I Will Have Vengeance Read Free

reckless or even suicidal. Maione suspected that Ricciardi went in search of death, of its quintessential meaning, with an inquiring frenzy, as if to define it, to reveal it; with no particular interest in his own survival.
    But Maione didn’t want Ricciardi to die. First of all because, in his good-natured simplicity, he was convinced that a part of his lost son lived on in the Commissario. Then too, because over time he had become fond of those silences, those brief smiles, the echo of sorrow that could be seen in the gestures of those tormented hands. And so he continued to watch over the Commissario’s well-being, on Luca’s behalf and in his memory.

III
    I n the chill wind of that Wednesday morning, Ricciardi was walking down from Piazza Dante, hands in the pockets of his dark grey overcoat, head hunched between his shoulders, eyes on the ground. Moving briskly, he could hear the city without looking at it.
    He knew that on the way from Piazza Dante to Piazza del Plebiscito he would cross an invisible boundary between two distinct realities: below, the wealthy city of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, of culture and entitlement; above, the working-class neighbourhoods in which a different system of laws and regulations applied, equally rigid or perhaps more so. The sated city and the hungry one; the city of feasting and that of despair. How many times Ricciardi had witnessed the clash between those two sides of the same coin.
    The boundary was Via Toledo. Old buildings, silently facing the street but noisy in the back: windows thrown open on narrow alleys, the housewives’ first songs. Church doors, their façades wedged between other buildings, opened to welcome the faithful who went to commend the day to God. The wheels of the first buses rumbled over the large stones that paved the street.
    Morning was one of the very few times when mingling occurred: from the warren of alleys in the Quartieri Spagnoli, street vendors came down along Via Toledo with their carts of assorted goods and hearty calls; from the densely populated port districts and from the outskirts, skilled craftsmen, shoemakers, glovers and tailors went up towards the maze to reach the burgeoning residential district of the Vomero or the shops lining the dim alleys. Ricciardi liked to think that that was a moment of reconciliation, of interaction, before the awareness of disparity and hunger led some to be consumed with envy and contemplate crime, and others to fear an assault and crack the whip.
    At the corner of Largo della Carità, as on the last several mornings there, Ricciardi saw the image of a man who had been the victim of a pickpocket: he had fought back and had been savagely beaten with a stick. Brain matter oozed from the crushed skull and blood covered one eye; the other still flashed with rage, and the mouth with its broken teeth kept repeating incessantly that he would never let go of his things. Ricciardi thought about the thief, by now impossible to find, swallowed up by the Quartieri; about hunger, and the price paid by the victim and his killer.
    As usual, he was the first to arrive at the Questura. The policeman at the entrance snapped to attention in a military salute and Ricciardi responded with a brief nod. He didn’t like walking through the crowded halls of the municipal headquarters once life at Palazzo San Giacomo reached the mayhem and bedlam stage, or making his way through the detainees’ venomous invectives, the guards’ loud calls to order, the lawyers’ strident arguments. He much preferred the early morning hours, with the still-clean staircase, the silence, the nineteenth-century feel.
    When he opened the door to his office, he noticed the familiar smell as he did every day: old books, prints, a bit of dust left by time and memories. The leather of the old desk chair, of the two chairs facing the desk and of the worn olive-green desk blotter. The ink in the crystal inkwell set in the