By My Hand (36 page)

The commissario held Maione back by one arm: he wanted to watch this situation unfold without being seen. He pulled the brigadier aside, the two of them withdrawing from the flow of the crowd, and he stationed himself next to a calamari vendor who was tossing an enormous squid from one hand to the other, boasting of its freshness and flavor.

Some fifteen feet away from him, Criscuolo stopped near the stand that was being stocked by Lomunno, who was over at the horse-drawn cart at that moment. The fishmonger recognized the militiaman and greeted him respectfully, doffing his cap and bowing his head; the officer replied brusquely with a nod of the head, and his mustache quivered as a result. There was an exchange of glances, an inquisitive one from Criscuolo, a sly winking look in response from the fishmonger, who tilted his head in Lomunno's direction, just as he was approaching the stand.

The eyes of the militiaman and his former colleague locked. Lomunno reddened visibly, ashamed at being seen working as a simple roustabout by his one-time inferiors, while at the same time aware that he owed his friend a debt of gratitude for having obtained this job for him. Criscuolo, with a twitch of his whiskers, having completed his favorable inspection, decided to spare Lomunno the mortification of being recognized by the other militiamen and ordered the little group to make a rapid about-face and head elsewhere.

Ricciardi and Maione exchanged a glance, having understood this additional dynamic in the relationship between Lomunno and his former colleagues: life had made other decisions, but certain ties of friendship had remained intact. Even if they thought that he'd killed Garofalo, the militiamen believed that Lomunno had paid his debt to society.

They swung back out into the middle of the stream of people and let themselves be pushed along, in search of the other figures of interest to the investigation. They didn't have to go far: in fact, only about thirty feet. There they all were, the Boccias, husband and wife, the three fellow crew members, a couple of female family relations, and even little Alfonso, who was in charge of sprinkling the merchandise with water he carried in a bucket, a task he performed very conscientiously.

They were painstaking and professional at their work, and their expressions, it seemed to Ricciardi, betrayed their fear that they wouldn't be able to sell all the fish they had on display. They called out to passersby in loud voices, trying to gauge the prices that they would be willing to pay, and showing themselves amenable to discussions of discounts.

The commissario watched them, and he also watched Lomunno, who was tirelessly loading and unloading crates of fish a few stalls away. All around, the noise of the vendors' cries and the haggling was deafening, almost intolerable. Just a few feet away a boy was swearing to a woman, on the Madonna no less, that he was losing money at the price he was giving her for a sack of clams: Signo', as God is my witness, these aren't just clams, this is the freshness and the salt air of the Gulf of Naples that you're carrying home to your kitchen.

Ricciardi thought about the profiles of the suspects, Lomunno and the Boccias, and how neither one fit perfectly with the findings from their investigation. Lomunno had the strength, the motivation, and the rage to account for the savagery of the crime, as well as the knowledge to have wanted to destroy the Saint Joseph as a way of saying that stealing a father's living was a mortal sin. But he was alone, while it seemed that there had been two pairs of murderous hands, and taking his revenge would have been mortal to his children as well as to Garofalo. Really, he didn't seem the type, to Ricciardi, to kill the informant who had ruined his life in his home, killing his wife while he was at it. If he had to guess, he thought that Lomunno would probably have ambushed him somewhere else, so as to be able to carry out his intent with greater ease.

Now the Boccias had an even more powerful motivation: the life of their son. And they'd already gone once to the Garofalos' home; they'd been seen leaving, they knew all about the doorman's habits, and they could easily have sneaked back in. Moreover, there were two of them, and if they had wanted to commit that murder they'd necessarily have had to get rid of the woman as well. But Ricciardi just couldn't see them inflicting all those wounds on an already-dead body; and they were certainly not likely to have attributed a special symbolism to Saint Joseph, or to have left that kind of signature on the crime scene, staying longer than necessary to do so.

Standing motionless on the sidewalk, being shoved and tossed about by the crowd, as was Maione, Ricciardi once again realized that something wasn't quite right with either of the two hypotheses, but that he had no other theories to go on.

Just then, from a crate ten feet away, a large saltwater eel made its escape.

And as if by enchantment, every tile in the mosaic suddenly fell into place.

I
f fish is the prince of the Christmas table, the saltwater eel is certainly king.
The big eel with its jutting jaw, fat and slippery and perennially on the move, brought home partially stunned by the brown paper in which it's wrapped, comes back to life the minute it's tossed into a bath of fresh water for a wash, and becomes very much like a snake, wriggling before the fascinated and terrified eyes of the children who stand watching the whole bloody preparation, never to forget it as long as they live. In fact, the cut-up pieces of eel continue to move in the blood as if possessed of a life of their own, as if the animal were capable of defeating death itself, until finally, coated in flour, they land in the frying pan and become the main dish of Christmas dinner, served with a traditional laurel-leaf garnish.

On Via Santa Brigida the basins with saltwater eels were virtually under siege, more and more so as the time passed and the hour to return home drew near. One of the most active vendors, a dark and handsome young man with a charming smile and a deep voice, drew women to his stand by picking up clusters of eels and swishing them around in the large basin before him, shouting:

“They're dead and they're alive, authentic saltwater eels, the tail of the Devil himself!”

The symbolic phrase, the reference to the Devil's tail and life and death, attracted the commissario's attention and he moved away from Maione through the crowd. The brigadier stayed behind, keeping an eye on the Boccias, who seemed to be having good luck with their sales.

When Ricciardi was near the eel tank, as one large eel was being moved from the scale to a paper wrapper, it suddenly twisted and lunged and flew into the street.

The girl who'd just bought it watched it hurtle through the air, as surprised as the fishmonger by the eel's sudden spurt of energy as it landed at the feet of a couple who happened to be passing by. The man noticed it first, and he darted to one side, knocking flat to the ground a little boy who was walking by and holding his mother's hand. The woman, in turn, screamed and hiked up her skirts with both hands, breaking into a sort of propitiatory dance around the poor creature as it writhed on the stone slabs of the sidewalk.

In the space of a few seconds, the place was a madhouse: some people were screaming, while others were laughing; a few little girls burst into tears because they'd suddenly been separated from their parents; and everyone was diving forward at once in an effort to catch the huge eel, which, slippery and contorted as was its nature, managed to slip through all of their hands.

Ricciardi watched, openmouthed, the only person to remain motionless amid all the confusion.

He stood staring at the elusive, uncatchable eel. He watched it slither through one outstretched hand after another until suddenly, with a forward lunge, the very same fishmonger who had let it get away seized it, restoring it to its fate.

But by that point, Ricciardi had vanished.

H
e kept asking himself how he could have missed it; it was suddenly all so obvious.
It had been, from the very first, as clear as day.

As he ran through streets still packed with people, stalls, stands, food, and merchandise.

As he ran through the cold, hurrying past the living and the dead, all so wrapped up in what they were doing that they didn't listen, capable of looking at only their own, tiny worlds, capable only of not seeing, not understanding.

That was the same mistake that Ricciardi had made. He could see that only now. He'd looked closely, where they'd told him to look. He'd stopped at the first station, then at the second and the third, without stopping to consider that the train might also have gone a long way round to fetch up exactly where it started from.

He was furious with himself for having allowed himself to be distracted by his own concerns. A step back, damn it, he told himself as he hurried along Via Chiaia, pushing past people still lingering to gaze at shop windows, through small knots of strollers laughing and talking loudly without exchanging any information at all, past pedestrians trudging along with their heads bowed and their foreheads furrowed, in the silence of their own thoughts. If only he'd taken a single step back, he would have been able to see everything in its proper perspective, read all the signs.

He thought about Rosa, her tears, her malaise, her sense of uselessness. Once again he cursed himself and his mind's inability to make the proper connections between the clues that he had gathered. And he hoped with every fiber of his being that he could complete the circle before any other terrible things happened. He trembled at the thought of the terrible risk they'd run over the past few days, chasing after will-o'-the-wisps. And yet everyone had told him, in one way or another, both the living and the dead; and Modo had been right, two different hands had wielded the knives, with different degrees of strength, and from different angles.

The murderous hands.

He started running even harder.

 

Maione found himself alone in the swirling mob that was pushing through Via Santa Brigida. He'd been standing there watching the Boccia family and their desperate struggle to sell every last bit of seafood; then his eyes had locked for a moment with those of Aristide's wife, Angelina, and she had nodded her head in his direction without breaking off her negotiations over the purchase of two gray mullets with a mustachioed gentleman clearly reluctant to buy. The brigadier was fascinated by the sense of timing and choreography that seemed to guide everyone's movements, and by the sheer determination that he could see in the people's faces, even in the face of Alfonso, the Boccias' older boy, even though he was really still just a child.

Then his attention was caught by the upheaval attendant upon the eel's escape, and he realized that he'd lost track of Ricciardi. He looked around, but he was nowhere in sight. He wondered where he had disappeared to, then he noticed someone in the distance, pushing his way through the stream of people pouring into the market, and heading for Via Chiaia. Baffled, Maione wondered what could have driven Ricciardi to run off like that, and he tried to reconstruct his superior officer's thoughts.

The eel, he thought; the Boccias' little boy; Lomunno; the militiamen.

With a sinking feeling that danger was imminent, he started shoving his way through the crowd.

H
e was ushered into a room on the ground floor that he hadn't seen on any of his previous visits. It was dark by now, and the air was growing colder by the minute.

At first he couldn't see anyone; the room was dimly lit, with a pair of low-hanging lamps emitting a yellowish glow that left darkness in the corners. At the center of the room, dominating the space, was one of the largest manger scenes Ricciardi had ever seen: a full-fledged miniature city, which sloped down from the hilltop toward a crowded city quarter in the middle of which, in a large grotto illuminated by a series of small lightbulbs concealed from view, was the Holy Family.

Even caught up in his thoughts as he was, the commissario was entranced by the construction. There were distant houses with windows glowing in the darkness, flocks of sheep, grazing cattle, wandering shepherds and peasants; inns, taverns, and shops of every kind on the intermediate level, with goods laid out for sale, and shopkeepers and shoppers engaged in mute but realistic conversations; and at the very front, angels, the Three Wise Men come to adore the Christ Child, all portrayed by figurines of extraordinary beauty and evident antiquity. Ricciardi was certainly no connoisseur, but he felt sure that the value of that manger scene and the work that had gone into its creation must certainly have been quite considerable.

As he gazed at it, openmouthed, a voice as shrill as a piece of chalk screeching across a blackboard made him start.

“Our manger scene is famous throughout the city, Commis­sario.”

Sister Veronica emerged suddenly from the darkness, a smile on her round red face.

“There are shepherds from the eighteenth century, and every year some pious soul from the neighborhood, returning home to the Almighty Father, leaves us a donation in their will, so that we can complete the scene and make it grow even more. Or rather, so that
I
can; for the past seven years, that task has fallen to me.”

Ricciardi walked over to the nun to greet her. She extended her little hand, as usual clammy and damp with sweat. The policeman continued to let his gaze range over the miniature panorama.

“Very impressive, indeed. And you do it all on your own, Sister?”

The woman gazed in satisfaction at the fruit of her labor.

“This room is dedicated to the nativity scene, which is closed off all year long until the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8. The structure is left intact, but the shepherds are removed after Epiphany and put away in their boxes, carefully packed, of course; some of these pieces are very valuable, you know. My work consists of arranging and adding a few pieces every year, so that the children and my sisters have a surprise every time they come to see it, when the door is opened on December 8.”