*
Mrs Burtenshaw, Wilkins’s sister, was in the office on Monday morning. So was her basset hound, curled up on my desk chair and defying me with hung-over eyes to do anything about it. I didn’t take up the challenge as I was only passing through on my way to the airport.
I said to Mrs Burtenshaw, ‘Fisk will be coming in every other day in case anything crops up.’ Fisk was an ex-policeman who gave me a hand now and then.
‘Hilda,’ said Mrs Burtenshaw, ‘was very annoyed that you wanted her to go to Tripoli. After all, Mr Carver, a holiday is a holiday and people should be free to choose where they go.’
I said, ‘You think she’ll ever get round to marrying Olaf?’
‘I should hope so. He’s a good, sound, solid, respectable man with money in the bank.’
Practically everything I wasn’t—and that’s what she meant.
I said, ‘If your hound in there gets bored sitting at my desk —and God knows I do at times—just give him a few of the confidential files to chew up. And thank you for coming in to help. I appreciate it very much.’
She fixed me with her steely blue eyes and said, ‘I notice that whenever I do you usually contrive to be away. I think that’s a very suitable arrangement for both of us.’
The air trip produced a fine selection of irritations; fog that delayed take-off two hours, then something wrong with the plane so that we had to be switched to another and then—because of bad weather—a switch to the Caselle airport at Turin instead of Linate at Milan, so I missed my train connection. It was ten o’clock at night when I finally checked in at the Excelsior in Florence. I had a late meal and went to bed. It was a bad idea, because sleeping too soon after eating always gives me wild dreams and a restless night. The next morning I was bad-tempered and my eyes felt as though their sockets were too small. Leon Pelegrina was listed in the telephone directory at 23 Piazza Santo Spirito. I called him from the lobby and when a man’s voice at the other end said ‘Pronto’ a few times I just put the receiver down. I didn’t want to talk to him over the phone. I just wanted to know he was there.
Piazza Santo Spirito was only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel, over the Arno by way of the Ponte Alla Carraia, down the Via dei Serragli and then left-handed into the Piazza. At the far end of the square was the Church of Santo Spirito. It was a narrow piazza, with the space in the middle tree-lined and holding a few seats for those who just wanted to sit and stare and rest their feet. Number 23 was on the left not far from the church. A twisting stone stairway served the three or four flats into which the house had been converted. Halfway up at a turn there was a Madonna and Child set back in a wall niche decked out with some artificial flowers and lit by a weak electric light bulb. At the next turn up there was a heavy wooden door with a small brass plate carrying the name—Pelegrina. Below it was a brass knocker shaped in the form of Michelangelo’s David. I took him by the legs and rapped his backside smartly against the door three or four times. I waited. Nothing happened. I repeated the treatment. This time I was rewarded with a shuffling sound on the far side of the door.
It opened slowly on hinges that needed oiling. Standing on the threshold of a small, very dark hallway was a large shape, oval, about five feet tall at its vertical axis and three feet at the horizontal. There was a round excrescence at the top of the oval from which came the glint of glass.
I said, ‘Signore Pelegrina?’
‘Si.’
I handed the shape one of my cards. He came forward a little into the light of the stairway to read it. The dim light threw up more details. He wore a monocle stuck in the right eye of a fat, reddish-brown face whose colour could have come from weather exposure, blood pressure, drink or all three. He didn’t have any neck, his shoulders went straight up to his ears. When he readjusted his monocle to examine the card, his mouth gaped open like a goldfish starved of oxygen. He could have been anything between forty and fifty and he had wiry, almost curly dark hair which had scattered a fine dandruff dust on the shoulders of his jacket.
‘Inglese?’ His voice was a little hoarse as though he had lived in a damp atmosphere too long.
I said, ‘Yes. I’d be glad if you could spare me a few minutes.’
He let the monocle drop from his eye, and frowned. There was a strong odour of Turkish tobacco about him and stains down the front of his velvet waistcoat. One of its fancy pearl buttons was missing.
In English he said, ‘It is very early in the morning.’
‘Well, you know the old saying. The early bird.’
He frowned again and momentarily there was a nervous tic in his right cheek. I had the feeling that I had worried him.
‘I am not dressed for visitors.’
He looked clothed enough for me. Maybe he was referring to a pair of sloppy carpet slippers he was wearing.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ I said. ‘You speak very good English.’
‘I should do. My mother was English, and insisted. She was a very insistent woman. That’s why my father left her. Come in.’
He stood aside for me to enter, closed the door on us, and then passed me down the gloom of the little hall. He opened the door at the far end and ushered me into the main room of the flat. From behind me he said, ‘I will be back in a minute.’
I was left alone in the room. There was no gloom here. Three sets of windows looked out over the piazza. It was L-shaped, with a small fireplace set in the smaller part of the L. By the window was a large divan. In one corner stood a grand piano with a purple cloth runner on the top and a silver-framed photograph dead centre on the cloth. There were a couple of well-worn armchairs, a long narrow table and, in another corner, a small roll-top desk, open, with a typewriter on it. I walked past the fireplace and examined the bookshelves beyond it. Two of the shelves were given up to paperbacks. English, Italian and French. The bottom shelf held a collection of English books, mostly, I noticed, about sailing or the sea. Flat on their sides at the end of the shelf were an old Lloyds Register of Shipping, Volume I, 1962-63, and on top of that a Mediterranean Pilot of the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty. Over the fireplace was a big photograph of a coastwise tramp steamer, and above the desk another photograph of a steam yacht. I was moving over to look at it when Leon Pelegrina came back.
He had put on patent leather shoes and a different jacket. He waved me to a chair, picked up a cigarette box and said, ‘You will probably prefer to smoke your own—unless you like Turkish?’
He sat down and we both lit our own cigarettes.
Without going into a lot of side details, I told him that I had been employed by Mrs Stankowski to find her brother, Martin Freeman.
At the first mention of Freeman’s name he began to pick a few bits of imaginary fluff from the sleeve of his jacket, saw me watching him and stopped. I explained why Mrs Stankowski was worried about her brother, not having heard from him on her birthday, that he had left his job, and also that he had walked off with a valuable bracelet and some money. I didn’t specify the amount. I said nothing of the anonymous phone calls assuring her of his safety, and nothing about Jane Judd and the Robert Duchêne angle.
I finished, ‘Mrs Stankowski is not concerned about the thefts from her. Apparently Freeman had done this before. She is genuinely worried about him. I discovered that he had a cottage in the country and I found there a New Year’s card from you. Since his letter of resignation from the News Service was written from this city it seemed reasonable to come and ask if you knew anything about him. How well did you know him?’
He put his fingertips together and made a steeple, eyed it, and then let it slip into a cat’s cradle. Everything he said to me, I guessed, was going to be carefully considered.
‘I’ve known him for some years, on and off. First in Rome, I think. He has many friends there. If he wrote this letter from Florence, I certainly didn’t know he was here or see him. I’ve been away for a long time and only got back last week.’
‘Can I ask how you c
ame to meet him?’
‘Through my daughter.’ He got up and went to the piano and picked up the silver-framed photograph. ‘She is in the theatrical profession and Freeman did some publicity work for her. Ever since then we have kept in touch loosely.’
He handed me the photograph. She was wearing jodhpurs and a shirt and carried a saddle over one arm. It was the same girl whose photograph in Oriental get-up I had seen in Freeman’s cottage.
‘I see. Where is she now?’
‘I haven’t the least idea. We had a quarrel about six months ago. Not our first. But always when it happens—’ he shrugged his fat shoulders—‘we lose touch.’
‘Could Freeman be with her? Was there any romantic attachment?’ It’s a good phrase when you want to be polite, and I wanted to be polite with this man. I had a feeling that it would be easy to scare him and make him clam up.
‘A little once, I think. But not now that I know about.’ He nodded at the photograph in my hands. ‘When I say that she is my daughter, let me make it clear that I have never been married. Even in that photograph you can see that she has a certain amount of, well, coloured blood.’
I nodded. It seemed an odd thing to tell me, a stranger—unless it was a way of sliding the conversation away from the main point. Dads don’t usually go out of the way to explain to my kind about their bastard, partly coloured daughters. He went even further.
‘Just before the war I had a business in Italian Somaliland. I met her mother there. Beautiful, beautiful. When she died I naturally looked after the child.’
Big of him.
‘How,’ I asked, ‘could I find out where your daughter is? Has she got an agent?’
‘Yes. In Rome. Marrini Fratelli. They’re listed in the book. Her stage name is La Piroletta. But I could probably do more for you. I could ring up a few friends in Rome who might know something of Freeman’s movements recently.’
‘I would be glad if you would. I’m at the Excelsior Hotel, certainly for tonight, and maybe tomorrow night. Could you ring me there?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
He stood up, adjusted his monocle and gave me a little nod of dismissal.
At the door to the stairs, he said, ‘Freeman’s sister—she is paying you well for your work? I understand she is a very rich lady.’
‘She’s giving me the rate for the job.’
He smiled, and it was the first time he’d given me that benefit. Just for a moment, I sensed, he was completely relaxed.
‘It must be a wonderful thing to have much money, too much money. One could do so much with it.’
‘I gather that’s Freeman’s angle too. And, let’s face it, mine. Always the big dreamers and schemers are the chaps who lack capital.’
The smile went. He pursed his fat lips and said, ‘Certo. “Senza speme vivemo in desio.” That’s Dante. My father made me read him. Without hope we live in desire. And that, Mr Carver, is a bad state for any ambitious man.’
He closed the door on me and I had the feeling that, despite himself, he had revealed something of the alter ego struggling for freedom inside him.
*
He hadn’t called me by ten o’clock that night. I telephoned him at ten minutes past ten and there was no answer from the flat. I went up to my room to go to bed.
A man got in the lift just as I was about to press the button for the third floor. He was a big man with shoulders like the back of a truck. He had a large, bland face, and he wore a well-cut grey silk suit with a tiny white line in it, an immaculate white silk shirt and a yellow tussore tie. In one hand he carried a fat briefcase. There was something about him that made me think he was an actor. I’m a great one for instant diagnosis. In Rome I would have bet that he was straight from Cine Citta with his contract renewed for another three years at double the salary plus a slice of the gross.
I raised an eyebrow at the board of floor buttons.
He said, ‘Terza, grazie.’
It was a nice voice, vibrant, manly, guaranteed to send chills of pleasure down the spine of any woman who needed her head examined.
We went up in silence. The lift stopped, the doors went back and I stood aside for him to move out. He shook his head and waved me forward. We had a silent courtesy duel for five seconds and he won. I went out and he stepped after me. I went away down the corridor towards my room. Behind me I heard the lift doors close.
At the same moment something hard was stuck into my back and the vibrant, manly voice sent a chill down my spine as it said, ‘Just open the door of your room and go in without causing trouble. We do not want blood on this highly expensive corridor carpet, do we?’
I said, ‘Nor on the one in my room, I hope.’
He chuckled. It’s a verb which is used loosely. Not many people can really chuckle after the age of four. He could—a fat, babyish sound of pure, uninhibited pleasure.
I fished out my key to open the door and decided against a quick swing round to catch him off guard.
We went through the tiny hall into my bedroom. He shut the door behind us and said, ‘Go and sit in the chair by the window.’
His English was good, but the Italian accent was strong in it.
I went and sat in the chair. He put his briefcase on the bed and, holding the gun in his right hand, he opened up the case left-handed. He took out two bottles of whisky. Vat 69. For a moment hope flowered in me. He took the glass from the water carafe by my bed, poured a liberal helping of whisky and then came and handed it to me from a safe distance.
‘Drink.’
I did. Not all, but a fair portion. I felt I needed it.
‘Hold this.’ He handed me the bottle.
‘Why?’
‘Because it will keep both your hands in sight.’ Then as I took the bottle, thinking it might be used as a counter weapon, he added, ‘Also it is a good thing to have your prints on it.’
He went and fetched the other bottle and, for the first time, I noticed that he was wearing gloves. Holding gun and bottle in one hand, he opened it and then splashed some of the contents on the bedside table and the floor around it. A nice aroma filled the room.
I flung my bottle at him. He ducked and it hit the wall on the far side of the room, smashed, and whisky trickled down the striped wallpaper.
He said, holding the gun on me, ‘I was hoping you would do that. It will make it more authentic.’ He tossed the other half-empty bottle at me and instinctively I caught it to save my suit being drenched.
‘Grazie,’ he said. I knew why. My prints were now on this bottle. I said, ‘Care to tell me how this scene ends?’
‘Accidental death of a drunk,’ he said. ‘The window behind you opens on to one of the inner hotel wells. A very long drop. Nasty. However, I’m in no hurry. Some men, knowing they were going out of the window for good, might, given the time, ask for a woman, or a good meal; some, I suppose, a priest. All I can offer you is ten minutes and the whisky from the bottle in your hand.’
He sat down on a chair by the door and kept the gun on me. From above it I had the benefit of his high-glazed smile.
I finished the glass of whisky and half filled it from the bottle. He nodded approvingly.
I said, ‘I had you figured for an actor.’
He said, ‘I am. People pay me and I act for them.’
‘Steady work?’ How did I get out of this? I was wondering. Or if I couldn’t, should I finish the bottle? Why not? Where I was going, anyway, a reek of whisky on the breath wouldn’t be held against me.
‘Too much,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, I have to be selective nowadays.’
‘Lucky you. Most of us scratch around for jobs.’
‘I make plenty and pay no taxes. Also I meet interesting people. Like you, for instance. I shall be disappointed if the moment I move to hit you with this—’ he indicated the gun —‘you start to sob or plead. Some do.’
‘I’ll try not to disappoint you.’
‘Good.’ He shifted in his seat to make hi
mself more comfortable, made a flappy motion with his free hand for me to go on drinking, and said, ‘It is interesting that, about last requests. I consider it often. For instance—if you had wanted a woman and I could have provided any one you wanted, which would you have chosen?’
‘You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you?’
‘Well, fundamentally my work is without much variety. I try to give it some status, intellectual or philosophical. I find it helps both me and my client. Which woman would you choose? Some glamorous film star? Or society woman? Or maybe some nothing-to-look-at number of a secretary or typist who was more a bomb in bed than any of the big names ever could hope to be. Big names, you know, are like that. They have the habit of thinking all the time only of themselves, and that is no good in bed. The ego must be swamped, the body, the senses must dominate all thought, all personality.’
‘You should write a book about it. That kind of thing sells well these days.’
‘Maybe I will. I have had many experiences. Once, you know, I did a job for the Mafia. It was a man, a neurotic type, but good, sincere, a sort of religious man, in a way like Billy Graham—but much smaller. It was in the south of this country, Calabria, where he was giving the contadini ideas. He was a peasant himself. You know what he would have liked?’
‘Go ahead. Astonish me.’
‘A hot bath.’ He chuckled. ‘Unbelievable, no? A hot bath he wants, with expensive soap, bath essence and thick towels —because never in his life has he had such a bath. So now, which woman would you choose?’
I said, ‘If you’re serious about last requests, you ought to be naming yours.’
‘Why?’
I didn’t bother to answer. In the last ten seconds the bedroom door had been gently opening behind him and I had seen part of a face which I recognized. The door now went back with a bang and Francois Paulet was in the room. I sat comfortably where I was and watched. Not long ago Paulet had said to me that, although he was without much up top he had a strong body and could be useful in an emergency. His demonstration of it was a joy to watch. He wasn’t handicapped in any way by the fact that my philosophical friend was as big as he was.
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