*****RECENTLY FEATURED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.*****
”He saw a man sitting on the ground holding both arms tightly around his stomach as if hugging *****RECENTLY FEATURED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.*****
”He saw a man sitting on the ground holding both arms tightly around his stomach as if hugging himself. A yellowish foam bubbling with air oozed from his mouth. His eyes were glassy, Even from a distance like that, the Commissario could make out his words: I can’t live without you. I can’t live without you. I can’t live without you…. He poisoned himself, Ricciardi thought. Barbiturates, acid, bleach, Does anything ever change?"
Commissario Ricciardi would have a more peaceful existence if people would quit dying violently.
You see… He sees… Dead People... and they talk to him.
It is March 1931 in Naples and the world’s greatest tenor Maestro Arnaldo Vezzi is found murdered in his dressing room at the Naples’ San Carlo Theater. He also happens to be the favorite tenor of Il Duce, or better known as Benito Mussolini, or as I affectionately call him The Chin. Ricciardi’s bosses are receiving a little more pressure than normal to find the killer, and find them quickly. They assign the case to the officer that has closed more cases than anyone else in the history of the department, of course, that would be Ricciardi. With his gift or should I say his curse, he is able to obtain information that is not available to a normal detective.
”He felt the emotion more than anything else, Each time he grasped their sorrow, their surprise, their rage, their misery. Even their love…. This was what the Incident, his life sentence, was like. It came upon him like the ghost of a galloping horse, leaving him no time to avoid it; no warning preceded it, no physical sensation followed it except for the recollection of it. Yet another scar on his soul.”
The victims are frozen in time muttering the last thing they said or their last thought. It makes it so easy when they say “Guiseppe, you bastard you’ve killed me”. Not the case with Vezzi. He is muttering “I will have vengeance”.
Vezzi is loved/worshiped by thousands of ardent opera fans, but like many talented people of the genius level he was temperamental. He threw expensive fits that kept his manager busy trying to explain away his bad behavior. He had a particular fondness for girls barely out of the tween age group. This tends to upset fathers. He also enjoyed, as a pastime, seducing married women, which tends to upset husbands. He, in other words, always preferred the forbidden fruit. The suspect list grows the longer Ricciardi investigates.
Ricciardi is rich, titled, handsome, and sporting a pair of flashing green eyes that make women from all ages a little weak in the knees. Even though he is one of Naples most eligible bachelors the husband-seeking women of Naples receive little encouragement. He wears his melancholy like a shroud. His one joy, and he eats one almost every day, is a sfogliatella.
He does have another joy. It is so secret I don’t know if I should tell you, but I have to tell you because it is the very thing that raised this book from a locked room Agatha Christie with a supernatural twist up to a book that left an indelible impression on that part of my soul that still believes in love, unrequited love, true love.
”With the lights turned off, he went to the window and parted the curtains. The patch of sky, swept clear and cloudless by the strong north wind, displayed four bright stars; Ricciardi wanted to be illuminated, but not by the stars.
The light that mattered to him was that of a dim lamp on a small table, behind the window across from his building opposite. The table was beside an armchair in which a young woman sat, embroidering….Ricciardi knew that her name was Enrica.”
Every night, whenever possible, he parts the curtains of his bedroom and gazes upon Enrica. He has never spoken to her, nor been in her presence, but his longing for her is a soul yearning for another. He is completely smitten and so is she.
”...every night she felt those same feverish eyes on her, for hours. From behind a windowpane in winter, and unobstructed in summer, when the scent of the sea reached Santa Teresa, borne by the hot wind from the south. And how that gaze was everything, a promise, a dream, even an ardent embrace. Thinking about it, she instinctively turned to the window. The curtain opposite was open. Lowering her eyes and blushing, Enrica hid a small smile; good evening, my love.”
So yes I will have to read more about Commissario Ricciardi. I must see if Maurizio de Giovanni has the fortitude and the patience to handle this wonderful, brimming love affair with the deftness and the assurance that he did in this book. This is another in my growing stack of satisfying reads of the genre termed: Mediterranean Noir.
“I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark“I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.”
Fabio Montale grew up one of three, a trio of boys who chased girls together, committed crimes together, listened to the same music, and drank with passion. “We fought over a girl's smile, not because of the color of our skins. It created friendships, not hatreds.” They grew up in a polyglot city where the languages merged and formed new words, new expressions, new possibilities, but then a recession hit.
”There were already quite a fair number of Arabs around in these days. Blacks, too. Vietnamese. Armenians, Greeks, Portuguese. But it didn’t cause any problems. It had started to be a problem with the downturn in the economy and the rise in unemployment. The more unemployment there was, the more some aware people became of the immigrants. And the number of Arabs seemed to be increasing along with the unemployment! In the Sixties the French had lived off the fat of the land. Now they had nothing, they wanted it for themselves! Nobody else was allowed to come and steal a crumb. And that’s what the Arabs were doing, stealing our own poverty off our plates!”
If you read enough history you see this scenario repeated over and over again. A place booms and people don’t have time or inclination to do some of the more menial jobs, so they encourage people from other cultures to move to their city to do the work they don’t want to do. The economy tanks as it invariably will do. Everybody starts to feel the squeeze. They start to notice the people of different tints and shades, and they resent them for having ANYTHING. Eventually they start to blame them for the pressure they are feeling. When we look at ourselves collectively as a species we are always so boringly predictable.
Ugo and Manu stay in the old life. Fabio becomes a cop, shocking everyone including himself. He isn’t sure if he likes the job, but he hates having to shake down Arab kids and throw them in jail to meet a quota. Manu is dead at the beginning of this novel and Ugo has come back to Marseille to avenge his friends death. Soon Ugo is dead as well, and Fabio finds himself following two rocky paths. He is sure those paths will twine together into one path as he starts to unravel the nest of lies, the perplexing stoic resistance of all those involved, and his own guilt which clouds his own objectivity.
And then there is Lole.
The girl of their dreams. The girl they each wanted to possess, but all three managed to lose her.
"Her hands deep in the pockets of a straw-coloured bathrobe. The colour made her skin look browner than usual and emphasized the blackness of her hair, which she was wearing short now. Her hips may have grown thicker, he wasn't sure. She'd become a woman, but she hadn't changed. Lole, the gypsy. She'd always been beautiful."
Fabio has screwed up every relationship he has ever had because he has already been imprinted by the perfect woman.
”You couldn’t get over loving Lole. It wasn’t a question of beauty…. Everything about her, the slightest gesture, was sensual. Lole was thinner, more willowy. Ethereal, even in the way she walked. She resembled Gradiva in the Pompeii frescoes. She seemed hardly to touch the ground. Making love to her was like letting yourself be carried away on a journey. She transported you. And, when you came, you didn’t feel as if you’d lost something, but as if you’d found something.”
So after the last woman leaves joining a growing list of women, wonderful women, who could have all been the love of his life, Fabio decides he needs to accept that it is Lole or no one.
He isn’t celibate though.
”Marie-Lou felt increasingly light in my arms. Her sweat released her body’s spices. Musk, cinnamon, pepper. Basil, too, like Lole. I loved bodies that smelled of spice. The bigger my hard-on, the more I felt her firm belly rubbing against me. We knew we’d end up in bed, and we wanted to delay it as long as possible. Until the desire become unbearable. Because afterwards, reality would catch up with us. I’d be a cop again and she’d be a hooker.”
I found myself pulling for Marie-Lou as she struggles to free herself from the life that she fell into so easily, and yet, is finding so difficult to escape. She wants Fabio to be the man on the white stallion who carries her away to a new life. He isn’t that man. He’s drinking too much, and as he turns over more and more stagnant rocks he is starting to rattle the nerves of the mafia. As he gets closer to the truth things become more dangerous for Fabio and the people he cares about.
”A blow landed on my jaw. I opened my mouth, and another blow followed in my stomach. I was going to suffocate. I was sweating gallons. I wanted to bend double, to protect my stomach. the guy with steel arms must have felt it. For a fraction of a second, he let me slide down. Then he pulled me up again, still pinned to him. I could feel his cock against my buttocks. The bastard was getting a hard on! Two more blows. Left, right. In the stomach again.”
Now Philip Marlowe might have set the record for getting knocked in the head, beat up, punched, and thrown down, but he never had to contend with some guy with a WOODY. It pissed Fabio off for days. He wasn’t too happy about getting beat up either.
”Better to be alive in hell than dead in paradise.”
Jean-Claude Izzo is considered the premiere writer of Mediterranean Noir. On a recent trip to Oxford, Mississippi I was browsing in Square Books and happened to notice this grouping of Europa Books. I pulled out the one with the red cover and noticed it had an introduction by Massimo Carlotto. Many years ago a British publisher, Orion, decided to print his Alligator books in English. My British Bookseller, there have been times when it felt like he was MINE and MINE alone, contacted me and told me I needed to check out Carlotto. He didn’t have to twist my arm too hard. He sent me two books by Carlotto, and one was even signed. I thought they were intriguingly good which has led me to several other great Mediterranean authors. I won’t bore you with the details. Like with many writers, Izzo was on my radar and then fell off my radar as my fickle book sluttiness took me in other directions. My point is a cosmic reconnection happened when I pulled this book from the shelf. It just took ten years to reach the BIG BANG.
Luckily for me this is only the first of a trilogy. Unluckily for all of us and him, Jean-Claude Izzo passed away at the age of 54 in 2000 from lung cancer. He was born in Marseille and he died in Marseille. This book might be a part of the mystery genre, but it is much more than that. It is an ode to a city.
What made this book a five star book for me was that I reached a point where the mystery, a very good one by the way, became the least interesting part of the book. I was so caught up in Fabio’s struggles with guilt, with women, and with his confusion and pain. Fabio, the self-appointed protector of the city, finds himself unable to continue to be a cop. Izzo tells us about the booze he drinks, the food he eats, the tang of the harbor air, the scent of the sweat on a woman’s neck, the music that defines him (mostly blues), and explains the politics of a city that is in the process of forgetting the very spices and vices that made it such a great city. You can label this book whatever you want, but for me it was just a fine piece of literature.
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