Blood Curse

XIV

Ricciardi and the girl were both looking at the old woman. Not at the corpse; that was a dirty, abandoned thing, like the carpet on which it lay. They observed the image, erect in the shadowy corner, vivid in the colors of her last passion.

The commissario wasn’t surprised. He’d understood right away that the girl had second sight.

It was a paradox: Ricciardi wasn’t afraid of the dead; he was afraid of the Deed and those who had it inside them. Including himself.

Now he was watching the girl as she squatted on the floor: she was rocking back and forth rhythmically, moaning. Her eyes were focused, as if she saw something. Her brow was furrowed, as if she didn’t understand. She was looking at death, not at a dead person. And she was crying, possibly in sorrow, or else in horror.

He focused his own attention on the image of the woman. She was like so many others, the kind of woman you’d see at the market, weighed down by years and suffering. A cotton print dress, the same outfit in summer and winter, a stained shawl. Diminutive, her hands twisted with arthritis, hunched over. Swollen legs, red with varicose veins, blue with bruises.

It was immediately obvious to Ricciardi that the murderer had beaten her to death. A red-hot fury, rather than a cold and calculated violence: a blind, stupid rage. The way her neck bent was unnatural, due to her shattered vertebrae; a profound hollow in her skull, on the right side, her eye crushed, the cheekbone staved in, the ear torn to shreds. A succession of blows, possibly from a club.

The other side of her body also seemed to be crushed in. Ricciardi glanced at the bundle of rags and saw what he had expected: she was lying on her right side. The murderer had taken out his rage on her corpse, perhaps by kicking it repeatedly. That would also explain the extent of the bloodstain across the floor, a trail nearly a yard long. We have a center forward on our hands, he thought. A talented soccer player.

He concentrated, blocking out the girl’s whining lament and the sounds of movement and conversation coming from outside the door. The one intact eye had an almost sweet, tender expression: probably a cataract, a translucent, light-blue film. He cocked his head slightly to one side, to listen more carefully.

He didn’t hear the surprise that almost always accompanied sudden death. He didn’t hear violent hatred, blind rage, or the wrath of privation. He didn’t hear the ripping of one being wrested away. What he heard, instead, was melancholy. And a certain obscene tenderness, a hint of pride. The faint, scratchy whisper from the old broken neck: “’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.

They stayed that way without moving for another minute: an odd little family, bound together by death, pain, and grief. The girl, with her singsong lullaby and her furrowed brow, a trickle of drool sliding out of the corner of her mouth. The man standing motionless, as if made of wax, just inside the dining room door, hands stuck in the pockets of his unbuttoned overcoat, his head tilted at a slight angle, a shock of hair cutting across his bare forehead. The ghost of the old woman with the broken neck, gazing at the consummated death with unusual emotion, repeating with a faint sigh an age-old proverb in dialect.

What finally broke the black enchantment that had made time stand still, slamming shut the gates of hell, was the large, stubborn fly, as it had one final and definitive collision with the balcony window, thus becoming the second corpse in the room.

XV

Teresa was dusting in one of the parlors. She asked herself why it was her daily duty to clean what was already clean, to tidy up what was already tidy, and why that enormous, perpetually closed-off palazzo should have so many drawing rooms and parlors when there were never any guests.

It seemed like the house of the dead; her employers lived their lives elsewhere, outside of it, and then came home to immerse themselves in the silence of the dark rooms and the lightless silver, as unlikely to glitter as if it were buried in a tomb.

The signora had returned from her long night out at about nine in the morning. Teresa had crossed paths with her in the hallway and whispered a buongiorno that went unheeded, as it always did; the dead can’t hear. All the same, in that fleeting instant Teresa had noticed something different: the faint smile that had brightened her lovely features for the past month had disappeared from her face. This time, her expression was one of grief, loss, and resignation. She dragged her feet, her eyes empty, the tracks of tears discernible in her makeup.

She hadn’t spoken a word to her; she hadn’t asked Teresa about her husband, as she sometimes did. Teresa was relieved. She wasn’t sure that she could have lied, as the professor had ordered her to do, to say that she hadn’t seen him since the night before. Fortunately, Signora Emma had walked right past her without seeing her, as though she were in another dimension. Like a ghost.

Leaving a police officer to guard the door, Maione had responded to Ricciardi’s call and was now searching the apartment with his superior officer. They had a good half hour before they the magistrate and the medical examiner they had summoned would show up.

Not that there was all that much to see. The victim, whose name was Carmela Calise, lived alone; she was unmarried, had no children, no known relatives. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, and the lavatory on the landing, which was shared with three other families. Aside from the dining room where she had died, there was a bedroom with a squalid lining of bright floral wallpaper, from which emanated a strong odor of fresh paste. Maione thought to himself that if they hadn’t killed her, the old woman would surely have died that very same night, asphyxiated in her sleep.

There were only a few simple pieces of furniture: the narrow bed pushed up against the wall, a crucifix, a chest of drawers, atop which stood a statuette of the Madonna with a crown of gilded plaster on her head and a rosary around her neck, a portrait of a man and a woman from bygone times, and a small flickering candle. Perhaps those were the parents, or perhaps a brother and his wife: memories now lost forever. A chair. A bedside rug on the gray-and-black checkerboard floor. They went back to the dining room where the expressionless porter woman was bent over her daughter, stroking her hair. The girl went on singing her lullaby, rocking back and forth, never taking her eyes off what only she and Ricciardi could see in the dark corner. Mechanically, the commissario followed her gaze.

“’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato,” repeated the image with the broken neck and croaking voice. God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. The curtain stirred slightly in the breeze. From the street came the shouts of children playing.

Maione spoke to Nunzia.

“So then, you’re the one who found her.”

The woman looked up from her daughter, straightened up, and gave the commissario a look of fierce pride.

“Yes, that’s what I told you before.”

“So tell me exactly what happened.”

“Every morning, when she wakes up, I bring Antonietta up here to spend the day with Donna Carmela. She’s the only child that she keeps; she says that she keeps her company and isn’t any trouble at all. Antonietta stays close to her and watches her work, and now and then Donna Carmela gives her a cookie or something else to eat. It makes me happy to know she’s here, I got so much work to do. There’s a whole apartment building to run. You have no idea how much work it is. I’m alone. My husband. . in the war, he went north and never came home. The little girl was only one year old.”

“So this morning you brought the girl here.”

“Yes, it was nine thirty. I know because I’d finished up with the stairs and the landings and I hadn’t started cooking yet. Before I went down to the pushcart to get some vegetables for the broth I wanted to make sure that my girl wouldn’t be afraid to be left alone.”

“So, you knocked on the door. .”

“Who said I knocked? Donna Carmela’s door was already open. She opens it first thing in the morning, when she comes home from seven o’clock Mass, and that’s how she leaves it. This whole palazzo is one big family. We all know each other. There’re no locked doors here. It’s all safe as safe can be.”

Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a quick glance, to highlight the unmistakable contradiction between the presence of that bundle and the trail of blood on the floor and the porter woman’s claim.

Nunzia saw it too, and turned as red in the face as if they’d just insulted her.

“The miserable coward who did this isn’t from the neighborhood. Take it from me, that way you’ll save yourselves a lot of pointless work. Much less from this building. Donna Carmela was a saint, a genuine saint, and everyone loved her. She gave everyone a hand, she helped everyone. Damnation and eternal suffering be visited on the swine who did this.”

Teeth clenched, almost in a hiss: the hatred poured out of the woman’s mouth like a spurt of bile. Maione and Ricciardi, if only mentally, instinctively struck the woman off the list of suspects.

The brigadier proceeded with his questioning.

“So you went in.”

“That’s right, I wanted to say good morning to her and tell her I was leaving the girl. And what I found was this. . this thing, on the floor. This act of slaughter, this disgrace.”

“When was the last time that you saw her alive?”

“Late last night, it must have been ten o’clock. We went up, me and my daughter. We closed all the windows, put out the coal fire in the kitchen. It’s what we do every night.”

“And how did the signora seem to you? Nervous, worried. .? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“No, nothing. She said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ I went downstairs, and Antonietta came down about an hour later. That’s all I know.”

“Do you know whether the signora had had any, I don’t know, any disagreements or disputes with anyone, any friction, as of late? Maybe she complained about something, or you overheard fighting. .”

“No-what’re you talking about? I told you once and I’ll say it again, Donna Carmela was a saint and everyone loved her. No one would have dared. Not to mention she had gnarled hands and was very weak. She had that disease old people get. .”

“Arthritis?”

“Yessir, that’s exactly it. She got these pains. We could hear her moaning in her sleep in the summer, through the open window. Well, she’s done suffering now,” she said, looking down at the bundle of rags.

Maione turned to Ricciardi, to see whether he had anything to ask her.

“You said, ‘My daughter stays close to her and watches her work.’ What kind of work did she do, Donna Carmela?”

To their surprise, the woman blushed and looked down, suddenly abandoning the haughty demeanor she’d maintained up until that moment. There was a long silence. Maione broke in.

“Well, did you hear what the commissario asked you? Answer the question!”

The woman slowly looked up and answered the brigadier. Maione realized that throughout the conversation Nunzia had never once looked Ricciardi in the eye. Here we go again, he thought. The usual fear and revulsion.

“Donna Carmela. . she was a saint. She helped her fellow man to work things out.”

Ricciardi spoke in a low voice.

“How? How did Donna Carmela help her fellow man?”

Silence: Nunzia didn’t answer. Sensing tension in the room, Antonietta had stopped her plaintive song, though she continued to rock back and forth, staring at the corner.

From the little piazza below came a joyful burst of noise from the boys; someone had scored a point, whatever game it was they were playing. In the air, a delicate scent of flowers was winning out over the smell of caked blood, but still not over the garlic and the urine.

Nunzia turned slowly to face Ricciardi, looking him straight in his glassy green eyes.

“Donna Carmela read the future. She read cards.”