The Bottom of Your Heart (44 page)

“Excuse me, but would you tell me what you're doing, dressed like this, in the private salon of one of the most exclusive cafés in this city? And why is it your treat, what, did you win the lottery or something?”

Bambinella laughed with her characteristic whinny, covering her mouth with the fan: “No, no, what lottery; it's just that the waiter you saw outside is a customer of mine, and when I ask him to do me a favor, he just can't say no. I ought to tell you that he likes it when I wait for him in my fishnet stockings and . . .”

Maione clapped his hands over his ears: “Stop! Tell me one more word about the things you do when you work and I'll absolutely have to take you in. But before I do, I'll smash your face in and claim that you were resisting arrest!”

Bambinella assumed a bitter look: “There. That's my reward for doing a favor for a friend. After all, I come all the way down here for your sake, at the risk of getting into serious trouble—because if anyone sees me talking to you they're likely to assume that I'm your informant—and that's the thanks I get.”

Maione threw his arms out wide, disconsolately: “What do you mean, aren't you my informant? Sometimes I think that if someone murdered you, they'd be doing me a favor.”

The
femminiello
replied, offended: “Why, what a thing to say! I tell you things because you're a friend, it's not as if I'm an informant! I'm a respectable girl, I am! Anyway, this time I had no choice but to run the risk, because it seems to me that the information I have for you is urgent, very urgent indeed: and I couldn't just wait for you to call on me. So I put on my nicest dress, I took care of these disgusting black hairs that just won't stop growing on my thighs—and if it weren't for the hair, let me tell you, I'd have the finest thighs in the city if I do say so myself—and I told Egisto, the waiter and a client of mine, to close off the salon just for me, and here I am. And after all, Brigadie', can you just imagine if someone did kill me? Just think of the newspaper headlines:
Bambinella, the City's Most Beautiful Woman, Murdered. Brigadier Maione, Who Was Secretly in Love with Her, Personally Conducting the Investigation
.”

Maione considered the matter and concluded: “No, I'm not going to wait for someone else to you kill you: I'll do it myself, right now, and rid myself of the bother. I don't want to let anyone else have the honor. I'll give you one minute, and I'm timing you, to tell me what you want, then I'll leave you all alone with your perverted waiter friend.”

Bambinella made herself comfortable, put her gloved hands together, and raised her eyes to the ceiling: “Now then, Brigadie', the last time you came to see me you asked about a certain Ferdinando Pianese, known to his friends as Fefè, isn't that right?”

Hearing that name, and remembering, along with it, how he had made illicit use of a police informant for his own personal ends, Maione felt a further pang of annoyance.

“Yes, that's all right, Bambine', forget about it. I don't need to know anymore.”

Bambinella's eyes opened wide: “Oh, you don't? Too bad, because I'd rounded up some interesting information. Actually, not interesting: fascinating.”

“Well, then, tell me what you know. But be quick about it, I've got work to do.”

“Well, the first thing you need to know is that in that apartment house there lives a girlfriend of mine, who used to work in a bordello that's in the Sanità district, but she didn't like working there: soldiers, students, some of them paid, others didn't bother, and even the madam was a filthy character who pretended to pick and choose her clientele but actually didn't give a damn, so finally she said, enough, what am I putting myself through this for, and since she was good at sewing—she tends to put on a few pounds now and then and constantly has to let out her dresses and so got quite good at it—well . . .”

Maione roared: “Bambine', I'll kill you right now and sneak out of here, that way they'll charge your waiter with the murder and I'll be rid of you both, once and for all! Just tell your story!”

“Hey, Brigadie', if you do like that you're going to make me lose the thread of my story! In any case, this girlfriend of mine found a job as a seamstress and the lady, her boss, is very happy with her work. They have plenty of business and . . . all
right
, Brigadie', why, what a grouch you are this morning! It can't be good for your health, with all this heat! Well, to make a long story short, she's on good terms with the doorman of the building, in fact, if you ask me she services him every once in a while, just to keep her hand in the game. Well, and do you know what she told me?”

Maione was suddenly alert: “No, what did she tell you?

“That Fefè is under surveillance by the Fascist police, that's what she told me. And that's nothing! Since yesterday, Fefè has locked himself in his apartment and won't open the door to anyone. It seems that he's scared of something, I hear that he told the doorman not to let anyone upstairs, to tell anyone who asks that Fefè left for America, that he's not home. Just think that he gave the doorman money to have his groceries delivered, even though everyone knows that he's a first-class penny-pincher.”

Maione was crushed.

“So what? Why are you bothering to tell me this?”

“Listen closely, Brigadie', because the best is yet to come. Fefè told the doorman not to let anyone up, and especially not to let two people in under any circumstances, even if it costs him his life: one is a tall strapping policeman, very angry, whose name he didn't know but that the doorman would recognize because he's a kind of monster, violent and sweaty. Strange, eh?”

Maione mopped his brow.

“Strange, but I continue not to see why I should give a damn about this story.”

“Fair enough, you shouldn't care at all, I was just telling you as a curiosity. The other person that Fefè has refused to see—well, that's something even more curious. The Marchesa di Morsano. Do you know who she is?”

“No. Who is she?”

“The Marchesa Lucrezia di Morsano is an aging harridan who only recently became Fefè's lover, but whom he'd been wooing for years, very rich and very generous. Blonde. Ugly as sin, but blonde. Isn't that strange?”

“Isn't what strange?”

“It's strange that, after all this time that he's been courting her, now he refuses to see her. Also because poor Fefè by now was seeing her exclusively. He'd decided to make an honest man of himself, in a certain sense. Evidently, his encounter with this policeman scared him so badly that he's more or less collapsed.”

Maione said nothing. Bambinella smiled like a sphinx who had gone a little overboard putting on her makeup that morning.

“Then my girlfriend told me something else. Apparently no more than a week ago a lady came in to see her employer, and said that if there was any extra work for a seamstress she'd be eager to try her hand at it. This is a respected dressmaker's shop, you know, Brigadie', it's not as if they take in just anyone who shows up. There's more: this lady has children at home, and maybe there's a pigheaded husband to deal with, and she only wanted to work an hour or two a day, in the afternoon, who knows why. She just wanted to make a little extra money to help out her husband, since he seems to be having some financial problems.”

Maione was struck dumb. Bambinella went on, unfazed: “And so my girlfriend's employer gave this lady a chance, and it turns out she's good, but really good. So she hired her, but only for an hour or two a day, and this lady is coming in regularly. The dressmaker's shop, you know, is on the second floor of the same apartment house that's under surveillance by the Fascist police. Strange, no?”

The brigadier did his best not to smile, and the effect was spectacular, his mouth spreading wide under a glare that remained grim.

“Bambine', I continue not to understand the cause of the absurd confidences you're imparting to me this morning. Would you mind explaining why you're telling me all this?”

Bambinella slipped off a glove, uncovering her hairy forearm, and began examining her lacquered fingernails with ostentatious interest: “No, Brigadie', it's nothing, it's just that I thought I might tell you that, if you ever happen to run into this monstrous, strapping, angry, sweaty policeman, you might want to tell him from me to stop being such an ass; that if he has a wife—I mean, in the unlikely case that he still does have one and she hasn't yet told him to go take a hike like he deserves—that that wife is a veritable saint who not only puts up with him but even tries to give him a hand in making ends meet for their family. That he might consider leaving poor Fefè in peace, since he wants nothing more than to support himself by taking advantage of his ability to go to bed with a woman who's ugly as sin, a woman who, poor thing, just wants a little happiness in her life, homely as she is and married to a Methuselah to boot. And also you can tell him from me that a man as charming and handsome as he is, any woman that has him isn't likely to cheat on him. There. Could you do me this little favor, then?”

Maione got to his feet and looked long and hard at Bambinella, who returned the gaze with her large dark eyes. Then he said: “Bambine', I've never heard of this policeman you're talking about, and that strikes me as odd, because we policemen all know each other. But if I were ever to meet him I'd have to tell him that he's one lucky cop to have the friends that he has, friends who are willing to remind him what an ass he is. I'd tell him: lucky you, that you have such friends. While I, on the other hand, am surrounded by people who never seem to be willing to mind their own damn business, and one of these days I'm probably going to wind up in jail because I'm going to have to slit their throats with my own two hands. That's what I'd tell him.”

And, attempting to regain some shred of his lost dignity, he turned to go. Bambinella called after him: “Brigadie', if you slit my throat you'll miss my smile. Believe me, you're missing so much already: ask the waiter on your way out and he can tell you!”

And she laughed, with her usual horsey whinny.

R
icciardi was standing at his office window, which was thrown wide open to let in a little breeze. The afternoon wasn't bringing relief from the heat, quite the contrary, but the piazza below was bustling; the commissario watched the intersecting trajectories of cars, wagons, carts, trucks, trolleys, electric buses, mothers and nannies with strollers, in a general state of ungovernable and indecipherable chaos.

He would have been almost astonished not to see any collisions; still, he certainly would never have expected to see two fresh fatalities occur right before his eyes, practically simultaneously. He saw them, and he wondered bitterly what kind of a person he might have been without the unfortunate ability he possessed to make out quite distinctly the two new victims, far apart as they were—one at the corner of the entrance to the wharf, the other just a few yards away from the front door of police headquarters. They were victims of distraction, haste, and carelessness, Ricciardi saw. A little girl with a basket who was carrying fish from one of the boats that lay moored below, supplying the nearby market, had been sliced nearly in two by an automobile; and an aged businessman, perhaps a lawyer, had been clipped in the head by the ironshod hoof of a rearing horse.

From that distance, all Ricciardi could pick up from the two victims was a faint murmur. Still, the murmur reached him. The girl was singing the words to a popular song,
Tutta pe' mme
:
pe' dint' all'ombra va 'stu core, ca nun pò durmi' . . .
The man, in contrast, was running some numbers:
two hundred forty lire, less thirty-one makes two hundred and nine, plus twelve gives me . . .
They'd been hurrying. And now they'd never hurry again.

How many things, Ricciardi thought—his arms crossed on his chest, the city below him tossing like a stormy sea—are lost through haste. And if you die, how many more things you lose. Rosa, who was leaving this earth and who perhaps, though his conscious mind was unwilling to admit it, had already left; Enrica, whom he hadn't seen in a long while; Livia, forever awaiting a smile that he was incapable of bestowing. Leaving, waiting. Perhaps returning. Haste.

As usual, almost without realizing it, his thoughts went to the murder he was investigating; perhaps to take his mind off the dark musings that were piling up, Ricciardi began reflecting on Coviello, the goldsmith who had killed himself. Coviello had worked, day and night, on something that had been commissioned by a party who remained unknown. The young man, Sergio, had seen an ex-voto: a heart topped by a flame.

Ricciardi actually knew next to nothing about ex-votos; but he remembered the church in his hometown where his mother and Rosa would take him to Sunday services, and he recalled that on one wall adjoining the altar, topped by a cross and a Christ that was taken out for a procession twice a year, there were a number of strange objects. Once he'd asked his mother what they were, and she had uttered those words: those are ex-votos.

He had been particularly impressed by a small silver leg, rather crudely made, beneath which lay a sort of leather legging, rather timeworn. Rosa had told him the story of a farmer's son who couldn't walk because a horrible sore had formed on his leg, and how he had to wear a bandage and that legging to cover it until, through the direct intervention of the Christ on the cross, it had finally healed. The father, to thank Jesus, had ordered that silver leg and donated it to the church. Laughing, Rosa added that the cost of the ex-voto, however, had almost forced the family into starvation, so in the end the boy's miraculous cure had actually made things worse.

Ricciardi felt a pang in his heart. He didn't know how he'd survive without his
tata
; he missed her intrusiveness, her laugh, and the unconditional love that he'd never again feel on his very skin, the love he'd taken for granted for far too many years.