The Bottom of Your Heart (14 page)

“And now the trousers,” said the doctor, lifting another item of clothing from the countertop.

At the center of the dark fabric, in the rear, just under the belt loops, there was a deeper mark than those on the shirt.

Maione murmured: “Just one. And right in the middle.”

Modo smiled, like a schoolteacher before a diligent pupil.

“Exactly. And I'll remind you that the suspenders had been unhooked in the back: on the left from both buttons and on the right from just one. While in the front they were still in place. Last of all, I'd remind you that our Professor Iovine landed on his head.”

Ricciardi nodded: “I'm starting to understand.”

Modo gave him a wink: “Good boy. But now let's move on to the main course.”

He went over to the marble slab, where a body lay under a sheet. The doctor uncovered it with a theatrical gesture, like a chef revealing an elaborate dish. Maione grimaced in disgust: “Dotto',
madonna mia
! Just being in here is ghoulish enough, but when you start acting the magician with the dead—just a little bit of respect for my stomach, if you don't mind!”

Modo raised an eyebrow: “Maione, you're too delicate for this line of work. Or else, and this is the explanation that I prefer, you're getting too old: time to make way for the new generation, take it from me.”

The corpse on the slab was naked, belly-down. There was no missing the fractures of the spinal cord and the dent in the skull corresponding to the point of impact.

Maione shook his head: “Poor man. With all the power and wealth he had, he still winds up on a marble slab in the morgue, exactly like everyone else.”

Modo threw both arms wide: “That's exactly right, it's just like the philosophical brigadier says. You all wind up coming to me, sooner or later.”

Maione made the sign of the horns with both hands, index finger and pinkie pointing downward to ward off evil: “For the love of all that's holy, Dotto', I'll come take you out for an espresso whenever you like, but as for coming in here feet-first, try to understand: I'd just as soon put that off as long as possible!”

Ricciardi was eager to get to the point: “If you two are done with the warm-up act, let's proceed.”

Modo raised one hand: “Well put. The dead commune with the dead, so our cheerful commissario wants to know what poor Iovine has to say to him. Look down here.”

And he pointed to the area just above the corpse's flaccid gluteal muscles. Ricciardi leaned forward to look closer and so did Maione, after a moment's hesitation. Following the doctor's finger, they saw four lines on the skin, running parallel and vertical, some five or six centimeters in length, and reddish in color.

“What are those?” asked Maione.

“Scratches,” Ricciardi replied before Modo had a chance.

The doctor nodded approvingly: “Exactly. Put that together with the marks on the trousers and the bottom of the shirt, and it tells us that someone came up behind him, grabbed him by the belt and in so doing tore loose his suspenders. And with the other hand, the same person grabbed him by the throat, ripping the buttons off his shirt. He almost choked him, just look here.”

He turned the corpse's head ever so slightly, producing a soft sound, like broken crockery.

“Those are the fractured cranial bones, don't let them distract you. What we're interested in is right here.”

On either side of the neck was a deep red stripe, produced by the chafing of the shirt collar and the tie.

“Now do you see the dynamics of what happened?”

Maione scratched his forehead: “
Mamma mia
, in that case he didn't jump. Someone else threw him, and it must have been someone . . .”

Modo gave him a slap on the shoulder: “Good work, my intelligent brigadier. It must have been someone very, very strong. A real giant.”

F
or Ricciardi and Maione, the walk back to police headquarters was a chance to review the scenario suggested by the autopsy findings. Night was starting to fall, but the air gave no sign of cooling. There was almost no one out on the streets; a few families trudged wearily home from the beach.

Maione said: “To be honest, Commissa', I never believed that a man like Iovine would throw himself out the window. First of all, there wasn't so much as a goodbye note; and then, what reason would he have had to do it? He had plenty of money, he had risen to the top of his profession, he was married, with a beautiful house, a wife and a son . . . And if the inscription in the second ring means what I think it does, well then he even had a
cummarella
, a sweetheart on the side. Why on earth would someone like him ever commit suicide?”

Ricciardi was reluctant to agree: “You know better than I do, Raffaele. We've seen so many who've been given wealth and comfort and taken from it nothing but loneliness and a sense of emptiness. People do lots of stupid things: the professor's lover, whoever she was, might have been blackmailing him, or perhaps he had some secret vice that was ruining him. In any case, the marks on the body and clothing are unequivocal: someone murdered him.”

Maione was huffing and puffing from the slight uphill climb.

“And it was someone very strong, Commissa'. For that matter, Coviello, the jeweler, told us that he saw someone in the shadows who was immense, in fact he said the man looked like a mountain. This someone picked the professor up and tossed him out the window. And he did it so quickly that the poor professor never even had time to scream, because if he had someone would surely have heard him, since the hospital is full of patients and nurses.”

Ricciardi stopped suddenly: “By the way, did you check to see whether Antonelli remembered that guy . . . what was his name . . . Giuseppe Graziani?”

Maione slapped his forehead: “Oooh,
mamma mia
, Commissa', you're right, I completely forgot to tell you; I was coming to see you when the doctor called. I was right when I thought that name was familiar. Giuseppe Graziani is none other than Peppino the Wolf!”

“Should I recognize that name?”

“No, Commissa', he hasn't passed through your hands yet; but if you ask me it's only a matter of time, guys like him never escape their fate. He's a
guappo
, a low-level criminal who's building his career, he runs the Pendino quarter. We've already had a couple of tips about him: he's expanding his territory. He controls fruit and vegetable shipping, the pushcarts that sell in the streets all around town. Everyone's afraid of him, according to Antonelli, but he doesn't know much else about him.”

Ricciardi started walking again.

“That's one lead. And the threatening letter is another. That makes two. And another thing we need to figure out is just who this Sisinella from the second inscription is: what the goldsmith told us might suggest it's someone who had power over the professor, if he was in such a rush to have the ring made for her. Experience tells us that where there's a lover, there's always danger. Emotions are excellent motives for killing someone or getting yourself killed.”

Maione commented bitterly: “Commissa', to hear you talk, you'd think a man would have to live blindfolded, gagged, with both hands tied, locked up alone in a windowless room. That way he'll never suffer for sure.”

He'd barely finished speaking when he caught a fleeting movement out of the corner of his eye: someone had just walked out of the door of an apartment building and slipped into a side street, a narrow
vicolo
. The brigadier furrowed his brow and said to Ricciardi: “Commissa', excuse me, would you wait here for a second?”

He took a few steps, leaned out into the small cross street and narrowed his eyes: in the crowd he spotted a blonde head he'd have recognized out of a thousand like it.

He felt a twinge in the pit of his stomach. What was Lucia doing in an apartment house on Via Toledo at that time of day, when she ought to have been home getting dinner ready?

As he turned around, he made a mental note of the building's street address. He'd have to look into this.

“Something wrong?”

“No, Commissa', I just thought I saw . . . But I must have been mistaken. You were saying?”

The commissario went on: “I think the time has come to find out a little more about the three situations. First: this Peppino the Wolf. A gangster, but a smart one, it seems to me. I doubt that he'd have done something as foolish as going to the general hospital, which would have been too risky; why not lie in wait for the professor somewhere else? Next, the colleague who sent the letter: he says that he's sick, actually on his deathbed. How can someone in such a condition find the strength to hurl a man bodily out a window with his bare hands? And then last of all, we need to track down this Sisinella and question her.”

Maione, still distracted, replied: “Maybe not for the sick doctor, because this wouldn't be his stomping grounds, but for the lover and the Wolf, we can ask around a little.”

They'd reached police headquarters. Ricciardi said: “Now you get home, you've been here since this morning. As for the information . . .”

The brigadier sighed: “I know, I know, Commissa'. I'll have to climb all the way uphill, in this heat, to San Nicola da Tolentino, and walk into that room full of certain perfumes that I don't even like to tell you about. But a job is a job, isn't it? Have a good night, Commissa'.”

Ricciardi started up the staircase that led to his office.

At the top of the stairs, Livia was waiting for him.

T
his time she hadn't come, to the Immacolatella. He was siting in his usual place, surrounded by the coils of hawsers, at a certain distance from the boarding area.

It was hot. Terribly hot. The air felt like what pours out of a blast furnace full of molten metal. The more the wind blew, the hotter it got. A wind out of Africa.

A few of the passengers waiting to board were laughing out loud. It wasn't the way it had been just a few years earlier, when you could read a terror of the unknown on the faces of the poor waiting to emigrate, and tension quivered in the air, a fear of sailing into the maw of death.

He could remember that scene: it was like a stage production of fear itself. There were some who feared the ocean, across which they would venture after steaming for a day or two through the Mediterranean Sea; they feared that black expanse of water that no doubt harbored horrible monsters ready to gobble down the steamship in a single gulp. Or else they were afraid of the water itself, and the waves of the stormy seas, towering above them like mountains, only to thunder down without pity upon their heads, their hands, their open mouths, crushing them under, drowning them and breaking their bones. And they were all afraid of the new land toward which they would be sailing, an unknown incomprehensible place, inhabited by all manner of ferocious animals, as violent as it was inhospitable. They were driven by hunger, and they trembled at the thought that perhaps that same hunger would be waiting to greet them when they arrived. They were leaving in the spirit in which you reshuffle the deck after an unlucky hand, or pick a number to play in the lottery, placing your hopes of a new destiny at the crossroads where you met the old one.

It wasn't like that now. Now there were people smiling as they looked up at the belly of the huge black ship. The letters had started to come. At first there were just a few, haltingly written and read even more haltingly in evenings around the fire: a voice that struggled to decipher the large awkward letters as wide eyes glistened, listening in silence. Then there were more and more of them, letters written in a language contaminated by the mewling speech of those other people, in that land across the salt water. And the news, which had been terrible, started to become good. The relatives who'd sailed for America were getting organized, doing business, everyone putting himself in contact with everyone else; they were working, establishing partnerships and alliances. Desperation was a powerful force, they'd found, and if it was carefully husbanded it became determination, and then success. Money came back, but no one spent it. They set it aside, for the day they too would set sail.

He liked it better when there was fear. Fear justified staying, his being on this side of the wharf, far from the densely packed crowd and the household possessions wrapped in knotted, tattered sheets. He used to feel wealthy and strong, because he didn't have to leave. But now he had doubts.

He wondered why she wasn't there. She'd never missed their unspoken appointments. She was important to him. Very important. It was for her sake that he'd decided to stay, it was for her that he'd worked so hard to find this apprenticeship, for her that he'd begun building a future of possible happiness. Because he sensed her ambition, her determination to be different from the people they knew.

A shiver swept through the crowd of passengers about to depart, like a gust of wind in a field of high grass; a few people stamped and jerked, uneasily. A sailor was coming down the gangway with a sheaf of paper in his hand: the passenger manifest. The moment was about to arrive.

He sensed someone moving behind him. His heart leapt in his chest, but he gave no outward sign. She crouched, as always, a foot or so from his back.

“They're leaving,” he murmured. “That sailor is about to begin calling them.”

She let a few seconds go by before answering: “I see that. But I don't want to come here anymore, I don't want to watch the ships anymore. I came here to tell you so.”

He swiveled around suddenly: “Why don't you want to come anymore?”

“I don't like it. I used to feel I was lucky to be able to stay. Now I'm not so sure anymore.”

He was surprised to hear her confirm the doubts that he felt in his chest. But these meetings belonged to them and them alone, and he didn't intend to give them up.