Blood Curse

XI

Maione emerged from the basso door, holding the woman up, pressing his handkerchief, already sopping with blood, against her ravaged face. In less than a minute the usual crowd had gathered, the kind that the poorer quarters of the city bestow upon every event, be it a stroke of good fortune or a catastrophe. When it was the former, one always sensed envy in the air; when it was the latter-a far more common occurrence-there would be a sense of having dodged that bullet, and of chilly commiseration.

This time, however, Maione read in the eyes of the women lining the little piazza a vein of hostility, throbbing more powerfully than the awful wound he could feel through his handkerchief. The person he’d hauled out of the darkness was certainly not beloved by the quarter. The brigadier looked around him.

“Serves you right, whore!” he heard someone hiss behind him. He turned around, but he couldn’t say which cruel mouth had uttered those words. The woman’s eyes were stunned and glassy, as if she’d gone blind.

“What’s your name?” Maione asked, but she didn’t respond.

“Filomena’s her name,” the old woman he’d first met, the one who had screamed, replied on her behalf.

“Filomena what?” Maione asked her, giving her a hard cold stare. Her hostility and indifference were unmistakable.

“Filomena Russo, I think.”

Had there been time, Maione would have smiled bitterly. In a place where people knew everything about each other, down to the number of hairs on their neighbor’s ass, that “I think” sounded just as ridiculous as a toy horn at the Festa di Piedigrotta.

“Are any of the signora’s friends here? Anyone who would be willing to see her to the hospital?”

Silence. A few of the women standing closest even took a step back. With a look of disgust, Maione pushed through the crowd and walked briskly in the direction of Piazza Carità, toward Pellegrini Hospital. But not before committing to memory several faces, the half-open door, the blood-smeared partial footprint.

Already gathered in front of the hospital was the usual crowd of fake invalids, those who tried to gain admission by playing on the sympathies of doctors, nurses, and attendants, all for a warm room and perhaps even a bite to eat before being sent back out onto the street. Maione, with his hand wrapped around Filomena’s shoulder and his handkerchief over her face, pushed through the crowd with great determination, making his way toward the main entrance. Outside, the Pignasecca market was teeming with life and the air was full of the shouting of vendors competing for business.

The brigadier had tossed his overcoat around the woman’s shoulders; she hadn’t spoken a word along the way, nor had she moaned or complained. A couple of times she had winced, when the uneven ground had made Maione press her face a little harder. The pain must have been atrocious. He wondered who could have done such a horrible thing to such a lovely woman; and what motive there could be for her neighbors’ hatred, in a place where one usually found solidarity and consolation.

The wound was on the side of the face that Maione was covering, so that one or two peddlers from the market snickered when they recognized him, Look, look, the brigadier with the girlfriend. He ignored them; he was starting to worry about all the blood the woman had lost. As he walked into the hospital lobby, he called out to the porter.

“Is Doctor Modo on duty?”

“Yes, Brigadie’. His shift is over in an hour. He’s been here all night.”

“Call him immediately. There’s not a second to waste.”

Doctor Bruno Modo was a surgeon and a medical examiner. He had trained as a military officer in the north, but as far as he was concerned, it was nothing compared to what he’d seen after that, when he witnessed the things people were capable of doing to each other without the justification of war. That is, granted that war is, in fact, any justification, he thought to himself with a hint of bitterness. It astonished him that he had failed to become jaded, that he still felt on his own skin the pain of the wounds he saw, the gushing blood of the miserable people who passed through his hands from morning till night. And he had failed to make a family of his own; it took too much courage to send a child out into this world. Thus as far as women were concerned, he found what he needed in one corner or another of the ravenously hungry city, then he paid and returned home content.

He watched the fascist era unfold from a distance, unwilling to tolerate a new power with such violent inclinations. He was unable to accept the idea of doing evil in the name of a greater good, and made no bones about making his opinions known. This had isolated him, depriving him of a social life and of the career that he would have otherwise deserved. But he had earned the respect of the people he worked with, and Ricciardi for one would never have accepted a murder case unless Doctor Modo’s skilled hands had interrogated the victim’s wounds.

That’s why Maione sought him out, and why the doctor, in spite of having spent a grueling night stitching up heads cracked open in a drunken brawl, promptly forgot his exhaustion.

“Brigadier, what fair wind brings you my way, so early in the morning? Your boss with you?”

“No, Dotto’, just me. While I was heading to headquarters I found this. . this poor thing here.”

Modo had already uncovered Filomena’s face, turning it toward the light. She had obediently lifted her head from the policeman’s shoulder without complaint.

“Madonna. . who on earth could do such a thing. . what a pity! Okay, Maione. Bring her into my examination room and I’ll see what I can do. Thank you.”

“No, thank you, Dotto’. Please, do me a favor: don’t let the signora leave. I want to find out who was behind this. I’ll be back later today.”

Neither man failed to notice a flash in Filomena’s eyes. What was it? Fear, anger. But also a hint of pride.