Murder In Matera Read online

  Go home, the voices in my head said. Turn around and just go home.

  Go back to America and leave the dead in peace.

  Evil happened in threes, even in Italy. Or maybe people just stopped counting after three. The saying here was “Non c’e due senza tre.” There’s no two without three. And this was my third strike: the explosive traces on my hands, the canceled flight, and now my stolen wallet.

  Had I been able to think straight I might have laughed at the thought that I was no longer searching for a crime but was now the victim of one. But I wasn’t thinking straight. All I knew was that I had a one-euro coin in my pocket.

  With my mouth as dry as a passatella loser’s, I walked to the restroom for a quick drink of water and to splash my face to calm myself down. But then I remembered you had to pay for the restrooms here. I didn’t even have enough money to use the bathroom.

  I texted my husband: “MY WALLET WAS JUST STOLEN.” In all caps. I never texted in caps.

  Wendell was used to handling reporters in crisis. So he calmly texted back, “Oh no. I’m so sorry. Just get on the train.”

  And just in case I had misunderstood the first time, he yelled in all-capital letters in a second text: “JUST GET ON THE TRAIN!!!!”

  Chapter 15

  GYPSIES, GYPSIES, GYPSIES

  LEO WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.

  I looked around nervously at the darkened streets near the deserted Metaponto train station, every shadow a potential mugger or rapist. At least I had no wallet to steal.

  I didn’t know what the crime rate was in Basilicata, and right now, I didn’t really want to know.

  The five other passengers who had gotten off the train with me had quickly met their rides and were off. I briefly considered hopping in and hitching a ride to town. I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. But I waited instead.

  I looked up at the stars and tried to make out a few of the constellations, their Greek names swimming in my head, just to calm myself and pass the time. But there were just too many stars up there, all crowding together and confusing me and making me feel even more lost and insignificant. I craned my neck and looked down the dark and dusty road leading to the station.

  No Leo.

  I glanced over at the small station café, called Grofé, with its bar and couches and tables, but its lights were out and its glass door locked tight. I was alone. With no cash. No credit cards. There were no taxis. And once the train pulled away, no people. No stray dogs or cats. Not even any lizards. Just me. And the ghost of Vita, laughing in my ear.

  I felt unmoored.

  After about ten minutes of nail biting, I finally texted Leo. “I’m here!” I wrote, trying to sound upbeat and not too pushy. (I wanted to text, “Where the fuck are you?!” but I hardly even knew the guy and was grateful he had agreed to come and get me.) Southerners were notoriously late. And I knew it. But I was a tangle of frayed nerves.

  “On my way,” Leo wrote back, and within moments his compact car was rounding the curve to the station’s pickup point, going so fast it practically screeched in on two wheels.

  After a brief hello and a hug, I told him my wallet story.

  Leo smacked the steering wheel with an open palm and chanted, “Zingare, zingare, zingare.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will take you to dinner. You don’t need money.”

  We headed to Bernalda for pizza and a beer, taking seats in an outdoor garden of the town’s newest pizzeria. Though I hadn’t eaten in more than eight hours, I had no appetite. The owner knew Leo and brought over a giant plate of appetizers: triangles of provolone, homemade circles of soppressata and soft mounds of ricotta, roasted red pepper strips, pickled artichokes, and some local peasant bread. It looked delicious, but I barely picked at it. I happily drank the beer, though, a local brew, served in what looked like a wine bottle. It was called Jazz Beer. The restaurant was packed with Bernaldans, including small children, though it was close to midnight. Leonardo knew everyone there. He chatted with some, waved to others, but greeted them all.

  “Isn’t today a holiday?” I asked Leo.

  “Not so much down here,” he said, shrugging. Leo’s shrug said more than the volumes I had read back in New York about the history of Basilicata and the rest of the South. Centuries of domination had left the Southerner with a fatalistic view of the world—the Italian shrug, half-closed eyes, and melancholy outlook its main symptoms.

  As Leo drove me to my apartment, my mind wandering in my delirium, I thought about the history of the dark fields we were passing. When I had first seen this landscape ten years ago, I had been struck by its simultaneous beauty and sadness. But since then, I had learned its history, which helped explain that sadness: decade upon decade of repression and the failed attempts, one after another, to remedy it.

  A Neapolitan revolution, led by the Jacobins, broke out in the winter of 1799, with the invasion of revolutionary France. They promised reform for the peasants. But that summer, a Bourbon monarch took control, sentencing the Jacobins to death.

  In 1806, Napoleon placed his brother, Joseph, on the throne in Naples, throwing the ruling Bourbons into exile. Serfdom was outlawed, with a plan to redistribute the lands among the peasants. But reform failed once again.

  I thought of Garibaldi, and how he, too, had promised reform and a better life for the peasants. But the South suffered more at the hands of their northern brothers than they had at the hands of all those invaders.

  Unification seemed to be the straw that broke the farmer’s back. Brigands started to appear in the countryside, robbing the wealthy landowners, maybe not giving it over to the poor but nonetheless giving the peasants something to cheer about. Industrialization had taken hold in the New World. And so the peasants began to leave—streaming over to the Americas by the thousands.

  From 1906 to 1915—the year Vita died—Basilicata lost nearly 40 percent of its population to emigration.

  The government started to worry about the loss of its best and strongest, and finally made an effort to entice them to stay. After World War II, a series of identical white houses with arched doorways were built for the Metaponto-area farmers, which came with a small parcel of land.

  Leo pointed the colonica houses out to me. It was like the American program of forty acres and a mule following the Civil War, but without the mule. In the 1950s and ’60s, crops were diversified and true change started to take hold.

  These days land was cheap and available to anyone who wanted to farm it, though it was hard work. Many of the young men in and around Bernalda wanted nothing to do with the agricultural life of their ancestors. They wanted instead to be rappers or videographers, chefs or bartenders.

  Or beach bar owners.

  Many of those small white houses, the ones set aside for the farmers, were now summer cottages. Some were rented out to tourists in the high season. In fact, Leo owned one of them. He pointed it out to me as we sped past, his small dog running out into the dark road to greet him. Leo nearly ran him over.

  Chapter 16

  MONDAY, TUESDAY, THURSDAY, WEDNESDAY

  IMMA WAS TALL, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL FOR WOMEN IN THESE parts, or for anyone really. She had straight brown hair a shade lighter than mine and huge, curious eyes rimmed with dark eyeliner, though they were often covered in fashionable black sunglasses. With her bob and those sunglasses, she looked a bit like Anna Wintour, but always wore jeans, even in the hottest weather. She smoked Chesterfields and was cool but kind and smart and was always up for adventure, never saying no to a suggestion or request.

  Like many of Bernalda’s young adults, Imma lived at home with her parents. To make a living, she edited manuscripts and worked as a deejay in a bar, which she gave up for a month to devote herself solely to me and my research. She was going to be my Girl Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, and any other day of the week I needed her.

  Her college thesis had been an analysis of the dialects of Pisticci and Bernalda. She had
family in both towns and was a cousin of the historian Dino D’Angella, Professor Tataranno’s counterpart in Pisticci. Imma also knew Tataranno very well, having had his wife, Carmelina, as a teacher in school.

  Giuseppe—my other researcher—was also unusually tall. He was Hollywood handsome, with a wide, bright smile, downturned black eyes that sparkled, dark, thick eyebrows, short, neat brown hair, and a raspy voice. He was happily married to a beautiful blond woman named Emanuela, who matched his good looks and even raised them. She resembled a fairy-tale princess and was just as sweet.

  Her prince, Giuseppe, was at least a shade or two darker than us all, with a deep tan from working his fields. Even though he was a farmer, he had had a first-rate education because his family had been landowners. His features and his speech were more refined than most residents’ but he moved easily between the locals he had grown up with and the local landowners, who seemed more sophisticated. Like me, he was caught between social classes and the expectations that came with both. I had grown up working class but had moved out of Jersey City long ago. I sometimes felt adrift, without a real tribe to call my own.

  Giuseppe was just a few years younger than I was. I noticed that he popped the collar on his polo shirts straight up in a very 1980s way like I had many years ago. (The popped collar was making a comeback in Italy; Giuseppe was ahead of the trend.) His English was impeccable and he was a gentleman, holding doors open for me, explaining anything I was confused about—which was a lot—and always arriving on time, a rare trait in the South. He was so dependable and responsible that he wore a wristwatch, in a world where most people simply checked their phones for the time, if at all.

  He was the one who drove me to the post office to pick up money that was being wired by American Express my first afternoon back in Basilicata. We went to Marina di Ginosa, a small, lively seaside village outside Pisticci where he had grown up. He knew everyone there but had moved out years ago to a private farmhouse in Marconia, nearby. It was difficult to live in Marina di Ginosa, he said, because some people resented him for coming from a long line of landowners.

  Giuseppe was eager to find the murder, so eager that before I even arrived, he had found a local Grieco family with a soprannome that meant “murderer.” After a few days of digging, he found out one of the ancestors in that Grieco family had simply been a very successful hunter and, because of his vast collection of animal heads, was jokingly called “the murderer.”

  Imma, meanwhile, had tried searching in the Bernalda archives but was rebuffed by the awful clerk there, who said she needed my written permission to look into my family records. Which was ridiculous.

  The next morning, the three of us met with Professors Tataranno and Salfi in the scented garden at Francesco’s Hotel Giamperduto. We all hugged and sat down at a long table overlooking the fertile Basento Valley. Twisted olive trees filled the property, making it look like the Garden of Gethsemane. Professor Tataranno looked nearly the same as he had ten years earlier, his face only slightly aged, his mind as sharp as ever. He was still chain-smoking. I worried his lungs didn’t look quite as good as he did on the outside. I was happy to see that Professor Salfi was still alive. He didn’t look much older, since he had looked so old to begin with, but he seemed much quieter this time around. I wondered if his hearing had gone.

  We talked about the past ten years and about the murder. This time I was prepared. I had brought along copies of the birth certificates I had for Vita and her sons and also her death certificate and handed them around the table, as if shuffling cards in a game of passatella. They agreed to make some inquiries in town and we said our goodbyes, promising to reunite later in the week. But before we scattered, I handed out the baseball hats with “NYC” written on the front. Everyone laughed and put them on, looking like a ragtag team of players with me as their nervous coach. “Team Helene,” Giuseppe said with a laugh.

  GIUSEPPE WAS THE ONE WHO DID MOST OF THE DRIVING, SINCE I had a lousy sense of direction. Also, the streets in Bernalda and Pisticci had been built for mules, not for cars, and someone was always scraping the paint job off the side of their car. I didn’t want it to be me. It was also possible I would get a ticket if caught driving without a license, even though I had a Bernalda police report explaining what had happened, safe in my backpack, which I now carried in front of me, like a baby in a BabyBjörn, like the one worn by the gypsy who had stolen my wallet. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for days. Maybe I would lose weight this trip, a first for a visit to Italy.

  The rental car company was named Stigliano Motors, the same last name as Vita’s mother. I wondered if we were related, too, and asked the car rental guy about the murder. He had no idea what I was talking about and shrugged. Luckily, he ignored the fact that I had no driver’s license and simply handed me the keys to my boxy brown Lancia. I wouldn’t have to ride a mule after all.

  With my Lancia—lance—Giuseppe and I headed out like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in search of enlightenment. (I wasn’t sure who was who.)

  Giuseppe turned to me and thanked me for hiring him. “It’s not just the money that’s important,” he said. “Trying to find your family murder is kind of like therapy for me.”

  “Really?” I asked. “How?”

  “It’s helping me to forget my own family story for a little while.”

  “What story?”

  “My sister, Sabrina, was murdered a couple of years ago,” he said, very matter-of-fact. I stared at him.

  “Oh my God,” was all I could muster.

  “She was killed by a stalker who was in love with her. She left behind two kids. Our whole family is still a little bit in shock.”

  I gasped. I didn’t gasp often. It took a lot to make me gasp. I hardly knew Giuseppe and wasn’t even sure how to respond to such an awful story. “Jesus,” I said, finally, shaking my head in disbelief. “Did they catch the man who did it?”

  “He killed himself,” Giuseppe calmly explained as he drove.

  “Oh my God, how awful. I’m so sorry,” I said. I felt like he should pull over. But he lived with this horror story every day. It was only new to me.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s a terrible story. But your family murder is helping me to forget my family murder. At least for a little while.” He shrugged and tried to smile.

  The murder—Sabrina’s murder—had been big news in Cesena in northern Italy, where it had happened in the spring of 2012. Sabrina was forty-five years old, Giuseppe’s big sister. She was scheduled to take her real estate agent’s exam in a few weeks but was mostly a full-time mother of two. The kind of mother who still sang lullabies to her eight-year-old son.

  Her biggest fault, said Giuseppe, was that she was too friendly and kind to those who didn’t deserve her kindness.

  She had complained to the police only weeks earlier about the sixty-year-old man from Bari who had become obsessed with her. He was the father of one of her friends.

  The stalker had confessed his obsession and desire to kill Sabrina to a doctor, who then told the Bari police. But they did nothing.

  The morning of the murder, Sabrina had just dropped her son off at school and was waiting outside her friend’s house to meet her. The stalker, meanwhile, had driven up to Cesena with a pistol, his rental car full of scribbled rantings. He saw Sabrina outside his daughter’s house and walked up to her car from the passenger side, leaning into the window and shooting her twice in the chest.

  He sped away to the nearby seaside town of Cervia, where he took refuge in the cathedral there, taking two hostages, including the priest. After hours of negotiations with the police, Sabrina’s killer shot himself in the chest upon the altar. Some said it was suicide. But the police chief told Giuseppe the killer was in the middle of a sentence when the gun went off, that it was an accident. Giuseppe thinks he was too much of a coward to deliberately take his own life.

  Sabrina was one of fifty-five Italian women killed that year by men who claimed to love them—husbands,
boyfriends, stalkers.

  “Most days I wake up and I think it’s some bad dream, some nightmare,” said Giuseppe. “But it’s real.”

  Giuseppe seemed like one of those good people to whom bad things happened, like a modern-day Job. Sabrina’s death was the worst. But then his farmhouse had recently been ransacked and robbed while he and his wife were out. He had had cancer, though he was cured. And now he was having financial troubles with his farm in Marconia, which was why he had taken the job helping me.

  Part of his apricot harvest was finished, but he still had to harvest his wheat, and the man who was supposed to come with the harvesting machine—the mietitrebbia—kept putting him off day after day after day. Giuseppe was worried the wheat would burn as the June days grew longer and hotter. After a week, he decided to hire another man, but when he arrived, the machine was not big enough. He told me all this as we drove, and not in a complaining way, but in order to let me know his story before we searched for mine.

  Giuseppe was the first one to say out loud that maybe there was some sort of curse not just on his head, but on mine. Right after I arrived, Imma dropped her phone in the toilet and had to travel over an hour to Potenza to visit the only Apple Store in the region for repair. It wouldn’t be ready for several days, making it difficult for us to contact one another.

  “There is some spirit that does not want you to tell this story maybe,” Giuseppe said. “Do you believe this is true?”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I said, trying to laugh about it.

  “But we will overcome it,” he said, patting my hand on the car seat. “We will be strong and we will find your murder. You will see.”

  Chapter 17

  THINKING ON YOUR FEET

  VITA’S PARENTS KNEW THAT ONE DAY THEY’D GIVE THEIR daughter a beautiful wedding. Simple, but beautiful.