The Flying Boat Mystery

by Franco Vailati

  Again, Luigi paused. Again, Boldrin showed a certain ill-disguised disappointment.

  Renzi continued his train of thought in his firm, unwavering voice:

  ‘Apart from the failure of their very clever trick, we can find a second technical mistake in their plan. Why did they leave the two original suitcases on the Brindisi train only at eight p.m., well after the other two had already left Naples: one for Rome at twenty-past six and the other for Palermo ten minutes later, at half-past six? Why such a delay in disposing of two such damning and dangerous clues as the victim’s legs? Particularly since this delay also required the involvement of other accomplices, apart from Marchetti.’

  Boldrin started to object, but Luigi didn’t give him the time to do it:

  ‘You could explain the delay by the absence of earlier trains, but a swift perusal of the train timetable will convince you that such an assumption would be wrong. It’s a clear and obvious technical mistake by the killers, and now we arrive at their even graver, psychological, blunder. Marchetti was the only gang member known to the police, thanks to the Agliati case, so it would have been quite logical to keep him quietly out of the further, grisly development of the case. It would have been far safer if he’d tried to attract the least possible attention to himself. Instead, he tried very foolishly to be in the spotlight, in a very silly way. He gave the wagon-lit conductor Sabelli’s suitcase with a host of explanations and recommendations. Instead of disposing swiftly and quietly of the second suitcase, he took it with him to Rome, where he was caught almost red-handed by the police. If he had wanted to be immediately suspected, he couldn’t have acted in a more effective manner. A very odd demeanour for such a clever and resourceful criminal, wouldn’t you say?’

  Boldrin was now very confused and tried not to convey his utterly conflicting ideas:

  ‘So, you think that....’

  ‘I think that we must abandon the first, more seemingly logical theory that you so beautifully described, the theory of Marchetti’s guilt or complicity in the crimes....’

  Boldrin’s common sense at last overcame his astonishment:

  ‘But... if Marchetti didn’t do it, who did?’

  Luigi stopped him with a raised hand, trying to keep him calm and quiet:

  ‘Please be patient, Boldrin. The psychological blunder made us understand that our first assumptions were wrong, and a short reflection about the two technical mistakes can put us on the right track. First and foremost, the leather tag and the numbers on the inside of the second suitcase were clever tricks to divert our suspicions, and to make us believe that it was Sabelli’s suitcase—the one flown on the Dornier Do-Wal from Ostia—when instead it was one of the pair of new suitcases bought in Naples only on Wednesday the thirteenth. The reason for this trick will be very clear after my little exposition: the killers didn’t have the real Sabelli’s suitcase at their disposal at that moment! And the second technical mistake confirms the correctness of this affirmation, so our supposition becomes a solid fact. The real Sabelli and Marchetti suitcases were left on the Brindisi train at eight o’clock, after the other two had been sent to their fate on the Rome and Palermo trains one and a half hours earlier.’

  Luigi paused to take a breath, then launched himself into the final attack:

  ‘From the chronological exposition of the various trips of our suitcases, we can obtain a chain of logical deductions. If the killers couldn’t use the two original suitcases before half past six, it means that at that very moment they were in the hands of another person, a person who wasn’t their accomplice and who can only be Marchetti himself!

  ‘So, Marchetti is certainly innocent. But we found him leaving one of the tragic, gruesome suitcases on the Palermo train, and afterwards we found him arriving in Rome with the second suitcase with Sabelli’s grisly remains! If you notice that they are not the original suitcases which arrived by plane in Naples, but the new pair bought in Naples that day, you can find only one crystal-clear solution to the problem: the new pair were substituted for Marchetti’s original ones. By whom? By the killers, of course! And Marchetti, needless to say, was completely ignorant of the substitution. Where did the substitution take place? In the station hall, when Marchetti was waiting for his friend.’

  Luigi made the classic gesture of satisfaction of the conjuror having successfully performed a very difficult act of legerdemain. He took pleasure in explaining the trick to Boldrin in all its technical details:

  ‘I agree with you about the first part of your splendid reconstruction: that we are fighting a very clever, resourceful and well-organized gang, having planned and effected the banker’s disappearance from the plane and its terminal stop to Naples. I agree that both Marchetti and Sabelli were among its members, but I invert their positions in the gang; for me, Marchetti was the minor legman, completely ignorant of the full plan of the gang and receiving his orders from Sabelli, the only crook in the organization he actually knew. But Sabelli was scared by our investigation and by our discovery of the phone numbers on his suitcase....’

  ‘Could we consider those numbers again, Dr. Renzi? We stopped at the first phone numbers, but... what about the other two? And the four isolated numbers? ’

  Luigi was slightly irritated by the interruption. Boldrin’s intervention had disrupted his splendid logical explanation, reminding him of the only annoying detail he couldn’t explain at all!

  ‘Yes, yes, we shall return to it, don’t worry. So, Sabelli is scared by our investigations. He knows that other members of the gang are in Naples, he knows how to contact them in case of need, he wants to warn them about the unforeseen developments in the situation.... ’

  Renzi stopped for a moment, his rhetorical exploit waiting for a sudden thought to crystallize and solidify in a definite form, losing its momentary state of gas-like uncertain impalpability. He smiled with apparent satisfaction at the result, and he returned to reconstruct the complex machinery of the murder plot:

  ‘Sabelli decided, with his accomplices, to book a berth for himself on the Palermo wagon-lit. Marchetti’s presence wasn’t necessary and he received the order to return to Rome. Sabelli thought to have a long meeting with the rest of the gang, so he asked Marchetti to wait for him at the station until twenty-past six, and, if he was still delayed, to leave his suitcase in the Palermo wagon-lit, being afterwards free to take the Rome train.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what Marchetti has been saying, word for word!’

  ‘Why not? If he’s innocent, why can’t we accept his sincerity in all the details of his convoluted story? If his statement is true, it certainly can’t damage our reconstruction, far from it! Now, the situation is the following—.’

  Someone knocked at the door and a policeman informed the chief inspector of an emergency in his precinct:

  ‘Someone broke into a Corso Re d’Italia office. They have found papers in disarray and a room locked from the inside, and they will force it only in your presence.’

  Boldrin was quite angered by the interruption , but he looked with resignation at Luigi, feeling that his own intervention was absolutely mandatory and inescapable:

  ‘Please come with me, Dr. Renzi,’ he asked. ‘It will only be a very brief pause in our discussion, and we can even continue it on the street.’

  And so they did. Closing the door of the bureau, Boldrin returned at once to the subject at hand:

  ‘So, according to you, the situation is….’

  ‘The situation is that Marchetti is not lying and Sabelli has been killed in a trap set by his accomplices, seeing in his fear a real danger to their plan.’

  ‘A premeditated murder? ’asked Boldrin, walking side-by-side with him on the street.

  ‘I don’t think so. Possibly he was killed by a blow in a fight, as you surmised. But they had decided to dispatch him from the moment he communicated his fear to them, following our interview. The gang had hoped that the banker’s disappearance could be considered a suicide or an accident, and
now Sabelli was suddenly becoming a very dangerous accomplice, ready to spill the beans to the police. So they decided to kill two birds with one stone, dispatching dangerous Sabelli in a way that could put us totally off the scent in the Agliati case. Certainly, the police would have connected the murder with the banker’s disappearance, but the new danger would have been dispelled by the choice of a scapegoat, a man who could be considered guilty of both the crimes….’

  ‘Our friend Marchetti!’

  ‘And Giovanni Marchetti, as we know from your detective’s report, was waiting for Giuseppe Sabelli in the station hall before quarter-to-five, with the two original suitcases, his own and his friend’s.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have happened before quarter-to five? The two friends were released at half-past two, you know.’

  ‘Certainly I agree that Marchetti had no alibi before quarter-to-five, and we have no solid proof that he really had gone directly to the railway station and waited in the hall for all the time. But the suitcase change wouldn’t have been necessary at all, if Marchetti had been the killer’s accomplice, and that’s solid evidence in itself. The very fact that the murderers could stubbornly decide to execute so effectively and daringly such a risky operation demonstrates Marchetti’s innocence beyond any reasonable doubt, even passing over the other evidence of the inexplicably delayed shipment of the other suitcases and of the even more inexplicable demeanour of Marchetti, far more easily explained if we believe in his innocence. The timing and logic of the plan are now strictly and solidly connected. Sabelli is ensnared in a trap and killed in a brutal fight at three o’clock. The body is sawn up and some of the grisly remains are hidden in two suitcases the gang members had previously bought, two suitcases absolutely identical to the other two they had possibly given to Giovanni Marchetti and Giuseppe Sabelli for their plane trip: the two suitcases Marchetti took to the station and that were near to him at that very moment in the station hall.

  ‘Sabelli had spoken about him to his accomplices; possibly they were his partners in crime themselves and gave him the suggestion of sending Marchetti to the station with the suitcases, anticipating perhaps the chance of a substitution. And possibly they pushed Sabelli to book his berth on the Palermo express. At six o’clock, the murderers arrive at the station with the gruesome suitcase, one of them finds an excuse to distract Marchetti, the others easily exchange the suitcases, and Marchetti plays very gullibly and naturally the part the murderers had sneakily imposed on him. He leaves his friend’s suitcase on the Palermo train, he goes to Rome with his own suitcase…and he’s ready to be caught red-handed with the grisly proof of his own apparent crime. And now, with the easily explained delay, the killers have at last in their possession the real Sabelli and Marchetti’s suitcases, and they can put the murdered man’s legs in them and leave them on the Brindisi train.’

  Luigi interrupted his reconstruction on a gesture from Boldrin. A detective was emerging from the hall of a large modern building:

  ‘The bureau is there, on the second floor.’

  On the stairs, Luigi could finally end his explanation:

  ‘When they had the two original suitcases in their possession, at half-past six, the killers returned to the house where they had committed the crime. Certainly it was done in a closed place, out of sight of possible bystanders. They made the rest of the damning body parts disappear in the suitcases, they returned to the station and they shipped them to Brindisi on the train. And so the two original suitcases, having flown on the mysterious Dornier Do-Wal 134, could arrive as if by black magic in Brindisi with Sabelli’s legs in them.’

  Luigi made a gesture of satisfaction and huffed and puffed his joy to have freed himself of the wretched problem of the suitcases.

  8-WHILST THE NAPLES POLICE INVESTIGATE….

  On the second floor, Renzi and Boldrin found two doors. The door to the right had the brass plate of a mail-order firm selling typewriters, desks and other office material and facilities. They were promptly and ceremoniously met by the very worried managing director, a Signor Suvini, who led them along a long corridor lined with identical doors on both sides. He stopped in front of the last door on the right:

  ‘The first person to notice something wrong was the doorman. He cleans up the offices every morning before nine o’clock, when we are still closed—.’

  Boldrin interrupted him brusquely, as if he were fearing the sudden escape of a very important idea:

  ‘So, someone let himself into the office during the night, for an unknown reason….’

  Suvini stopped him with his large, raised hand:

  ‘We’re not sure, Commissario. We found traces of his intrusion in two rooms, here, and there.’ He pointed first at the closed door, and then shook the handle of the big wooden door at the end of the corridor. ‘You will notice that we are in the inner part of the office, the part we use as a warehouse. We very rarely come in here. Even the doorman only cleans it up occasionally. The last time was three days ago… or so he says!’

  ‘I see.’

  Boldrin shook the handle of the end door vigorously, but to no avail. ‘Where is the key?’

  ‘Here it is, the doorman found it on the floor in the other room. We tried to open the door with it, but it’s bolted from the inside.’

  Boldrin looked at the reddish light suffusing the sides and bottom of the door:

  ‘The light is on. What kind of bolt is it?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘A simple iron bar fitting into a catch. The kind of old-fashioned bolt only used in country farms nowadays.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ smiled Boldrin. ‘Of course, our friends took away their own tools, but with a long-bladed paper-knife, I think....’

  Suvini handed him one and Boldrin inserted it adroitly in the crack, just above the lock. Moving the blade up, he found only slight resistance, and with little effort the bar was lifted from its catch. The door swung open to reveal a sort of long cellar with a very low ceiling. The room was filled with old office desks, cases of many shapes and sizes, two unmatched chairs, a big round table in the centre and a big iron bar in a corner. A single lamp hanging from the ceiling barely illuminated the scene. Suvini was the first to enter the room, searching everywhere with his hands and his eyes and finally commenting in astonishment:

  ‘Just like in the other room! Everything is in disarray but nothing is missing!’

  Boldrin was so absorbed in his silent examination that he didn’t notice when his companion sneaked out of the warehouse and directed himself towards a half-open door on the left of the corridor. Suvini tried to stop him:

  ‘No, sorry, they entered through the other room on the right.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just wanted to check something,’ answered Luigi vaguely, going inside.

  Everything was in order, of course, as he could check by looking round the room, but his attention was immediately caught by a telephone in the corner. After only a minute, he let himself be dragged by Suvini into the incriminated room on the right, but before crossing the threshold he asked the director:

  ‘Your office hours, please.’

  ‘From nine to three,’ came the answer, without hesitation. ‘After that, the work is done and we close for the day.’

  Very satisfied, Renzi at last examined the disarranged office: open drawers, papers everywhere, overthrown chairs and baskets... everything was in a total, even forced and fake disorder.

  ‘Nothing is missing?’

  He knew perfectly well that the question was superfluous, and that attempted theft was not the real motive for the mysterious breaking and entering.

  ‘Nothing. They didn’t even lay a finger on the safe in my office. In any case, we don’t keep vast sums of money in it, so any thief would have been disappointed.’

  ‘If they’d really wanted to steal... but I sincerely doubt it.’

  They joined the silent chief inspector in his thoughtful examination of the warehouse. Boldrin seemed quite worried:


  ‘The motive for the intrusion seems very odd and strange. What’s more, the breaking and entering was planned: they didn’t force the door, they used a false key instead! I don't want to appear to be casting suspicion on your employees, Signor Suvini, but....’

  Renzi let Boldrin go on for a while, but at last he stopped him, to avoid him sinking ingloriously into a quagmire of blunders and painful confessions of confusion and befuddlement:

  ‘Please, Boldrin, come with me!’

  He dragged him into the office on the left and indicated the black telephone on the wall. A white card had been stuck next to it, on which a telephone number had been written in pencil. But the chief inspector had no reaction until Renzi repeated the five numbers out loud. Only then did the sound awaken a mechanical rhythm in his memory:

  ‘41285? But that’s—.’

  ‘Yes, the third phone number on the infamous Sabelli’s suitcase! I made a mistake, only the first one was a Rome number, the 861591. A second one is here, before our own eyes, and the third one is possibly in Palermo, and refers to another base of the gang... And if you notice that this office closes at three o’clock every afternoon, or at 15.00, the last four numbers, 1519, now at last have their rightful explanation. Have you observed that many of the shipping cases in the warehouse are still full of sawdust? And that nobody has noticed that someone has stolen all the towels from the bathroom? Thus we can readily arrive at the conclusion that we have at last found where Sabelli was trapped and killed!’

  When they returned to Boldrin’s bureau, they found a morning newspaper on his desk, with a big headline crowned by the STOP PRESS circle: