Blood Curse

III

He liked strolling through the city in the early morning. The streets were almost empty, practically silent aside from the distant calls of early-stirring street vendors. Not making eye contact, not having to look down at the street to avoid showing his face, his eyes.

He knew he had a highly developed sense of smell. Not surprisingly, this wasn’t a particularly good thing, because there were far more bad smells than there were good ones. Still, on a morning like this one, he could detect the perfume of the green hills, well hidden under the miasmas that rose from the stench-ridden city quarters, and winning out over the smell of the sea. It reminded him of the aromas of Fortino, the small town in Cilento where he was born and where, without knowing it, he’d been happy for the last time. It was the smell of nature, primal and luxuriant, embracing mankind like a mother.

A subtle pleasure, and a worry; he knew what awaited him. Springtime, Ricciardi mused as he walked toward Piazza Dante: it changed people’s souls like so many leaves on the trees; stern, dark, lofty trees, strong and unyielding in their centuries-long wait, suddenly went crazy in that season, showing off garish blossoms. In much the same way, even the most stable people suddenly got the strangest ideas into their heads.

Though he had only just turned thirty, Ricciardi had seen, and saw on a daily basis, exactly what every single individual was capable of, however innocuous that person might appear at first glance. He had seen, and continued to see, far more than he wanted and more than he ever would have asked for; he saw pain; he saw grief.

Overwhelming grief, pain that repeats itself, over and over. The anger, bitterness, and even the strutting irony that came with death. He had learned that death by natural causes settled its accounts with life, amicably and conclusively. It left no lingering footprints in the days that followed, it snipped off all the threads and sutured the wounds, before heading off down the road bearing its load, wiping its bony hands on its black tunic. But that’s not how violent death worked; it didn’t have time. It had to leave in a hurry. In those cases, death staged a show, offering up the portrayal of the final pain and grief for the eyes of Ricciardi’s very soul; it was heaped upon him, the sole spectator of the rotten theater of human evil. The Incident, he called it, or even better, the Deed. And the idea that death in its hasty departure hadn’t had time to settle its accounts washed over him like a wave, demanding vengeance. Those who leave the world in this manner do so with a backward glance. And they left messages that Ricciardi gathered, listening to that last, obsessively repeated thought.

The first of the balconies overlooking Piazza Carità threw open their shutters, bringing it to life. As he walked toward police headquarters, it dawned on Ricciardi, the way it did every morning, that he’d never have a choice, that there was only one profession for which he was suited in life. He’d never have the strength to ignore the pain, to turn away from it, or travel the world scattering his money with a free hand. There’s no escaping who you are. He knew that his distant relations couldn’t understand why he, the only child of the late Barone di Malomonte, didn’t take his place as the new Barone di Malomonte, capitalizing on the social advantages that would come so easily with that title. He knew that his Tata Rosa, the nanny who had raised him from his infancy and was now in her seventies, ardently wished to see him at peace, living an untroubled life. No one could explain his prolonged silences, his downcast gaze, the constant gloom that absorbed him.

But, as Ricciardi knew full well, it hadn’t been his lot to choose; he was obliged to walk against the wind, buffeted by the last shifting gusts of grief of all the dead people he met along his path. So that he could complete the work that death hadn’t had time to finish.

Or at least try to.

In the placid early morning air, Ricciardi walked into the building that housed police headquarters. The watchman at the front door, half-asleep in his guard booth, made an attempt to leap to his feet and salute him military-style, but he succeeded only in knocking over his chair with a sharp crack of wood that echoed across the courtyard. Irritated, he shot the spread index-and-pinkie sign of the cuckold toward the back of the commissario, who hadn’t so much as waved in his direction.

Ricciardi wasn’t well liked by the staff at headquarters, whether uniformed or administrative; and it wasn’t because he was a bully or took a hard line. If anything, he was the one most likely to conceal the oversights or failings of others from the notice of the top brass. Rather, it was that no one could figure him out. His solitary, taciturn personality and behavior, the seeming absence of any weakness, and the complete lack of information about his private life did nothing to encourage camaraderie or fellowship. And then there was his extraordinary ability to solve cases, which had something of the uncanny; and there was nothing that struck more fear into the heart of that city’s populace than the supernatural. The idea that working with Ricciardi brought bad luck became increasingly deep-rooted. It was becoming a matter of course for those assigned to one of his cases to be kept home by a convenient but debilitating head cold, or, even worse, for his presence to be blamed for mishaps that had nothing to do with him.

A self-perpetuating state of affairs: the greater the void Ricciardi created around himself, the happier other people were to steer clear of him. The commissario seemed not to be aware of this, much less bothered by it.

With his superiors, the deputy chief of police, and the police chief himself, things were no different. These weren’t years in which one could easily afford to dispense with the services of such a talented individual. Increasingly, Rome had been interfering with the independence of police headquarters, and the police were expected to provide evidence of their successful investigations by tossing a guilty party to the press. The regime demanded that the image portrayed of Fascist life in the big cities convey safety and high hopes. Ricciardi, with his rapid and unorthodox way of cracking cases, was perfect.

But there was no denying that his presence created a sense of unease. He wasn’t welcome, and so his merits were overlooked. He was denied the promotions and the opportunities that he objectively deserved. They might not be able to do without him, but they weren’t about to reward him, either. For that matter, Ricciardi didn’t seem to care about advancement in the least. He was constantly absorbed in his work, more a priest militant of justice than a civil servant, bent over his desk or striding through the seamiest quarters of the city, in the driving rain or the blistering heat of summer, frantically seeking the source of the suffocating grief and pain that engulfed him.

Within the barricade of mistrust that surrounded him, however, there was at least one person he could count on.