The Marshal and the Murderer (10 page)

The young man reappeared.

'She's quieter now.'

'She might need a sedative tonight, nevertheless.

Does she have a doctor here?'

I'm not sure but I doubt it. I could call mine.'

'You've know them a long time, these girls?'

'Ever since they came here, more or less, since I teach at the school.'

'Then perhaps you could help me. I doubt if the Signorina can until she's calmer.' They could still hear her sobs which were muffled, probably by the bedclothes.

If you think I can tell you anything useful - but perhaps you wouldn't mind telling me exactly what's happened to Monica . . .'

'She was strangled. To be more technically correct I should say throttled. There may well have been an attempt at rape beforehand but we won't know for sure until after the autopsy.'

'Do you mind if we sit down?' Young Corsari's face was white and he seemed dazed though he kept himself well under control. 'Where . . . ?'

"Where did it happen? She was found near a terracotta factory where she was thought to have gone to work on Monday.'

'A factory . . .'? But she worked for an artisan.'

'Yes, but it seems that every so often she went to this factory to keep her hand in at throwing.'

'I didn't know . . .'

'It had little enough importance until now. As you know her quite well perhaps you could tell me what Signorina Stauffer meant by saying "I warned her"?'

'It's difficult to explain.'

'Take your time.'

Corsari studied his hands for a moment and then the Marshal's face, as if trying to gauge his capacity for understanding. The Marshal's face told him nothing.

'I suppose it's a question of personality really . . .'

"Whose?"

'Monica's, of course. Elisabeth - well, you've seen her for yourself.'

'She's not very forthcoming.'

'You have to know her. People tend to think she's sullen or unfriendly but that's not the case. She's desperately shy, but once you've got her to trust you -anyway, it's Monica you want to know about. She's just the opposite, completely open and friendly. She's so lively and affectionate - I should be talking about her in the past tense, shouldn't I? But it's difficult . . . I expect her to burst in at the door any minute. She had a way of filling the house with life . . .'He looked around the room. 'It's so silent without her it seems like half a dozen people were missing instead of one. Do you understand what I mean?'

'I understand.'

'Then you can imagine that she attracted people.'

'Especially men?'

'I'm trying to come to that in a way that won't create any misunderstanding . . .'

'Go on.'

'I can't even say for sure whether I understood her completely myself, even though I've known her so long and have been in a position - she was friendly and affectionate with everyone, you see, and what Elisabeth felt was that she shouldn't be. There's a question of different cultures, too, of course. I've travelled a lot in northern Europe myself, so I know that it's possible, normal, for there to be affectionate friendships between men and women where no other sort of rapport ever enters into things. Here it's rather different. If a girl offers affectionate friendship to a man he's likely to take it for quite another sort of offer. Elisabeth felt, and I agree with her, that Monica should have adapted her behaviour to the country she was living in.'

'That seems reasonable.'

'Monica wouldn't accept it. She said her personality was what it was, that she enjoyed herself, and had no intention of being repressed. They quarrelled about it often, sometimes violently.'

'You don't think Signorina Stauffer might have simply been a little bit jealous, given that she doesn't have much of a gift for making friends herself?'

'Of course she was jealous. She was bound to be.'

A question of personality. A question of cultural differences. When was this young man going to come to the point? The Marshal observed him. He was perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old and good-looking. He seemed intelligent and cultured. The Marshal decided to bring him to the point, having already understood what it was.

'Were you a victim yourself of this sort of misunderstanding caused by the young lady's personality and these cultural differences?'

Corsari flushed. 'Yes, I suppose I was, though I think victim's too strong a word for it.'

"As you like. In any case you remained friends?'

'Certainly. There was no reason why I should give them up as friends because of that.'

'And then you got to know Signorina Stauffer better and transferred your affections to her, is that it?"

I'm very fond of Elisabeth,' he said simply. 'But even so, you mustn't think I had anything against Monica for the way things went, I said before I wasn't sure whether I completely understood her and it's true. Even afterwards, when I wasn't what you call the victim, I watched the same thing happen to other men without ever knowing for sure whether she did it in all innocence or whether there was a touch of . . . what shall I say . . . ?'

'Malice?'

'That's too strong ..."

Most plain speaking seemed to be too strong for him. The Marshal was revising his first good opinion of this man on the grounds that though he was very charming he really didn't seem to be much of a man at all. There was nothing in him you could get to grips with.

'Maybe she didn't know herself,' was his only comment.

Cbrsari's charming eyes lit up. 'Do you know, I think you're right. In any case, you couldn't call it malice. The most you could say is that she enjoyed teasing a little.'

'Somebody didn't take kindly to being teased a little, then.'

'You think that's . . .'

"What else do you expect me to think? Somebody killed her!'

'But nobody would go so far because of that, nobody normal!'

'So somebody happened along who wasn't normal. You said yourself she behaved that way with everybody. Things may have been precipitated by something further, like jealousy of another man - I presume that out of all these men she liked to tease a little there were one or two who succeeded with her?'

'No, no, it never went that far. At the most she would invite someone here for dinner and it would soon become clear that there was nothing further on offer, so they either disappeared or changed their expectations.'

'As you did?'

'Yes. I'm afraid that in spite of my efforts at explaining you've got the wrong picture. It was all very light. Monica was a lovely girl and highly intelligent.'

'Would you mind giving me your name and address?'

'Certainly. I'll write it down for you.'

He got up and went to a small desk in the corner where there were writing materials in a drawer. It was evident that he was at home here. The Marshal stood up and waited. No further sound came from the bedroom and he wondered if the girl had exhausted herself with crying and fallen asleep.

'Here you are. I've given you my phone number at school as well, since I'm there most of the day.'

'You could also give me Monica Heer's home address and phone number if you know where to find them . . .'

'Of course. You'll have to inform her parents . . .'

'Yes.'

'It should be here somewhere.' He opened one or two more drawers, found what he was looking for and copied a second address on to the same piece of paper.

'Thank you. I'll be on my way.'

They passed the bedroom door which was ajar. The Marshal could see only a corner of the bed but a rustle and a faint sniff suggested that the girl was not asleep. The room was full of cigarette smoke.

'Remember what I said about a tranquillizer - and I •don't think she should be left alone for some time.'

'I'll call my doctor now, and I can always sleep here on the sofa, I've done it before.'

The Marshal stared at him with bulging eyes but made no comment. Once the door had closed he stumped down the stairs since there was no lift, muttering to himself as he opened the street door: 'Well, I'm not convinced ..."

But if anybody had asked him what it was he wasn't convinced about he would have had a hard time answering.

Five

The Marshal was descending the great staircase with difficulty. There was such a crush that he had already lost sight of his wife and the crowd was pressing him against the broad marble banister which was loaded for all its length with branches of bay and heaps of citrus fruit. The air was filled with the scent of lemons and the music of an opera by Verdi, though the Marshal couldn't remember which one. The staircase seemed to go on for ever and he had no hope of finding his wife until he reached the bottom of it. He was too hot in his uniform, and to make matters worse there was a rather elderly woman beside him with a brown velvet hat and protruding lips who was suffocating him with her perfume and kept prodding him in the ribs with her elbow as she gesticulated and shrilled her dissatisfaction with the way things had been organized.

'My dear, if they would just be more selective!'

The selection would presumably include herself but not overweight NCOs, to judge by the vicious little glance she gave the Marshal's uniform.

When at last he reached the bottom he spotted Dr Biondini shaking hands with people on the left, but the Marshal who was too far to the right had no hope of reaching him and didn't intend to try. All he wanted to do was to extricate himself somehow from the crowd that was carrying him along and turn round to see if his wife had got down. When he managed it he was surprised to find that she was tapping him on the shoulder, having reached the bottom before him.

'Did you speak to Dr Biondini?'

'How could I?' he grumbled, 'It's impossible. Where are we supposed to go now?'

'To the Sala Bianca. I asked someone. You really should have made the effort, Salva. He'll think it so rude ..."

The Marshal only grunted and tried to fish for a handkerchief to mop his brow.

'We should have got here earlier,' whispered his wife.

'I don't see how if I was working . . .'

When they reached the Sala Bianca they were unable to get in and had to stand outside the room, hemmed in by the crowd, while an interminable speech was made by the politician who had been invited to open the exhibition and who was making the most of the opportunity to speak about anything other than the paintings, mostly, as far as the Marshal could make out, about himself and his early life in Florence. As if the exhibition hadn't provided enough of a security problem without this . . .

The Marshal glanced about him. He might be no expert but a crowd this size was a security risk, no matter how many men with metal detectors you had on the doors . . .

The thought was driven from his mind by a sharp poke in the back and a familiar voice.

'I can't hear a thing, let alone see. There really should be some provision for people who can't stand for any length of time. Can you get a glimpse? They say he's aged - I was a great friend of his mother's before
the
quarrel . . . you know what I mean ... It
was
quite shocking, of course, and since the Princess considered herself to have been insulted in that woman's drawing-room I had no choice ..."

'Let's get out of here,' muttered the Marshal.

'Salva! Shh . . .'

'Who, me? But if everybody else'

'Shh!'

That was the woman behind. It was true that there was no hope of escape in reality since they were blocked in on all sides. There was nothing for it but to stick it out. It had been too long a day, that was the trouble. It was only four hours or so since he had left Niccolini to come back and visit Signorina Stauffer, but it seemed more like four days. And at this rate they'd be lucky to get home to their supper before eight-thirty or nine . . .

'. . .
the questions and problems inherent in the
cultural, environmental and artistic heritage of the
city known — not without reason — in the last century,
as the Athens of Italy. In the words ofCarducci
. . .'

Just as well he'd managed to phone the Captain before coming over here, though he hadn't been able to tell him much apart from the girl's home address. After all, there was nothing concrete to tell, nothing cut and dried that you could put in a report or even explain on the phone. Not that the Captain expected anything unreasonable.

'I'm just interested in your impressions at this point . . .'

Which was all very well, but the Marshal wasn't a great one for explaining things. You needed someone with brains for that sort of thing. Someone with the gift of the gab like this fellow sounding off now . . .

'. . .
Florence at the end of the thirteenth century
could in a way be said to have anticipated what, at the
end of the seventeen hundreds, five centuries later,
was the atmosphere of revolutionary France. The
Guilds became republics within the Republic, and the
artisans, while having no active part in the government
. . .'

'If you have any ideas, even in a general way . . .'

But the Marshal never had ideas. His mind was full of images that jostled each other without resolving themselves into anything definite: the hostile gaze of a red-stained man, his feet buried in clay shavings; the silent, smelly little room where Tina's cat warmed itself against a terracotta bowl of ashes; the dreariness of a high black wall in the rain . . . What was the point of trying to explain stuff like that, even if he'd been capable of it? It may well have been to cover his embarrassment that he had said, rather prematurely, he thought on reflection, 'We might need the Fiscal Police . . .'

'Really? You mean '

'I don't know, it's nothing definite - I've no proof that there's anything . . . we'd better wait and see.'

Thank goodness the Captain hadn't insisted but had asked him instead how things were going with Niccolini. That at least was something he could answer.

'All right, I think, We're getting along. At any rate I get along fine with him and I hope he doesn't mind having me around ... It was a bit difficult at first ..."

'I'm convinced you'll work well together. Now if you'll give me the girl's home address I'll see about getting in touch with her parents.'

He wouldn't have been so convinced, thought the Marshal, if he'd seen them that morning. Still, he was right, after all. The Captain was an intelligent man.

And so, if it came to that, was that young fellow . . . what was his name? Corsari. Hm. Very smooth hands he'd had, and something else ... his ears, that was it. Funny ... he couldn't remember having noticed them at the time but now he could see them as clearly as if they'd been in front of him. Clean and pale and so sharply modelled they might have just come out of a mould. What was it Niccolini had said? You're the sort of person who notices things . . . a fat lot of good that was, noticing things that were irrelevant. Those great moulds of Sestini's up in that damp, freezing room with the rain coming in at a broken window ... he hadn't caught on to what they were, though of course they were in pieces. Must have been drying there above the kiln. Funny how you could see those great big red pots in gardens all over Tuscany and never wonder how on earth they were made . . . That was what the half-empty room smelled of. . . damp plaster, and the rest of the rooms had the clean earthy smell of wet clay. All of it so cold and then the sudden heat of the kiln when they fired . . . That couldn't be very often. Most of the time it must be a pretty uncomfortable place to work, especially in winter, but they were used to it. Not the girl, though. It couldn't have been much fun working in that desolate, ramshackle factory in winter, especially when it was empty. Hadn't he thought that same thing already? No . . . that was to do with Berti's place when he'd thought she surely couldn't have stood out there in the rain waiting - well, she'd found a way round that because there was Tina. Had she found a way round it at Moretti's too? There she didn't even have Berti to drive her into the town to get a hot meal. Berti could have picked her up there, of course, if he'd wanted to . . . but no, Niccolini said she hadn't turned up to eat. Funny that she'd never missed before so that nobody realized she sometimes went to Moretti's. It would have been logical, after all, for Berti to have given her a lift. What other solution could she have found that one day . . . There was Robiglio's house across the way ... He remembered there being a face looking out there too and tried to imagine the pale indistinct figure he had seen, beckoning . . . too far-fetched altogether. Must be something simpler, something more obvious. What if she was killed before lunch? That could be it, in which case Berti did go there and so knew . . . Well, the autopsy would tell. Even so, he felt he was missing something, something that had already crossed his mind right at first, just as it had crossed his mind that if Berti kept his place locked up and wouldn't give her a key . . . No. It was there somewhere but he couldn't grasp it. No doubt it would come back to him when he wasn't trying to remember. At least he could stop at Berti's tomorrow and ask him outright whether he usually picked the girl up and drove her to the restaurant when she was working at Moretti's. He might be a shifty character but the Marshal had a feeling that he wouldn't risk telling a downright lie if he was asked the right question. Had she given him the treatment, the teasing job? Probably she considered him too old to bother with. No doubt the young brigadier would have got the full works if it hadn't been that Niccolini had always been present -and there was an odd business! Niccolini had a head on his shoulders and you'd think he'd have cottoned on to her tricks. Of course, in a way he had, but like young Corsari, he had insisted that it was all very light and charming . . . 'Teases him a bit but nothing out of place.' But something was out of place all right. For one thing it couldn't be true that some man or other hadn't succeeded with her. At that age she must surely have a lover - unless she'd been crossed and was going through a bad patch, taking her revenge. But no, the bitterness would have shown through -and young Corsari would have known by this time, having remained friends with the girls for so long. And since he was so anxious to defend her behaviour he'd have been the first to offer that as an excuse. He was no fool.

'Well, there's something wrong somewhere . . . must be me that's a fool if I can't see it!'

'Salval'

'What?'

He came to himself with a start and found himself being gazed at reproachfully by a boneless-looking saint with her mouth hanging slightly open. He blinked and looked around him as if the brilliant chandeliers high above him had just been switched on.

'Salva . . .' murmured his wife, blushing in her embarrassment, 'Whatever's the matter with you? You've been scowling at everybody for the last twenty minutes and now you're talking to yourself . . .'

'I am? Well, what of it? Nobody can have noticed in all this chaos.'

'Lots of people noticed. And you haven't so much as glanced at a single painting.'

If that whey-faced saint with her mouth open was anything to go by the Marshal reckoned he hadn't missed much, but he didn't say so. He made a valiant effort at craning his neck and standing on tiptoe and managed to glimpse a few gilded frames over and around the crowd of people. He hadn't even noticed, to tell the truth, that at some point the long-winded speech had come to an end and he had been carried along with the rest to view the exhibition.

One good thing was that they had lost the velvet-hatted woman somewhere along the way. After a moment he found that the crowd had pushed them aside and rolled on so that for the first time he had a whole painting before him and no heads in between. He stood still, staring at a curious little figure to the right of it and then let his gaze roll over the rest. If he stopped off at Berti's on the way tomorrow, might it not be wise to have another word with Tina while he was at it? Crazy though she had seemed, such of the things as she had told him that he had been able to check on had turned out to be true. There was no knowing what else-

'Ah, Marshal! Signora, good evening. Well, Marshal, I see you're admiring the Parmigianino. Lovely, isn't it? A very original work and so modern, of course, for its time.'

They both shook hands with Dr Biondini and the Marshal's big eyes widened in perplexity.

'You were quite engrossed in it,' said Biondini, smiling. 'Now I feel guilty for having interrupted you.'

'Ah . . .' And he turned to the picture again, this time seeing it whole and wondering what he should say. 'Well . . . but isn't it . . . the neck looks a bit on the long side to my way of thinking . . .'He felt his wife's fingers digging into his arm and thought he'd probably said something he shouldn't.

'Of course!' Biondini laughed. 'You're quite right. In fact it's known as the Madonna with the long neck.'

His wife's fingers relaxed their grip.

'I'm afraid it's a terrible squeeze here this evening, but there are some lovely things to eat and drink if you can only get to them - and if you can drag yourself away from the Madonna with the long neck! You certainly do notice things, but then I suppose it's your job, isn't it? You are quite a character!'

*

'Oh, Salva, you really are a one, and no mistake!'

'Who, me?'

'I give up!'

He became aware that his wife was knitting with some agitation, stopping every so often to count stitches ferociously. Something was up.

'What's the matter?'

'Never mind, if you're too tired to talk about it.'

'Talk about what?'

'About what? But if I've tried to tell you once I've tried five times - about the boys having to go right across the city with practically nothing in their stomachs to a gymnasium that's half the size of this room just to run about in the dust. They'd be better off staying at home!'