A Few Drops of Blood (12 page)

“Trouble?”

“Nah. Couples are work, right?”

“I’m not sure I remember,” Natalia said, as Angelina eased the car out of their parking spot. “Listen, get in touch with Vincente Lattaruzzo’s literary agent and get a copy of his manuscript. And run a history on CAM and Mr. Creepy Domenico Bertolli.”

“My pleasure,” Angelina said. “Why is it you never hear about lesbians mutilating one another to get off?”

“Superior gender.”

“Precisely, Captain Monte.”

Natalia pushed the air conditioning button up a notch. “A promiscuous young man, Vincente.”

“Stefano may have been in denial,” Angelina said, “and jealous of Garducci. Then again, Garducci sacrificed his straight life and his marriage only to find he had committed himself to Vincente Lattaruzzo, a man still involved with his domestic partner and maybe others, like Domenico Bertolli at the gallery and the gossip columnist who shared his last moments, Bagnatti.”

“You’re saying maybe one of his paramours got jealous, trapped Vincente in bondage sex-play with another and took his vengeance.”

Natalia exhaled, lips pursed, thinking.

“Any or all of his lovers may have felt betrayed and angered by the late Vincente Lattaruzzo. We don’t even know all his partners.”

“He seems like the type to have had a lot of anonymous encounters,” Angelina said. “Hard to trace.”

They drove through the town center, past a large building with an enormous gate. Two policemen in blue jackets and teal trousers stood guard on either side of a pole that bore a huge heraldic flag.

“Casoria City Hall,” Natalia announced. “Turn here. It’s a shortcut to the highway.”

Angelina braked sharply, and the car veered into a narrow cobbled street that seemed to have no reason for its existence other than to show off the blue flowering vines that covered the backs of ancient houses. Two old men at a tiny café touched their caps as the car rolled past.

“Probably can’t see well enough to make us as female Carabinieri,” Angelina giggled. “Their hearts wouldn’t have stood the shock.”

“Pretty spot, isn’t it?” Natalia said.

“Reminds me of Sicily.” Angelina shifted and sped up.

“Miss it?” Natalia glanced over.

“It will be better for the two of us here,” Angelina said. “Palermo is a fishbowl, yet so much remains hidden and will always be so.”

“Don’t think it’s any different here,” Natalia said. She thumbed through the catalogue.

“What are you seeing?” Angelina said.

“Penises and hedge clippers. Penises and razor blades. A crucified scrotum, pinned to plywood.” She stopped abruptly. “Oh, my.”

“What?” Angelina said.

Natalia held it up.

Angelina, driving, shook her head. “I can’t look. Tell me.”

“Two naked men, masked, cavorting astride a marble horse. I think the one in front may be Vincente. He’s lying flat on the back of this huge stone horse, and he’s got a gag in his mouth that’s being used as a bit by the one behind, who appears to be buggering him.”

Angelina reached over and drew the hand and catalogue closer to quickly glance. “Wow.”

“It’s not exactly the look of the victims in the
contessa
’s garden, but it may well have inspired the killers.”

“Killers? Plural. It’s official?”

“It’s been pretty certain from the start if you think about it.”

Back at the station, they hung up their hats and uniform jackets and examined the catalogue more closely. Most images were black and white, the tones muted, figures shadowed. Others were focused and vividly clear. One showed a crumbling wall and a niche with a skull and bones. Taken in the city’s underground? Possibly. The police had become more rigorous about controlling access to the vast subterranean structures below Naples. Since the Greeks it had remained a repository of myth and bones. Modern artifacts accumulated, too, from the war years when the city was bombed, and the populace took shelter in the vast underground caverns and tunnels and the ossuaries beneath churches. Self-appointed urban archeologists snuck in regularly to search for personal articles left behind during the war, like old Zenith radios, love letters, a Doro tricycle ridden through the dank caverns by someone’s child as war raged above.

Natalia remembered Marshal Cervino’s story of a German couple arrested the previous summer at Fiumicino Airport. At the bottom of their luggage, wrapped in a Gucci scarf, the customs men had discovered a cache of fascist memorabilia and a child’s skull.

“Incredible,” Natalia said, looking at the catalogue.

“What?” Angelina leaned over to see. It was a photographic study of someone with a clerical collar—and little else—being masturbated, while a naked devil used a cross on him as a dildo. She gasped. “It’s titled ‘Sacrilege.’ ”

“Appropriately enough.”

Natalia was surprised the exhibit hadn’t gotten anyone arrested or stirred more controversy in the press. But could
these images have gotten people killed? Were they meant as social commentary? A stab at church clergy? No wonder Domenico had been so defensive.

“I wonder how the tabloids missed this,” Angelina said, coming again to the photograph of Vincente being sodomized on a marble horse.

Natalia slipped the catalogue into her desk and locked it. “Don’t even whisper that in here. Walls have ears in Naples.”

They convened in Dr. Agari’s oddly pleasant and warm office at the morgue, its air filled with the rich fragrance of coffee and chemicals. The decor colors were all warm: rust and beige, interspersed with scarlet curtains and cadmium blue cushions. Natalia and Angelina settled themselves on a comfortable couch. Angelina hated mortuaries but found the pathologist’s office pleasant, she explained, in contrast to the gurneys and grim steel desks and fluorescent lights of the coroner’s office in Palermo.

Dr. Agari looked lovely in a violet silk blouse and white skirt. Also exhausted and stressed.

“What’s wrong?” Natalia said.

“Nothing. I just had to reattach a head. Not my favorite thing.”

Angelina grimaced. “They catch the perpetrator?”

“No, no. This was from a horrendous traffic accident,” said Dr. Agari. “Also, modern embalming and body
preparation is so demanding. Not like the old days. They’d remove the entrails, bathe the body in lemon water, fill the body cavity with straw and were done. They didn’t have to reattach many heads.”

“The good old days?” Natalia said. “When I was in the Third Form, the sisters made us go down into an ossuary beneath a church. The dead were bones, skeletons fully dressed and standing upright, except for the young virgins and girl children. They lay on the ground with crowns on their heads.”

“Sounds creepy,” Angelina volunteered.

“So,” Natalia said, “what do we have here?”

Francesca flipped open her file. “There were traces of animal blood on both bodies and in the surround.”

“Animal blood?” Natalia said and took a sip of coffee.

Francesca nodded. “Pig, cow, goat … A lot of traces in the swabs that came back from the crime scene.”

“You think they were doing animal sacrifices?” Angelina asked. “Part of some weird ritual?”

“No, Officer Cavatelli,” Dr. Agari said. “I believe the two died where animals are butchered.”

“A slaughterhouse.”

“Right,” Francesca said. “The knife used to mutilate was most likely a butcher’s blade designed for dismembering cattle.”

Natalia said, “Camorra are known partners in at least three abattoirs, and I’m sure they have their hooves in many more.”

“God,” Angelina said, grimacing. “What didn’t they do to these two poor people …”

“The question so far avoided,” said Natalia. “Sexual activity?”

Francesca glanced at her report. “Vincente Lattaruzzo suffered tears in the mucosal lining of the rectum and
colon. Likewise Bagnatti, who also suffered perforations of the bowel and near the sigmoid curve at the top of the rectum that leads into the ascending colon. Both would have required emergency medical care and surgery had they survived.”

“Were they raped?”

“Both men were anally penetrated but not by a penis.”

“Hand balling?” Angelina said.

“What’s hand balling?” Natalia asked.

“Fist fucking,” Angelina said.

“The slow introduction of a hand into a body cavity,” Francesca explained.

“A hand?” Natalia said, incredulous.

“By the way,” Francesca said, “you did note where Vincente Lattaruzzo’s testicles were found?”

Natalia balanced her cup on the wide arm of the chair. “In the other victim’s mouth, yes.”

“Symbolic perhaps?” Francesca said. “Maybe he talked out of turn. And the killers wanted to make their point. The cosmetics might have been a further insult and humiliation of the victims, Nat.”

“Including the white dots at the outside corners of their eyes?”

“White dots?” Angelina said.

“She’s still reading the reports,” Natalia said. “We’re keeping Corporal Cavatelli quite busy.”

“Of course,” Dr. Agari said. “First week on the job.”

“Compared to Palermo, it’s a picnic so far.”

“She’s still in the honeymoon phase,” Natalia said. “Her boss hasn’t transformed into an incompetent ogre yet.”

“Don’t listen to Captain Monte,” Francesca said. “Hasn’t ever happened. We’ve worked together—what?—seven years. You’ve done well and come far, Nat.”

“Starting out late as I did, I had to try and make up for lost time.”

“Which you most certainly did,” Dr. Agari said.

Natalia flipped open a postmortem loose leaf on the coffee table and turned to a color close-up of Vincente Lattaruzzo’s eyes. Angelina leaned forward to look.

“See?” Natalia said. “Heavy coke users once put cosmetic white dots next to their eyes to obscure the gray caste. It used to be common, a subtle sign of one’s decadence. A much dated practice now.”

“Were drugs involved?” Angelina asked.

“Nothing of note in their systems. Insignificant traces of cocaine and marijuana in both bodies.”

“So they had no serious levels of drugs in their blood?”

“No,” said Francesca. “Though they may have wished they did, given what they endured.”

Angelina made a face as she skimmed through the autopsy photos. “Slaughtered in an abbatoir and delivered to the
contessa
’s garden butchered. Lovely.”

“You have anything on the worker’s shirt at the scene?”

“Very old, very stained with badly deteriorated dried blood. Not from either victim. Eight stab marks in the fabric: seven slits in front, one in back.”

“The blood,” Natalia said. “How old?”

“Decades. Half a century?”

“The sign of an old score settled?” Natalia said. “A killing avenged?”

Dr. Agari nodded. “Possibly.”

It was Camorra custom for a wife and mother to remove the shirt from the slain. The women would kiss the wounds and suck at the blood of the beloved, saying,
Likewise may I drink the blood of the man who killed you
.

The shirt would be handed down from generation to
generation, preserved until the time of vengeance. Had an ancient blood debt been settled there in the
contessa
’s magnificent garden?

Natalia thanked Francesca for her time and departed with her young partner.

“So,” Angelina said, as they left the morgue, “you think we have a Camorra hit? A vengeance killing?”

“An old vendetta? Could be.”

“So what now, Captain?”

“Well, Scavullo is practically broadcasting his involvement, though he’s made sure he’s left nothing to connect him. He’s not insane—certainly homophobic. But why draw attention to himself?”

“Perhaps it was business or, as you said, the settlement of an old score for someone else. That fits him more than any other theory.”

“Who’ve we got? Who do we press next?”

Angelina stopped and ticked them off on her fingers. “Stefano Grappi? Director Garducci? Ernesto Scavullo? Persons unknown?”

Natalia squinted in the bright sunlight. “Garducci. We’re overdue on a run at Garducci.”

“Good,” said Angelina. “I’ve come up with more ammunition.”

A lone royal palm towered over the entrance to the museum. It had survived there for years despite the pollution from the heavy traffic on Cavour. Somehow the pink brick of the giant edifice had not been completely tarnished. Likewise the large marble columns that flanked the entrance, dirty though they were. And somehow, despite the roar of cars and motorbikes, the parked cars and hulking tour buses, Natalia always felt a sense of tranquility as
soon as she climbed the steps and made her away across the tuff stone.

In the soaring vestibule, the security guards greeted them with a friendly salute. A lone tourist stashed a lime green backpack in a tiny metal locker in the coatroom as they passed through the turnstile. Some unseen docent lectured loudly in German; the halls carried her voice into the cavernous lobby.

As a student, Natalia had liked the Farnese Collection on the ground floor in the corridor of river deities and for many hours had strolled between the fountain sculptures, imagining them and the fountains as they once were, water flowing from the mouths of cherubs, angels, gargoyles, lions, dragons, the breasts of women. She’d liked the gem collection on the second floor the best.

Natalia led the way through the gift shop and out onto the courtyard’s unkempt grass. Greek and Roman sculptures were placed without seeming rhyme or reason, many of them broken and eroded. Along the corridor hung large stone sarcophagi engraved with assorted mythological scenes—Prometheus, centaur Nereidi. Myths to comfort the dead, Natalia thought, long after it was of any use to them. Among the ragged greenery, she recognized a Japanese camellia, the lone bloom a sudden white glow.

“Is this where?” Angelina said.

Natalia hesitated. Where? Ah. Her partner meant the garden where Garducci and Vincente had been discovered: lovers in the darkness, away from the world.

“Yes,” she said. “By the way, Colonel Fabio wants to give us Marshal Cervino to help with the case.”

Angelina glanced at her superior. “Didn’t you warn me against the marshal?”

“Yes. He’s a great cop and a hopeless misogynist. Not a fan of women on the force.”