Everyone in Their Place

III

God damn the Sunday shift, thought Brigadier Raffaele Maione with a snort of annoyance as he headed downhill from Piazza Concordia toward police headquarters. The heat was already hellish, and it was only eight in the morning. God damn the summer, too.

The brigadier was furious, and he really shouldn’t have been. But he decided that he had perfectly good reasons. Actually, he was having a good moment, the best in the three years since a thief had stabbed his son Luca to death. This horrible event had not only broken his heart, it had also driven a wedge into his family, separating his wife from him and the other children, and leaving her closed up in a silent, inconsolable grief.

Until the miracle happened that spring, just when he was beginning to despair of ever seeing her enchanting smile again. Man and wife had come together, united again the way they had been so long before, and at age fifty Raffaele had been given another unhoped-for chance at happiness. Once again, the Maione household rang with the bright laughter of mother and children, once again the father good-naturedly allowed himself to be mocked and ridiculed; once again on Sundays Lucia’s legendary spaghetti sauce opened stomachs and hearts to optimism. And so, why was the brigadier striding off with a grim expression of discontent toward his Sunday shift? And above all, why had he intentionally accepted that shift, swapping with a colleague who could hardly believe his ears when Maione proposed the trade?

This is how it happened: a week ago Raffaele had gone out for a stroll, arm in arm with his pretty wife, their five children trailing after them. Just a short distance from their front door they had walked past the shop of Ciruzzo Di Stasio, vendor of fresh fruit and vegetables, one of the brigadier’s old schoolmates and longtime official purveyor to the Maione family. The man had stepped forward, doffed his cap, and had proffered a gallant compliment to Maione’s wife:

“Donna Luci’, you’re simply enchanting. There is gold in your hair and your eyes are the color of seawater. One of these days I’m going to write you a song, you know how much I love to sing. But what are you doing with this burly bear, is what I’d like to know?” And he’d reached out to give an affectionate pat to the jacket of the police uniform, comfortably stretched over the prominent belly.

Lucia had laughed and thanked him. Maione however was hurt, and a stab of jealousy had pierced his heart. He preferred not to show it however, swallowing bitter gall when Lucia commented that Ciruzzo too was holding up well, still thin as a nail at age fifty. Maione, who weighed a corpulent 265 pounds, now felt even worse; actually Lucia’s comment was due only to her concern for her husband’s health. His father, after all, had had the same physique and had died a young man, of a heart attack.

And so it was that, from that day forward, every time he took a bite of food, his mind ran to Ciruzzo and Lucia, which put him in a bad mood. And so he decided to lose weight, and right away; he’d teach that oaf of a grocer to court his wife; he’d show him who was still the luckiest husband in the Spanish Quarter. So there he was now, cursing under his breath and going into the office on a Sunday for a reason he would never have confessed, not even under torture: to avoid eating Lucia’s wonderful spaghetti sauce.

From behind the shutters, already half-shut to ward off the ferocious sun, Lucia was watching her husband leave for the police station. On Sunday. Just when she’d finished cooking the finest pot of beef ragu in the city: nine pieces of meat, nine different varieties, sautéed in lard and then left to simmer for a whole day in tomatoes, onions, and red wine. This was impossible, she knew her husband too well. He’d never give up his ragu. There could be only one explanation: Raffaele had another woman on his mind.

That was the only possible explanation for the silences and unhappiness of the past few days, ever since they’d gone out for that stroll with the children; it was unmistakable, he’d met another woman and it had altered his mood.

Stirring the terra-cotta pot with her wooden spoon, she remembered that her mother used to tell her that the cook’s mood altered the food that she prepared: to cook well, you had to be happy. This ragu would no doubt be bitter as wormwood, she decided.

A sharp stabbing pain in her chest: jealousy. She was not going to let destiny deprive her of someone that she loved so dearly. Biting her lip, Lucia walked away from the window.

Enrica Colombo liked to wake up early on Sundays, so she had plenty of time to prepare the midday meal while the rest of her family lazed away in bed, taking advantage of the fact that it was a holiday. Her methodical personality required order, and order required time. She laid out on the table all of the ingredients for her ragu, and wondered what her parents and her brothers and sisters would have thought if she suddenly burst into song. Certainly not because of the dawning Sunday-considering the heat, already blistering in the early morning-nor because of the family stroll that would come later in the Villa Nazionale, with the traditional purchase of peanuts for the little ones by her father. There was another reason entirely.

Enrica was twenty-four years old and she’d never had a boyfriend. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but you couldn’t call her homely either, because she possessed an utterly feminine grace and kindness as well as fine delicate features. A little too tall, perhaps, and reluctant to open up to strangers; from behind her tortoiseshell rimmed glasses, her eyes were perfectly capable of chilling the ardor of anyone ill advised enough to try to bridge the distance that she put between herself and outsiders. This attitude was a source of great concern to her parents, who were afraid their firstborn might be looking at a future as an old maid; after all, her younger sister had already been married for two years, while she seemed unwilling even to meet anyone. She’d had her suitors, but she’d discouraged them all, turning down invitations courteously but firmly.

Truth be told, Enrica was not indifferent to the subject. Quite simply, she was waiting. She was waiting for the man she had slowly fallen in love with over long blustery winter evenings and then during the sweet mild flower-scented nights of springtime, to finally step forward in some fashion.

After waiting for a year, she’d had an opportunity to speak to him. The occasion was hardly what she’d been dreaming of: she’d learned that the man of her dreams was a commissario in the police department, a discovery that had come when he’d questioned her about the murder of a certain fortune-teller she’d been to see a couple of times. The interview hadn’t been particularly friendly, — he sat there in silence and she was furious at how unprepared she’d been for the meeting;-but at least the ice had been broken and now, in the evening, when she sat stitching her embroidery by the kitchen window, she’d tilt her head ever so slightly in his direction, and in return she’d receive a hesitant wave of the hand from him. It might not seem like much, but to her it was a great deal.

Now she had to wait for Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, for that was his name, to find a way to be introduced to her father and ask his permission to pay a call on her. That, too, might take time, but she was certain that he’d manage it; because otherwise why would he come to his window, every night between nine and nine thirty, to watch her embroider? It was only a matter of time.

Enrica Colombo had a quiet, determined personality. And she knew how to wait.

Livia Vezzi, née Lucani, and now widowed, believed that she’d waited long enough. That was why she was now sitting in the central Rome train station waiting for the direttissimo to Naples, where she planned to take an extended holiday. The choice of destination was no accident, of course; and of course it had caused concern and worry among her friends and relatives, becoming a topic for the gossips who inhabited the high society of Italy’s capital.

Livia Vezzi was in fact a prominent personality: she was beautiful, dark, and feline, her buxom figure and symmetrical features embellished by a dimple in her chin and a dazzling smile. Moreover, she had been married to the nation’s most famous tenor, Arnaldo Vezzi, an absolute genius, the leading man in the society pages for a decade; she herself had been an opera singer, endowed with a lovely contralto voice. Her promising career had been interrupted by marriage. Her husband had had plenty of lovers before being murdered in his dressing room at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, just four months ago; and Livia, too, had had fleeting affairs that had left her untouched except perhaps for a deepening of her loneliness. As for her marriage, Livia couldn’t remember it ever being a happy one.

When she was left a widow, there were plenty of men who stepped forward; her beauty aside, she possessed an attractive position in society, and plenty of money, too. There weren’t many women who could boast among their friendships the daughter of the Duce, and she was invariably invited whenever he entertained. But she didn’t seem interested in new relationships; she showed the world a calm and smiling face but kept everyone at arm’s length. It was said that she had other things on her mind.

Putting on a show of indifference to the two men who were trying to strike up a conversation in the train station waiting room, the woman admitted to herself that what they said was true: she had other things on her mind. What she had on her mind was a pair of extraordinary green eyes, whose gaze she had met at an absolutely inappropriate moment, during the investigation into her husband’s murder.

A pair of eyes that had remained indifferent to her allure, which was something she was unaccustomed to; and yet it was no mere whim that had led her to take a train back to the city of blinding lights and deep dark shadows. She’d told her girlfriends, who were eager to determine whether there was a love story behind her apparently macabre decision to return for a holiday right in the city where her husband had been murdered, that her decision was an attempt to exorcize that ghost, once and for all. The truth, however, was that she wanted to understand what lay beneath her uneasy dreams. And if she wanted to understand, she’d have to see those eyes again.

As she watched the direttissimo come puffing into the station, offering a smile to the two men who’d offered to carry her luggage, she decided that she’d waited long enough to understand this thing about herself.

Perhaps she’d waited too long.