first quick exam was correct: it was a single sharp blow from right to left. There are two possible scenarios: either the blade was very sharp indeed, or someone held her head still while they cut her throat.”

Ricciardi listened attentively.

“So you found no signs of struggle on the body? I don't know: bruises, even small ones, ruptured blood vessels, lesions . . .”

“No, absolutely not. Those are the first things I look for, as you know. No signs at all. She wasn't expecting it.”

“Was the killer right-handed or left-handed?”

Modo shrugged his shoulders.

“Impossible to say. You'd have to know whether her throat was slashed from the front, as I think it was, or from behind. The cut goes from left to right, from the victim's point of view. But there are no signs of a struggle. The woman put up no resistance.”

In his mind's eye Ricciardi saw Signora Garofalo as she asked, smiling and oozing blood from her terrible wound:
Hat and gloves?
graciously and courteously. From the front, I'd have to say, he thought. From the front.

“What about the husband, Bruno? You find out anything there? How can you explain the number of stab wounds?”

“That's something you're going to have to ask the killer, or rather I should say the killers, because to my mind—and I told you this when we first talked—there was more than one hand at work here. The fatal blow was the first one, straight to the heart. That blow alone would have killed him. While he was dying, and it couldn't have been more than a matter of a few seconds, he was stabbed at least five more times, between the ribs and the abdomen. I can tell you that for certain, because the wounds went on bleeding, though not for long, which means that the heart hadn't yet stopped. The other twenty-six . . . that's right, twenty-six . . . stab wounds were inflicted on an already-dead body.”

Ricciardi committed the information to memory, remembering Garofalo sitting in a pool of his own blood, stating in no uncertain terms that he owed nobody anything.

“And you confirm that in your judgment there was more than one killer.”

The Gambrinus pianist charged into the afternoon with a heartrending tango. A couple stood up from their table and began to dance.

“That's right, and I'll tell you why: the first wound is a clean, deep cut, inflicted with great power. The murderer first set the tip of the knife as if carefully taking aim, and then slowly drove it down, sure as can be, until it penetrated the heart. That's not an easy thing to do, you know; it takes a determination that you can imagine for yourself, but it also requires a truly strong hand, because there would have been none of the momentum you get when you pull back and bring the knife down hard from above. The other wounds are all much shallower, and they were all delivered from right to left.”

Lost in thought, Ricciardi watched the dancing couple twirl and pirouette. The woman, under her breath, sang along raptly:

 

. . . terra di sogni e di chimere

se una chitarra suona

cantano mille capinere

hanno la chioma bruna

hanno la febbre in cor

chi va a cercar fortuna

vi troverà l'amor . . .

 

“So, forgive me, but what makes you conclude that there was another hand? If the direction was the same . . .”

Modo shook his head.

“Eh, no,
caro
, let me finish. I was just talking about the first group of stab wounds. Then there's another dozen or so that were inflicted in the opposite direction, from left to right, not as deep but more closely grouped together. A different arm, a whole other kind of strength. So I'd have to conclude a different hand.”

The doctor was certain of his analysis, and Ricciardi knew very well how conscientious he was. The picture was starting to take shape.

“And so what's your conclusive impression?”

Modo knitted his fingers together behind his head. He followed Ricciardi's gaze and saw that he was watching the dancers. The woman went on singing:

 

. . . e nell'oscurità

ognuno vuol godere

son baci di passion

l'amor non sa tacere

e questa è la canzon

di mille capinere . . .

 

“My conclusive impression, as you say, my dear lord of the shadows, also known as Ricciardi of the Handsome Smile, is that the murderers started off with one idea and then let themselves get swept away by their passions, just like the warbling chickadees in the song sung by the lovely signorina, who by the way is a high-ticket whore, if you ask me. They wanted to see justice done, to take the law into their own hands and perform a formal execution, and then they went overboard and turned it into an orgy of blood, either each with his own knife or else passing the weapon around. You don't murder someone like this during a robbery or because of an argument that spun out of control. You and my beloved Brigadier Maione, who's now enjoying a pleasant Sunday meal with his family and a bowl of ragú—at least
he's
enjoying himself, lucky man—are going to have to find some powerful motive for this hatred. Because it took a lot of hate to commit this murder. Not for the woman; she was no more than an obstacle.”

Through Ricciardi's mind passed first the statuette of the Madonna, tipped over against the figurine of the ass, and then the shattered fragments of the Saint Joseph. In the rain out on the street, almost deserted by now, the child stared into the middle distance with his bloody half smile, asking for a couple of coins to play a song on his crank organ.

Some ten feet away, the dog lay curled up, his coat ruffled lightly by the wind, one ear hanging and the other perked up, waiting for the doctor.

In the café, the tango came to an end with one last chord and a wobbly dip.

“Have I earned myself an espresso to top it off?” Modo said.

Outside, night had already fallen.

M
aione had waited for night to fall, engaged the whole time in a terrible struggle to conceal his emotional state from his family.

The news that Franco Massa had given him had demolished with a single fell blow the wall of the room in which, in his soul, he'd tried to lock away his perennial grief over his son's death. A wall he'd built day by day, brick by brick.

He realized only now how important it had been to know that the man guilty of the murder had been punished in accordance with the law in order to find an equilibrium, a state of resignation. Maione was a simple man, and he knew that he was: every action needed to be met by a reaction. Arresting the man that he believed guilty of the murder certainly did nothing to bring Luca back to life, but it had at least fulfilled his duty as a policeman.

He still had a vague memory of the days spent at the trial. At first he hadn't wanted to go at all, then Lucia had asked him to, because she couldn't bring herself to attend; she didn't want it thought that Luca's family had abandoned his memory. They had been days of confusion, altered states of mind, time passed in sleepless nights and blurred thoughts.

He remembered the courtroom in Castel Capuano, the smell of wood and dust, the chill in the room, the eyeless gazes of the busts and statues of the great lawyers of the past. He remembered the stentorian voice of the prosecuting attorney, who was demanding a conviction and a sentence that would set an example, and the pale, bloodless face of the man who he then believed had been Luca's murderer.

He vaguely recalled the mother, a woman who seemed much older than she was, and who wept incessantly, while someone comforted her.

Just as vaguely, he remembered the face of a boy who couldn't have been any older than Luca, arm in arm with his mother. Pale, light-skinned, fair-haired. He remembered thinking, and then saying to Ricciardi, who was at his side the whole time, that he couldn't imagine a man murdering a boy who so closely resembled his own brother. Ricciardi had replied that that's how it always was, after all.

That face, just barely emerging from the mists of the memories that he'd tried to erase, that face was the face of Luca's killer. Now he knew it. If only he'd known it then.

Playing with his children, listening to the radio, eating his Sunday meals, Maione had had that obsessive thought burrowing into his brain the whole time. Just have to get used to it, he told himself. Until I can start building that wall again. In the meantime, it's getting dark: time to come up with some excuse for Lucia and go see Bambinella.

 

He found Bambinella with her customary black kimono dotted with red flowers, tied closed at the waist with a silk sash, her long raven locks gathered in a ponytail with a large horn comb holding the hair together, and a black slip underneath, the lace trim peeking out from under her décolletage. On her chest and face, the dark shadow of mutinous hair and whiskers.

She was wrapping the corpse of the pigeon that had been struggling to withstand the cold just that morning in a newspaper parcel. Hot tears streaked her face, and she dabbed at them with a handkerchief into which she noisily blew her nose from time to time.

“You see, Brigadie'? It's dead. I knew it. I could see it was sick, when they start to tuck their heads under their wings, that means they're dying.
Puveriello!
Poor little thing!”

And she blew her nose again, producing the sound of a trombonist hitting a flat note.

“Buck up, Bambine', it was only a pigeon. Come on, what's it amount to? Human beings are born and die, and pigeons are born and die every day. Get over it.”

“What can I do about it, Brigadie'. I'm tenderhearted; little critters just grab me inside, the same way little children do. There's no one to defend them. I bury dead pigeons in the dirt, out on the terrace. The thing is they won't let me keep them, and besides this is where I have to do my work, otherwise the place would be full of cats and dogs.”

“That's all we need up here, a nice little zoo. Listen, forgive me if I'm hammering at you today, on Sunday of all days, but I need to know if you were able to find anything out.”

Bambinella sat down gracefully in her low wicker armchair, knees together, arms folded.

“Brigadie', you offend my honor when you say these things. Do you think that if Bambinella makes a friend a promise, she's going to break it?”