The Flying Boat Mystery

by Franco Vailati

  He proceeded to deliver a stentorian reading of the article in question, revealing unexpected dramatic skills:

  ‘“Our suicide solution seems to have at last convinced even our police. Dr.Luigi Renzi has happily decided to abandon the farfetched and utterly fantastic theories he was toying with last week, finally accepting to see the problem in the light we had shed on it. The proof he has surrendered to our mathematical reasoning can be found in the information we have just received from a reliable source: today at dawn, Naples and Rome police have organized a full search by sea and by land, along the coastline from Ostia to Naples, for Francesco Agliati’s dead body.”’

  ‘Vice Commissario Galbiati, sometimes you really astonish me!’

  12-RENZI’S ACTIONS

  Giorgio phoned at six o’clock, and again he was only able to speak to Superintendent Galbiati:

  ‘Dr.Renzi was here until half an hour ago, but he was obliged to go out again. He begs you and Signorina Arteni to kindly meet him in Piazza dei Re Di Roma, if you know where that is.’

  ‘Piazza dei Re Di Roma?’

  Vallesi was reverting to his mindless echo.

  ‘Out of Porta San Giovanni, on the Appia Nuova. Dr.Renzi is waiting for you in front of Number Three.’

  Once out of the Porta San Giovanni, the taxicab drove for a few minutes on the crowded highway, then stopped in Piazza dei Re Di Roma. Giorgio and Marcella found themselves in a wide circular space surrounded by a tall wall of buildings, with a ring of streets around two small parks traversed by streetcar rails and the straight Appia Antica. They looked at the house numbers, trying to orient themselves, and below the rightmost wall of the tall and almost identical buildings they noticed a big Alfa Roadster in front of Number Three. Renzi was at the wheel and introduced the other three passengers. Amongst them Vallesi was astonished to recognise the high commissioner himself:

  ‘Commendatore Bertini, Brigadiere Sagni, Brigadiere Pinardi....’

  Commendatore Bertini bowed gallantly towards Marcella, and helped to settle her in the car by his side, while Vallesi was vainly and peevishly questioning his friend about their expedition. For half an hour, the general conversation was represented only by Bertini’s courteous attempts to entertain Signorina Arteni, and by Renzi’s vague answers to the persistent questioning of Vallesi, doing his best impersonation of an investigative reporter.

  Suddenly there came a powerful rumble from the Appia Antica, and a large motorbike stopped alongside the Alfa. Seeing the high commissioner, the officer lifted his dusty goggles and gave a military salute:

  ‘All right?’ asked Luigi.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘On the Casilina?’

  ‘On the Casilina.’

  ‘And Giorgi?’

  ‘I left him at Porta Maggiore, he’s following them.’

  Luigi made a swift calculation:

  ‘They have ten minutes on us now... A Lancia Dilambda, if I’m not mistaken. How many people in it?’

  ‘Three, including the driver.’

  Luigi looked at his five companions, including Signorina Arteni. But the high commissioner encouraged him with a nod:

  ‘Don’t worry, the others will give us a hand. But we should leave immediately, they have a good start on us!’

  ‘No problem, I will overtake them before Frosinone.’

  Renzi noticed a slim girl entering Number Three, and executed a brilliant racing start in her honour.

  Via Appia, Piazza Santa Croce, Porta Maggiore... with the thumb constantly on the horn, Renzi raced madly through the crowded streets, leaving a wave of angry protests in his wake.

  They jumped and jolted on the rough suburban surface, before an inviting, seductively smooth asphalt ribbon helped them in their efforts. The Alfa ate up the kilometres without ever letting the speedometer drop below 120.

  The descending twilight obliged them to slow a little on the Valmontone slopes, but once night had truly fallen, the brilliant artificial light of the Alfa pushed her swiftly towards the alluring lights of Ferentino.

  On the wide turning road descending towards the plain after Ferentino, another motorbike appeared in the luminous square painted by the Alfa’s lights. The high commissioner touched Renzi’s shoulder. He gave an understanding nod and approached the bike at the next turn. He signalled with his lights to the mobile officer, who kept alongside the car. The high commissioner shouted from the car:

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘All right, sir.’

  ‘Where is the Dilambda?’

  The officer pointed at the dark plain where the wide turns were dimly visible in the night. A white caterpillar of light crept towards the sparkling, distant hill of Frosinone.

  ‘Anything to report after Rome?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  Renzi turned towards his chief:

  ‘If you think, sir....’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Pinardi passed his notebook and pencil to the high commissioner. Bertini swiftly wrote down some words and gave the paper to the bike officer:

  ‘You know what to do. Pass along these orders at once.’

  ‘To Naples and Pozzuoli,’ added Luigi, his foot itching on the accelerator.

  ‘Yes, to Naples and Pozzuoli,’ echoed his chief.

  The bike officer saluted Bertini as the car continued its mad dash along the road. The bike light flashed for a moment behind the Alfa, then disappeared into the night, far, far away, whilst the roadster began to eat up the road behind the creeping white caterpillar. Renzi hurtled towards Frosinone and at last, when they entered the town on the top of the hill, his lights could pick out the clear shape of a powerful speeding car. Bertini touched Renzi’s shoulder again, inviting him to rein in his battle horse. The driver obeyed promptly, but not before commenting with satisfaction on the accuracy of his calculations:

  ‘We caught up with them in Frosinone, as I predicted.’ He looked at the car clock. ‘Even if they are quite speedy themselves, we’ve covered eighty kilometres in fifty minutes, including the brief slow down... An average speed of 95, not so bad!’

  Renzi was going at a very slow pace now, keeping his distance from the escaping car. Entering Frosinone, he had switched the lights to low beam, keeping them there even when they were out of town. In so doing, he was rendering the chase more difficult, but if he were to keep the escaping car in his sights, he couldn’t risk revealing himself by a too powerful, long and indiscriminate beam.

  The chase continued through the darkness, splintered by the Dilambda’s lights into a thousand fantastic, ever-changing shapes, in a whizzing and whirring kaleidoscope of running arabesques. But swiftly the night closed in as a silent accomplice of the pursuers.

  After Frosinone, Ceprano, Cassino, and Caianello....

  Now, after two and half hours from the start, the two cars, still separated by only a few hundred meters, traversed the bridge across the Volturno River and entered Capua. The escaping car slowed briefly in hesitation, then swiftly turned to the right, leaving the main road.

  Renzi stopped next to a sign at the crossroads. One arrow pointed straight ahead to Naples and indicated a distance of ten km. The arrow pointing to the right indicated instead that they were at one and a half km from Giugliano and sixteen from Pozzuoli.

  Renzi activated the dashboard light and he and Bertini perused a road map of Naples area in its dim glow. Renzi pointed to an intersection only a few km to the south of Aversa:

  ‘We’re here, you see, with Pozzuoli on the right. For five kms the road goes straight, posing no problem, but after Qualiano there is a fork....’

  ‘I see,’ replied Bertini. ‘With the road to Pozzuoli on the left, and a small road down to the sea on the right.’

  ‘To the sea and to Fusaro Lake and Baia.’

  Renzi followed the red line of the road with his finger, to a point before Procida, after the blue oval of Fusaro Lake.

  Bertini nodded and reflected for a moment:

 
; ‘Possibly they will choose that road, in order to stay away from big towns. But we could pick the other road, which is longer, but safer and quicker. So we could stop at Pozzuoli and be able to check whether everything is going according to our predictions.’

  Renzi drove quickly towards the small village of Giugliano. He slowed briefly in Qualiano where their route crossed the Terracina road, and, as they had foreseen, he could still see at the distant fork the red lights of the Dilambda, turning right towards the sea.

  After ten minutes he stopped at the Pozzuoli police station, ran inside, and was soon back in the car:

  ‘Everything is OK.’

  He continued rapidly along the road framing the gulf between Pozzuoli and Baia. After the small town, he left the main road and the coast and proceeded in the inner countryside until they met a road coming from the right. He stopped and examined the fork, using the moving searchlight of the car:

  ‘Have they been here?’ shouted the high commissioner from the Alfa.

  ‘I have found clear tracks of Michelin tyres, the kind used on the Lancia Dilambda,’ replied Luigi, returning to the driver’s seat.

  ‘Proceed, but with caution,’ ordered the high commissioner.

  They proceeded very slowly along the country road, passing a level crossing and the fork to the right for Torragaveta, and found themselves in a deserted hollow. After a few hundred metres of turtle-like, cautious exploration of the countryside, Luigi stopped the lights and the car. He took a few steps in the dark and pointed at the shape of the Dilambda, barely visible in the soft embrace of the night.

  As they cautiously approached the car, a shadow detached itself from the dark bushes on the roadside and gave a reassuring military salute to his chiefs. The officer pointed at the empty Lancia:

  ‘You can proceed safely, all three men are gone!’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Behind that thicket on the left.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘By bike from Naples.’ He pointed to a tangle of handlebars and wheels, hidden in the shadows behind the bushes.

  ‘OK. Lead us to them!’

  They reached the thicket by a small path on the left. Behind every bush was a motionless shadow, watching. Their guide stopped and beckoned to Luigi with a silent gesture. They knelt down and peered through the darkness, hidden behind the tangle of brambles and twigs. Behind them, Bertini, Vallesi and Marcella approached with cautious curiosity. To the right, beyond the thicket and the side of the hollow, lay a half-barren meadow of withered, sparse grass, in the middle of which, darkened by the vivid blue of the summer night sky, could be seen the shape of a big man seated or crouched on an oblong rock. But was it a man, or a voluminous crate?

  At the end of the barren meadow, they could see two more shadows, moving about as if they were trying to orient themselves or find some lost object. Possibly they were searching for a place, without remembering exactly where it was.

  After Luigi spotted the two new actors of the mysterious drama, he exchanged a few words with Bertini, then whispered to Vallesi:

  ‘Please stay here with Marcella. I don’t think they’ll offer any resistance, but it’s better to be safe.’

  Giorgio understood that the amazing night drama was approaching its denouement. Renzi was observing the stage from the bushy wings, as the master director. Now there were three shadows circling the odd shape in the middle, and Giorgio could see that it was definitely a very big crate.

  Luigi raised his arm. Eight, ten, twelve men emerged from the trees and bushes and circled the three shadows around the box on the oblong rock:

  ‘Hands up!’

  The three shadows were so stunned by the sudden circling assault of this army of darkness that they immediately surrendered, without any attempt at resistance. Renzi and the high commissioner broke the circle of darkness with the beams of their powerful torchlights. Bertini gallantly left the centre stage to his young assistant and master detective. Renzi approached the three captives and directed the beam of his torchlight to the big box on the rock:

  ‘There is the dead body of Francesco Agliati, the banker murdered eight days ago, and there is his murderer!’

  He lifted the beam to illuminate the tall figure of Commendatore Marsigli, managing director of the Italy & Argentina Bank.

  13-RENZI’S EXPLANATION

  Four people were seated at a corner table in the Miramare Restaurant in Pozzuoli. They were High Commissioner Bertini, Giorgio Vallesi, Marcella Arteni and Luigi Renzi. Three of them had confined themselves to coffee and pastries, but Luigi had before him an almost empty dish of noodles with mussels, and a waiting steak drowned in a forest of green salad. Vallesi used any possible space between two fork-loads of noodles to try to interview his friend:

  ‘But how could you suspect Marsigli? When did you solve the mystery of the banker’s disappearance?’

  ‘I'm very sorry, I wasn’t watching the clock at that historic moment! But I wouldn’t ever have solved the case without your smiling friend’s help.’

  ‘You really are a gentleman,’ said Marcella, ‘but I don’t know how.’

  ‘Please, don’t deny your indisputable contribution! That’s why, with the kind permission of Commendatore Bertini, I invited you to the exciting dessert of this mysterious affair. I broke some rules in doing so, but really you deserved it! Nobody would ever have solved The Flying Boat Mystery without the timely rubber paunch of my friend Giorgio; your gift suddenly provided me with all the required answers.’

  Marcella answered with a kind nod, but now she was smiling at Giorgio, and Giorgio alone. Renzi continued with mock and hilarious humility:

  ‘Heavens, I can’t deny having had some suspicions even before my return to Rome. During our investigations in Naples I was immediately puzzled by the return ticket in the banker’s briefcase... why wouldn’t he have carried it in his pocket, or in his wallet? And the notorious phone numbers in Sabelli’s suitcase... Everything made me suspect the presence of hostile enemies of Francesco Agliati. And there were too many banks involved: the Metropolitan Bank rushed Larini to Palermo, forcing him to be on board the Dornier Do-Wal 134 in a very suspicious way, whilst the Italy & Argentina Bank was doubly compromised by the assistant manager’s phone number in Sabelli’s suitcase, and by the mysterious trip to Tunis of Bertieri-Pagelli. But the rubber paunch trick, if it could explain the escape from the toilet, restored the same degree of probability to all four options for Agliati’s disappearance.’

  Vallesi proceeded to list them, once again:

  ‘Accident, suicide, murder and purposeful escape.’

  ‘And the clues didn’t necessarily point to murder. I refer to the clues I had noticed before the suspects’ release, because after their release the killers made their first mistake. Our adversaries committed three grave errors of psychology, errors that ultimately gave us a great advantage in our clash of minds. Only the third mistake was deliberately and knowingly suggested by us; the first one was committed even before we could decide any possible course of action, and the second involved a field of investigation completely different from our actual line of enquiry. So, for two of them, we can’t claim any credit at all. Think about it: what happened to Sabelli and Marchetti when they were released?’

  ‘Sabelli was murdered....’

  ‘Exactly. And that was their first mistake; a mistake caused by an excessive belief in our powers of deduction, and by an excessive fear of the very few, miserable clues in our possession. Both Sabelli and Marchetti were members of the criminal organization responsible for the banker’s disappearance, but they certainly weren’t its leaders; Sabelli was simply Marchetti’s contact, the mouthpiece transmitting his bosses’ orders to him. Marchetti was a very low-level accomplice, completely ignorant of the other members’ names, plans and goals, so they could easily leave him in our hands without any fear for their own safety. Neither Sabelli nor Marchetti had any knowledge of Agliati’s fate, they simply received th
e order to be on board that particular plane, and we shall talk later about the necessity of their presence there. So, you can easily understand their amazement and fear when they found themselves involved in a very dangerous police investigation. Sabelli had more to lose, and his terror was very obvious when we discovered the numbers marked on his suitcase and we could correctly understand the real meaning of the first group....’

  ‘But what did the other numbers mean? ’

  ‘One was the phone number of the office where Sabelli was trapped and killed. I haven’t as yet found the meaning of the other, but very possibly it was the phone number of a Palermo den of the gang. Sabelli had rushed to note the numbers on his suitcase when they gave them to him by phone, so he could use them in case of emergency. The emergency presented itself with our Naples investigation. When Sabelli was released, he immediately phoned the local den of the gang. We identified and arrested the Naples members of the gang, who were successfully organizing, together with their Roman accomplices, headed and covered by the Italy and Argentina Bank, an extensive ring of clandestine emigration smugglers. Witness the highly competent participation in it of our old friend Pagelli.

  ‘So, Sabelli informed his accomplices about the current, dangerous situation, and they were amazed and terrified by the unforeseen development of the police investigation, and by Sabelli’s arrogance: certainly, he was trying to find some personal advantage in the present quandary. His partners in crime invited him into the den to discuss the new situation and they ordered him to send Marchetti to the station with the suitcases. Marchetti also received the order to wait in the hall for his partner until twenty-past six ,when he was due to leave for Rome, having previously left his friend’s suitcase on the Palermo train, in the compartment he had just booked.