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CHAPTER 1

The angel of death made its way through the festa, and nobody noticed. It passed close to the wall of the church, which was still decorated from that morning's religious celebration; by now, though, night had fallen, and the sacred had given way to the profane. A bonfire had been set in the middle of the piazza, in keeping with tradition, even though the brutal heat of August left everyone breathless, and no one needed those flames dancing over the pile of old wood that every family in town had contributed.

But the flames proved useful to the angel of death, casting the shadows of couples as they danced merrily to the sound of tambourines, guitars, and clapping hands, accompanied by the shouts of children and the whistles of strolling vendors. The angel hadn't foreseen it, but it knew that divine justice would intervene in some way. A firecracker exploded, followed by another. Midnight was approaching. A fat perspiring woman pretended to faint, and the man next to her laughed. The angel of death brushed past him, touching his elbow, but the man didn't even shiver: it wasn't his turn, not that night.

Skirting the edge of the piazza in a nondescript black outfit, there was nothing about the angel that could've attracted notice, save perhaps the sadness of the downcast eyes and the slight droop of the shoulders. That too was something it had counted on.

It reached the front door of the palazzo and for a moment feared it might have been locked for the festa; but no, it had been left open just a crack, as always. The angel of death slipped inside, shadowlike, as the tarantella built to a crescendo and the crowd accompanied the dance with song and applause and firecrackers crackled, keeping time to the music. It knew just where to hide. It reached the narrow gap behind a pillar, took up a position, and settled in to wait.

Its hand slid into its pocket and touched the cold metal, but it brought no comfort. Nor did the courtyard's solitary shadows bring comfort of any kind.

Nothing did, except the thought of the justice that would soon be meted out.

Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi didn't mind working on Sundays, and that was just another of his quirks. His colleagues came up with excuse after excuse to get out of Sunday duty, every time shifts were being assigned: they had sick mothers to care for, seniority accrued, alleged family emergencies. Any excuse would do, as long as they could skip working the one day of the week that the whole city rested.

But Ricciardi said nothing, as usual, and so as usual he was stuck with the worst assignments. Not that the fact won him any goodwill from his fellow policemen; in fact, they took every chance that presented itself to whisper venomously behind his back.

He was a solitary soul, his hands always in his pockets, invariably hatless even in winter; he never attended parties or drank toasts, he was always somewhere else when people gathered. He let invitations lapse, he failed to form friendships, and he was never open to the confidences of others. His green eyes glittered in his dark face, a lock of hair unfailingly draping across his forehead, only to be swept away from time to time with a sharp gesture. He spoke only seldom, and then with a cool irony that most failed to understand. Still, his presence never failed to attract attention.

He worked tirelessly, especially when he was pursuing a murderer, indifferent to the vicious backbiting of those colleagues incapable of equaling the pace he demanded from all his investigators; the officers assigned to him cursed him under their breath for the hours he expected them to spend in the pouring rain or the hot blast of the noonday sun; he sent them out on seemingly endless and often futile stakeouts. They bitterly noted that, on each case he worked, it was as if someone had murdered a member of his family, no matter whether the actual victim was an aristocrat or a pauper.

On the other hand, nobody questioned his abilities. Without adhering to procedure or following the instructions issued by his superiors, he pursued his own incomprehensible twisting paths and always seemed to catch the culprit. Word had spread that Commissario Ricciardi spoke directly with the devil himself, and that the devil whispered to him the very thoughts that had been in the murderers' heads; this rumor only widened the empty space around him, because superstition was so deeply ingrained in this city's soul. No one knew a thing about his life, or perhaps there simply was nothing to be known. He lived alone with his old nursemaid, Tata Rosa, and no one knew of any relatives or friends. He frequented no women, or men for that matter, and no one had ever run into him at a bordello or a theater: never an evening out on the town. He inspired the same mistrust that always seems to spring up around those who have no vices, and can therefore have no virtues.

Even his superior officers, first and foremost among them Angelo Garzo, the deputy chief of police, were openly discomfited by the presence of a man who, despite his enormous abilities and skills, seemed to lack ambition entirely. It was whispered that Ricciardi was wealthy by birth, the owner of vast estates somewhere in the distant countryside, and that he therefore aspired to no increase in salary. The only thing that seemed to attract his interest was investigation itself.

Not that he ever showed signs of satisfaction, once he finally laid hands on the guilty party. He limited his reaction to a steady glance from those unsettling clear eyes, then turned his back and moved on. To another murder. Hunting new blood.

Ricciardi always came into the office early, even when he was working a Sunday shift. On his long walk from Via Santa Teresa to the end of the Via Toledo, he met fewer people when he walked early, and he didn't mind that a bit; the city slowly awakening from slumber, the occasional fruit vendor or milkman strolling bandy-legged up the hills, the morning songs of the washerwomen gathered around hidden fountains in the working-class quarters through which he walked. In this brutal August — more than two months since the last drop of rain — it was a way of enjoying the last trace of evening coolness that made the walk pleasurable.

In the dim light of the half-closed shutters, sitting at his desk, the commissario gathered his thoughts for the day. Mechanical gestures, bureaucratic details, reports to compile, the roll call of attendance: very few people present that day. The piazza beneath his window was still deserted. A drunk sang raucously: somebody else working the Sunday shift, thought Ricciardi.

He'd left his office door ajar, to create some minimal cross breeze. Blades of light played on the wall, underneath the official portraits of the midget king and the oversized head of state. A seagull sang counterpoint to the drunken melody from below, and Ricciardi decided that of the two, the bird had a better sense of pitch and melody. He idly glanced through the narrow opening of the half-open door, looking down the hallway to the stairs, as far as he could see.

Even in the dim light the two corpses were clear to his eyes. They stood side-by-side, joined for eternity after their ever-so-brief meeting while still alive. A monument to cops and robbers everywhere, thought Ricciardi. But a monument invisible to almost everyone.

From where he sat, a dozen yards away, the commissario could see the broad scorched cavity carved into the side of the robber's head and the tiny entry wound that the same bullet had made in the cop's forehead, the rivulet of blood and gray matter that oozed down his neck; and he could hear the subdued murmuring of both men's last thoughts. The two of you don't work shifts at all, he thought with hatred. You're here every goddamned day, poisoning the air with the useless sorrow of your wasted young lives.

He tore his eyes away and stood up from his chair; the heat was growing more intense by the minute, and out on the street he could hear the occasional engine roaring past, heading downhill to the waterfront. He went over to the calendar and tore off the previous day's sheet. He read the new date: Sunday, August 23, 1931 — IX. Year Nine. Of the New Era. The era of black ribbons on hats and high black boots, the era of full-page newspaper photographs of men in shirtsleeves, guiding a plow. The era of enthusiasm and optimism. The era of law and order and clean cities, by government decree.

If only a decree were enough, thought Ricciardi. The world keeps spinning the way it always has, since long before Year One, unfortunately: the same murders, the same corrupt passions. The same blood.

He shot one last look down the hallway, listening to the murmuring thoughts of the dead. He went to shut the door, as if that would be enough to fence his soul off to those emotions, as if he were hearing those words with his ears, not his heart. Before tossing it into the waste bin he once again read the date on the sheet torn off the wall calendar: Year Nine. Yet it's been twenty-five years for me, since my first scorching August. Twenty-five years today, to be exact.

The Baroness Marta Ricciardi di Malomonte was a petite, elegant, quiet woman. In the small town in the Cilento region that was overlooked by the ancient castle, everyone loved her — but from a distance; there was something strange and remote about those beautiful sad green eyes. Something unsettling.

Fate had not been especially kind to the baron's child bride; her husband, so much older than her, had died when little Luigi Alfredo was only three years old. She had chosen not to go back to the city and instead led a life of active involvement in the village, aiding the poorest families and teaching the little children to read and write so that they might be good company for her son, who was so very like her. But social distance is hardly a promising foundation for friendship; indeed, Luigi Alfredo chose to spend his time with Rosa, the tata who had been with his family since she was a little girl, and with Mario the overseer, a young man who was a passionate reader of Salgari's adventure novels and who told the young boy stories of tigers and warriors. The child was a daydreamer and he liked to reenact the stories he'd heard as he played in the castle gardens; surrounded by imaginary comrades and enemies, he battled loneliness with his imagination, brandishing the wooden sword that Mario had made for him by nailing together two sections of board in the shape of a cross.

Luigi Alfredo's world was an equal blend of reality and imagination; he used reality to fuel his imagination, selecting the most intriguing and fascinating details and inventing new adventures based on them, to while away his long, solitary afternoons. His mother and the help were used to hearing him murmur in the garden, urging invisible troops into battle and beheading sea monsters with a single blow; it fell to a grumbling Rosa each night to treat skinned knees and mend ripped shirts before giving him a rough but consoling hug good night.

But one day the boy ran into the house screaming, in tears, and told his mother and Rosa that he had seen a dead man who spoke to him. The tata had soothed him and that night she'd grimly questioned the housemaids to find out which of them had been stupid enough to tell the child about the murder of the hired laborer, the one who had been stabbed to death in a jealous vendetta the previous winter. The women all protested, swearing that they had never spoken in the presence of young Master Luigi Alfredo about "the Deed." The boy, who was eavesdropping as usual outside the ground floor window, would later use that term, "the Deed," to describe the second sight that he possessed, the ability to feel the pain and grief hovering in the air in the aftermath of a violent death. And to see its source.

He had almost forgotten about that encounter, one August morning when his mother told him to get dressed so that they could go out for a walk; he was six years old and time spent with her was the greatest source of pleasure in his life, even though she didn't have Mario's gift for telling wonderful stories, nor did she envelop him in rough hugs the way Rosa did. She would look at him with her large green eyes, smile at him with gentle sadness, and caress his forehead, brushing aside the rebellious lock of hair. That was more than enough. That day, however, his mother's expression was different, tense and distant. Luigi Alfredo decided that she must not feel well, perhaps one of her headaches.

They had walked together along the road that led out of town. Now, all these many years later, Ricciardi could still remember the suffocating heat and the smells of manure and farmland, as they strolled along, leaving the last few houses behind them. He'd asked his mother where they were going, but she had squeezed his hand in hers and said nothing. The boy didn't sweat much but still the heat drained his strength; he was thirsty and eager to stop walking. But the woman continued along the road. They'd been walking for close to an hour when they reached a house that seemed abandoned. There was a wooden gate hanging askew on its hinges, while weeds and stubble covered what had once been a little lane. From the branch of a great tree, in the center of the courtyard, dangled a rope with a plank, an old swing, now broken. His mother stopped a few yards short of the tree; she looked around her, her brow furrowed, hesitating. The broad brim of her white hat concealed her expression, but Luigi Alfredo could sense her uneasiness. Behind the trunk of the tree, he glimpsed a little girl more or less his age; he hadn't seen her before because she was standing in the shadows, he supposed. He walked toward her with a smile on his face and asked:

"Do you want to play with me?"

His mother, startled, raised one hand to her mouth. The little girl was pale, her dirt-encrusted hair hung loose over a dress made of rough gray homespun. In his memory, Ricciardi could still see her, as real as the portrait of Mussolini hanging on the wall. The front of her dress was some other color, black, it seemed. Luigi Alfredo walked over to her, and looked more closely: the little girl's belly had been torn open by a spray of buckshot fired at point-blank range. Her ribs jutted white from the mess of burnt and ravaged flesh. Staring at him with dead eyes she said:

"Mamma, run come see, someone's knocked down the front gate, run come see!"

Luigi Alfredo took a step backward, astonished. He turned to look at his mother, pointing the little girl out to her.

"Mamma, help her! Can't you hear what she's saying?"

Marta didn't move; she stood there like a statue carved in stone. She looked toward the tree and Ricciardi realized that she couldn't see the child, though she certainly sensed something. So he headed toward the house: he'd go himself to summon the little girl's mamma. He'd only gone a short distance when he saw a boy, sitting next to a large stone. At first he thought the boy was asleep, but as he got closer he realized that something was gurgling out of his mouth, like water. He drew closer still until he was able to make out individual words:

"Papa, Papa, the brigands, the brigands have come!"

From a gaping wound in the boy's throat a bubbling black liquid came pouring forth, unstoppable. Luigi Alfredo, without realizing what he was doing, began to cry. A dull and fathomless sense of grief swept over him, surging intermittently like the boy's blood, and with every gush he felt filthier and more desperate. From far away he reached out his hand toward his mother, who was still standing motionless next to the tree with a broken swing, her hand covering her mouth. He took a few steps toward the house. At the threshold of the door a kneeling woman, almost hidden by the shadowy interior, was stretching her hand toward the courtyard.

"Lucia, Gaeta', run!"

From throat to belly, the woman's body was ravaged with knife wounds; her tattered dress left the dozens of cuts that had been inflicted upon her open to view. A large puddle of blood was spreading across the ground between her legs. Behind her the little boy glimpsed a man, and he too was on his knees; half of his face was gone, eradicated by a close-range shotgun blast. The other half was the very picture of terror. From the one staring eye flowed tears, from the mouth twisted into a grimace poured an incessant mumbling:

"Have pity, have pity, take anything you want, take the girl and the boy, have pity ..."

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Excerpted from "Everyone in Their Place"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Fandango Libri s.r.l..
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
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