Everyone in Their Place

XXXIX

On Friday afternoons, the city ignores the heat; it ignores the cold, the rain, and the wind.

The city, on Friday afternoons, has no weather, or perhaps it’d be better to say, it has a special weather all its own. It’s the weather of anticipation, two wonderful days when the brutal pace of work slows, when you can think about yourself and your own interests for a while, at last. Two days of seeing friends, attending mass, dancing. Two days of uniformed children doing calisthenics in the middle of the piazza, guided by lovely young ladies with megaphones; two days of children at summer camp marching in double file down to the beach, shaved bald to ward off lice, squinting in the dazzling sunlight of Mergellina. Two days of sunbaked scugnizzi-street urchins with a rag bound around their waist, tied with a length of rope or twine, bare feet deformed, soles as tough as shoe leather, recklessly hanging off trolley cars. Two days of gypsy girls reading your palm, or counterfeit monks offering lottery numbers. Two days of singing and music.

The city, on Friday afternoons, populates its streets with anticipation: it’s far too wonderful and important to wait for Saturday together, no one wants to be shut up at home. Via Toledo fills with voices and noises, the watermelon vendor promising the cool fire of his merchandise, the strolling coffee-seller with his monumental wheeled cuccuma, the lemon man, his merchandise dangling from bobbing branches. And focaccias with fresh anchovies and raw shrimp, mussels, and octopus, pretty farm girls with a nanny goat on a rope and an iron pitcher to hold the goat’s milk.

The city, on Friday afternoons, didn’t want to know about poverty and hunger. In the vicoli, chickens peck through the garbage, while little processions of street urchins follow the pazzariello, sweating in his heavy uniform and twirling his baton, beating his drum and calling the crowds to attend the opening of some shop or other. The comari confide secrets by shouting them from one balcony to another, as they hang laundry on clotheslines that extend the few yards separating one apartment building from another. The guappo leaves for the evening, dressed in white suit and two-tone shoes, with a matching hat and two enforcers, his sgherri, following a few feet back; as he passes, men doff their hats and women bow, and after he’s gone, they all spit on the pavement.

The city, on Friday afternoons, is accommodating and generous. Along the grand boulevard where the quality stroll bloom little match girls and fortune-tellers, blind men, both real and fake, victims of every deformity, holding out their hands, begging for charity and commiseration in the form of tossed coins. But if a pair of mounted policeman appear in their dress hats topped by tall plumes, the cripples and unfortunates are miraculously healed, scampering away down the vicoli on legs no longer bowed and twisted, effortlessly dragging behind them huge baskets of merchandise; only to return to their places minutes later, once the danger is past, lamenting their misfortunes even louder than before.

The city, on Friday afternoons, is preparing itself for love. The girls plan out what flowers they’ll pin to their hats and their necklines, when they go for a stroll in the Villa Nazionale on Sunday morning or out dancing on Saturday afternoon. They’ll need to decide well ahead of time, because their best dresses have to be pressed with a coal-heated clothes iron and they have to curl their hair, lest the most important meeting of a lifetime takes place this time and catches them unprepared. And the university students busily discuss the best place to meet up later, which club or theater will feature the most enchanting soubrette or the most scantily attired dancers, polishing their shoes as if they were rifles. The fathers and mothers eagerly anticipate their Saturday mornings, when their young children will be at meetings and rallies and they will be able to enjoy, in their one- or two-room apartments, an intimacy they’ve awaited all week; the scugnizzi know it all too well, and so they’ll run from one floor to another in the apartment buildings of Naples’s middle class, twisting doorbells to annoy and disturb: but no one comes to open the door.

The city, on Friday afternoons, wants to forget about blood. It has the good fortune of being unable to see ghostly figures crushed by horse-drawn carriages and automobiles, proclaiming with their bleeding mouths and collapsed lungs their desire to go on living another day, or even another minute. It is the city’s luck that it is incapable of seeing knives protruding from red-stained shirts, necks shattered by clubs, uttering one last, gurgling appeal to the Madonna. It has the good luck not to see the unrecognizable corpses of workers who plummeted from wobbly scaffoldings, martyrs to the construction boom, calling out to their mammas to let them live longer than their fourteen years.

The city stops thinking about it all, on Friday afternoons. Because tomorrow is Saturday.

Ricciardi was walking toward Gambrinus, enjoying the sights of both Via Toledo and Friday afternoon. He felt sure that the conversation he was about to have with Capece’s son would give him the evidence he needed to solve the duchess’s murder. As he strolled through the crowd, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, he thought about himself, too, and the way he’d come to know certain emotions that, until just a few weeks ago, had been completely alien to him.

Garzo, the deputy chief of police who never seemed to miss a chance to show off his limitations, used to express a concept that Ricciardi had always found particularly inane: if you want to understand the way a criminal thinks, you must, to some extent, be able to think like him; in other words, you have to be a criminal yourself, at least to some extent.

Now, in the light of these new events, the commissario came back to this idea with some concern: both because he’d seen with lucid clarity who had killed the Duchess of Camparino and because he was no doubt infected with the same disease that had triggered that murder: jealousy. Let’s call a spade a spade, he thought, as he brushed past a beggar’s extended hand. I’ve encountered a new perversion, yet another corruption of love that leads to death and to murder. And now that I’ve encountered it myself, I can clearly recognize it.

Love, the worst enemy to have, often traveled twisted paths: but jealousy flew straight as an arrow. Like hunger, the other great mother of crimes, it was unpredictable and violent; but it had very different roots, sunk into the soul of selfishness and possession. And jealousy also knew how to be patient.

He found Maione and Andrea sitting inside, in silence. The boy was staring into empty air, lost in thought; the policeman was staring at the door, anxiously awaiting the commissario’s arrival, which would put an end to his uncomfortable vigil. It was no easy thing to be guarding such a young suspect, and to make things worse he was in civilian garb, and the location was hardly the usual police holding tank. Sitting on the table between them, like the clinching point in an argument, was the newspaper-wrapped package.

Ricciardi sat down and ordered an espresso. Andrea neither looked up nor said hello. Maione started to snap a military salute, then he remembered that he wasn’t in uniform and simply waved his hand, lamely.

“Commissa’, it was all exactly as you said. The pistol was behind a brick, in the cellar wall. It’s clean, and it looks like it was recently used. The youngster, here, was at school; he came along without objecting.”

Without raising his eyes, Andrea said:

“So you were keeping us under surveillance. Even before you came to our apartment, you were keeping us under surveillance.”

The tone in which he spoke was that of a simple statement: there was no moral judgment, no reproof. Nor was there an admission of guilt. Ricciardi set the record straight:

“No, we weren’t watching you. We received a report from others. This is a city where nobody minds their own business, you should certainly know that by now. In any case, it doesn’t matter how we found out: what matters is that you hid your father’s pistol. Why did you do that?”

Andrea finally looked the commissario in the face, with a shrug.

“Just because. Because I felt like it, because it made a big impression on my friends. I’m a boy, right? It’s the kind of thing boys do.”

Sad, pained eyes. Ricciardi decided that those eyes hadn’t been a young boy’s eyes for years. The theft of childhood and youth is not yet a criminal offense, he mused. But it ought to be.

“Listen: this is no time for games. Not anymore. This is a very serious matter. It will take our forensics experts five minutes, tops, maybe less, to prove that this pistol ejected the shell that we found on the scene of the murder, and that it therefore fired the bullet that killed the duchess. So let me urge you, let’s not waste time.”

Andrea went on staring at the commissario, expressionless, his jaws clamped tight. A knot of young girls went past their table, laughing loudly. Ricciardi softened his tone of voice.

“I understand you. Whatever reason you may have had to hide that pistol, you did it to save your family, or what’s left of it. You can see for yourself, we didn’t come to get you in uniform, we didn’t take you down to police headquarters. But if it becomes necessary, we will: because a murder’s a murder, and whoever the victim might be. .”

The boy leaned forward, turning pale and compressing his lips. His face had taken on the feral rage of a cornered animal, forced to attack in self-defense. His voice was a hiss.

“Whoever the victim, you say. But do you know who she really was, your poor pitiful murder victim? She was someone who took away the happiness of an entire family just to satisfy a whim. Now you see him crying like a baby. But do you know that that man-yes, that man: I will never again consider him to be my father-hasn’t come home in months? Yes, I know what my mother told you. But she’s lost her mind, and that’s just one more piece of fun that the signora, her ladyship, decided to have with us. Now she’s dead. Because she needed to die. And that’s all.”

Once he was done talking, he slumped back into his chair and stared down at the tabletop again. Maione wondered whether he’d really seen and heard it, so sudden had the metamorphosis been. Ricciardi went on, in a harsher tone of voice:

“You can think whatever you like. But we want to know who shot the duchess; and the fact that you hid the pistol tells us beyond the shadow of a doubt that you know.”

A long silence ensued. All around them, the crowd was beginning to swell, the Friday night strollers were reaching some kind of crescendo. The shops were nearly all still open and the ladies with their big fans were lingering before the display windows, commenting on the prices and models of dresses and hats. At last, Andrea spoke.

“It was me. I couldn’t take my mother’s madness any longer, her sobbing. I couldn’t take the shame that my father had heaped on us; the fact that everyone knew, even at school. I couldn’t stand the fact that my little sister still loved him, after what he’d done.”

Another silence. Ricciardi stared at the boy, taking in the harsh glare, the clamped lips. Maione, as always, seemed to be half-asleep; after a while, it was Maione who broke in.

“So, you waited for school to be over and you went to the palazzo, is that it? And you went all the way into the bedroom, where you shot the duchess, who was still sleeping. Four shots, you fired; and then you took to your heels.”

The boy nodded, still staring into the middle distance. Ricciardi shot the brigadier a rapid glance, encouraging him to go on.

“So explain this to me, how did you manage to get away? Why didn’t anyone see you?”

The boy answered in a firm voice, as if he were talking about what he’d done at school that morning:

“There was no one there. Maybe the doorman was at lunch. The front door was wide open, it was hot out, and at that time of day there was no one walking in the street.”

Maione shook his head, sadly.

“Guagliò-youngster-the duchess wasn’t killed during the day; and only one shot was fired. She wasn’t killed in the bedroom, either. None of this was in the newspaper, and for once we owe a debt of gratitude to those who decided to eliminate crime reporting. No, it wasn’t you.”

Andrea’s expression remained unchanged, as if he hadn’t heard a word. But one tear did suddenly course down his cheek. Frustration, thought Ricciardi.

“What can I tell you? I could insist, say that I got my facts backwards. I’m sixteen years old, the punishment would be a slap on the wrist, wouldn’t it? But then I’d get tripped up again, and again: because I wasn’t there, when the bitch was murdered. So I have to admit it. It was him. It was my father.”

Maione settled back in his chair. At last, the case was solved: for once the murderer was the prime suspect. He turned to look at Ricciardi and recognized his expression; he immediately realized that he hadn’t understood a thing.

“No. It wasn’t him. We have an alibi for him, we know where he was at the time of the murder. And we even know who it really was: who you’re protecting. But we need to hear you say it. To keep you from being implicated in any of this, to make sure you come out of this story free of guilt, to make sure we can forget the fact that you hid the pistol. And also to make sure that you understand clearly that a murder is a murder: even when the murderer is perhaps more innocent than the victim. Who was it?”

In the cheerful din of Friday, as the afternoon slowly faded into the evening and Via Chiaia filled up with noise and hopes, Andrea’s face resumed its age and dissolved into grief and uncontrolled sobbing. Through his tears he looked at Ricciardi and said:

“Can’t you see what she’s been through? Don’t you see that the pain and grief have driven her insane? That she doesn’t know what she’s doing and she never will, my poor mamma?”