Blood Curse

LVI

When Ricciardi got back to police headquarters, he was still confused.

Emma’s revelations had settled some questions, but they’d stirred up others. A new figure had appeared on the scene: her lover. Now it was easier to explain the involvement of the distinguished professor, seeing as his reputation ultimately depended on what Calise told his wife.

Even Emma had earned herself a place on the list of possible murderers: her absolute dependency, the limitations placed on her freedom could both be excellent motives for murder, even if the brutality and the violence both seemed to point to a man rather than a woman. But he’d seen them before, too many of them in fact: merciless killings at the hands of a woman.

He continued to be of the opinion that the professor was the most likely intended recipient of Calise’s proverb, that obscure malediction concerning the recompense that fate would surely visit upon her killer. In his view, Iodice was innocent; but that didn’t mean he could prove it. What’s more, he’d learned at his own expense how the Deed tended to steer one away from the truth far more often than it led one to the solution. On the verge of death, people dig up a surprising array of emotions.

Maione joined him, a little short of breath, begging his pardon in a fluster for not having been in the office when he returned. Ricciardi was worried about him, as he had been increasingly as of late. But if Maione didn’t ask him for advice, he certainly couldn’t barge into his affairs. And so he limited himself to reporting on his meeting with Emma.

“Yes, Commissa’, I can see what the professor’s problem was,” and he made the sign of the cuckold’s horns with extended pinky and forefinger, “losing his wife and his reputation in a single blow. But if Calise had forced Emma Serra to break things off with her lover, then why would the professor kill her? After all, they both wanted the same thing, didn’t they?”

Ricciardi swept his rebellious bangs out of his eyes.

“Not necessarily. Maybe Ruggero Serra paid Calise to give that response, but when it came time to pay up, they quarreled and he murdered her. It could also be that he didn’t learn of Emma’s intention not to leave him until after he’d already killed Calise. Or that he simply wanted to take revenge on the old woman for having pushed his wife into her lover’s arms. Or perhaps it was Emma who did it, because she wanted to free herself from her state of subjugation to the fortune-teller. It could be anything. Or the opposite of anything.”

Maione swung his arms open wide in bafflement.

“So what do we do now, Commissa’? We can’t just let the blame be laid on poor Iodice, can we? And we don’t have much time, not even a whole day. What’s the next step?”

Ricciardi stared pensively at the paperweight made from a fragment of mortar shell sitting on his desk.

“Listen, do you happen to have the name of Signora Serra’s lover? I think he’s an actor, right? A stage actor.”

“Yes, exactly, that’s what the Serras’ doorman told me. I don’t know the name, but I can find out. Everyone knows about it.”

Ricciardi nodded.

“Fine, and be quick about it. If you ask me, we’re going to the theater tonight.”

Filomena was selecting pea pods from the vegetable man’s pushcart in the Pignasecca marketplace. It was no simple matter: if they were too hard, they could be unripe and not add enough flavor to the soup, while the soft ones might be shriveled and lacking in nutrition.

She was rediscovering the pleasure of cooking dinner; Gaetano ate like a wolf, ravenously consuming whatever she set before him. Rituccia, who had come to stay at their house, never touched her food. But these days, Filomena thought with an inward smile, someone else came around at dinnertime; someone who clearly showed his pleasure at receiving a woman’s attentions.

And she still felt like a woman; in fact, she felt like a woman for the first time since her husband died. She thought of him as a sort of gift, given in exchange for the slash on her face; the loss of the beauty that had been her cross to bear, in exchange for the warm eyes of a man who looked inside her instead of stopping at the surface. In a way she’d never experienced. Smiling, Filomena wondered what kind of fruit Raffaele liked best.

Lucia hadn’t gotten out of bed. She hadn’t even opened the shutters. She’d just lain there, stretched out on her back, staring at the ceiling.

The children didn’t know what to think; they walked back and forth and looked in from the doorway with worried faces, to make sure that she wasn’t ill. After a while, the littlest girl asked: “Mamma, are you all right?” She told her yes with a tense smile. But was she all right? That she couldn’t say.

She missed Luca, of course. But she missed her husband, too, she missed him so much that she felt intense pain, a physical pain, in her chest, a pain that left her breathless. And she missed her other children, watching them from the other side of the glass wall she’d built around herself over the years, unable to touch them. She even missed herself: Lucia, the woman who laughed, sang, and made love, looking life right in the eye. She felt as though she were already dead, as if she were a ghost observing the world from the beyond.

She would have liked to sleep and dream of Luca, hear him laughing, in that completely unique way of his, telling her: “Mamma, c’mon, get up and take your life into your own hands, like you’ve always done. You’re still the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, you’re still my best girl; are you trying to put me to shame?” Instead, her sleep was fitful, sorrowful, and dreamless, and she woke up wearier than she was when she went to sleep.

From the balcony she could hear street noises, the songs of the washerwomen, vendors hawking their wares. Through the closed shutters she could feel the light gusting push of new spring air, heavy with the perfumes of the farmlands of Vomero. Springtime, she thought. Another springtime.

Lucia got up from the bed and threw the shutters open wide. The light hurt her eyes. She looked down, four stories high. Solid, ancient stone; the marks of a century of horses’ hooves.

She saw the daughter of Assuntina, wife of Carmine the carter, go by hand-in-hand with a dark-skinned lad wearing a brown cap. Madonna, she thought. It seems like just yesterday that that girl was born, and her mamma was selling sulphur mineral water on the street with the child hanging from her neck; and now there she is strolling with a boy, and tomorrow she’ll be married, and before you know it she’ll have children of her own.

And Lucia Maione decided that she was alive after all. She turned around and went back inside, because her blood, and the blood of her blood, was still flowing.

And with that another minor, unnoticed miracle of the springtime of nineteen thirty-one was complete.