Everyone in Their Place

VI

Behind the door was a proper room, not at all the anteroom that the housekeeper had described. It was swathed in dim light, the shutters pulled to, as if to let a sleeper sleep, but the figure that he glimpsed on the sofa wasn’t sleeping.

Ricciardi stepped forward, shutting the door behind him. He could make out the silhouettes of the furniture, the chairs, a writing desk. Paintings on the walls, a soft carpet underfoot. Odors. Lavender, sweet smelling, a sparkling clean house. But also the smell of cordite: gunshots had been fired in that room. Perhaps just once, the smell wasn’t overpowering. And something else: blood. Clotted blood, that characteristic odor, like rusted iron.

The commissario gazed at the form of the corpse, which he’d take the time to examine more closely, later, in the light. He identified the direction of the face, well aware that the Deed would set the image in the place where the victim had last looked: this was the strange physics of his power, one of the rules established only to be broken. There was no exception to the rule that time, however: in the corner exactly opposite the couch on which the dead woman lay, perfectly visible to Ricciardi’s mind’s eye, in spite of the darkness, the Duchess Musso di Camparino went on repeating her last living thought.

She’d been a very beautiful woman: death could not conceal her height, her prosperous shape wrapped in a black silk nightdress. She would have been forty, more or less, but she must have carried her age with all the pride of wealth and the confidence of her resources. The image stared straight ahead, proud and motionless. Ricciardi sensed none of the most common emotions: fear, rage, horror. Instead, he sensed surprise, something approaching curiosity: the woman never thought that she was about to die, right up to the end.

Still, now she was dead; in fact, to be exact, she had been murdered. At the center of her forehead, sharp and precise, above her half-closed eyes, was a round hole: the entry wound, a bullet hole. Her face was reddened, her black tongue protruded from her lips. But her features were also fine, high cheekbones, dark eyes, a mouth with large, very white teeth.

As always, the commissario focused his attention on what the Duchess di Camparino had to tell him, the message that she was leaving; the portion of thought that death had interrupted, the snapped thread.

“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”

Like a prayer, murmured endlessly, repeated until it could dissolve into the air along with the simulacrum of a mouth that was uttering it. A simple phrase, as clear as if it had been screamed in silence.

“The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing.”

Ricciardi had no need to memorize it: he’d hear those words, and the suffering that lay behind them, over again many times. Head down, he went to open the shutters and let in shafts of pitiless sunlight.

Maione had stayed outside to sweat with the Sciarras, man and wife, and the housekeeper. Two children had come laughing down the stairs, a boy and a girl, the girl brandishing two large hunks of bread. The brigadier’s love of children was sorely tested by that sight. Sciarra, in a firm voice, hushed them both and halted their progress by seizing each by the nape of the neck, as if they were a couple of puppies. The little boy loudly protested:

“Papà, listen, that Lisetta took my bread, you tell her to. .”

The doorman pried one of the hunks of bread out of his daughter’s fingers and gave it to the boy. The little girl whined:

“Papà, Totonno ate my cheese, we’d made a trade and now he wants to eat the bread too!”

Sciarra smacked them both hard and threatened them: “If the two of you don’t cut it out, I’ll take the bread away from both of you and give it to the brigadier, here, and he’ll gobble it up for himself. Now get out of here, and shut the door behind you!”

Maione inwardly prayed that they’d keep it up, and that, strictly for educational reasons, let that be clear, he’d be forced to eat both pieces of bread. Possibly, to wash them down a little bitter, dipped in a nice tomato sauce. But instead, the two children, duly frightened, shot back up the stairs, each clutching his precious chunk.The brigadier heaved a sigh.

“Sweet. Are they yours?”

“Yes, Brigadie’, two scourges of God. And there are two others upstairs, an older boy and a little girl. But these two are the worst stinkers.”

Mariuccia had started up the stairs after her children, but Maione had halted her with a wave of the hand.

“No, Signo’, you’ll have to wait here until the commissario says otherwise, and allows you to go. And while we’re waiting, tell me something: just how is the duke’s apartment divided up? Are there personal rooms, shared rooms, and how many?”

The housekeeper struck a stance that seemed strangely defensive to Maione.

“No, you understand, Brigadie’, each of the three has his own rooms, they don’t actually see each other much.”

Sciarra grimaced, wrinkling his enormous nose.

“No, for that matter, they never see each other at all. The duke stays in bed and never moves, while young master Ettore is always out on the terrace, him, the flowers, and the plants, and the duchess. .”

Concetta blasted him with a murderous glare.

“It would be best if everyone just stayed in their place, that’s what would be best. You won’t learn, will you, that we’re the servants and what the dukes do is none of our business.”

“Why, what’s the matter, Donna Conce’, what have I done wrong? All I meant to say is that each of them keeps to himself, to try to answer the brigadier here-that they might have common rooms, but they weren’t used.”

Mariuccia broke in; she’d never stopped sniffling into her handkerchief the whole time.

“That’s right, no one ever goes there, but the duchess insists that the room be kept clean and tidy, she checks, and if she ever finds anything out of place, she calls me and gives me a lecture. That is, she used to. Now, she’ll never give me a lecture again. .” and she started in again, sobbing in despair. Her husband intervened:

“Now, what a fool you are, it almost sounds like you’re sorry the poor duchess can never scold you again.”

Once again, Concetta thought it her duty to explain to Peppino how matters stood.

“No, you’re the ones who don’t understand that now, with the death of the duchess, the way this house is organized might change, and maybe there’s no more need of us, and we find ourselves kicked out into the street.”

Sciarra shrugged his shoulders.

“Eh, when would that ever happen? If anything, now the young master and the duke will need us more than ever. After all, who’s supposed to keep all this household running, otherwise?”

Maione listened to the exchange of remarks, with apparent distraction but actually letting nothing get by him. He’d understood that in the palazzo there lived not one single family, but five different clans: the Sciarras, Concetta, and the duke, the duchess, and the young master, who had as little to do with each other as they could. He made a mental note to inform Ricciardi of the situation, just as the commissario stuck his head out the door again and told him to come in.

Now sunlight had filled the anteroom, and the temperature was rising noticeably. Ricciardi and Maione looked around at the wallpaper, the paintings, the furniture. Their expert eyes detected an abundance of silver objects, fine artwork, two Chinese vases, and an ancient bronze statuette: there had been no robbery, or if there’d been an attempt, it had been thwarted before it could be completed. Nor did they see any signs of a struggle; nothing was broken or even overturned. The only visible sign that anything had happened was a square cushion on the floor, at the corpse’s feet, with a hole in the side facing up. Ricciardi didn’t turn it over, because he didn’t want to move a thing until the photographer got there, but he was willing to bet that on the other side there would be unmistakable burn marks on the fabric, the very same signs that had been missing on the dead woman’s forehead. The murderer had fired through the cushion.

The duchess, if you didn’t look at her face, might have been sleeping, languidly stretched out on the sofa, just slightly relaxed, legs extended and hands in her lap. Ricciardi drew closer and noticed that she had no rings on her left hand, though there were marks of a ring on both her middle and her ring fingers. The middle finger actually seemed broken or at least sprained, though he saw no signs of bruising. He’d have to wait for the medical examiner and the photographer, before moving the corpse; but there was no mistaking the cause of death, the bullet hole in the forehead, right between the half-open eyes.

Maione, huffing and puffing and sweatier by the minute, had squatted down by the sofa and was trying to look under it.

“Where are you, now where are you, you damned little. . ah, there it is now. Commissa’, here’s the shell, it was right under the sofa, exactly where I expected it to be.”

“Nice work, Raffaele. Don’t touch it, though; let’s wait for the photographer. And while we’re waiting, why don’t you call the housekeeper, let’s hear what she has to say.”

The Sivo woman entered the room, silent and bulky. She shot a quick glance at the duchess’s dead body and quickly looked away, her face turning pale but with no change in her impassive expression. Ricciardi, standing with his hands in his pockets, watched her sweat for a long moment without speaking, seeking any other signs of discomfort, but he saw none.

“Now then, Signora. Tell me how you discovered the corpse of the duchess.”

“I rise early, around six. When I don’t have to go to the market or run other errands out of the house, like today, since it’s a Sunday, I stay in my room for a while. I tidy up my own things, in other words. Then I go to the first mass, the seven o’clock mass.”

“So this morning you left around seven, too?”

“No, this morning I wanted to look around a little. Last night, I don’t know if you’d know this, but it was the Festa of Santa Maria Regina. Those people get up to everything imaginable, there’s garbage scattered outside the front door, they light a bonfire in the middle of the piazza. I wanted to give Mariuccia instruction to start cleaning up a bit.”

Ricciardi tried to reconstruct a time line.

“And in order to go out, you go by way of the anteroom?”

“Yes, I have to. At night, when I go to bed, I shut the padlock on the gate outside here. The Signora, who comes home late, leaves the keys on the chain in that drawer,” and she pointed to a console table next to the door, “so in the morning I can open up and let Mariuccia in to start her cleaning.”

“And you close the padlock with a key of your own?”

The Sivo woman shook her head.

“No, no. I don’t have the keys to the lock. I snap it shut, and in the morning I take the keys from the drawer. I take a look at the room, and usually I find it’s tidy and clean. But this time I found. . I found the duchess.”

“And what did you do?”

The woman’s tone of voice remained subdued but her expression betrayed deep emotion.

“I thought that she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, fully dressed. It had happened before, more than once, the duchess. . sometimes she came home tired, very tired.”

Ricciardi decided to call a spade a spade.

“Do you mean drunk?”

The Sivo woman had no intention of uttering words she didn’t feel authorized to use.

“I couldn’t say, Commissa’. It’s none of my business, and when something’s none of my business, I look the other way.”

Ricciardi looked her straight in the eye.

“But this time you couldn’t look the other way. What did you do when you realized that the duchess wasn’t sleeping?”

“I stuck my head out over the courtyard and I called Sciarra. I told him to come upstairs and stay close to the duchess, and I went up to the top floor to call young master Ettore.”

Ricciardi tried to reconstruct events with as much precision as possible.

“And was the gate already open or did you open it?”

The Sivo woman seemed surprised. She furrowed her brow.

“It was open. Now that you mention it, the gate was open and the padlock was shut, the way I leave it in the daytime.”

“Go on. Was the young master at home?”

“Yes, he was already out on the terrace, watering the flowers. He wakes up early too.”

“What did you say to him?”

Concetta looked down.

“I told him that I thought the duchess was dead. That she had a hole in her forehead.”

Ricciardi kept pushing:

“What about him, did he come downstairs with you immediately?”

After a moment’s hesitation, the woman replied:

“No. He said that he’s no doctor. And he went to call the police. But he didn’t come downstairs.”

There was a long silence. Ricciardi processed the information.

“How long have you been in service with the duke and the duchess?”

“Twenty-five years, Commissario. Ever since I was twenty-one. First as a scullery maid, then as a cook and for ten years as housekeeper, since the duchess passed away.”

“What? What do you mean, since the duchess passed away?” asked Maione, staring at the corpse.

“The first duchess, I meant to say. The duke was married before, and young master Ettore was the son of his first wife, Signora Virginia. The Duchess Adriana is. . was. . his second wife.”

Ricciardi decided to dig a little deeper. He meant to understand just what relations there were between the two women.

“So when the duke remarried you were already here. And did you get along with the duchess?”

The woman shrugged.

“The duchess was almost always out. Practically speaking, the house runs itself, there’s not a lot to do. I do my work and, more importantly, I mind my own business.”

Ricciardi didn’t miss the implicit condemnation in the Sivo woman’s reply and he made a mental note to explore this matter further.

But there was one thing he wanted to see immediately: he went over to the console table and pulled open the drawer. And in the drawer, just where the Sivo woman had said it would be, was the key to the padlock that was used to fasten the chain on the gate to the landing.

You can see the street through a gap in the bougainvillea hedge on the south side of the terrace. I left it there intentionally, since there’s no way anyone can look in from that side. And the street outside the front door is full of people. Rubberneckers, passersby. Who knows what they expect to see. Don’t they already know what’s happened? But as soon as one person stops, another one stops and stands next to them; in this city no one minds their own business.

I remember when I was still attending the university, four or five of us would go to the Villa Nazionale or to Via Toledo and start looking up at the sky. Two minutes later, there’s be at least ten other people with their noses in the air, and no one would ever ask, “Youngsters, what are you looking at?’ No one. Then, as soon as we’d had enough of that game, one of us would say: “Well, let’s go now, it’s clear that the flying donkey won’t be coming today after all.” And back home I’d tell my mamma, and she’d laugh, even through her pain.

I still see you, you know, Mamma, in your bed, smiling, because now you’re too weak to laugh. I see that you don’t want me to see that you’re suffering, in your heart and in your soul.

Because you’d already figured out what that whore dressed as a nurse was planning to do.

But now that woman’s dead, you know that, Mamma? She’s dead too. And not like you, in your own bed with a rosary in your hand and with my tears. No, she died the way she deserved too. Murdered.

Like the bitch she was.