Everyone in Their Place

XXIX

When Ricciardi closed his office door behind him, it was already practically dark. In the half-light of the hallway, he could clearly make out the images of the dead cop and thief, luminescent with curdled suffering.

“Maria, Maria, oh, the pain,” the policeman was saying. Exactly, thought Ricciardi. The pain.

He was so tired. As he walked down the steps of police headquarters, in his mind the details of the Camparino murder were floating disconnected and devoid of meaning, like asteroids hurtling through the night sky. The ring taken, he thought, reminded by the voice of the dead man who had just spoken to him. And the traces of gritty dirt on the carpet, the broken ribs, the padlock that hadn’t been forced. The keys in the drawer, the broken fingernails. Details, each of them with a weight of its own: but that only worked if placed into a framework whose principal figure was fully understood.

Ricciardi was frequently sardonic when people told him about the detective movies or yellow-jacketed mystery novels that had come into fashion over the past few years. In the plots of those books and films, everything always fit perfectly, and the detective found only clues that led unerringly to the guilty party.

He didn’t like the movies and he rarely read novels: he didn’t like pretending when it came to murders. He thought there was already plenty of crime out there, without any need to invent more of it. And anyway, reality was quite a different matter: false leads were indistinguishable from real leads, at least until you could get a better idea of the larger picture.

Lost in these thoughts, he jumped when he heard the officer on duty at the main entrance call to him:

“Commissario, buona sera. There’s a lady here to see you.”

He stepped aside, to let Livia come ahead.

As he looked at her, Ricciardi realized that even though he’d only met her recently, she was always more beautiful than he remembered her. She was wearing a silk blouse with broad horizontal stripes and a skirt that sat snug on her hips, slightly flared just below the knees. On her head, with her hair cut short to leave her long neck visible, she wore a cloche hat at a rakish angle. Her long legs, sheathed in transparent stockings with a black stripe up the back, slipped into a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her generous décolleté was adorned by an amber necklace, and it inevitably attracted men’s eyes. Her tapered hands wore black, elbow-length gloves.

She gave the policeman a dazzling smile, and the man was clearly charmed.

“Grazie, officer. It’s been a pleasure to wait with you.”

The policeman snapped a smart salute, though he was apparently still unable to close his mouth. Ricciardi gave him a nasty look, but couldn’t bring himself to upbraid him. Instead, he addressed Livia:

“Good evening, Signora. To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Do you have some information for us?”

The woman quickly guessed that the commissario was ill at ease in the presence of a subordinate, and picked up the lifeline he had thrown her.

“Yes, Commissario. I’m here to report to you on. . on the matter in question. It’ll take some time, though. I don’t think we’ll be finished soon.”

Ricciardi nodded, stone-faced, then he turned to the officer: “Capezzuto, send someone to my apartment; have them say that I won’t be home early, and I’ll get something to eat on my own. Don’t forget, now.”

The policeman snapped his mouth shut loudly and said: “Yessir, Commissa’, don’t give it a second thought. I’ll send someone immediately.”

As soon as they were out the front door and around the corner, Livia burst out laughing as she slipped her arm through Ricciardi’s.

“Did you see that? Wasn’t I subtle? That means I could be a policewoman, doesn’t it?”

The commissario looked at her face; she truly was splendid. Her smile illuminated her features, underlined by a light and skillfully applied makeup; but it wasn’t just that. It was the light that he saw in her eyes whenever she looked at him. Ricciardi remembered the first time they’d met, when her husband had been murdered: her gaze was dimmed with suffering and regret. It was a gaze that he knew well, that he glimpsed regularly in the living and the dead: the gaze of sorrow. Then it had started to change, especially toward him. The veil had slowly slipped away from her eyes and now she looked like a young girl who’d just gotten what she’d always wanted.

“So why have you decided to show up here? How did you know that you’d still find me in the office at this time of night?”

She laughed again.

“But I know that you always work until late! Don’t you remember telling me that yourself? But to make sure I didn’t miss you, I came at seven o’clock.”

Ricciardi was sincerely astonished.

“At seven? But it’s past nine now! What did you do, that whole time?”

“I read a three-week-old copy of La Domenica del Corriere from cover to cover, twice; it was the only thing you have in the guard’s waiting room beside depositions, crime reports, and registers. And I chatted with your sentry for a while: but I was doing most of the talking, actually, because he didn’t seem able to get out a sentence without tripping all over himself.”

“I can well imagine; you’re certainly not the kind of individual that poor Capezzuto deals with on a daily basis. In any case, I’ll repeat the question: what are you doing here?”

Livia was still smiling, as they walked arm-in-arm. Her good nature and her beauty attracted the stares of the passersby they encountered.

“If you want to be rude, by all means, go right ahead: this is a magical night, have you noticed all the stars? I have no intention of letting you put me in a bad mood. I’ve decided to kidnap you, for one evening. Since I know you’ll never come to see me on your own two feet, I came to you. And I want to take you to a nice place, I want to drink something sparkling, I want to look at you, and I want you to look at me. I want to laugh, and I want you to laugh with me. You might as well resign yourself to it.”

Ricciardi looked up. It was true: there were thousands of stars in the sky. And it was a pleasant night, with a warm wind that carried away some of the muggy air. Why not? he said to himself; after all, you told yourself you ought to be less of an oaf with her, the next time you saw her, if you ever did. His mind shot to Enrica, straight as an arrow. And like an arrow, it ricocheted off the whispering young man, and fell to earth at his feet.

“All right, I’ll go along with your demands, but under duress. We can’t stay out late, though: tomorrow I have a long-”

“. . and difficult day, so it’s no different from any of the others. Don’t worry, I’ll distract you from your top-secret investigations for no longer than two hours. Just enough time to go get some dinner.”

So they went to eat at a restaurant just outside the Galleria, popular with singers after the opera at the Teatro San Carlo. It was a remarkable thing that Ricciardi, who lived in Naples and worked not far from there, had never heard of the place while Livia, who lived four hundred miles away, was welcomed as an old friend by the restaurant’s proprietress.

“I sang a few times in Naples, you know,” she explained, once she’d extracted herself from the woman’s hug.

It was a strange evening, for Ricciardi. All of the men in the place, whether accompanied by women or not, stared at Livia. The commissario felt waves of envy wash over him, and, all things considered, the sensation wasn’t unpleasant; there was someone wishing they were in his shoes, for a change.

They ate fish freshly caught from the Gulf of Naples; the proprietress, who was also the chef, told them about the fisherman who went out every night just to supply her restaurant, and the challenge of adapting her various recipes to suit whatever the catch of the day happened to be-and it was never the same. She asked Livia who Ricciardi might be and what work he did, as if he weren’t sitting right there; Livia replied that he was a professional musician in a symphony orchestra, and he was grateful to her. He even tried to imagine, as that beautiful woman regaled him with stories from her own career, what it would be like if it were actually true: if he’d played, say, the violin or the double bass. If he’d led a normal life, where the challenge was to make it to the end of each month, wearing shoes that might be falling apart, but still without the constant flood of grief and without a dead man talking to him at every street corner.

He didn’t contribute much to the conversation: his stories weren’t the kind you could tell over dinner. But he never thought he’d feel so completely at ease. Livia’s lovely musical laughter was intoxicating, even more than the chilled white wine that accompanied the fish.

Two posteggiatori came in, the charming singing musicians who provided atmosphere in restaurants of this kind: a guitar and a mandolin, strummed and plucked with virtuosity by skilled fingers. The songs, the true voice of Naples, reawakened sleeping souls and brought age-old emotions back to the surface. The proprietress of the restaurant prodded Livia to sing, and she held out as long as she could, laughing lightly. Finally, she gave in and, looking into Ricciardi’s pale green eyes with her dark, luminous eyes, she sang the first verse of ’O sole mio. Her accent was anything but Neapolitan, and it was a song meant to be sung by a man: still, her contralto voice was as warm as, if not warmer than, the salt air wafting up from the sea, and when she was done the whole room burst into thunderous applause.

When they left the restaurant, it was past midnight. The late hour, the long day, the wine, and the new feelings had all gone to Ricciardi’s head, and he looked back at himself, as if from some window. He couldn’t seem to shake a bad feeling that he was somehow doing Enrica wrong; but in some other way Livia was soothing the pain he felt in his stomach. If that’s the way it’s got to go, then let it, he thought vaguely.

As for her, she was happier than she’d been in many years. Pulling Ricciardi out of his shell was like mining for diamonds, difficult but very gratifying. And in his eyes-not always, but occasionally-she’d seen the gleam of a new light. She knew he liked her, but she could also sense an obstacle of some sort, something that kept him from opening up completely. She’d cleverly persuaded him to tell her his life story, all about his family: she’d confirmed that there was no other woman, at least not one who formed part of his life, institutionally speaking; but her intuition told her that there was another woman in her smoldering dark commissario’s heart.

That’s no big problem, she thought to herself. If she got in, she can also get out. All I have to do is find a way to open the door and take her place.

Ricciardi was walking her back to the hotel; she was leaning on his arm, enjoing the darkness that enveloped the Piazza del Plebiscito, the columns and the statues of bygone kings, with only the sound of her shoes on the broad stone slabs. She’d read the inscription on the entrance to the church, and Ricciardi was explaining that it was the vow made by a king of Naples to put an end to an outbreak of the plague, when in the little alley leading into the piazza, a few shadows emerged from the overall darkness.

At first Ricciardi, who was looking at the inscription and translating it, didn’t notice a thing; he sensed Livia’s hand squeezing his upper arm, and he turned around in time to see four menacing figures surrounding them. He couldn’t see their faces; it was too dark for that. But the commissario’s attention was caught by their dark, rumpled suits, by the heavy boots they were wearing, and especially by the clubs in their hands.

Livia let a moan escape her lips and one of the men told her to keep quiet, with a rough insult. Ricciardi turned to face him, staring at him fearlessly. The man took a step forward and slapped him, once, hard, in the face. As he was raising his hand to hit him again and the other three were bearing in, Ricciardi spoke, in a firm voice, as if he were reciting a poem:

“Buffoonish clowns, you’re nothing but four buffoonish clowns. Four to one, for shame, for shame, you buffoonish clowns.”

One of the four men heaved a deep sigh, as if he’d just been punched in the stomach. They stepped back, exchanging glances. One man let his club fall to the ground, turned, and took to his heels. Two others followed him almost immediately. The last man, the one who had slapped him, said:

“You be careful, Ricciardi. You be careful where you wander late at night, and the questions you ask. Because if you’re not careful, next time it won’t be clubs. It’ll be knives.”

Then he, too, turned and ran.