MONDAY: DAY O
He woke certain that what he wanted would be found in Naples.
Niccolò rose quickly, closed the door between the bedroom and the kitchen and called Fede to explain that the police wanted to speak with him. He needed to go into the city. It would take all day.
Niccolò was careful to sound perfunctory.
Fede agreed to cover the first two hours of his shift, after that he would tie the barrier back and they could manage without a guard. If it couldn’t be helped, it couldn’t be helped, but couldn’t the police give them more advanced warning? Uninterested in debate Niccolò said that he had to go.
Niccolò dropped his keys. As he stooped to pick them up he caught his reflection in the frosted glass of the bedroom door. Behind the glass, in the dark, Livia slept. Fearful of spiders, wasps, mosquitoes and blood-borne diseases she preferred the shutters closed. ‘I’m a magnet for disaster,’ she claimed, ‘any kind of trouble,’ although this was simply not true. The air from the room was still and warm and baby-sweet. He reached for the keys and caught his face half-lit, and believed for a moment that the reflection was someone else’s. He waited expecting the reflection to move independent of him, to pick up the keys before he picked up the keys.
He prepared breakfast knowing that Livia needed to be away early. He took his time showering and dressing. He dressed as usual in his uniform, but once Livia had left he changed into casual clothes and laid his uniform out across the bed ready for the end of the day.
Checking his watch he made sure he had plenty of time. Niccolò stood in front of the mirror and took measure of himself. Uncomfortable, he undressed, folded away the clothes, took a second shower, selected new clothes and re-dressed.
He rubbed oil into his hands and tousled his hair, then combed it, then gave himself a parting, a clean straight cut, so that his hair no longer fell forward to disguise the edge of the plate. He studied himself in the mirror and began to feel satisfied. While he found it difficult to associate with this face, he understood that it was his and how it felt, increasingly, less like a mask. The student’s notebook wrapped in plastic safe in his pocket. As he came across articles about the case he clipped them from Fede’s newspaper and folded them between the empty pages in chronological order.
* * *
At the station Niccolò bought a ticket from the tobacconists’. After franking the ticket he walked up to the platform and stood where he could watch the other passengers.
The train was not crowded. He stood with his back to the door so that he could see about the carriage without having to move. People read newspapers or sat looking out of the window, there were few discussions. At Torre del Greco passengers began to move toward Niccolò’s end of the train. At the far set of doors he could see two men in carabinieri uniforms. While most people avoided looking at him, the officers caught his eye, and Niccolò nodded back, and couldn’t help but smile at the idea that they were probably on the train for the same reason.
Niccolò studied the passengers and considered that none of them looked strong enough to abduct and stab a young man. He knew that it was a mistake to assume that the person who committed the assault would stand out in some way or even look interesting. He knew that once some discovery was made, the assailant would, in many ways, be a disappointment. But still, the possibility remained that the man responsible for the stabbing would be on the train.
The station in Naples was busy with police and carabinieri. Up on the concourse, the police watched people coming out of the station and up onto the street. Uniformed men stood in threes and fours, armed and prepared, and immediately outside the station, under the shade of the concrete awning, carabinieri waited beside black vans marked with official insignia, and Niccolò guessed that there was to be a parade or demonstration.
Niccolò came slowly through the market stalls at piazza Nolana, his hands in his pockets, hoping to see why there were so many police, for some kind of reason to materialize. But no demonstration emerged. Disappointed to have discovered nothing Niccolò walked through piazza Garibaldi and further, along via Carbonara, hoping that something would occur to him now that he was in the city. As he hadn’t read the paper that morning, he bought Il Mezzogiorno, and decided to take a coffee and see if there had been any developments overnight.
* * *
The front page carried an image of the star: a simple black square with the white outline of a star set in a circle. Inside, on page seven, he found an article about the graphic and how it was used in the city by a publisher, a printer, a chain of bakeries, and as a logo for a biscuit produced by the bakery. He read slowly, took breaks so that he would not become addled, so that he would not lose himself. This is what he needed to focus on. The star. This was the reason for his journey. Niccolò remembered the biscuits. Surely everyone knew of them. The tins were stacked in every shop and market for weeks before and after Ferragosto. It wasn’t a tradition, as such, but this is when he always remembered seeing them. He also had an idea where the bakery was located — although the newspaper had indicated that a number of bakeries produced the star-brand biscuits.
* * *
Uncertain of the neighbourhoods Niccolò walked first through I Miracoli and found the roads forced him up the hill; the streets became steeper and narrower and took him away from where he sensed he should be heading. At first, catching his reflection in shop windows, he did not recognize himself. But this was no confusion, instead he saw himself as someone who lived in the city, someone who belonged on the streets, a man with authority. The almond sellers, the gypsies asking for money, the shoe salesmen, the women at the markets, they all knew him, or knew his type: an independent man going about his independent business.
The further he walked the quieter the streets became, until he was surrounded by buildings five or six storeys high, their fronts rose directly from the black-cobbled road and their backs stumped into the hillsides. One row of houses topped another, butting higher at each level, so that the road appeared to rise through a canyon of dank grey rock. Turning back, he returned through the market on via Vergini, then seeing a street sign, via Arena di Sanità, he followed the street through to a long curved piazza and regretted that he had no address and no map. Even so, he couldn’t find the bakery.
Stopped on the piazza with only a general notion of his location, he decided to return to the station. Once on via Carbonara his thoughts now ran on other subjects. When he stopped at via Capasso to wait for a break in the traffic, he looked down the small street directly at a red tin sign of a star in a circle mounted under a porch.
The dimensions, colour and design of the star were identical to the star on the missing student’s T-shirt, the sign duplicated in Fede’s newspaper and this morning’s Mezzogiorno. The discovery astounded him. He walked to the entrance and found the small portal-door open. Niccolò peered into the courtyard to smell fresh bread and see what looked like apartments rising above the central courtyard. On the brass plaque beside the doorbells he read the names of the businesses: a language school, a furniture ‘fabricator’, a lawyer, a seminary. It took a while for the information to sink in and seemed oddly coincidental, so odd that it might not be a coincidence at all, but some deliberate design.
Niccolò stopped at the entrance perturbed, unsure of his discovery. The longer he looked at the tin sign, the more significant it seemed.