These Dark Things
For Dave
Copyright © 2011 by Jan Merete Weiss
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weiss, Jan Merete.
These dark things : a novel / Jan Merete Weiss.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56947-938-4 (alk. paper)
eISBN 978-1-56947-939-1
1. Women detectives—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Catholic Church—Fiction. 4. Camorra—Fiction. 5. Organized crime—Italy—Naples—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.E4553T44 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010045686
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
With special thanks to Juris Jurjevics for his guidance and vision. And to the wonderful team at SOHO—particularly, Mark Doten, for his editing genius. As well, Bronwen Hruska and Justin Hargett.
And with gratitude to Laura Hruska,
in memoriam.
In October the sowing of the wheat begins, and November honors that which lies beneath the ground awaiting rebirth; the dead return in a ritual visit to the cult of the dead, and the whole period between the beginning of November and Epiphany, is tempis terrible, in which the gates to the Afterworld remain open.
FRANCO CARDINI,
I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste
Contents
A large cypress tree arched over the graves, and a few clouds the color of peaches. The horizon glowed. The Neapolitan sun hadn’t yet begun her climb. Gina Falcone surveyed the newest additions beneath the burlap on her cart. Besides the midsized tibia, a rib cage, and a large femur, there was a child’s skull. Male or female, the bone cleaner didn’t know. Nor did she care. The recent dead troubled her no more than the bones of the plague victims from centuries ago.
At Via della Piazzola, she entered the old section of the city. Most of the red paint was chipped off her cart. The bare metal wheels ground against the black flagstones. Walking past tiny dark alleys, the
vichi
, she imagined the omnibuses draped in black that had waited, centuries ago, for the priests and stretcher-bearers to carry out the cadavers during the plague epidemic.
It was a block more to the Church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio. Outside the flower shop, a middle-aged tourist, her hair rumpled from sleep, was bent over the buckets, inhaling the jasmine. Gina passed like a shadow come loose from a building. She adjusted the bag on the cart as it banged along the cobblestones. Market stalls clustered under medieval arches. The fishmonger dumped mussels onto a bed of ice. Across the way, the cheese man hollered up to his wife, who scowled and lowered a basket from their window. He removed keys and substituted butter and a loaf of bread.
“
’Giorno
, Signora,” called a robust man arranging burnt orange apricots in his shop.
“
’Giorno
, Nico,” she replied.
Near the back of the shop, Nico’s mother sat crocheting. Everyone knew not to touch the fruit. You pointed to what you wanted and he made the selections, weighed and bagged the apples or grapes, and you paid. Gina Falcone disregarded the convention. Nico didn’t like it but never objected, even when she ate a piece of fruit without paying. Or grabbed a pear to test its ripeness and sent a half dozen others rolling across the ground.
That she did holy work and could intercede for souls waylaid in purgatory—like Nico’s grandmother—kept him from saying anything to her. Gina Falcone was among the last of the bone cleaners. Officially, second burials had ceased decades ago. It was an ancient practice going back to the Egyptians. The mourners waited a year for the flesh to decompose, then disinterred the bones. Some placed them in an ossuary, a bone box, for the second burial. Or the few remaining bone cleaners, like Gina, collected them from the grave keepers and carried them to their rest in certain Naples churches where the practice was still quietly tolerated.
“
Ciao
, Gina,” Nico said, charging her a token for the fruit she’d taken.
She crossed the street to the church, a dark structure amid the crumbling ochre buildings that surrounded it. A sunflower, a rose, and a stem of mimosa rested in the iron gates. Four bronze skulls and femurs sat atop four short columns. The skulls gleamed, polished daily by the passersby who touched them. Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio. Vagrants dozed in the shadows of the black stones, the Church being too stingy to invite them in but not heartless enough to forbid them a concrete bed outside its doors. The odor of urine was strong.
Purgatorio was four centuries old, built around the time the Cult of the Dead took hold in Naples, when Jesuits celebrated sixty masses a day on its altars. They preached among skulls and skeletons laid out on black cloth. The priests hadn’t held ecstatic services here in many years. Gina missed them and the large crowds of parishioners carrying torches and flashlights in procession, descending to the crypts where each would select a skull to pray over.
The faithful still climbed down into the crypts to wash bones and privately pray for those in limbo, souls that had left this world but not yet reached the next.
At the end of the Second World War, Gina Falcone had dug up the remains of her young husband and another fallen soldier and prepared them for their second burial. She felt called to continue, and her work began. For a long time, business was brisk, but it had slowed during the past decade. Signora Falcone survived on a small stipend from the Neapolitan Burial Society and donations from the bereaved.
Church bells tolled eight times. The madwoman on Vico del Sole screamed “
Attenzione
,” as she had every morning for years. “
Sono malata!
” I am ill. “
Il pericolo. Il pericolo
.” The danger. The danger.
A dozen people waited to enter the sanctuary—two women for every man. Some fingered their rosaries, prayed under their breath. Tonio the Dwarf stood at the front. A gang of pigeons pecked at scattered breadcrumbs around their feet.
“Away!” Gina cried, waving her arms. They warbled in protest, ruffling their wings, lifting a foot before alighting again. She knew who was responsible: Uccello Camillo. “Bird” Camillo’s pockets bulged with crumbs.
The bone cleaner mumbled and grabbed her cart. The faithful moved aside to let her through to deliver the new bones before they entered and descended. Tonio stepped out of the line to help lift the cart up the steps to the narrow church entrance. Gina handed him a key. Tonio was barely taller than the keyhole.
“Needs oil,” he said, working it into the lock. He pushed open the wooden door in to the dark interior. The only bright spot was the white altar. At its foot, purple and white chrysanthemums wilted in a vase.
Gina rolled the cart inside and leaned it against the last pew, a simple wooden bench without a cushion. She made the sign of the cross and took the bag from the cart. Gina Falcone could find her way anywhere in the church with her eyes closed. She dragged the bones past the altar and through a small door that led to the crypt. Bones in one hand, with the other she felt her way down the long narrow staircase. Her eyes adjusted. At the very bottom was a faint light. Candles, left perhaps by someone the previous day.
The crypt comprised several rooms. In the first, skulls were piled and stacked everywhere: on the ground, in niches cut into the walls. A shrine with a lone skull strewn with dead flowers rested atop a mound of leg bones. Gina Falcone shifted a decayed sunflower to a flat tin tray layered with finger bones and more skulls. She passed through a hallway of tombstones into the larger burial room. This gallery was filled floor to ceiling with yet more skulls and bones piled neatly in niches. Some eye sockets held slips of paper: messages from worshippers, personal information about the deceased gleaned in dreams about them.
In the room’s center was a bench carved from volcanic stone. There was an armrest and a hole in its seat. In times past, the body was placed there, for the flesh to rot away, the putrefied fluids to pour into the drain below.
Puozzà Sculà!
May you drain away—a taunt still heard in the streets.
It was quiet. Dank and peaceful. Gina stopped short before a stack of skeletons. Half reclining on the bench, resting her chin on her hands, was an angel, her face pearly and framed in wavy red hair. Lovely, all in pink. At her pale throat, a beautiful necklace glinted with rubies and pearls. Gina stepped closer to gaze at the red blossom near her heart. There were no petals, only the hilt of a large knife.
The call came in to the Carabinieri regional station on Via Casanova, as Captain Natalia Monte finished her twenty-four-hour sleepover duty. She swung her feet to the floor and tried to clear her vision.
“Why not the police?” she demanded of her dispatcher.
“The body was found at a cultural shrine.”
“Damn,” she muttered. Protection of cultural institutions was one of the Carabinieri’s odd areas of responsibility, answering as they did partly to the Ministries of the Interior, Exterior, and Defense.
Cursing, Captain Monte pulled on her uniform jacket and closed the knot of her tie, splashed water on her face, wet her fingers again, and tamped down her curls. They had sprung back up by the time she descended the three flights to the street and her duty car and driver. Getting in beside him, she closed her eyes and tried to doze as they headed for the crime scene.
Father Cirillo, the monsignor, was waiting for her at the entrance to the church, his ample stomach straining against the mended cassock he’d donned for this task.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said, coming up to Natalia as she buckled on her holster. “I was at breakfast when I heard the commotion.”