Blood Curse

XXII

Doctor Modo appeared in the doorway between the autopsy rooms and the waiting room, and there he found Ricciardi and Maione, just arrived from headquarters. The doctor was drying his hands with a handkerchief, his lab coat splattered with unmistakable stains.

He looked like a little boy about to run out into the street to play soccer.

“Oh, what nice visitors! Welcome, friends; have you come to take me out to breakfast?”

With a nice broad smile, satisfied.

Ricciardi looked him up and down.

“Yes, but please take off your butcher’s uniform first. As it is, people turn away when we walk by and make hand gestures to ward off evil, and let me tell you, some of those gestures are hard to look at. The last thing we need is to show up for a stroll through Pignasecca market with Doctor Frankenstein.”

“Here’s the Ricciardi I love best: cheerful, optimistic, a lover of light reading. Have you tried reading Carolina Invernizio, or that author who goes by Liala? Or Pitigrilli; I see his books being carried around by all the idiots who passionately support your regime.”

“My dear intellectual friend, for your information, I don’t have time for reading-and I’m more optimistic than you are, since you see a future darker than the present. Come along, and I’ll treat you to an espresso and a sfogliatella pastry, as promised.”

Outside, Pignasecca market had already reached a fever pitch of activity. From the ramshackle stalls a roar of singsong voices touted the wonders of whatever merchandise happened to be available that day; rickety pushcarts pushed their way through the crowd; dozens of dark-skinned, half-naked street urchins, their heads shaved to ward off lice, darted from one vendor to another, trying to steal a bite to eat.

As the trio moved through the crowd, people obediently stepped aside, as if pushed away by a silent bow wave. Two policemen and a doctor-the latter a professional butcher of corpses. What could possibly bring worse luck?

They came to a café in Piazza Carità and sat down at a small table inside, near the plate glass window. The moving picture of the busy city outside suddenly became a silent one.

Ricciardi gestured to the waiter: three coffees and three pastries. “Well? Any news about how the Calise woman died? Don’t tell me she died of consumption.”

Modo snorted with a smile, lit a cigarette, and crossed his legs.

“You might show a little respect for the work that other people do, for a change. Between you and Brigadier Maione here, I haven’t been able to leave that dump of a leper colony I work in for the past two days. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to be at the hospital when someone sends you there, so that I can personally put you out of your misery, I would have already fled the country. To Spain, for instance, where they truly appreciate doctors; otherwise they line them up against a wall, give them a last cigarette, and good night, nurse!”

Maione broke in, ironically, feigning an afflicted tone. “Dotto’, forgive us, it’s just that the sight of all that lady’s blood. . It was too much for me, and you know I don’t trust anyone else’s work. After all, when you find a shop that provides good service, you go back. Am I right?”

“Go on, keep jerking me around, since that’s become our national pastime. Of all my faithful clients, luck had to send me the two most down-at-the-heels cops in all of Naples! Well, listen, I’m a gifted physician, understand? Your lady friend, for instance, Brigadie’, I’d love to see what my colleagues who boast about their academic titles would have done with her face. I operate in the hospital for ideological reasons, not because I couldn’t have any position I wanted in any one of the best private clinics!”

Ricciardi was baffled.

“Shop, lady friend, clinic. . what are you two talking about? Who is this lady friend of Maione’s?”

The brigadier’s plump face had turned red as a watermelon.

“No, what lady friend? That woman I told you about yesterday, Commissa’, the reason I had blood all over my jacket, remember? I don’t know her; that is, I’d never met her before yesterday. I took her to the doctor, here, because she was badly hurt.”

“Damned right, she was badly hurt! They’ve ruined her for life, is all! And she was a stunningly beautiful woman. Believe me, Ricciardi: a living cameo. An honest-to-God cameo, carved in mother-of-pearl. But why on earth has our good brigadier turned so red? Did someone slap him in the face? Or could it be he’s in love?”

“Trust me, Maione has a wonderful family waiting for him at home; he’s not a lonely dog like the two of us. So he’s not going to fall in love anytime soon. Let’s just say that a cop is a cop, on duty or off.”

Maione looked up in silent gratitude for Ricciardi’s help. But the commissario did not return his glance.

The doctor went on, stretching out his legs under the table and clasping both hands behind his head.

“A cop in springtime, then. And what about your springtime, Ricciardi? Any sign of it?”

“It’s still cold out and you know it. Come on, now, enough chitchat; it’s getting late. Have you finished up with the Calise woman? What can you tell me?”

“What am I supposed to tell you? Why don’t you just tell me what you want to know? You know that I can make the dead sit up and talk. They keep no secrets from me; if they want to tell me something, they just whisper it in my ear. Then it’s up to me to decide whether to report it to you or keep it to myself.”

Maione snickered at the efficacy of that macabre image. Once again, Ricciardi’s expression remained unchanged.

“Are you trying to tell me that the dead speak to you?” he was tempted to say. You have no idea what that even means. You know that every morning two dead men greet me on the staircase down at headquarters? And the corpse that you sliced into tiny pieces this morning? It keeps repeating the same weird proverb to me out of its broken neck. And now you’re trying to tell me that the dead speak to you?

“Take the Calise woman, for example. She was sick; a particularly nasty form of bone cancer. She had maybe six, eight months to live. Your murderer was wasting his strength. He just barely beat Mother Nature to it.”

Six, maybe eight months, Riccciardi thought to himself. And you think that’s so little? Spring, summer, and autumn. Flowers, the scent of new grass, the smell of the sea breaking against the cliffs; the first cool wind from the north, chestnuts roasting on street corners. A few flakes of snow, naked children plunging into the water, or with their noses lifted in the air to see what this or that cloud looks like. Rain on the street, the clang of horseshoes. Street vendors calling their wares. She might have lived to see another Christmas and hear the shepherds playing bagpipes in the piazzas and in people’s houses.

Six, maybe eight months. Wasn’t she entitled-the poor despicable usurer, the lying fortune-teller-to even an extra six, maybe eight minutes, in exchange for the two-bit illusions that she bestowed upon her customers, if life had decided to concede her that time?

“. . and her bones were like paper, like the wood of a worm-eaten piece of furniture. All that force wasn’t even necessary. You know how much the corpse weighed? A hundred pounds.”

“But what about the wounds? What kinds of wounds did you find, Bruno?”

“The wounds, you ask? Right parietal bone, crushed in, with loss of brain matter,” the doctor began enumerating with his fingers, without putting down the cigarette in his hand, which he held cupped a manner uniquely his, “right ear shredded; three fractured vertebrae in the neck; at least two blows to the side of her body. Right cheekbone recessed, while the eye was literally popped. And then there’s the kicking.”

“What do you mean? More wounds?”

“Yes, Brigadie’, numerous wounds. Fortunately by that point the poor thing had already been reduced to a bag of rags, already flown away to wherever it is she is now, into the absolute void, if you ask this old materialist physician. All of her ribs broken, and I mean every last one of them, with her lungs and stomach perforated, her spleen crushed, and so on. Name a traumatic lesion, and she had it. After a while I just got tired of transcribing what I found, if you can believe it. I got sick of the job altogether; so I stitched her up, closed the bag, and went outside to smoke. I needed a breath of fresh air.”

They all sat in silence, looking out the plate glass window. It had suddenly become very pleasant to watch the street urchins running around, the women chatting, and the men ripping each other off, pretending they were making business deals. That was life, as it would be always. And life was preferable to death.

“But leaving aside the laundry list of wounds and fractures, did you come to any conclusions that might prove useful to us? About the mechanics of the thing perhaps?”

Modo scratched his whiskery cheek, with a sorrowful expression.

“Let’s see: the woman died between ten PM and midnight, give or take a minute or two. The fatal blow, the first one, came from above, as you can see from the direction of the cranial fracture. The fact that it’s on the right side could mean one of two things: either the person who dealt the blow was left-handed and was standing face-to-face with the victim, or else they were right-handed and the Calise woman had her back to them. I’d opt for the second hypothesis, because then the first kick fractured her neck and that landed here, at the base of the nape of the neck. Also, even though the bones were fragile for the reason I explained to you earlier, a remarkable amount of force was used. It’s not certain, of course, but I’m inclined to think it was a man. Or else an enraged young woman.”

“Any marks on the wounds? I don’t know-imprints of rings, strange cuts. Sometimes that sort of thing happens.”

“No, nothing like that. They were definitely wearing shoes. The wounds showed abrasions-cowhide, leather, stitched soles. Is my memory failing me or weren’t there some nice clear footprints on the carpet? That’s it,” and he pointed out the window, “you should be looking for someone with stains on their shoes.”

They looked out at the market again. Now, for some reason, the cruel expressions were more vivid than the smiles. As if the world outside were full of murderers seething with hatred, the soles of their shoes black with blood.

“And someone out there, my dear Ricciardi, and my dear Brigadier Maione, was carrying around a good deal of anger, which they vented on the poor little old woman who’s been my guest for the past day or so. They showed no mercy, nor could they have imagined even for an instant that she could have survived. Of course, the unfortunate woman had no idea that she was dying. She can’t have suffered; she just saw stars and then she was gone. Not a scream, not a breath. Whoever hit her must have had the fury of hell inside him. He wanted to get rid of it. He satisfied his urge and then put the thought out of his mind.”

“No, he didn’t just put the thought out of his mind, Bruno. He didn’t. He’ll have to think about what he did, over and over again. And he’ll curse the moment that he decided to satisfy that urge. Trust me.”

Ricciardi spoke in little more than a whisper, barely opening his mouth and staring into the blackness of his untouched demitasse of coffee as he leaned back against his chair, a shock of hair dangling over his forehead, his hands in the pockets of his unbuttoned overcoat. His green eyes were clear and he seemed to see beyond what was visible to others. And in fact, that’s how it was.

As he whispered, the other two men shuddered.