by Francis King
The older man spoke, while the youth prowled about the living-room, lethargically opening drawers and boxes and even raising the lid of the teapot. They had both been suspicious of Enzo when called to the dead woman, and though the verdict at the coroner’s court had been death by misadventure, they still persisted in connecting the operation the girl had attempted to perform on herself with the young boy. They now not unnaturally felt that their suspicions had been justified.
‘‘You remember us?’’ the sergeant said; and each word seemed to be impregnated with sourness, as if it were something brought up from his stomach.
‘‘Yes, I remember you.’’
‘‘You had an easy time, last week,’’ the youth drawled, turning a cup over in his hands which were remarkable for the length to which he had grown the nails of the little fingers. ‘‘You were lucky,’’ he said.
‘‘The court never——’’
‘‘We’ve come about the brooch,’’ the older man said.
‘‘What brooch?’’
‘‘The Englishwoman’s brooch.’’ The sour vomit again bubbled effortlessly upwards and emerged from between his lips. ‘‘Where’s your pal?’’
‘‘What pal?’’
‘‘Come off it. Rodolfo Benelli. You know who we mean. He’s not at his home.’’
‘‘How should I know where he is?’’
Outside the door five of the inhabitants were already listening, among them Signor Rocchigiani, who, when he heard this defiant question, exclaimed with disgust. That wasn’t the way to speak to a policeman, he knew from experience.
‘‘We must search you,’’ the little man said. He beckoned the other forward.
‘‘I’ve stolen nothing.’’
‘‘All right. We must search you.’’
‘‘But why the hell—?’’
‘‘We must search you.’’ He perched on a corner of the table and began to fan himself with a paper he had drawn from a pocket.
The young man began to run his clumsy hands over Enzo’s body, standing close to him and looking into his eyes with his own lazy, mocking ones. He had not shaved that day and there were heavy shadows under both jowls. At one point in his examination he touched and then made an obscene reference to a part of the boy’s body, and Enzo suddenly leapt away from him.
‘‘Come here,’’ the policeman said quietly, in his soft, indolent voice, and he raised one hand and pointed to a spot between his feet.
‘‘Not on your life.’’
‘‘Come here!’’
‘‘Not if you give me that sort of stuff.’’
The policeman sprang at the boy and the two scuffled together, blundering round the room until they knocked over a table on which stood a bowl of gold-fish. The sight of the fish, gaping and thrashing their tails on the stone floor, at once quietened Enzo. He stood staring at them, and appeared hardly to notice when the panting detective slipped some handcuffs on his wrists.
‘‘May I put them back?’’ he said.
‘‘No, leave them.’’
‘‘But they’ll die.’’
‘‘Let him do it,’’ the sergeant said from the table.
Clumsily, because of the handcuffs, Enzo picked up one after another of the slithering fish and put them back in the bowl; then he carried it over to the tap and filled it with water. ‘‘Lucky it didn’t break,’’ he said. ‘‘That mat must have saved it.’’ He was quite calm now, and spoke in an ordinary, conversational voice. ‘‘ Well, what do you want me to do?’’ he asked.
‘‘You’re coming to the station.’’
‘‘Do I—do I have to walk through the streets with—with”—he extended his hands—‘‘with these?’’
The sergeant lowered himself from the table as carefully as if he had a time-bomb inside him.
‘‘Now don’t be silly,’’ he said. ‘‘We look after you well. We’ve brought a car for you—just think of that. A car for you, for you alone.’’
‘‘What about searching the house?’’ his junior demanded.
‘‘The other two can do it.’’
‘‘Those two bastards? They wouldn’t notice a thing.’’
‘‘The other two can do it,’’ the sergeant snapped decisively, irritated, as always, by his assistant’s vigour and health.
When they went out, the junior wrenched so violently at his own end of the handcuffs to get Enzo to hurry that the boy slipped and fell on to his knees, bruising them on the stone. As the boy raised himself, he noticed, lodged along the wall, a few scattered pieces of brightly coloured confetti among the grey dust. ‘‘There was a wedding here,’’ he told his two companions; and then he wondered what interest such information could possibly have for them. They went down between the small, silent crowd who now lined the stairs, and out into a glare which made all three of them pause and blink their eyes. Enzo tried to raise a hand, but of course could not do so. He could feel a trickling sensation on the knee, and wondered if it were a fly or blood from his fall.
At the station he was again questioned, by the same sergeant and later by a white-haired man of an extreme, if exhausted, courtesy who, as he spoke, dug holes in his blotter with a tooth-pick. They asked him what had become of Rodolfo, putting the same question over and over again to him in different forms, and each time he answered that he did not know. ‘‘ But surely,’’ the white-haired man urged in his smooth, tired voice, ‘‘ you must know what has become of your accomplice.’’
‘‘He is not my accomplice. I have no accomplice.’’
The white-haired man shrugged his shoulders and dug the tooth-pick deep into the blotter. ‘‘That remains for us to see,’’ he said.
‘‘I know nothing about it.’’
‘‘That, too, remains for us to see.’’
At the door one policeman was glancing vacantly at the ceiling while another rubbed an eye on whose lid was an incipient inflammation; then they both yawned simultaneously and smiled as they looked at each other, their hands over their mouths. The room was suffocatingly hot, and its worn leather chairs smelled as if they had just come from a tannery. There was a large red stain, like a pool of blood, where some ink had been spilled on the beige carpet. Two flypapers dangled above the desk, thickly encrusted, but the air remained loud with an incessant buzzing.
‘‘You spoke to the English family about going to Tunis with your friend, didn’t you? … Well, didn’t you?’’
‘‘Yes.’’ Enzo, who had no handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his forehead on the back of his hand and then wiped the hand on the side of his trousers.
‘‘And you once stole a fountain pen?’’
‘‘No … it was …’’ He hesitated from a desire not to betray Rodolfo, and at last mumbled: ‘‘Anyway we took it back.’’
The tooth-pick again dug deep into the stained blotting-paper and the white-haired man again gave his exhausted, courteous smile as he looked up. ‘‘That’ll do for now,’’ he said, like a dentist to his patient. ‘‘Since you won’t help me more. But I wish you would be reasonable.… All right.’’ The two policeman stiffened from their slouched positions, and marched briskly forward.
Enzo sat on the uncovered wooden slats of the bed in his cell and, hands clasped between his bruised knees, let his feelings of despair and indignation rise over him like a suffocating cloud. In his mind there had been established a connection between the loss of the brooch and his father’s sudden wealth, though there was a mystery here which he could not yet fathom, search it how he would. His father had never met the American family and, as far as Enzo knew, he had never even entered the Palazzo d’Oro. Yet he had stolen the brooch; of that the boy was certain. But how, how? And then through the thick cloud of his present mood an awful suspicion crept. His father had somehow forced his mother to steal it. True, she did not usually take the laundry upstairs to the guests’ rooms—that was done by the chamber-maids and valets. But he now remembered that she had once told him of how, when a woman had be
en in a hurry for an evening-dress, she had herself carried it up. Would his mother ever do such a thing? It was incredible. No, no, there must be some other explanation; perhaps, after all, his father had had nothing to do with the theft. And yet—she was so weak; she would do everything her husband told her; it had been like that ever since he could remember.…
‘‘Cheer up, son.’’
The carabiniere on duty had looked up from his English Grammar, and was smiling at Enzo. He sat, neat and small and handsome, on a rusty iron folding-stool, with his legs crossed before him and his cap on a peg behind. He was a young man, and he had about him an air of scrupulous cleanness. His ears were delicate and pointed; his hair, smooth at the sides where he brushed it in two glossy wings, frothed into curls at the top, in the manner of an Edwardian beauty. His hands, too, were delicate and beautifully kept.
Enzo smiled back gloomily.
The carabiniere folded his newspaper and put it into the breast-pocket of the tunic which hung behind him as he asked: ‘‘What’s the matter? What did they get you for?’’ His voice was soft and low, and his beautiful dark eyes, under the arched brows, seemed full of friendliness and sympathy.
‘‘I didn’t do it.’’
He laughed. ‘‘Well, of course you didn’t. They all say that.’’
‘‘I didn’t.’’
‘‘You’re the one who was supposed to have taken the brooch?’’ he said with sudden recognition. ‘‘They were talking about the American woman—seems she’s quite a beauty.’’ He leant forward, and asked in his soft, pillowy voice: ‘‘How did you come to meet her?’’
‘‘Rodolfo—my friend—met her husband first. They asked us back. We met the kids. They were decent to us—until this.’’
‘‘Oh, you met the husband first.’’ The carabiniere showed his small white teeth as he smiled, and then put his tongue roguishly between them. ‘‘It was like that, was it?’’
‘‘It wasn’t like that at all,’’ Enzo said with sudden anger.
‘‘All right, all right,’’ the carabiniere conceded, laughing. He looked up and down the hunched, despairing figure of the boy, and then exclaimed: ‘‘Your knees! What have you done to them?’’
‘‘It’s nothing.’’
‘‘You’d better wash them.’’
‘‘It’s only a graze.’’
‘‘Wait a moment.’’ He got up from the stool and, having taken a tin mug, filled it at the sink which stood at the far end of the corridor. ‘‘ Have you a handkerchief?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘This one’s quite clean.’’ He pulled a handkerchief from his trouser-pocket and unlocking the iron grille which served as a door, went in to the boy. Enzo made as if to take the water, but the carabiniere said: ‘‘ No, no, I’ll do it. You remain where you are.’’ He rolled back his sleeves, knelt on the floor and dipped the clean handkerchief in the water. When he stooped over, Enzo noticed how clean the back of his neck had been shaved, as if he had just been to the barber. The carabiniere began to wash the grazes, saying in a voice as soft as the movement of his hands: ‘‘Tell me if I hurt you. It must be done, mustn’t it? You’ve taken off the skin.’’
‘‘You are kind,’’ Enzo murmured.
‘‘We are not all brutes here,’’ the carabiniere said, looking up and laughing in his eagerly youthful way. He began to dry the grazes on another part of the handkerchief and asked: ‘‘ Do you know who pinned this on to you?’’
‘‘Who——?’’
‘‘Who took the brooch?’’
Enzo replied abruptly: ‘‘ I think so.’’ His face slowly darkened.
‘‘You know where it is, you mean?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Where?’’
Enzo shrugged his shoulders; and the carabiniere, glancing for a moment, with a peculiar intentness, at the boy’s averted face, said lightly: ‘‘There! That looks better.’’
‘‘Thank you.’’
‘‘You’re welcome.’’ He gathered up the tin and the handkerchief, and went out, leaving the cell door open behind him. ‘‘Well, I suppose I’d better lock you into your cage again. That’s orders.’’
‘‘When will they let me out?’’
‘‘Who knows?’’ The carabiniere extracted a cigarette from a packet which lay on the table, lit it, and haying puffed two or three times asked: ‘‘ Care for a smoke?’’
‘‘I could do with one.’’
The carabiniere took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it through the bars, and thus they continued to smoke it, turn by turn, until it was finished. ‘‘Care to see the paper?’’
‘‘Thanks.’’
‘‘Montevardia lost—two goals to nil. Does football interest you?’’
‘‘I play myself—for Castellocino.’’
‘‘You do? I thought you looked like an athlete when I first set eyes on you. Those muscles in your legs.…’’ He glanced down. ‘‘I bet you’re strong.’’
Enzo blushed slowly, without contradicting him.
A few minutes later the carabiniere was relieved by a middle-aged man who grumbled, for some time, in a bass voice, about the meal he had just eaten, and then took off his tunic and cap, revealing a shirt sticky with perspiration, lowered himself on to the stool, and having rested his head against the white-washed wall and stuck out his legs, at once began to snore. Enzo stretched out on the wooden slats but they pressed too uncomfortably into his back and his thoughts were too troubled for him to fall asleep.
More than an hour later, a carabiniere clattered down the stairs and unlocked his cage. ‘‘You’re wanted,’’ he said, still chewing on the remains of something he had apparently just eaten.
‘‘What for?’’
‘‘How should I know?’’
‘‘When are they going to give me some food!’’ His belly had begun to rumble and ache with hunger.
‘‘I don’t know, brother. You’d better ask when you see the sergeant.’’
It was the same room in which he had been interviewed by the white-haired man, and the same two sentries still slouched on either side of the door; but it was the sour, dyspeptic little sergeant and the peasant detective who were now waiting for him. The peasant was swinging a key ring round and round on its chain, as he looked Enzo up and down with his small, lazily malicious eyes.
The sergeant said: ‘‘ Well, what have you got to tell us?’’
‘‘I?’’ Enzo pointed at himself in astonishment.
‘‘Yes, you.’’
‘‘Nothing.’’
‘‘Look, Rocchigiani, you’re being a bloody fool. You’re wasting our time. You know where that brooch is?’’ The last sentence was a statement, rather than a question; but at the end of it the sergeant cocked one of his thin eyebrows in interrogation and added: ‘‘ Well?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Now look here, Rocchigiani, you know where the brooch is. Tell us.’’
‘‘I don’t know.’’
‘‘You’re wasting our time—and of course your own. I have a note here’’—he glanced down at a pink slip of paper, the size of a visiting-card, which lay on the desk, and held it to the light from the window, as he read out—‘‘from Police Constable Gardini. He says that you told him at thirteen-forty hours that you had certain knowledge of the whereabouts of the brooch.’’ The boy had gone white and one nervous tremor after another was making his right knee, recently so carefully washed and tended, flutter against his left. ‘‘ Did you or did you not say that?’’
In a voice attenuated by despair Enzo answered: ‘‘ Yes.’’
‘‘You know the whereabouts of the brooch.’’
‘‘I said I thought I knew. I meant that I could guess.’’
‘‘Well, where is it?’’ The right knee continued to tremble as the boy rubbed the palm of his right hand down the seam of his shorts; but no answer came. ‘‘Well?’’ the peasant put in, the twirling bunch of keys ma
king a rotating shadow on the white-washed wall behind him. ‘‘Are you dumb?’’ At some slight indication from the sergeant, he eased one buttock and then the other off the table and, still twisting the keys, slouched over to Enzo. ‘‘Tell us,’’ he said; and then, suddenly raising a hand, he slapped the boy five or six times back and forth across the face. Tears came into Enzo’s eyes, not from pain but as a reaction to the swift, stinging blows, but he made no effort to move away or to resist the detective; he was filled with a profound, lonely despair which made even this humiliation seem unimportant.
But he still had obstinacy and the honour which forbade him to mention his father’s name, even though that illogical connection between Signor Rocchigiani’s extravagance and the theft persisted, as strong as ever, in the boy’s mind. They did much else, in a mild, half-hearted way to force him to speak, and he endured it in silence. Fortunately it was too hot, and his persecutors were too lazy, for any systematic brutality to be practised against him. In the end, his nose having been made to bleed, the peasant administered a brisk, parting kick and the boy was led back to his cell.
He huddled his bruised and aching body on the hard wooden slats and covered his blotched face with his hands, as nervous tremor after nervous tremor made his whole body shudder. As he lay there, he looked like someone who is crying, but his was a dry, tearless grief. Uninterested, the carabiniere continued to snore, his head tilted against the wall and his vast thighs stuck out.
Later, this carabiniere was relieved by the smooth, clean young man, Gardini.
Gardini strolled over to the iron grille and rattled a foot along: ‘‘Hey, there,’’ he said pleasantly.
Enzo remained huddled on the bed, his face to the wall.
‘‘Hey, there! Rocchigiani!’’
When there was still no answer, the young man fetched the key of the cell, opened it and went in. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said: ‘‘What’s the matter? Did they give you a tough time? I’ve brought you something to eat. Otherwise they don’t feed you till six. Look’’—he pulled a package from his tunic—‘‘it’s bread and mortadella. Come on,’’ he coaxed. ‘‘Eat it. It’ll do you good, Rocchigiani!’’