Maurizio de Giovanni - Everyone in Their Place

Things changed radically however when, still a good fifty yards, perhaps more, from his own front door, he caught an unmistakable whiff of Lucia’s Genovese savory pastries. It couldn’t be anything else: the meat and onion sauce his wife cooked, and no other sauce out there, would have woken him out of a deep coma, and it was famous throughout the quarter. Long before the topic of food became a minefield, Lucia used to rib him, saying that the reason he’d married her was her Genovese pastries: and he, with a laugh, would say that she was probably right.

The thought only irritated him more: it struck him that making Genovese pastries for their children, now that he couldn’t eat them, was gratuitously cruel; a torture that Lucia was inflicting on him to punish him for rejecting the soup she’d made the night before. He was tempted to turn around and head straight back to police headquarters, just to deprive her of that satisfaction; then he decided that a real man faces challenges, he doesn’t turn and run, so he climbed the stairs, down in the mouth but grimly determined.

When he opened the front door, the celestial odor wafted over him violently; he even thought that he could detect the scent of fried broccoli and roasted potatoes, and possibly even a rum baba. He couldn’t believe it: a full Christmas banquet in the middle of August. What on earth was happening?

He noticed that none of the children came running to greet him the way they usually did. He made his way into the kitchen and stood there, openmouthed: the table was groaning with an array of food, cooked in every style imaginable. There were only two place settings, with the tablecloth and silverware that were only used on very special occasions. Lucia stood glaring at him, combatively, by the kitchen sink as she dried her hands with a dish towel. He asked her:

“Where are the kids?”

“They’re down at my sister Rosaria’s. They’ve had lunch there and they won’t be back until tonight.”

The brigadier pointed to the dishes arrayed on the table: “And all this food. . who put it here?”

Lucia replied in a harsh voice, but laughter was glinting in her eyes. She was enjoying herself.

“Who do you think put it here? And you tell me, who else would I let set foot in my kitchen?”

As she spoke, she came closer to Maione and gave him a fake punch in the chest, and another, then another, punctuating the things she said:

“And you tell me, is there a woman in all Naples who cooks better than I do? And you tell me, is there a place in all Naples where you’d be more comfortable than in your own home? And you tell me, how should a woman feel when she sees her own husband not bother to come home for dinner? And you tell me. .”

He seized her wrist to stop her from hitting him and put one arm around her waist, pulling her close to him.

“Well, while we’re at it, how is a man supposed to feel when he’s rejected in his own home? And you tell me, how is a husband supposed to feel when he sees his wife flirting with an idiot fruit vendor-and even if we went to school together when we were kids, it’s never too late for me to pluck out every last whisker in his whorish mustache, one by one?”

And they both burst out laughing and crying, until Lucia said, sit down and eat, or else we’ll have to throw out this whole banquet; and Raffaele replied, if you’re thinking of throwing away your Genovese pastries, you’ll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands. And they sat down and ate for an hour, and then they made love, and then they ate the rest.

Crying and laughing the whole time.

His lunch with Modo had at least helped Ricciardi to pinpoint the source of his uneasiness: the duchess’s second ring. He realized that whoever had torn the ring off her finger, dislocating it in the process, had done so after she’d already been killed, but still he felt compelled to complete his picture of the emotions that had danced around her corpse that night. His sense of order demanded it.

He headed off toward Palazzo Camparino, on an afternoon so muggy that the movements of the few people out on the street seemed to be in slow motion, as if they were underwater.

In the courtyard he saw Sciarra sweeping, doing his best to stay in the shade of the columns; he had his back to Ricciardi and didn’t see him coming. When the commissario tapped him on the shoulder he lofted straight into the air from a standing start, a comic sight accompanied by the loss of his hat and a high-pitched scream.

“Oooh, Madonna mia , Commissa’, it’s only you. You’re going to give me a heart attack, you know, really! I was lost in thought, I was. .”

“Forgive me. See if young master Ettore is in, I’d like to talk to him.”

The little man was panting, with one hand on his chest and the hat he’d picked up from the ground in the other hand; after brushing it off as best he could, he put it back on his head. In an apologetic tone he said:

“There’s so much sweeping to do, there’s always dirt on the pavement out here. The young master says that I’m supposed to water the hydrangeas now, in the heat of the afternoon: but I can’t do that, climbing up and down the stairs with a heavy pail of water in this heat. So I water the plants in the evening, and I just pray that he doesn’t notice. Yes, Commissa’, he’s here. He’s upstairs, surrounded by his plants, as always. Just a minute, I’ll walk you up, and let him know.”

Ricciardi replied:

“I just want to stop by the duchess’s anteroom first.”

He followed the doorman up the first flight of stairs and stopped on the landing, waiting for him to open the gate. He sensed how uneasy the man was, but that was certainly par for the course. Everyone was uneasy around him: Ponte, the other policemen, sometimes even Maione. He was the only one of his kind, he thought. From another planet, the moon or Mars, or another star. Condemned to spend his life alone, and watch the others avoid him like the plague.

He took one step into the room, which was now clean and tidy, as if nothing had ever happened; but something had happened, and evidence of the fact was Adriana’s corpse, still visible, even if it was gradually fading, speaking to him in a subdued voice from the same corner where he’d first seen her six long days ago.

“ The ring, the ring, you’ve taken the ring, the ring is missing, ” murmured the woman’s dead and swollen mouth, her strong white teeth bared, with the black tip of her tongue extended between them. Ricciardi stood still, staring at her, his hands in his trouser pockets, his shirt collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He wondered why her last thought should have been for her piece of jewelry, instead of some final curse or a note of regret.

Turning his back on the corpse he gestured to Sciarra and followed him upstairs to Ettore’s apartment. The duke’s son was on the terrace, leaning over a yellow rose bush. His back was to the two men, as he worked carefully with a pair of shears to trim the branches, with the utmost attention. After a moment, without giving any sign of having noticed that Sciarra was waiting, hat in hand, to announce Ricciardi, he said:

“ Prego , Commissario, come right on in. Do you know the story of the yellow roses? Sciarra, you’re free to go.”

With unmistakable relief, the doorman moved off quickly: it was clear that he enjoyed neither the commissario’s nor the young master’s company. Ricciardi stood at the threshold of the terrace.

“No, I don’t know the story. Should I?”

Ettore stood up and turned to look at his guest, mopping his sweaty brow with his sleeve.

“No, I imagine you wouldn’t. It’s an Arabic story: Mohammed suspected that his favorite wife, Aisha, a beautiful woman, might be betraying him. And so he asked an angel how he could find out the truth; there are angels, you know, in almost all religions. Well, the angel told him to bring the woman some red roses, and then to dip them in water: if the flowers changed color, it meant that the woman had been unfaithful to him. Mohammed brought her the flowers and arranged for her to drop them into the river: the roses turned yellow. The color of jealousy, of love betrayed.”