Maurizio de Giovanni - Blood Curse

When Maione informed him, Ricciardi smirked in amusement. The theater. Once again, real and fictional passions would mingle and blend. Who could say which would make the most noise?

The theater. That was destined to be the place where the mystery would be untangled. All right then. The theater. And we’ll be there, he thought. He told Maione to put together a small team of plainclothes officers: four men in all, to be positioned at various points in the auditorium and at the exits. One man would need to sit next to the professor, incognito, to forestall any sudden moves.

“What about you, Commissa’? What are you going to do?”

Unexpectedly, Ricciardi half-smiled and brushed the lock of hair away from his forehead with a sharp sweep of his hand. His eyes glittered in the low light of the setting sun.

“I’m going to pick up a young lady. I’ll be attending the theater with company this evening. Arrange to have two tickets for me at the box office.”

Nunzia Petrone couldn’t believe her own ears. She was mistrustful by nature, and especially so with policemen. It struck her as a ridiculous request, practically a joke, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in the commissario’s eyes.

“Antonietta? But why? What do you need her for?”

Ricciardi, standing with both hands in his overcoat pockets, his shock of hair dangling over his forehead, looked her in the eye.

“Because she may have been present, when Calise was killed. You told me yourself that she stayed upstairs with her another hour the night that she was murdered. And if the murderer had happened to notice she was there, he probably would have killed her, too. Perhaps, if she looked someone in the face, she might be able to help us identify the killer. Perhaps.”

Petrone looked around her with her small eyes, as if appealing to the cheap objects in her kitchen for help.

“But Antonietta doesn’t understand a thing, Commissa’. She just talks to herself, as if she could see people that we can’t, other children she can play with in her imagination. She’s. . simpleminded, you can see that for yourself. What could you possibly expect from her, the poor little thing?”

Ricciardi shrugged.

“It’s a shot. Just a shot. But I promise you that nothing will happen to her. I’ll stay close to her the whole time. And I’ll bring her back to you, safe and sound. And she might even have fun. An evening at the theater.”

So Ricciardi found himself strolling downhill from the Sanità toward the Teatro dei Fiorentini, walking alongside the girl, who dragged her feet and held her right hand near her mouth, continuing to murmur her singsong. As they went by, people stopped talking and stepped aside.

The shadows of night were gradually swallowing up the street, and the streetlights had not yet flickered on. This was the hour in which dreams materialize.

At the beginning of Via Toledo, Ricciardi cast his usual sidelong glance at the dead. Antonietta smiled and waved at them.

The commissario shuddered when the girl stopped to caress the ghost of a child with its head crushed in, perhaps the result of a streetcar accident, the bloody, naked skin on its chest grooved by the twine suspenders holding up its trousers. Oddly enough, the cap was still perched on top of the child’s head, at least on the half that was intact, while on the other side the cap rested on a shard of white skull and bare, rotting brain matter.

Passersby saw the girl reach her hand out into the empty air and thought nothing of it. Ricciardi on the other hand saw her caress an arm shaking with the final spasms of death, and heard the child’s desperate wail for help that issued from its broken teeth.

“Help me, Mamma,” Antonietta repeated, dreamily. Ricciardi put his hand on her back and gently pushed her along. She began walking again and didn’t look back.

Farther on, when they got to the construction sites of the new white buildings, one by one, in and among the clerks on their way home and the women returning from grocery shopping, dead construction workers who had died on the job began to appear. Ricciardi kept his head down, while Antonietta cheerfully waved her chubby hand, making no distinction between the living and the dead, although neither one nor the other paid her any attention. But maybe the two of them, invisible to one and all, were the real phantoms.

Antonietta blew a kiss to the boy and the old man who had died together; but when they came face-to-face with a more recently dead man, the one who kept calling the name of a certain Rachele, telling her that they had pushed him to join her, the girl started in fright and hid behind Ricciardi’s back. What did you sense, this time? he wondered. What other emotion? You must be able to sense even more than I do, then. In that moment, he felt a surge of infinite pity for the young girl, and he caressed her face. She smiled at him, and went on walking.

But she kept turning around to look behind her, trembling slightly.

Sitting at his desk, Ruggero Serra di Arpaja looked out at the springtime through the glass doors of his balcony. The silk curtains reached toward him, then sank back into place as if the breeze were playfully beckoning him to come outside. The air smelled of salt water and fresh blossoms.

The rays from the sun sinking behind the hill of Posillipo filled the room with sparkling light, hurting the man’s tired eyes. Another sleepless night. Another day of waiting.

Unfamiliar emotions, encountered after a lifetime spent speeding along rails determined by his social status, had taken command of his every decision. Lately, he’d done things that he could never have even imagined, and he’d discovered a part of himself that he hadn’t known existed.

In that final moment, that morning, he had done his best to maintain appearances: his dark suit, his perfectly ironed shirt, his face clean-shaven, his hair combed and brushed. Only his eyes, behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, betrayed the torment of his soul. The news that Emma was pregnant, which she had told him after a long night of reciprocal insults and accusations, bore the mark of redemption and irrevocability. No matter what, after that piece of news, nothing could ever be the same again.

The morning sun had brought him a new and extraordinary awareness: he loved his wife and without her, life meant nothing to him. Let the police come arrest him, let them denigrate him, let them blacken his reputation, let them toss it to the tender mercies of his so-called friends; if Emma left him, none of this would mean anything to him anymore.

Without taking his eyes off the indifferent springtime, he pulled open his desk drawer and took out the revolver. He’d already checked to make sure it was loaded. Not another loveless night. Not another loveless springtime.

He put on his overcoat. Let’s go to the theater, he thought.

For the last performance.

Sitting before her mirror, Emma tried to cover the weariness of her sleepless night with face powder. She couldn’t stand the idea of Attilio seeing her looking any less beautiful than usual.

She knew that by going to the theater, she was violating Calise’s iron rules; but could a woman who hadn’t even foreseen her own death really determine the fate of others? And what if the old woman had been wrong from the very beginning? What if she’d condemned her to misery by mistake?

She tried to steer her thoughts elsewhere, anticipating the flood of emotion she usually felt when she saw Attilio: the echo of his love, the passion and the tenderness that she’d come to depend on.

She’d had the car made ready, but she hadn’t yet packed her bags; just a few hours to go until their meeting, she still hadn’t decided what she’d do. She’d never made a decision for herself in her life, and now she was being asked to make the most important one of all, all alone, without help.