Susan Anderson - Death of a Serpent

She held her mother’s hand.

“Hear me.” Maddalena’s breath was ragged. “Afterward, the man and I, we sat in his kitchen. Wept together, found comfort in each other, became friends. More. Hid my condition, delivered the boy myself.”

Bones clutched Serafina’s arm. “Never told your papa. Away he was, teaching in Turin. Worked hard for us…loved me. I took the infant to Mother Concetta. God, forgive me, so hard, oh please forgive me.”

“Nonsense, nothing to forgive. I love you, sweet Mama, forever.”

“Remember him?” she asked. “Remember the boy with hair like ours? Concetta said the priest named him Tigro.”

“No one else knows this?”

“She kept my secret.”

Serafina heard a sound like the wheezing of bellows. Her mother had used up all her words.

The image vaporized.

Closing her eyes, Serafina made a conscious effort to forget her dying mother’s secret, an hallucination, she was sure.

• • •

With the bend in the road, Serafina hung onto her seat.

“Help me find the killer,” Rosa said. “You’re a wizard. You saw Colonna. He does nothing.”

She was surprised by the madam’s request. “Let me think. I need to think. My family. My children. I need to spend more time with them.”

Rosa sniffed into her handkerchief.

Serafina had never seen Rosa like this. They met as children when Serafina’s mother, summoned to the house for a birthing, brought her daughter along. ‘Best way to learn midwifery,’ her mother had explained. Rosa and Serafina would help with the cleanup. Afterward, they’d sit together at the long kitchen table while the robed women laughed or sat silent, eating their sauce.

Serafina handed Rosa a fresh linen.

• • •

Ochre light filtered through palm fronds, the stillness in this fashionable Palermo neighborhood not unusual for a Sunday. They walked the short distance to the home of Bella’s mother and father, located on the top floor of a large building near La Vucciria. Rosa gestured to the Baldassare family business, a costume and tailor shop, across a small piazza. Its doorways and windows were shuttered. When she glanced over, Serafina thought she saw movement behind a window on the second story, a flash of white. Bella’s ghost?

A man in livery opened the door to the apartment building and ushered the two women inside. They ascended, the madam running up five flights like a mountain goat. After knocking several times on Baldassare’s door, they waited. Serafina’s stomach growled.

“Can’t leave a note.” Rosa fanned herself with a glove. “Lost his sons, he did, in the war. The wife, caught in a spell. Now they lose the daughter. When he hears the news, oh, Madonna, the dread.”

“Of course we must wait.”

Rosa’s eyes welled up.

Bella’s killing is too much for her. “We’ll stand here a few minutes,” Serafina said, hugging Rosa, “and if there’s no answer, we’ll grab a bite and return. Must be a taverna open in La Vucciria. Or a vendor grilling paneddi . Aren’t you hungry?”

Rosa re-pinned her hat and looked away.

Minutes passed. They knocked again and were about to leave when they heard a voice coming from inside the apartment.

“One moment!” The shuffle of slippered feet, the tumble of locks, and a tall man with a large head stood before them. “A thousand apologies. Maid’s off today. Rosa!” Nittù Baldassare’s voice boomed. His smile faded when he saw her face.

“Bad news I have,” Rosa said. “It’s Bella.”

In the center of the room, a woman sat motionless. She faced the light, her mouth, a slash. Bella’s mother. Rosa planted a kiss on her forehead, whispered in her ear. No response.

A marble bust of Garibaldi stood on a side table. Serafina looked away. On the far wall, doors led to a patio with a view of Palermo, its domes gleaming in the afternoon sun.

Serafina and Rosa sat across from Nittù Baldassare. His eyes were focused inward.

Through clenched teeth he said, “Find him!”

• • •

On the ride home Serafina considered Rosa’s request. Giorgio’s death had been so sudden-what, less than six months ago. Her children needed her now more than ever. Bad enough leaving them when she was called in the middle of the night to a birthing, but she must continue with midwifery: it was her specialness. Besides, she had a commitment to the town, received a stipend, and they needed the coins. If she were engaged in finding the killer of Rosa’s women, she’d be away from the little ones too much of the time; when home, her mind would be forever wrestling with the mystery.

She looked over at Rosa who was wrapped in grief, frowning out the window. Well, then, Serafina would tell her later: she could not, must not, take up sleuthing.

The carriage slowed.

“What’s that? A pounding, I hear,” Rosa said.

“Nothing. The wind.”

They stopped.

She heard voices, laughter, the crack of a whip, an animal roar. Serafina squinted through clouds of dust to a long line of wagons.

The madam stuck her head out the window. “Turi,” she called, “why have we stopped?”

“Barco’s circus blocks the road.”

“Off the highway!” someone yelled. “Let us pass!”

Serafina asked, “Can’t the guards do something?”

“Thick, the guards,” Rosa said. “A show for bandits.”

“Stay here.” Serafina opened the door and climbed out.

Barco was a ball of a man, short and round, clothed in the only garb she’d ever seen him wear: overalls, a tattered shirt stained with sweat, red tails, a balding top hat. He rolled over to Serafina.

“Eh, Donna Fina, haven’t seen you since you was a tike. Heard you married the apothecary. And you, a midwife, same as your mama, popping out babies like a hocus-pocus lady.”

They hugged. She told him about Giorgio’s death and the killings at Villa Rosa.

“Heard about the trouble at Rosa’s. Word is, the red fox, he’s in the coop.” He leaned over, spat.

“Another woman killed today. We come from Palermo where we broke the news to her poor parents.”

He chewed the butt of his cigar. “Might as well camp here as anywheres,” he said, pointing to the open field.

Barco motioned to his foreman. In minutes, mules towed the wagons onto the side. Performers and animals flooded the field. A group of knife throwers crowded around a tree where they had set up a target. Acrobats tumbled. The cook began building a fire.

As Serafina waved goodbye, a clown in whiteface with a tuft of ginger hair stared at her from the side of the road, the butt of a knife sticking out of his belt. Running splayed fingers through her curls, she looked away, heard her mother ask again, ‘Remember the boy with hair like ours?’

Monday October 8, 1866

Serafina decided to drive the long way to Rosa’s, not wanting to navigate the Via Serpentina alone. The neighborhoods through which it snaked teemed with alleyways and crumbling fountains, infants wailing in one-room homes, young boys tossing knucklebones, the smell of garbage in the throat.

She flicked the reins but Largo kept his own pace, skirting the piazza with its fountain and suppliant statue of St. Benedict.

Without warning a begging monk stepped in front of her, his cart blocking her trap. He caught her eye, looked away. Fair-haired and gloved, he wore a frayed cassock. Next to him white-haired women gathered around a street vendor preventing the monk’s rapid movement. Or was it his swaybacked beast, moving with the rapidity of a snail, that delayed him?

“Whoa, Largo. This won’t take long,” she said, hitching the trap to a post. She stepped into the throng. Largo’s ears twitched.