The Marshal's Own Case (2 page)

‘You must go to the carabinieri in Scandicci. I can’t deal with this, it’s not in my area. Go to your local station with a photograph of your son and they’ll publish it along with his description in the research bulletin.’

‘And what if my son’s left Scandicci? What’s the use of its only being published there?’

‘No, no, Signora. The carabinieri at Scandicci will send the information to the Questura here in Florence who’ll feed it into the data bank and transmit it to the Ministry of the Interior. They publish the bulletin throughout the whole country.’

‘If that’s the case, then I don’t see why you can’t do it now that I’m here.’

‘I’m sorry, Signora, but I can’t do that. I don’t understand why you came here at all when there’s a carabinieri station not two minutes away from your house.’

‘I came here,’ she snapped, ‘because a friend recommended you.’

‘
Recommended
me?’ As if he were a restaurant!

‘A very particular friend here in Florence. She lives on the via San Leonardo and you settled a dispute over the boundary between her garden and her neighbours’. As I was in town with my granddaughter and my daughter-in-law buying the child’s school things, I took the opportunity of staying on and having a cup of tea with her. She suggested I come here. She said you were a sensible man . . .’

She didn’t complete the sentence but its implication hung in the air. What’s more he’d placed her now. In the department store . . . the blonde mother and child and the organizing grandmother. That little girl wasn’t quite so fortunate as he’d imagined!

Two hours later, when the woman was long gone and the Marshal was writing out the daily orders for Wednesday, he was still grumbling to himself. ‘ “A very particular friend”! What a character!’

The fine autumn evening had faded and the lights were on. A wonderful smell of cooking was filtering in from somewhere. He paused in his work to sniff, feeling hungry. Lunch had been a hasty affair because of the shopping expedition. That smell wasn’t coming from his quarters or he would have recognized one of his wife’s dishes. It must be Bruno cooking for the lads in the kitchen upstairs. They were supposed to take turns with the cooking and shopping as with all their other duties, but Bruno was a good cook and refused to eat the messes that the others served up. The Marshal had given up trying to interfere. The boy would be off his hands before long, once there was a place for him in Officer Training School, and a good thing too. He couldn’t cope with Bruno who always left him speechless. Teresa always said, ‘That’s because he’s so intelligent . . .’ Another of those unfinished sentences. Well, he’d never claimed to have any brains himself, though he did like to think he was, at least, a sensible man. That awful woman . . .

His reverie was interrupted by a piercing scream from the waiting-room.

‘Now what . . . ?’

He opened his door. The screams were coming from a small girl of about five who was stamping in fury on a pile of what seemed to be her own clothes, her face swollen and red with the effort. Di Nuccio, one of the two men who must have brought her in in a patrol car, was trying to quieten her. He received a sharp kick on the shin from a tiny but well-aimed shoe.

‘Ow!’ yelled Di Nuccio.

‘She bites as well,’ offered the other lad, rubbing his hand and standing well back.

‘I don’t want you!’ screamed the child, ‘I want my mum, I don’t want you! Go away! Go on, go away!’ She aimed another kick but this time Di Nuccio dodged it. Enraged, the child whipped off her shoe and flung it across the room. It hit the Marshal and, for the first time, she noticed him. It might have been his size or, more probably, his huge bulging eyes that were fixed on her, but whatever the reason, she stopped screaming and stood still. Then she marched up to him and clutched his trouser leg.

‘Are you his dad?’ she demanded, pointing an accusing finger at Di Nuccio.

‘We found her trying to cross the road by herself,’ Di Nuccio said. ‘All we could get out of her was that she’d been left in the Pitti Palace by herself. I suppose her parents lost her in the crowd and are still in there looking for her.’

‘I’m telling your dad on you,’ yelled the child, wagging a warning finger.

‘I told the porter we were bringing her in here, so I suppose somebody will come for her soon. She must have been trying to go home, thinking they’d left her behind, but she doesn’t know her address.’

‘You go away!’

‘We’d better get back out . . .’

‘I’m not going with you because you’re horrible!’

‘The thanks you get,’ muttered Di Nuccio as he and his mate went off to resume their patrol.

‘I’m staying with you, am’t I?’ said the little girl smugly, satisfied that she’d won some sort of victory.

‘If you put your clothes on, you are.’

She stared up at him, taking the measure of his authority, then went and gathered up the pile of clothing and her shoe. She offered the bundle to him in silence.

‘Put them on,’ he insisted.

‘I can’t!’ She seemed surprised by his ignorance. ‘I’ve only learnt how to take them off. You have to do it.’

She climbed on to one of the waiting-room armchairs and offered him a foot.

‘Hasn’t your mother ever told you,’ he said, unbuckling the shoe and letting her wiggle her foot into it, ‘that if you pull your shoes off like that without unfastening them you’ll spoil them?’

‘Yes.’ She stood upright on the chair and stretched up her arms ready for the frock. The Marshal’s efforts at getting it on were tentative and inexpert but with the help of muffled instructions coming from inside the bodice he managed, at least, not to rip it.

‘You’ve put it on back to front,’ observed the child, looking down at herself, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

‘Bring your coat,’ the Marshal said.

‘Where are we going?’

She trotted along beside him towards his quarters.

‘Teresa can see to your frock.’

‘Is Teresa your little girl?’

Teresa was in the kitchen getting supper ready. The boys were sitting at the kitchen table with all their new books and pencils spread out in front of them.

‘Clear all that stuff away,’ Teresa told them, ‘it’s nearly ready. Salva, I’ve put a bit of pasta on for you as well as the meat, seeing that you didn’t have much lunch. The boys don’t want any but—whoever’s this?’

‘She got lost,’ the Marshal said, ‘probably in the picture gallery. Somebody should collect her soon.’

‘Well, you are a pretty girl.’ Teresa bent to stroke the honey-coloured hair. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Cristina.’

‘Well, Cristina, you come and sit here at the table and in a minute I’ll give you a nice bit of supper.’

‘I’ll go and get changed,’ the Marshal said.

Subdued by the presence of the boys who were so much bigger and took no notice of her, Cristina sat still and watched their every move as they collected up their belongings. Only when they’d taken the stuff off to their bedrooms did she venture to ask: ‘Where will I go to sleep?’

‘To sleep? Good gracious,’ Teresa said, ‘your mum will come for you before bedtime. But you’ll eat some supper, won’t you? Now that we’re having ours?’

‘Are those big boys having some as well?’

‘And the big boys as well.’

After a while she frowned and asked, ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Where’s who gone, sweetheart?’

‘The man . . .’ She clenched her fists anxiously, ‘The man who’s fat right up to the sky and all black.’

‘You funny little thing,’ Teresa said, rubbing her head. ‘Here, this is his plate right next to yours so he can sit beside you. All right?’

‘Yes.’

The child remained silent throughout the meal, keeping an apprehensive eye on the two boys. Only when they’d finished and Teresa offered her a slice of red apple did she say: ‘I like staying here. I don’t want to go home, only . . . I want my mum! What shall I do?’ Then her eyes filled with tears.

The doorbell rang.

‘Just in time,’ said Teresa, ‘I think she’s had enough.’

The harassed woman shown in by Lorenzini had two older children in tow. She was as much angry as relieved.

‘This one drives me crazy,’ she said after thanking them profusely. ‘Every time we go anywhere it’s the same. One minute she’s there and the next minute I look round and she’s vanished. The minute she gets fed up she sets off home by herself. I can’t take my eyes off her for a second. We searched all the streets near home before thinking of coming back here. Cristina, say thank-you to these nice people for looking after you, then we’ll go home and leave them in peace.’

‘I haven’t eaten my apple,’ Cristina said, pulling off the coat her mother had just fastened and climbing back on to her chair.

Half an hour later the Marshal was settled on the sofa in the sitting-room with a small yellow lamp lit and the television on. He could hear the boys arguing about something or other in their room and Teresa moving about, clearing up the kitchen. As usual, he was staring at the film without following it properly, though he knew that when Teresa came in and sat down beside him she would want him to bring her up to date with the story and be annoyed when he couldn’t. The phone rang and he got up slowly, still staring at the screen. Teresa was out in the hall before him. For a moment he remained standing. He heard her tone of surprise as she answered, but then she said, ‘How are you . . . and the children?’ He sat down again, thankful it wasn’t for him.

It was one of those fast-moving American crime films, dubbed into improbable Italian, and the young policeman seemed to spend all his time either shouting abuse at his superiors or in bed with the female suspect. Every so often it would attract his attention sufficiently for him to emit a faint grunt of disbelief, then he would lose track again. What sort of stuff would that be that they were eating out of cardboard boxes in the car? They seemed to do that in all these films but they never said what it was. All that steam coming up in the road was from the underground trains, he knew that much. One of the boys had told him. Something they could do with in Florence, that, but he doubted if it could be done. The minute they started digging the archaeologists would pounce and everything would stop for years like in the Piazza della Signoria . . . how long had that been going on? Another dead body. That’s four, if not five. Five . . . Whoever’s that chap with the beard? Maybe the man who was seen coming out of the hotel right at the start. Teresa was going to want to know . . .

But Teresa was still on the phone, not talking much, though.

‘Mmm. Yes, I . . . no, no, not at all. You did right. Mmm . . . Mmm . . . I will, don’t worry.’

When at last she came and sat down she didn’t ask him anything about the film. She affected to watch it but he could feel her tenseness, and if she didn’t even want to know who was who . . .

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

He waited a bit but she still didn’t question him about the film so he got up and turned the sound down, then sat down again.

‘Well?’

‘Nothing, it’ll keep until after the film if you’re watching it . . .’

‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘A woman from down home, Maria Luciano.’

‘Luciano . . . ?’ He mentally went through their friends in their home town in Sicily but the name didn’t ring a bell.

‘Poor woman, she’s had so much trouble and with all those children . . .’

‘
That
Luciano, that awful family!’

‘It’s easy to condemn them but with the life she’s had—’

‘What’s the matter, is he inside again?’

‘I don’t think so, she didn’t say. It’s her eldest boy she’s worried about.’

‘I’m not surprised. He was roaming the streets before he was ten, looking for trouble.’

‘Even so, he’s not all bad. He practically brought up those younger ones.’

‘I should think he had to with a mother like that.’

‘She had to live. A husband always inside and all those mouths to feed.’

‘She wouldn’t have had all those mouths to feed if she’d looked for a job instead of getting money the easy way.’

‘It’s easy enough for us to talk, Salva, but she never had much of a chance. She never even knew her own mother and she was brought up in a home.’

‘You seem to know a lot about her.’

Teresa looked faintly embarrassed, the way she always did when she’d been helping somebody on the quiet.

‘I used to pass on a few of the boys’ clothes to her for the younger ones.’

‘Hmph. So what did she want?’

‘I told you, she’s worried about her eldest, Enrico. It seems he’s in Florence. He must be nearly nineteen now. She says he came up here nearly two years ago and got a job in a bar.’

‘Well, he probably did right to get out.’

‘He’d been sending her money, not regularly but every so often, but she hasn’t seen him since last Christmas.’

‘And what am I supposed to do about it?’

‘I suppose she was thinking you might . . .’

‘If she thinks he’s inside I can find that out, but if she wants to report him missing she must do it down there.’

‘I told her that.’

‘You did?’

‘The thing is that when he went home last Christmas he was in plaster. It seems he was in a car accident and broke three ribs. Since then she hasn’t seen him. He wrote once or twice and sent a bit of money but she was expecting him home for the summer holidays and he didn’t turn up. Well, what if he’s ill? He might be in need of help.’

‘She didn’t give him much when he lived at home by all accounts. It’s more likely she needs his money and he’s stopped sending it.’

‘She is his mother, Salva.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll check the prison and the hospitals. But if he’s decided he wants nothing more to do with his family, he’s over eighteen and there’s nothing I can do about it—why hasn’t he been called up, anyway?’

‘I don’t know, but it may well be he was rejected. He was always frail and his chest wasn’t too good. You will do what you can?’

‘I’ve said I will.’

‘After all, if he works in a bar . . .’

‘I can’t be going round every bar in Florence.’

‘Of course you can’t, no. It’s just that I can’t help thinking . . .’