Blood Curse

XXXI

It had all started years earlier, five years, perhaps, when her daughter was still a little girl. The old woman, crippled by the pain of arthritis, could no longer take on the small seamstressing jobs that had allowed her to make ends meet in her poverty. One summer evening, as they sat side by side down in the street, seeking refuge from the crushing heat and trading tales of woe, Carmela had told Nunzia that when she was a little girl she’d learned to read tarot cards. Her mother had taught her, and she in turn had learned from her grandmother, and on and on, back through the generations to the earliest mists of time, when the sirens sang on the shoals of Mergellina. She couldn’t remember which of the two of them had first had the idea to devise a nice little con.

In those days, not far away, there lived the widow of a merchant who was obsessed with her deceased relatives. The local children liked to howl beneath her windows for fun, and one morning she confided to Nunzia-whom she regularly ran into at the vegetable cart-that she would give anything to talk to her husband just one more time. Anything-she’d give anything.

The two women came to an understanding. Nunzia told the widow that she knew a woman who was capable of telling her anything that those in the great beyond wanted her to know with tarot cards. After many years of listening to her confidences, Nunzia knew the things the woman most wanted to hear, and sure enough, Carmela told her all of them. A little at a time. First five, then seven, and finally ten lire per séance.

When the widow died, overjoyed to be rejoining the devoted and loving soul of her husband, who had forgiven her for all her betrayals, the respected corporation of Nunzia and Carmela already boasted a dozen or so loyal customers. And word was spreading fast.

Here’s how it worked. A person would hear about Carmela. They’d show up one day and the old woman would say that she was busy just then and couldn’t find time to see them until the following week. She would take first name, last name, address, and reason for calling: love, health, or money. At that point, Nunzia would swing into action. Thanks to her dense network of porter women, hairdressers who made house calls, and gossipmongering women street vendors, by week’s end she was ready to provide Carmela with all the information she needed to ply her prospective new client with delectable scraps of news from beyond, for five lire apiece.

After all, the Petrone woman said, what harm were they doing? People came in sad and walked out happy. In a way, really, they were a couple of benefactors.

By now the name of Carmela Calise had gotten around and she had more paying customers than she could handle. The two women had also begun to supplement reality, giving fate a little push every now and then, just to make the oracular responses of the tarot cards that much more believable. A panhandler, a meeting with a man, a minor accident. Negligible things, apparently random incidents that constituted, for those who chose to view them this way, major confirmations. That part was Nunzia’s business, with the occasional paid assistance of chance extras who took the money and asked no questions. Nunzia’s investigations weren’t always necessary; in some cases the old woman excused her from performing this particular duty because, she told her, there were people who supplied her directly with all the information she needed. Sometimes people just needed to get things off their chests.

It was all going splendidly. There was more than enough money to improve their quality of life without attracting too much attention. So much money, in fact, that they both wondered what they were going to do with it all. And in Naples, everyone knows that there’s only one thing to do when you have too much cash: you lend it out at interest.

The carousel had started spinning about a year and a half ago: a woman who needed to put together a trousseau for her daughter, an office clerk whose wife was ill, a merchant who was having business troubles. If any of them had failed to repay the principal and interest due in full, everyone would have heard about it. The backbiting would have left their good names in tatters. It was the most effective form of debt collection imaginable.

A neat, efficient little operation: two complementary lines of business that whirred along beautifully, side by side. There’d never been the slightest problem. Until now.

No, she had no idea what Carmela did with the money. The old woman had always been particularly reticent on that subject and had never confided in her. She herself had put every penny into an account in her daughter’s name, held at the bank on Via Toledo, depositing a little at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. When Nunzia asked her, Carmela had replied, with resignation in her voice, that, in the end, the two women weren’t as different as they might seem.

Nor did she have the faintest idea as to who might have killed her. Carmela, with her tarot cards, constituted a threat to no one. She never hounded her debtors to get her money back. She gave them plenty of time and wiggle room. She was always happy to grant extensions-for a small added fee, of course. She couldn’t think of anyone who could have murdered her. And then, the brutal way she was murdered? Unthinkable.

“Well then,” said Ricciardi, tapping his finger on the cover of the black notebook that lay on the table in front of him, “you’ll be able to provide me with a surname, address, and story to go with all the names that are written down in here, whether they belong to the clients of the tarot card business or victims of your loan-sharking scheme. Names to go with their dreams-dreams that you nursed and tended, cultivated for a fee.”

Nunzia lowered her gaze under the commissario’s moral condemnation.

“Yes. For everyone.”

“All right. So, Maione: you have a seat here with Signora Petrone and take down the addresses and names of everyone the Calise woman saw on her last day, the day before her body was discovered. Tomorrow I want you to have them all come in to see me in my office, one by one, and we’ll check them out. And if that doesn’t give us anything to work with, then we’ll just start working backward. Until we find the right dream, the sick dream we’re looking for. The one that killed this old woman. I’m going home now. I have a headache.”