Blood Curse

LXIII

It took a good long time to make Garzo understand what had happened. They found him out of breath in the courtyard of headquarters, accompanied by his clerk, Ponte, with an even more anguished look on his face than usual. He’d hurried downstairs to find out more about Romor’s arrest, news of which had beaten them back there. And Garzo wasn’t alone; a small crowd had gathered in the street, in front of the entrance, to get a glimpse of the actor and murderer who had brought the play at the Teatro dei Fiorentini to a halt.

The deputy chief of police displayed a level of theatrical skill that Ricciardi would never have suspected: he shifted in a few seconds from worry to relief, and then to astonishment at the sight of the Serra di Arpajas, who had followed the police patrol in the same car, and finally to anger with the look he shot at the commissario.

Maione did a brilliant job straightening things out, even as he was dusting off his trousers following the struggle with the killer.

“Everything’s fine, Dotto’. This gentleman here is the murderer in the Calise case. We owe a debt of thanks to the professor and the signora, who went to the theater tonight expressly to corner him.”

Garzo went through one last lightning-fast change of expression, now displaying a look of authoritative satisfaction. With a slight and still circumspect bow to the Serras, he turned and addressed the two policemen.

“If you please, in my office, Ricciardi and Maione. Then I’ll bid Signore and Signora Serra di Arpaja a good night, if they’d be so kind as to wait just a few minutes.”

Perfect manners, as always, thought Ricciardi with a twinge of admiration. The beginning of the conversation was stormy: Garzo wanted to know why, after he had given explicit orders that all contact with the Serra di Arpaja family was to take place only and exclusively through him, he found them in the courtyard of police headquarters so late at night. Involved in a police operation, what’s more! What if the professor or, worse, the signora had been hurt?

Ricciardi, with an Olympian show of calm, replied that every detail had been planned out in advance, and that the plan had been designed to clear the professor’s name once and for all. That he had come to an understanding with the professor that laying the blame on Iodice would have lent support to theories of the family’s involvement in Calise’s murder, which is how the press would see it as well. A suicide, after all, was not the same as a confession; and the dead woman’s most assiduous visitor had still been the Signora Serra di Arpaja, as everyone knew. And since Ricciardi had come to the conclusion, as the result of an interview, that Emma’s lover, Romor, knew more than he was admitting, they had decided that if they subjected him to a state of particular tension, he might well betray himself. Which is exactly what had happened.

Maione and Ricciardi had concocted this whole song and dance that morning, as the early morning sun illuminated the piazza beneath the office window and the factory workers headed for the buses that would take them to work in Bagnoli. They had no backup plan. Their only hope was that this first one would succeed.

And just what had this Romor said, during the interview? What exactly, Garzo asked, had made Ricciardi suspect him?

The commissario described with honesty his conversation with Attilio the night before. The fact that he knew that Calise had been murdered at night, something that the press had never reported. And Calise’s propensity for speaking in proverbs, despite the fact that Emma had never told him about it. And how had he, Ricciardi, come to know these things?

In his mind’s eye, the commissario once again saw the broken neck, the crushed cranium, the streak of blood. But it was the memory of Antonietta’s voice that made him shiver. Petrone had told him everything, he said. He felt a sharp glance from Maione on the back of his neck and hoped that the brigadier wouldn’t ask him for an explanation afterward.

Garzo was finally placated. He smiled and said: Nice job. We did it again. Meritorious action. If it hadn’t been for the deadline I imposed on the case, we’d still be here frittering time away thinking that Serra di Arpaja was the killer. You’re talented, no question about it, but you need direction.

Without looking at him, Ricciardi was able to forestall Maione’s vehement and indignant reaction by laying a hand on his arm and asking permission to head back to his office so he could collect and transcribe Romor’s full confession. Garzo got to his feet gleefully and, amid the scent of fresh flowers, which he always made sure to have on his desk, he went to welcome the Serra di Arpaja family.

“Commissa’, I bring you the best wishes of the two Iodice women. They were in the crowd outside, but I know you don’t like that sort of thing. I told them they should go home rather than sticking around, that you’d be working late. The wife said that you’re a saint, that her husband’s soul sends you benedictions from the afterlife and so on and so forth-the usual things, in other words. The mother sends her wishes for your well-being; she said that in her opinion you’re unwell or perhaps you have some inner pain, that God Almighty helps people like you, if they’re willing to let themselves be helped.”

Ricciardi grimaced, without looking away from his office window.

“Thank you for sparing me another lecture. I think we’ve had quite enough fate for one evening, don’t you agree? Listen to me: fate doesn’t exist. What exists are men and women and the sheer courage it takes to go on living or choose to quit this life, the way Iodice did. And those who live in a sort of dream state, letting the currents carry them where they will. That’s what exists.”

Maione shook his head.

“What a shame, though, Commissa’, to hear you talk like that. Not even solving a case and sending a stinking lunatic to the criminal asylum is enough to bring a smile to your face, is it?”

Ricciardi didn’t turn around.

“Do you know the one thing you can take away from a man who lives on what he sees when he looks out the window? The only thing you can take away from him?”

“No, Commissa’. What’s the one thing?”

A brief sigh.

“The window, Raffaele. You can take away his window.”

Garzo was relieved, and more than just a little, by the demeanor of the professor and his wife. They looked tired, tested by the experience. Witnessing such a violent scene had probably proved to be more harrowing than expected, the deputy chief of police thought to himself. But they’d soon get over it.

Actually, what Garzo wanted first and foremost was to be sure that the influential academic wouldn’t be lodging any complaints with the authorities that he regularly had dealings with. If complaints were likely to ensue, then Garzo would distance himself from Ricciardi’s initiative; otherwise he’d make it his own and take full credit for it himself.

All that Serra di Arpaja wanted, for his part, was to get out of there as quickly as possible and begin forgetting. His wife, in the face of Romor’s violent outburst, had stepped backward into the darkness of the box and she had bumped against him as he stepped forward to protect her. She’d stood alongside him and squeezed his hand. It wasn’t much: just a beginning. He had used the handkerchief that he was pulling out of his pocket to dry her tears.

The same pocket in which he was carrying both his pistol and the weight of the decision he’d come to: if Emma did decide to run away with Romor, he would shoot himself in the head, right in front of her. And then they’d see how easy it was to build a new life together, a life built on the foundation of his blood. This was the desperate last act he’d planned, for when all other avenues had been exhausted and he had nowhere else to turn. He remembered his visit to Calise, to try to persuade her to free Emma from her obsession. He remembered the open door, all the blood spread across the floor, his headlong flight, hoping that no one had seen him go in; the certainty that it was all over now, that there was no more hope.

But now he and Emma were going to have a child; perhaps, for the good of the baby, she’d once again begin to appreciate the security that only he, and their lawful matrimony, could provide her.

His wife’s thoughts were far, far away, mulling over the days she’d spent believing that she couldn’t live without a man who had revealed himself to be a criminal lunatic. She doubted herself, and her judgment. Calise and her son had taught her, with their tragedy, just how much sheer damage motherhood can inflict.

She brushed her belly with one hand, while that idiot functionary whose name she couldn’t even remember yammered on with her husband about some uninteresting acquaintance they had in common. But what if the child inherited its father’s defects? And had the grandmother’s actions been acts of love or extreme selfishness?

She saw it all in a flash. Emma suddenly understood that the old woman’s blood, spilled with such brutal fury, was the same blood as that of the child she now carried in her womb. In a certain sense, blood of her blood.

Perhaps, she mused, her unanswered questions were her punishment, the price she’d have to pay. A life sentence.