The Flying Boat Mystery

by Franco Vailati

  Their friendship had begun when Giorgio entered the university and had been strengthened by four years of lazy wandering in the streets of Rome. It had survived the break after graduation and still remained warm and cordial, even if lacking the immediate, direct frankness of those earlier years.

  THE FLYING BOAT MYSTERY, as it had been dubbed by Il Messaggero, had immediately attracted Luigi’s attention and, when he discovered that his friend was mixed up in the tangle, he headed straight to Police Headquarters.

  Renzi held a very unusual position in the Italian police force. He had signed up out of passion and curiosity, and a small inheritance permitted him a far more luxurious standing than the vast majority of his colleagues. On top of that, his great independence was afforded by the protection of his uncle, a highly-placed member of the Home Office’s hierarchy who, although not enchanted by his nephew’s choice of career, had felt himself obliged to look after a member of his own family. Renzi had accepted the situation grudgingly, in the hope that it would help him escape betrothal to the awful cousin his uncle had earmarked for him.

  In any case, his uncle’s protection was very helpful when he requested to be sent to Naples. His intervention in the Agliati case investigation was by no means harmful to the Naples police: after all, the Do-Wal 134 passengers came from Rome, they resided in Rome—or in any case in Latium—and a Roman policeman’s help could be highly desirable.

  So it was that Renzi rushed from Piazza Collegio Romano straight to the train station, and within three hours was partaking of a very quick breakfast in Naples before introducing himself to Chief Inspector Boldrin.

  Good old Boldrin would have welcomed him warmly in any case, but, crushed by his responsibility, the intervention of another party was doubly welcome:

  ‘As you can readily understand, Dr. Renzi’—in Italy as in Germany, the title of Doctor is bestowed upon any official or important person as a sign of respect, like knighthoods in England—‘I’ve been able to detain passengers and crew members up till now, but I can’t hold them forever. I don’t have any proof, I don’t have a single clue… and everybody is protesting fiercely! They want to be free again….’

  ‘They’re right, I’m afraid. It’s only a teeny-weeny abuse of power on your part, my dear Boldrin.’

  ‘Should I have let them go?’ asked Boldrin nervously.

  ‘No, no, of course not! You’ve done very well, I admire your skill in detaining them until now!’

  ‘But I can’t detain them forever and ever. After all, the search….’

  He showed the assistant commissioner the promotional plan of the Dornier Do-Wal 134 and gave a detailed explanation of his own search of the plane:

  ‘Comandante Girini notwithstanding, I feel quite certain it was neither accident nor suicide.’

  ‘What’s Girini’s theory?’

  ‘He strongly favours the suicide option.’

  ‘Why not the accident?’

  ‘Because of the position of the skylight. In order to have fallen from the plane, the banker would have to have climbed through it to get to the top of the fuselage.’

  ‘That sounds like an absurd acrobatic exploit!’

  ‘Furthermore, the dimensions of the skylight also rule out the suicide theory.’

  ‘And if it’s neither an accident nor a suicide, then it’s inevitably murder, isn’t? And the murderer, or at least an accomplice, must have been on board.’

  ‘But we don’t have a single reason for detaining them,’ grumbled the poor chief inspector.

  Renzi shrugged away his doubts:

  ‘But you’ve already freed three of them.’

  ‘You know, Dr. Renzi, they were—.’

  ‘I know, I know, but were their statements at least useful?’

  ‘They were of great value,’ replied the chief inspector promptly. ‘They are quite sure that only four passengers left their seats: a corn tradesman named Sabelli was in the toilet before the banker; a reporter named Vallesi visited the cockpit; the banker himself, of course, was in the toilet; and afterwards a fellow corn tradesman named Marchetti.’

  Renzi listened absent-mindedly to the other’s explanations, but he continued to study the plan, trying to perceive among its regular lines the still undistinguished shadows of the banker and his travel companions:

  ‘Where were Sabelli and Marchetti seated?’

  ‘At the back of the cabin, near the tail.’

  ‘And Agliati?'’

  Boldrin reflected for a moment before answering:

  ‘In the centre of the cabin, on the left.’ He took the plan:

  ‘Yes, fourth place on the left, there we are.’

  Renzi followed his finger, mentally counting the seats:

  ‘Twelve seats in six rows. All occupied, of course?’

  ‘By thirteen passengers,’ replied Boldrin, with a ghost of a smile.

  ‘Thirteen?’

  ‘The thirteenth passenger was a Metropolitan Bank teller named Larini. He arrived at the last moment, when the plane was full, and convinced the mechanic to give him his seat in the cockpit.’

  ‘And the mechanic?’

  ‘He travelled in the luggage compartment.’

  Boldrin hesitated, noting the assistant commissioner’s anxious astonishment:

  ‘Of course, this hurried departure can be—.’

  ‘And the flight commander?’ Renzi cut him off.

  ‘It was probably rash of him to accede to the insistent pleas of the passenger, and the mechanic—who certainly didn’t want to lose his tip. And the plane was ready to take off… In any case, Larini didn’t leave his place in the cockpit during the flight, as both pilots have confirmed in their separate statements.’

  ‘And if he’d gone to the toilet, he would have been seen by the other passengers.’

  ‘Yes, through the glass door.’

  ‘And the mechanic?’

  ‘He justified what he did by saying that nobody would have refused a few one hundred lire notes!’

  ‘No, no, I was merely asking if during the flight….’

  ‘He came out of the luggage compartment to go into the cockpit, but he returned almost immediately. The young reporter noticed that he had a parcel under his arm.’

  The assistant commissioner looked him curiously.

  ‘He claimed that it only contained the bread and fruit he usually ate during the flight, and the commander immediately confirmed that.’

  Luigi Renzi remained silent, apparently accepting the simple explanation.

  ‘We can go on to the passengers now.’

  He read with a certain astonishment the list Boldrin had put together:

  ‘The lady in red?’

  The embarrassed Boldrin smiled wryly:

  ‘Well, her true name is….’

  After each passenger or crew member was questioned, Boldrin had allocated himself five minutes to summarising their statements. He never took notes during the interrogation for fear of disrupting the flow. Witnesses are always less spontaneous in their statements if they are worrying about any imprudent words being officially recorded.

  His secretary rushed to answer his sudden ring.

  ‘There are two ladies waiting in the lobby. Please send the older one in.’

  The young typist had already begun to consider poor old Boldrin a bit of a cad. Now he was calling a fascinating woman not a day older than thirty-five “the older one.” She answered with a small nod of indignation and went out to call the lady in question.

  ‘Commissario, will you be letting me go? ’ the lady implored.

  Boldrin answered slowly in response to her anxious look:

  ‘Of course, I would never permit myself to detain you.’

  Her pleading was immediately replaced by indignation. Seeing her looking at him scornfully, he decided to use a brusquer tone:

  ‘Your name is Vanna Sandrelli?’

  Her short red felt brim lowered itself suddenly, whilst her twitching hands gripped the smal
l, dainty handkerchief:

  ‘Vanna Sandrelli, yes.’

  She appeared oddly ashamed of her own name.

  ‘Are you from Rome?’

  ‘'From Rome, yes.’

  Apparently she was ashamed of her home town as well.

  Boldrin made a brisk gesture with his hand:

  ‘May I see your ticket, please?’

  The lady in red hastened to open her bag whilst the stunned Chief Inspector Boldrin strived to conceal his own astonishment. Not being a fashion expert like Vallesi, he wasn’t offended by its clashing lizard-green colour, but by the clashing monogram on the gilded catch: VF.

  He looked absent-mindedly at the properly stamped OSTIA-PALERMO air ticket, then searched for an explanation of his doubts:

  ‘Your maiden name, please?’

  ‘My… Yes, Antonini.’

  Boldrin tried to look solemn and officious:

  ‘In that case, may I know where you found this bag, which does not, apparently, display the right initials?’

  The lady in red looked at the policeman with confused anxiety, as if trying to work out the required right initials, then employed her residual energy for a shout of protest:

  ‘No, no, no! ’

  Three negatives are far less solid and convincing than one, so Boldrin felt himself vindicated and leant towards her with an insinuating look:

  ‘And you won’t tell me why you went to Palermo either?’

  The red felt brim was flapping nervously from left to right, so Boldrin got up from his chair with an ominous look:

  ‘Signora, I don't need to remind you that it’s in your best interests to tell the truth and only the truth, as dutifully requested. I think that a moment of quiet reflection should convince you of this very simple fact, but rest assured that we shall find the truth in any case. Until that moment, you will be detained at our disposal.’

  The woman in red tried to protest. Boldrin hoped that her rebellious look would translate into very revealing words, but the only result was a violent slamming of the door as she left.

  Renzi's response to that little tale was a vague shake of the head, before proceeding to read another name loudly from the list:

  ‘Marcella Arteni.’

  ‘Ah, that girl! I begin to ask the usual questions, where are you from, where are you going and why, and she replies that she’s going to Palermo for “family reasons.” When I insist, she tells me that she’s aware that it’s my duty to question her and that she will promptly and dutifully give me the required answers, but she has not the slightest intention of telling me more about her travel to Palermo.’

  Renzi smiled to himself, imagining the solid frame of the policeman pinned back in his chair by an outburst of energetic feminine grace.

  Boldrin was not blessed with methods and logic of a great detective. A world-famous sleuth, with his nose pressed against that high and impenetrable feminine wall, would have built a stairway of theories and hypotheses for climbing over it to achieve his ends. Plain, simple Boldrin had instead plainly and simply accepted the situation with his own natural good sense, not throwing himself into a sea of imaginative explanations where his total lack of clues and information would have ended up drowning him. So Renzi asked no more and returned once again to the passenger list:

  ‘Augusto and Maria Martelli.’

  ‘By contrast, those two talked too much… Ah, how they talked! Signora Martelli, in particular. A lengthy rigmarole about a dying uncle in Palermo, a promised inheritance and the malice of a scheming maid, and so on, and so on. If you want to interrogate them again, I think that you will be far more able to orient yourself.’

  ‘Of course, of course, I will hear the Martellis’ rigmarole with pleasure. And now, Giorgio Vallesi….’

  ‘Ah, the young reporter! Brisk, intelligent, and with too much fantasy for my humble taste.’

  Renzi smiled knowingly.

  ‘For Vallesi, everybody was nervous and very suspicious: Agliati was worried and anxious; the lady in red was a bag of nerves; the mechanic was fishy; the clandestine passenger was certainly crooked and the two pilots.…’

  ‘Good old Giorgio! He’s always the same! I remember when we were at university together… yes, yes, I’ve known him for ages! And I will be very happy to interview the reporter myself!’

  Boldrin answered with a smile, but his eyes and mind were attracted by the next name....

  The third corn tradesman, Bertieri, had entered the dark office with a fierce scowl on his swarthy face, and his violent words had immediately shattered the quiet calm.

  Bertieri protested with all his strength about the police brutally detaining him without questioning—him a peaceful citizen. Boldrin was startled by these fierce protests, but a calm and authoritative look at peaceful citizen Bertieri rendered him more and more peaceful, reducing his flaming outburst to nothing more than a very soft whisper.

  ‘So, you are calling yourself Bertieri today? Have you abandoned the emigration racket, or do you make them travel by plane these days? ’

  Bertieri had been calling himself Pagelli when Boldrin had arrested him, some years ago, for an unsavoury business of Italian emigrants to the United States. Now, he tried to respond with dignity to the policeman’s smug irony:

  ‘That’s all in the past, Commissario. Now we are living in the present! I’m straight now, I earn my living honestly.’

  ‘And pigs can fly with you on the plane! What a luxurious life you lead, Pagelli. Did you get a big inheritance from a Dutch uncle in the States? ’

  ‘I repeat, I’m straight. I’m an honest and peaceful citizen, and the bank pays my air fare.’

  ‘A bank? What kind of a bank, if you please?’

  Bertieri answered after a moment’s hesitation:

  ‘The Italy and Argentina Bank sent me to Tunis to deal with a newspaper.’

  ‘Do you take me for a fool? Please invent a better fairy-tale.’

  ‘It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the plain and simple truth, Commissario. Look at my passport.’

  Boldrin examined it very carefully, and the visa for Tunisia was indeed as regular as clear water. Bertieri showed him a letter as well, addressed to A J Morangis, Directeur du “Simoun”, 2 Rue de Naples, Tunis.

  ‘As you can see, I’m straight,’ repeated the alleged corn tradesman.

  ‘Straight as a crooked arrow, Pagelli. Your flight to Tunis doesn’t convince me even for a second. Why didn’t you fly directly from Ostia to Tunis? It would have been a swifter and more luxurious trip,’ smiled the policeman, without shaking the brazen and slightly ironic tradesman one little bit.

  ‘You are not so well-informed, Commissario. The plane to Tunis is only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Today is Tuesday, so….’

  Boldrin hid his irritation by changing the subject of the questioning suddenly:

  ‘And are your travel companions also as straight as you? Where do they send the emigrants? To Argentina?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but honestly I only met them on the Terminal bus, so I can’t swear to their own morality, I’m afraid.’

  Renzi interrupted Boldrin’s tale about Bertieri:

  ‘What can you tell me about the other two, Sabelli and Marchetti?’

  ‘Not so much, and not so convincingly. They are corn tradesman travelling to Sicily for a big trade contract, apparently.’

  ‘And they were travelling by plane?’

  ‘They told me they didn’t want to lose any time and that they loved to experience the emotion of flight,’ replied Boldrin with angry scepticism. ‘And there's something else about them; look at this suitcase, please.’

  He opened a big and almost new fibre suitcase. On the rough canvas lining, under the Franzi label, he indicated, close to the hinges, a series of numbers written with a violet pencil.

  8615915252241285 1519

  Boldrin picked up a half-empty glass bottle:

  ‘I wouldn’t even have noticed them if the Eau de C
ologne had not been spilt on the lining, rendering the numbers far more visible.’

  Renzi repeated each single number loudly, then repeated them in an irregular, broken rhythm, trying to find a pattern in the sound.

  ‘What do you think about that, Dr.Renzi? I admit that this series of numbers has intrigued me from the beginning, maybe far too much. It could just be a totally unimportant annotation made by the tradesmen.’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Renzi, in a non-committal tone, which would allow him to formulate any sort of fantastic hypothesis.

  ‘Certainly, we can’t be sure that these numbers had anything to do with our case. But if they were indeed a code or a cipher….’

  He had a moment of hesitation, but the assistant commissioner’s silence pushed him to continue:

  ‘Perhaps the last numbers, 1519, separate from the others, could be a sort... I don’t know... a sort of signature?’

  ‘Why not?’ said the assistant commissioner in a kindly manner. ‘But couldn’t they just be, instead of a cipher, a simple series of numbers, annotated casually on the first surface to hand, as you do, for instance, when you are on the telephone? Let me try a little experiment… I’m very perplexed about the last numbers, I admit, so I’ll try to ignore them for the moment. That leaves sixteen numbers, and we can divide them into three almost similar groups: 861591, 52522, and 41285... Couldn’t they be simply three telephone numbers?’

  ‘Telephone numbers? But from where? From which town?’

  ‘Possibly Rome, but I’m not sure.’

  Boldrin was actually quite convinced by this explanation, but he tried all the same to express a certain scepticism:

  ‘Excuse me, Dr. Renzi, but why are you making a first group of six numbers, when the other two have only five in them? Why don’t you try other possible combinations, like 86159, 152522, 41285, or 86159, 15252, 241285, or….’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course anything is possible, but telephone numbers beginning with 1 or 2 don’t exist in Rome or in any other town, as far as I know….For instance 861591 could itself refer to the new Quartiere Nomentano standard, and even the five numbers groups could be Rome telephone numbers… Would you allow me to try the Phone Information Service?’