Free By My Hand by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Page B

currently occupied by a team of stevedores cheerfully singing a popular ditty, had been crushed by a falling crate or something of the like: there was a vast depression in his chest and it was clear from the angle of his head that his spinal cord had been severed. He was muttering:
This last one, I’ll just do this last one and then I’ll head home
. What a shame, mused the commissario. If the one before had been your last for the day, maybe now you’d be with your children. You just wanted too much. Too bad for you. And maybe too bad for me, too, he thought to himself.
    Among the many uniformed men supervising the harbor’s operations, it was easy to identify the members of the port militia: the gray-green felt hat, the jacket of the same color with a half-belt in back. Active, precise, energetic. As Ricciardi made his way to the barracks with Maione, he thought that a military organization parallel to the administration of the state but answerable to a political party was potentially dangerous. But then it was also true that the party in question had won the most recent elections with more than ninety percent of the votes, and so it was hard to tell the Fascist party apart from the state itself.
    As far as he was concerned, and as he tried to make Dr. Modo understand whenever he tried to pull Ricciardi into one of his angry anti-Fascist tirades, politics was entirely uninteresting. He believed that, when all was said and done, the root of all problems was human nature: and for that there was no remedy.
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    The militia barracks was not centrally located, but it was located strategically, not far from the tracks along which the freight trains ran from the docked ships up to the station. The civilian personnel tended to steer clear of the place, perhaps instinctively. They seemd to prefer to take the long way around rather than walk along the barracks walls, which only added to the sense of its extraneousness from the colorful world of the Naples harbor.
    The two policemen walked around the building’s perimeter, in search of the main entrance. It was a three-story building, spartan and solid, in keeping with the architecture of the regime. Over the entrance, between the second and third floors, was a large sign: MUSSOLINI BARRACKS . Ricciardi remembered the inauguration, years earlier: Il Duce had come to Naples in person, and Garzo had been so anxious that he had almost tipped over into hysteria, as was typical of him on such high-pressure occasions.
    The militiaman at the front door asked them to identify themselves, then muttered something into a modern-looking intercom; Maione thought sadly of the miles of stairs and hallways that the officers were forced to walk at police headquarters just to deliver routine messages. A minute later, a junior officer appeared and, raising his arm in a rigid Roman salute, welcomed them and introduced himself.
    â€œFirst squad leader Catello Precchia. Please, come this way.”
    The militiaman headed up the staircase at a run. Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a glance of sympathetic amusement, and followed him at as quick a pace as they could manage; the commissario thought he could hear the brigadier inwardly cursing as he struggled to make it up the steps. On their way up they crossed paths with a large number of soldiers running at the same enthusiastic clip, each of them snapping a sharp Roman salute. Ricciardi spitefully wished that one of them would trip in his eagerness and tumble all the way down to the ground floor. He’d have gladly pulled out his wallet and put cash on the barrelhead to see such a sight.
    The first squad leader came to a sudden halt in front of a tall dark hardwood door, where an usher stood at attention next to a desk. The man didn’t even have a chair. The militiaman knocked just once at the door and then showed them in.
    The office they’d just entered was enormous. The marble floor had no other decoration apart from small