'I wish you'd told me about it.'
'I wish you told me she'd been murdered! But seriously, I'd have told you if you'd rung back when I was in. I forgot about it after that because I never did write it up. Some character from San Salvi called me and convinced me to write about her being a patient there. All the same to me, as I told him. Neither story was much cop for this season. A nice juicy scandal with a spot of sex and violence is what sells the paper in the holiday period, that and the Bingo competition. And I suppose you think your job's depressing. I'll send you a copy over.'
The Marshal closed the drawer and walked slowly through the flat. The bedroom was even darker because the shutters were closed. He wasn't looking for anything now, just taking possession of the place for a moment. Up to now someone had always got there before him, as they had at the asylum, removing all trace of Anna Franci and her story. Someone sharper than himself who had always managed to be a step ahead. The murder story had only broken in this morning's paper and yet by then he had already taken the precaution of sending his gorilla-like henchman up here to get rid this time of the right bit of newspaper evidence. How had he known so soon? The Marshal couldn't believe it was a coincidence. It was true you could get the first edition of the paper shortly after midnight at the central station, but if that was how he managed then he must have been doing it every night to be sure. He had a lot at stake but it still seemed far-fetched . . .
'In any case,' said the Marshal quietly in the silence of the dark little bedroom, 'I'll find him.' He took a last look around and then let himself out, locking the door. At any other time, in any other mood, he might have paused to wonder why the keys had been returned to him by the Prosecutor. They had been on his desk when he got back from Santa Croce, a wordless message of recapitulation. But he didn't pause to wonder about that or anything else. He was no longer assailed by doubts or by anger at his own lack of intelligence. He was conscious of Bruno, still and silent in his white hospital bed, of Clementina, once Anna Franci, now shut in a refrigerated drawer, and of a respectable-looking grey-haired man whom he intended to track down by the end of the day. That was all. That was if you could call it 'conscious'. His wife, after sitting opposite his silent bulk all through lunch, had tentatively said, 'I'm sure that by this evening Bruno will have come round from his operation. You'll see.' He hadn't even answered.
He stopped on the stairs and rang the bell of the Rossis' flat. No one opened the door and he went on down to the street to cross the square and go into Franco's bar. Franco was behind the counter and the smile with which he had begun to greet the Marshal faded from his face.
'What's the matter, Marshal? You look a bit strange— has something else happened?'
'I want to know the name of the owner of that house.'
'Clementina's flat? I couldn't tell you. I think it's all dealt with through an agency. The Rossis—'
'They're out.'
'Has something happened?'
'No.'
The Marshal turned and went out again. He was vaguely aware of having produced an odd impression. He liked and respected Franco, who had been a big help to him, and he wouldn't have liked him to think he was being funny with him because of the midnight gambling business. He could have gone back and explained, but he was plodding onwards and these vague thoughts weren't enough to stop him. Nothing would stop him now until he'd done what had to be done.
He heard the thunder begin as he climbed the stairs to his Station and unlocked the door. Di Nuccio appeared immediately.
'I just telephoned the hospital. They've operated and they said it all went as planned.'
'Is he conscious?'
'No. Not yet. . . There was a call for you—just a minute.' He disappeared into the duty room and returned with a slip of paper. 'The Tenants' Association, it came from. A woman. She said it was important.'
'Hm.'
'Shall I get the number for you?'
'No.'
'They said—'
'It doesn't matter.' He couldn't deal with the Rossi problem now but he would call the Tenants' Association after he had been to visit the man in the cells over at Headquarters. They could probably even tell him who the owner of those flats was. Everything in good time. He couldn't let them delay him now and they'd surely try to. He'd already promised to appear at the hearing and that would have to suffice for the moment.
'I have to go out again,' he told Di Nuccio.
'What time will you be back?'
'I don't know.'
'Because there was a girl here wanting to see you and she said it was very urgent.'
For the Marshal only one thing was urgent: catching up with a respectable grey-haired man who was always one step ahead of him.
'Tell her to come tomorrow morning early.'
'I'm sorry, Marshal, but I didn't know—I've already told her to come back today towards six. I thought you'd be in.'
'Well, I might be.' He looked at his watch. It was 4.10. 'I might be . . .' He walked into his office and sat down at the desk, pulling his battered typewriter towards him. Di Nuccio hovered in the doorway.
'What is it now?' He slid a sheet of paper into the machine and tugged at it because it was crooked.
'That girl. Well, she wouldn't tell me what she wanted, insisted on seeing you. She said you knew her. All I want to say is that I believed her when she said it was urgent. She was crying buckets—I've never seen anyone cry like that.'
'Oh, that girl. . .' The Marshal began to type and Di Nuccio stared at him, puzzled, then went out and shut the door. He would have stared even harder if he could have seen that the Marshal, with two plump fingers, was typing his own name and address straight across the page, time after time, sometimes varying it with a line of random letters and numbers. When he'd filled five pages he stamped them all here and there with various rubber stamps from his drawer and then pushed them into a large envelope, satisfied.
'The Prosecutor's on his way over here to question him, if you want to wait.'
'No. I'll go straight down.'
The officer called in a young Carabiniere. 'Show the Marshal down to the cells.'
'Yessir.'
The Marshal followed the boy in silence, watched him as he unlocked the door and stood back beside it, keys in hand, to wait. He stepped inside and heard the door lock behind him.
The man was lying on the narrow bed, smoking. He didn't bother to move, only watched the Marshal with narrowed eyes through a skein of smoke. His shirt was open to the waist and the thick mat of hair on his chest glistened with sweat.
The Marshal's big, bulging eyes were equally watchful and wary. He couldn't afford to make a mistake, even less so than his opponent who was now grinning at him confidently. There was one small hard chair in the cell and the Marshal sat down on it after placing it as far away from the bed as possible. He didn't speak, just went on staring at the gorilla-like man on the bed, sizing him up. It wasn't difficult. They'd shown him the man's record upstairs, but even without it there was no mistaking that he had spent more time in prison than out of it and that crime was his way of life rather than his profession. He had never gained anything much from it and never would, but it was the only life he knew. His only defence would be to deny everything and no amount of clever questioning would budge him, as it might someone more intelligent who'd try to balance possible gains and losses and follow some lawyer's advice in the hope of a lighter sentence. He was brutal and probably touchy. Brutal enough to stand his ground against all the odds and touchy enough to be unnerved already by the Marshal's unexpected silence so that he was the first to break it.
'I've got nothing to say to you.'
'Keep quiet, then.' The Marshal went on staring.
'I've said all I'm going to say. I broke into that flat because I knew it was empty and since I didn't steal anything—' 'I'm not interested.'
'So what are you here for?'
'I've got something to tell you.' But he didn't tell it.
The man, whose name was Bruti, dragged at the last half-inch of his cigarette and rolled sideways to stub it out on the floor.
'Got any fags you can give me?'
'No.'
He rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. A fly settled on his chest and he slapped at it. It circled above him and settled there again.
'You could suffocate in this bleeding hole. When are they going to transfer me to Sollicciano?'
'I don't know.'
He would be happier once he was settled back in prison with plenty of old friends around him and the familiar routine. He'd only been out eight months.
'Bastards!' The remark was aimed at nobody in particular but probably included all policemen and flies.
'Is that where you met him? In Sollicciano?' asked the Marshal.
'I thought you weren't interested.'
'That's right. It doesn't much matter. I can find out, anyway.'
'Find out, then.'
'I will, I should have asked him but I didn't think of it at the time . . .'
There was no reaction from Bruti. Probably it was wishful thinking on the Marshal's part that made the glistening chest muscles appear to tense up.
'Funny,' he went on, 'I wouldn't have thought that you'd be the sort to let yourself be pushed about that easily.'
'Nobody ever pushed me about.'
'He's clever, that's the trouble. People like you should stick to their own kind. You know where you are with them. Get yourself involved with somebody too smart for you and you're bound to end up taking the rap.'
'For what?'
'In this case for murder, to name but one charge—I suppose you've had a judicial communication for Clementina's murder?
'That means nothing.'
'No. At least, it didn't mean much at the time when there was no real evidence against you, but now they'll charge you. I thought I should tell you that. What you do about it is up to you, but it didn't seem right to me that he should get off scotfree while you spent the rest of your life inside.'
'I don't know who you think you're talking about.'
'Suit yourself. I just thought it fair to tell you. You'll be charged before the day's out.'
'Charged with what? You've nothing on me except that I broke into an empty flat and stole nothing because you interrupted me.'
'So we did, but then, there was nothing in there to steal, was there?'
He didn't answer.
'Well, as I say, suit yourself. If you want to stick to your story, that's your business. It's true that as long as there was no evidence, no motive and no witnesses, it was the best thing you could do. The only trouble is, as I said before, the chap's got brains and you haven't.' The Marshal flicked at the large envelope which he was holding on his knee. 'He even went so far as to say you were mentally deficient—I suppose he was still annoyed because you took the wrong newspaper cutting the first time. Is it true that you can't read?'
An accusation of murder had had no effect but this question made Bruti's face darken and his eyes glitter dangerously.
'Nobody said that!'
'That you're mentally deficient? He said it all right. I'm not saying I altogether believed him but you did take the wrong cutting and I know you can't read, anyway. It's in your file. I wouldn't worry about it much, if I were you. It's nothing compared to some other things he said. I'll be honest with you: I didn't believe much more than half of it, but that's only my opinion. It doesn't help you much because he's bound to have some fancy lawyer who'll have no trouble convincing the judge. It's plausible enough, what he says, and with your record . . . Well, he'll be sitting pretty once you're behind bars. He'll have not only got what he wanted, he won't even have had to pay you for the job. He hasn't paid you, has he? What you don't seem to understand is that he was never going to. I may have given you the wrong impression. Perhaps you're thinking that something went wrong and that he turned on you to defend himself. That's not the way it was. He was the one who came to us with this story.' He flicked the envelope again. 'That was the way he planned it, haven't you understood yet? You were the ideal mug, with a record as long as your arm. Once you'd done the job for him, all he had to do was come and tell us all about it.' He began sliding the five typewritten and much stamped sheets out of the envelope, frowning. 'He's a clever customer all right. . .'
The effect was gratifying but dangerous. Not for nothing had the Marshal sat as far away as possible and even now he was more than glad that the man couldn't read, for he shot bolt upright and made a grab for the papers which the Marshal thrust back into the envelope so fast as to crumple them badly.
Bruti flung himself back on the bed with such a volley of foul language that the young Carabiniere outside opened the grille to find out what was up.
'It's all right.' The Marshal waved him away and the grille slid back. 'Well, that's what I came to tell you, for what it's worth. If you want to defend yourself, you ought to know what he's accusing you of. According to him, he sent you round to see Clementina on some business, quite innocent business, to do with the flat, and when you saw a half-crazy woman living alone, knowing how much money she had stashed away, you went back there one night and—'
'That's rubbish. He can't get away with that! The old bag hadn't a penny!'
'You mean you had a good look round after you'd done it and didn't find any? But that won't save you because she did have money, plenty of it, so who's going to believe you weren't hoping to find it? You've been taken for a ride, Bruti, so you'd better get it into your head and start getting a better story together. You see, he says you told him what you'd done, told him in detail, and some of those details he could only have got from you. They weren't in the paper. You see what I mean. You've no hope of getting ofF with him as a witness against you, and all you're doing by keeping your mouth shut is making sure that he comes out of it as an innocent man who's been good enough to help us with our inquiries. You've been made a fool of, but I suppose it's no more than you deserve, when all's said and done. How did you bring yourself to do it? You've got a record of violence, I know that, but this was different. You killed a defenceless old woman in cold blood—and, as far as you knew, it was just because he needed to sell the house and couldn't get her out.'
'I was supposed to get paid, wasn't I? What he wanted was his business. In any case she was too soft in the head to know any different—he hadn't even paid her her full pension for years. Gave her some cock-and-bull story about a new law and that they'd put her away if she complained. She thought he was doing her a favour letting her have half of it, the crazy old bag! People like that should be locked up —she even hit me in the face with a brush when I went round there. I'm glad I did for her and I'll do the same for him if he tries to do me down with his fancy lawyers! Never mind that crazy old bag, what about me? Eh? What about number one?'
'That's right,' the Marshal said, 'you get thinking about number one, because the Prosecutor's on his way here.'
'Well, tell him! Tell him it's all lies. Tell him he sent me round there to threaten the old biddy and try and get money from that couple with the kid to pay for the work on the facade that he couldn't find the wherewithal for! Tell him—'
'Tell him yourself,' the Marshal said, 'I'm not interested.' And this time he was telling the truth. The only thing he wanted to know now was the man's name and where to find him. And that, after the trick he'd just pulled, he couldn't ask.
He met the Prosecutor at the top of the stairs.
'Ah ... So you've talked to him. I'm afraid we'll get nothing out of him. I've made out a warrant for breaking and entering which will at least keep him with us for the moment.'
'You can make out another,' the Marshal said, 'for murder.'
'For . . .?'
'He's confessed, more or less. But you'd best leave it until tomorrow. And I'll need another warrant.'
He wasn't conscious of the fact that he was virtually giving the Prosecutor orders. If the Prosecutor himself was aware of it he ma
de no protest. The man who had once complained at the 'blank incomprehension of the man' now only stared uncertainly at the Marshal, who said, 'I might need it tonight, that other warrant. . .' as though to himself.
'I see. In whose name?"
'I don't know.'
'You don't—'
'I could find out tomorrow when the Registry reopens but he always gets one step ahead of me, and this time I have to be one step ahead of him or he'll slip through my fingers. I have to find him tonight. Leave Bruti until tomorrow. I'll be in touch . . .' And he went plodding slowly away, breathing a bit heavily after the stairs. The expression on the Prosecutor's face remained fixed in his mind as something connected with the return of the keys but he didn't think about it. And when the Prosecutor called after him, 'How is that boy . . .?' he didn't even hear but turned the corner and went on his way. If anyone had been capable of breaking in on his mood and demanding to know where he was going and just what he intended to do about putting his hands on a nameless man of unknown whereabouts, he wouldn't have had an answer. But nobody was capable of breaking his mood, not even when he found himself, for no clearly defined reason, back at his Station and discovered the weeping girl plying her handkerchief in the waiting-room. He showed her into his office and sat down, prepared to listen patiently, his big eyes staring at her without really seeing her.
'In another two weeks it would have been all right—at least I'd have had time to look round for something but Laura says I ought to get out right away and not be involved and, in any case, he'll sack me now, for sure. Laura's left already. The minute she got back from her holidays this morning she emptied her desk drawers and went, but she's got a husband so it's all very well, she doesn't need a permit —but if I get involved in all this, even though it's not my fault, they'll never give me one. If only it could have happened in another two weeks! Laura's husband's in the trade, that's how he guessed what was going on and he made her leave, but what am I supposed to do?'
Slowly and with great impatience, the Marshal began to untangle this knot of garbled information. As usual, no sobs interrupted the girl's flowing lament but huge tears rolled down her cheeks as she talked and the handkerchief rolled up in her hand was soaked. He gave her his, which was soon reduced to the same condition.
The Marshal and the Madwoman Page 19