Vipers (35 page)

“Fine, Commissa'. That explains everything. All right, what's our next move?”

Ricciardi followed the thread of his thoughts.

“Here's our next move: you go with two officers to pick up the murderer, without making too much of a fuss. Be careful, this is likely to be something that won't come entirely as a surprise, though with every passing day the sense of safety is probably growing.”

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

Ricciardi smirked.

“I'm going to go spend a little time at the bordello. Everyone has been telling me that's what I should do, so this time I really will. Maybe I'll be able to pick up some confirming evidence. I'll see you afterward, at headquarters; move fast, and you'll get home in time for lunch and your wife won't have to cook you.”

O
nce again, Ricciardi walked up Via Toledo and then Via Chiaia, heading for Il Paradiso.

Springtime had decided to welcome in Easter dressed in her very best. The air was sparkling like a
vino novello
, and was every bit as intoxicating and treacherous, full of scents and promises that spring had no intention of keeping. He could hear singing from the apartments overlooking the street, women busy with final holiday preparations or finishing up some spring cleaning, and men shaving by the light of day for a change, the mirror hanging from a hook out on the balcony in the first whiff of the new season: voices both off-key and gloriously melodious, deep and high, all talking of love.

The commissario tried to put himself into the mind of Viper's murderer. Now that he was certain of the killer's identity, he could rule out what he had first theorized as a motive, a burst of rage or some accumulation of contingencies: the murder had been premeditated, prepared and planned out. Therefore the murderer must have walked this very same route, calm, the same as all the other pedestrians walking beside him on that magnificent Sunday morning.

Ricciardi mused on how often he wound up close to someone who was planning to put an end to a human life. He went past the ghostly image of the suicide outside Gambrinus who stood murmuring:
Our café, my love, our café, my love
. He was starting to fade, and before long he'd vanish just as the memory of him would, to be replaced by some new and despairing emotion. I prefer the dead, thought Ricciardi: their thoughts are blunted and by now useless, but at least they're obvious.

He reached Il Paradiso, but he didn't go in; instead he walked a little farther and stopped at the corner of the side alley, the
vicolo
that ran past the small door that served as the tradesmen's entrance. He found himself standing in front of the accordion player, with his dark glasses and his little metal plate of coins.

The man accompanied the music that his nimble fingers drew from the instrument with a few of the words of the song, modulated by his half-open lips. The position of his head, pointed toward some indeterminate point between the roof of the building across the way and the sky, was the very picture of blindness. No doubt about it, thought Ricciardi: he was a master at maintaining his fiction.

Noticing the commissario standing motionless before him, the accordionist raised his voice and begin singing with conviction, in a fine baritone: “
T'aggio vuluto bbene, a tte, / tu m'e vuluto bbene, a mme. / Mo' nun ci amamm' cchiú, ma 'e vvote tu / distrattamente pienz' a mme!
”

The song ended with an elaborate arpeggio and a passing matron dropped a coin in his plate; without shifting the direction of his eyes, the man thanked her. Ricciardi remained motionless.

The man went on playing, but his discomfort was making itself clear. Finally he stopped, his dark lenses pointed at some distant point straight ahead of him. Ricciardi said, in a low voice:

“We need to talk.”

The man nodded his head yes but didn't get up. So Ricciardi sat down on a step near him.

“Let's not waste each other's time. I know you're not blind, and I'd ask you to drop the pretense, which I care nothing about and about which, I assure you, I'll do nothing in the future. I'm here for something else.”

The beggar nodded.

“And I know exactly who you are, Commissa'. I was hoping to have a chance to thank you and the brigadier for defending us, the other day, against those Fascists who came dangerously close to ruining my accordion, and what would I have done then? Luckily the damage was light and I was able to fix it.”

“What is your name?”

The conversation was conducted in whispers and the man hadn't altered his posture at all.

“Francesco Lo Giudice, but they call me Ciccillo. Ciccillo 'o Cecato, to be exact.”

“'O Cecato, eh? Ciccillo the Blind Man. And how long have you been pretending to be blind?”

“When I was a boy I fell ill and for a while I couldn't see very well. That was exactly when I learned to play the accordion, from an uncle of mine who was a strolling musician. He'd take me with him, so folks would take pity on the little boy with the bandaged eyes and would be more likely to give us charity. Then I got better, but when people see that you're normal, they say: go get a job. As if playing the accordion and making people happy wasn't a job.”

Ricciardi considered the matter and deep down, he had to agree.

“So this is your regular spot, right? This is where you always work?”

“Yes, Commissa'. And it's a good spot. The police, given the fact that there's a bordello right here, generally leave me alone; lots of people pass by, and they stop to look in the shop windows; and there's a restaurant right there, with a good-natured waitress who always gives me leftovers.”

“And you were here last Monday, weren't you, when . . .”

“When Viper was killed, yes. Such a shame. You have no idea how beautiful she was, when she'd come out of that door and walk past me, you have to believe me, the temptation to turn my head and watch her even just from behind was almost irresistible.”

In spite of himself, Ricciardi began to understand the difficulties of being professionally blind.

“Then perhaps you recall who went in and who came out the little side door leading into the cathouse.”

Ciccillo snickered.

“Commissa', I may even pass for blind: but I have a memory like a steel trap, if I do say so myself, and I don't forget what I see.”

And he told Ricciardi exactly what he wanted to know.

 

Il Paradiso
 
was closed for Easter, and that struck Ricciardi as nicely ironic.

Madame Yvonne had greeted him in a nightgown, her hair a mess, her face free of the usual heavy makeup. Wearily she had walked him upstairs to the door of Viper's room, opening it with a key chosen from among the many that clanked on an iron ring.

“Commissa', forgive me if I ask you again: when will we able to use this room again? I'd like to give it to Lily, because word has gotten out that it was her who found . . . that she was the first to see Viper, and there are people willing to pay very good money to make . . . to hear the story.”

“I imagine there are. Don't worry, Signora: it won't be long now, not long at all. Now, if you'll be so kind, I'd like to go in alone.”

“At your orders, Commissa'. I'll wait for you here.”

In the room, everything was just as Ricciardi remembered it; his orders had been respected and no one had moved anything. The stale odor of a closed room, with the heavy traces of French perfume and disinfectant all but drowned out by the scent of rotting flowers, almost made him gag; he opened the window and let in the fresh spring air.

He shivered slightly when he heard the words of the girl's corpse, as she stood before the mirror and kept repeating:
Little whip, little whip. My little whip
. The little whip he'd looked for and been unable to find. Perhaps now this too had an explanation.

Ricciardi looked at the objects on the dresser, the ones scattered over the bed and on the floor. The pillow that had killed the young woman. The jewel box. The frame with the photograph, which he now knew was a picture of the girl's mother and her own son. Suddenly what Ricciardi knew about the dead girl's life weighed down on his heart, her sadness and her joys. This was no longer a stranger's room, the place where some unknown corpse had been found; now it was a place where a person had experienced pains and passions and emotions.

He took what he needed, and he left in a hurry.

R
icciardi didn't have to wait long, once he was back in his office. He was sitting at his desk, his thoughts lost in a reconstruction of what had happened, when Maione knocked at the door.

“Commissario, he's right outside. When he saw us coming, he tried to run, but I'd brought Special Agent Palomba, you know him, that kid is fast and he caught him right away. The crowd messed him up a little, those guys, you know what they're like, savages. We had to fire a couple of shots in the air, and that quieted them down.”

Ricciardi said:

“I was expecting him. Bring him in.”

The door swung open and two officers brought in Pietro Coppola in shackles, the younger brother of Peppe 'a Frusta, Joey the Whip.

As soon as he saw the commissario, the man started right in:

“Commissa', what does all this mean? To come and take a respectable citizen out of his home, on Easter Sunday, what is this, the moving pictures? And after all, I've been perfectly forthcoming the whole time, would you explain to me . . .”

Ricciardi raised one hand to halt the river of words.

“Coppola, let's not waste any time, let's just skip the part where you get indignant. The more straightforward our conversation, the less painful this will be for all of us. You should understand that to bring you in, and in shackles, we must have good evidence.”

“Commissario, you've got it all wrong! I don't have anything to do with it, I was just covering up for my brother, who . . .”

Ricciardi opened one of his drawers and set down an object on his otherwise empty desktop. The man fell silent; his lips kept moving as if he were murmuring something, but no voice emerged.

A long silence ensued, at the end of which Coppola slumped forward, as if his soul had left his body. The officer at his side held him up and, at a signal from Ricciardi, sat him in the nearest chair.

The man's gaze was fixed on the object on top of the desk: the inlaid wooden brush, in which what looked like long blond human hairs were tangled.

C
ommissa', in truth, my brother—you never actually met him. The person he used to be, the man, the worker he once was. You never met him.

He's the best young man in the world, or actually, he was. Always cheerful, always thinking about the business, all the work we do he dreamed it up himself. We were poor, we were starving; we had a vegetable garden that didn't even produce enough for us. And as long as he was with Maria Rosaria, when they were kids, they were satisfied with what they had.

That woman, Commissa', she robbed my brother of his will. When he had her, he didn't want anything else.

Then, when that man took her for himself and fathered her child, my brother resigned himself to it and started working, and he changed all our lives.

I don't know if he was doing it was so that he wouldn't have to think about her, or because without her he found other motives, like love for his own family: but he became another man. Little by little, with hard work and sweat, we became what we are now. We all work for the company—you saw my one sister, and the other one that you never met, and I take care of the carts and the animals: but the one who decides, who makes the choices, who points the way for everyone else—that's my brother; without him we're nothing. Without him we'll just go back to being the miserable yokels we were before.

I met Ines three years ago, when we weren't much more than kids. She's not from where I grew up, she came with her sister who, like I told you, is a schoolteacher. We fell in love immediately, but we have nothing, she lives on that miserable salary and I depend on my family. But then I talked my brother into hiring Ines to help us out, and we started to hope. We set a date; at first we'd live together with the family and later we'd build a house of our own.

Everything was going fine, Commissa'. Everything.

And then, the one time I didn't make the round of deliveries to our customers, and let my brother go in my place, they happened to see each other again.

Bad luck, Commissa'. The worst luck. Bad luck for my brother, whose peaceful life ended; bad luck for Ines and for me, because we were forced to forget about getting married; and bad luck even for her, for Maria Rosaria, seeing how things went in the end.

He went out of his mind, went right back to where he'd broke off when he lost her. He stopped working, he spent all our money on her, to spend time with her, to buy gifts for her. We saw all our hard work go into the house where Maria Rosaria's mother lived, which grew, one room after another; while he told me—his own brother—that there was no money for me and Ines to get married, that we'd just have to wait. For a whore, Commissa'. Because that's all she was: nothing but a whore.

But it wasn't her fault, it was my brother's fault. He had become convinced that he couldn't live without her, that he couldn't lose her again; he decided to marry her, if you can believe it.

You don't know what it means to hear those words, one Sunday at lunch: he wanted to marry her. We couldn't get married anymore, Ines and I; and the company would slide into ruin, and we'd lose everything, because my brother couldn't see beyond her and wouldn't have cared about anything else anymore.

That very Sunday, after lunch, Ines and I made our decision. There was only one way to save our future. Only one way.