The Disappearance of Signora Giulia

by Piero Chiara

  The new petition to the examining judge demanded the seizure of Esengrini’s diary for 1955, saved in the office archives. The judge looked at the page for the Saturday when the letter to Barsanti was sent. There he found the following annotations:

  — meeting with the lawyer Berrini on the Bassetti file

  — meeting with Egidio Rossinelli and family on the suit against Scardìa

  — appointment with the surveyor Chiodetti

  — request for provisional freedom: Alfredo Marchionato (N 468/62)

  Envisioning further requests from Esengrini, and curious to see him, the examining judge went to visit him in prison.

  ‘Sir,’ he heard Esengrini say, ‘perhaps you understand where I’m going with this; I therefore advise the utmost secrecy. Go ahead looking into things on your own. But we’re at a crucial point: just one word is all that’s needed to destroy the definitive proof. Don’t even speak with a colleague; don’t let a single soul look at the proceedings. My liberty is at stake. The guilty man is nearby, with eyes and ears open. We need to convince him that by this point, I’m done for…

  ‘I’ve been studying the documents I’m putting in the file for you for years and they have revealed the truth to me. Looking through them, I’ve identified the killer, reconstructed his actions and finally, five months ago, I discovered the corpse of my wife in the cistern. (This revelation is just for you.) When I had to leave the house where I’d spent twenty-one years with my wife, I felt I was in danger, but I defied that danger. I had, and I have, a careful adversary, as able as I but more determined, capable of killing again to save himself. An adversary who’s aware of my painstaking work to reconstruct the truth.’

  ‘But who is he?’ asked the judge. ‘It’s time to talk, Esengrini. You don’t trust the law!’

  ‘Sir, if I told you that I trusted the law I’d be lying. I trust you, I trust in your intelligence, your utter rectitude, and that of all magistrates. But I don’t trust the law. Justice is a machine with neither heart nor intelligence: it acts as instructed. And the instruction is determined by the evidence. We must feed it firm evidence, documents, reliable witness statements. Then it will strike accurately. Heaven help us if we feed it with opinions! Or worse, if we stuff it with incomplete or vague evidence…’

  ‘So then, what’s the next move?’

  ‘I would ask you to seal off my office, including the internal space and the windows, and put an officer there to sleep nights. Then I’d ask you to get hold of the file containing the proceedings against Alfredo Marchionato: drawer 468/62 – it’s archived in the magistrates’ court. It concerns an action for libel, which we won. I was the defender. In the trial there’s a request from me for provisional liberty. I drew it up that Saturday, as you saw in my diary.’

  The judge looked into the Marchionato trial and found the request for provisional liberty, typewritten and signed by the lawyer. He added everything to the records.

  Meanwhile the details of the investigation were coming in to him. The lawyer Panelli confirmed having found the letter in the drawer of the furniture at auction. The same bailiff remembered the details.

  The results of the autopsy also came through. The forensic pathologist had immediately stated that a three-year-old cadaver would reveal nothing, and in fact his report left the cause of death as undetermined. It could have been strangulation or drowning. The internal cavities were full of sand, mould and small algae that had passed through the oral cavity during the body’s submersion, when rainfall had raised the level of the water in the cistern. There were no broken bones in the cervical region. The carotid cartilage had been destroyed by decomposition and didn’t provide any evidence. Signs of breakage could only have been preserved in the event of a natural mummification. But the effects of the water and the airless environment had subjected the body of Signora Giulia to a type of partial saponification. The facial planes were partially preserved, and thanks to their having become waxy it had been possible to identify the dead woman’s face as soon as she was discovered, an identification confirmed by the wedding ring. The cause of death had to be considered violent. Whoever had hidden that body – dead or alive – down in the cistern was the killer or his accomplice.

  While the magistrate gathered the results, Sciancalepre came forward with some news. The grocer Lucchini had spontaneously presented himself to the Commissario in order to state that he’d met Esengrini fifteen days before his arrest in via Lamberti, at one-thirty in the morning in the neighbourhood of the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti. The grocer, returning home from his shop after having finished an inventory of his goods, bumped into the lawyer. The fact made an impression on him since at M—— everyone knew that relations between the lawyer and his daughter were not good. So when he heard about the arrest and the charge, he felt it his duty to come in. He didn’t mention that he was doing it gladly, since four years before Esengrini had upheld the plaintiff against him in a trial for commercial fraud and he’d been convicted. Apart from these proceedings, the incident could have some bearing on the murder of Signora Giulia; or rather, the wife-killing, as the papers called it, so the grocer had done his duty.

  The judge added Lucchini’s deposition to the record and took the opportunity to speak to Esengrini about other details. Esengrini admitted without hesitation having met the grocer that night; and so as not to tantalize him too much confided another piece of the truth to him.

  ‘At this stage, I must tell you, sir, that my means of entry to the park wasn’t the gate of the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti, but the one adjacent to the palazzo Sormani, to which I’d obtained the key. From the courtyard of the palazzo Sormani, I went through to the park, then climbed over the wall towards the back. I went in after midnight, when everyone in the palazzo was in bed. No one could see me go in. There’s a bend in the road there, and before entering I’d stand listening in order to be certain that there were no night-owls around. However, there was someone who saw me…’

  ‘Lucchini,’ the judge offered timidly.

  ‘Lucchini,’ the lawyer confirmed, ‘and not only Lucchini. But this is part of another revelation that I’ll make in a few days. Now I’d ask you to question all the people who came to my office that Saturday morning: the lawyer Berrini, Signor Egidio Rossinelli, his wife and sister-in-law, and the surveyor Chiodetti. That morning in my office must be reconstructed.’

  It was no simple feat. The lawyer, Berrini, didn’t remember anything any more, but he didn’t rule it out: he had discussed the Bassetti file with Esengrini. He went to see his colleague frequently as their offices were so close together, and he couldn’t be precise.

  The Rossinelli were more precise. In their entire lives they had fought only the one lawsuit, against some neighbours – the Scardìas, southerners – for damage and unlawful entry. A backyard squabble. That morning – and the date was confirmed by the lodging of the complaint – they’d gone to Esengrini’s office to lay out the facts and request him to act on their behalf. It wasn’t just Egidio Rossinelli; his wife and sister-in-law also remembered having been there for nearly an hour and having helped draft the complaint, which Esengrini dictated to the typist.

  Egidio recalled that as he was going into the office, Berrini was coming out of it. One of those ideal witnesses who end up remembering too much, he recalled that Demetrio was in the office as well – indeed that it had been Demetrio who’d advised him to lodge the suit the day before. He then found in the recesses of his prodigious memory that there had also been a very elegant man in the office that Saturday morning – something no one else remembered.

  The surveyor Chiodetti remembered having provided Esengrini with an estimate for a property that day, and he found the evidence in his diary. Yet another one with a good memory, he managed to recall that the lawyer had been out of his office; he’d had to wait for him.

  It wasn’t difficult for the intelligent magistrate to finalize the deposition by doing a little sleuthing: Esengrini had presented the Rossinell
i suit in person in court that Saturday. So the lawyer had drafted the lawsuit, gone with his clients to court to present it and returned to his office, where he’d found Chiodetti waiting for him.

  With these final witness examinations and his files on the investigation, the magistrate went to the prison in M—— to wring the final revelations from Esengrini.

  Esengrini was satisfied and said to him in a very friendly manner: ‘I told you I have no faith in the law; in abstract justice, that is. And you – without taking offence, you had faith in me, the accused. If only it were always like this!’

  The magistrate accepted the compliment. But then he sat down and told Esengrini it was time to come clean.

  ‘So it is,’ Esengrini accepted. ‘I’ll tell you everything, apart from the name of the killer. Prepare to have a bit more patience and another measure of faith in the accused. You should know that even before our diligent Sciancalepre, I was convinced my wife couldn’t have fled, but had been killed. I was certain of it after Sciancalepre’s famous trip to Rome, when he learnt about the letter Barsanti had received, which I was sure I’d never written.

  ‘It was the killer who wrote that letter. But only I could think so; as far as everyone else was concerned, the letter was written by me. So I would have had to be aware of the relationship between my wife and Barsanti, and hence the jealousy, the threats, the midday skirmish with my wife that Thursday, the murder, the faked escape. I’ve asked myself a thousand times why you didn’t arrest me! The logical proof was nearly there… I wanted to deny having written the letter! I repeat: I wondered how you could close the file.’

  ‘Esengrini, it was not only the letter that was missing, but also the body.’

  ‘You’re right; they were both missing. And they were the first things I looked for. The body couldn’t be far away. The murder took place in the house and the spot most suited for hiding the body was in the grounds. When I found out that the grounds had been searched with a dog (Demetrio told me), I shuddered. She wasn’t buried in the grounds, thank goodness. And if she had been, I can tell you that I would have changed the spot if I’d been able, since it would have spelt my death sentence: I didn’t yet have the proof to hand that you now have in the file!’

  ‘But what proof!’ exclaimed the judge.

  ‘What’s there now. All of it, apart from one thing: I don’t know where her jewellery is. About six months ago, I found a letter in the post from Panelli, the lawyer from Milan. A mysterious hand was helping me. I’m not a believer, still less am I superstitious, but that discovery, so unexpected, seemed like a sign from the heavens. I came to believe that that poor little thing wanted justice, and had had no peace, knowing I was suspected of her death.

  ‘You can’t imagine what these past three years have been like for me! My daughter’s hatred – first she gets engaged and then married to her mother’s ex-suitor – the looks from my colleagues and clients, the magistrate’s behaviour… Everyone was convinced that I was a cunning murderer.

  ‘When I opened the letter, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was the phantom document! The letterhead was mine, the signature could have been mine. I began to fear actually having been my wife’s killer, of having acted unconsciously, by doubling, like vampires. During that period I’d been skimming a book called I Believe in Vampires, which spoke of the dead who return to the world without a conscience and suck the blood of the living in an attempt to regain the lives they’ve lost. I thought I was one of them. I believed, too, in vampires, in Doctor Jekyll, in the doubling of Dorian Gray – that character in the famous novel by Oscar Wilde.

  ‘I’d killed my wife myself, without knowing it, and buried her in the grounds or in the cellar. I remembered that cellar, with its exit near the greenhouse under the embankment the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti is built on. For three years, I’d never thought once about it. I went all over it for several days. I shifted the paving, even knocked on the walls. Nothing. But by dint of searching under a pile of smashed demijohns and wooden tables, I found a cloth button from a dress my wife had been wearing in the last days I saw her – it’s missing from her wardrobe – perhaps the same one she put on the morning of her death. It’s for that reason I requested that the cadaver’s clothes be produced as evidence.’

  ‘Will we find a button missing?’ asked the judge.

  ‘That button was actually another thing against me,’ the lawyer continued. ‘However, I had to save it because it would become part of the jigsaw I was constructing. I put it back where I’d found it; that was the best hiding place. We’ll go together to retrieve it when the moment’s right. But it’s a trifling thing, and it doesn’t shift the blame from me to anyone else. They’ll only move the jewellery definitely when they find it. That is, if they find it. The killer’s ingenious, and he’s playing a difficult game with me. The jewellery is a crucial tool in his hands. If it could be hidden in my office or my house, I’d be finished. That’s why I asked for my office to be guarded by a policeman after the search. I feared – and I still fear – that the killer, seeing that the investigation is not winding up, or suspecting it’s going to broaden out to include to him, will opt to sacrifice the jewellery, and go to hide it in my office, where a thorough search will uncover it.

  ‘But let’s move on. When I found the button I began to think that the body could have been hidden during the day and then brought outside, who knows where. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it would have been possible. I felt I was close, incredibly close to solving the case! I walked around the grounds continually during the day while my daughter was at university in Milan. I examined every dirt clod. Now and again I took a pickaxe and dug somewhere, covering it up later.

  ‘One day, dead tired after digging along the wall near the villa Sormani, I started back to the coach house with the axe. I was dragging the thing on the ground, I was so exhausted. All at once it slipped from my grasp. It had got stuck in a hook on the lawn in front of the coach house, as if a hand had seized it. When I went to fetch it, I noticed that in dragging it I’d unearthed a large iron ring.

  ‘I tried to tug it up; it was stuck. I pulled up several handfuls of grass, and a manhole cover appeared. I struggled to lift it. It was embedded in the ground, with the edges sunk into the earth. Hardly had I moved it when a gust of damp air hit me. I’d discovered my wife’s grave.

  ‘I carefully closed it up again, sinking the ring into the earth and covering it up with grass. Now I knew everything. But I was certain that the jewellery wouldn’t be found in the suitcases. It was booty worth at least thirty million lire, and the killer couldn’t have thrown that away.

  ‘Meanwhile, events moved swiftly forward. My daughter was about to reach the age of majority. She got married without a word to me. On the same day, Sciancalepre came to tell me that I had to leave the villa; my daughter was now the owner. I left. The only thing I cared about was still being able to enter the grounds, and I made sure of this. Since I’m the administrator for the Sormani property, I have the keys of the door opening onto via Lamberti. That’s how I began my life as the night shadow. A shadow with little hope, since the jewellery could hardly have been in the grounds. The killer had hidden it very well, and had I accused him – with what proof? – he could easily have pointed the finger back at me.’

  At this point Esengrini suddenly became very tired. His head fell to his breast and he closed his eyes. ‘Leave me,’ he said to the judge. ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ve had heart trouble for a little while now…’

  The magistrate left. The next day he was at M—— first thing in the morning. He found the prisoner in fine condition and he prepared to listen to the end of the story, which had kept him awake all night.

  But Esengrini had another request to put forward. He asked the judge to carry out an experiment: to take Marchionato’s petition for provisional liberty and the letter said to be from Esengrini to Barsanti and put the two sheets on top of one another, place them against a window and compare the two signat
ures.

  The judge, who had the file with him, carried out the experiment against the window of the little room. The two signatures fit together perfectly. Only the dots of the two ‘i’s didn’t fit. ‘This signature was traced using a transparency!’ he exclaimed, looking at the letter.

  ‘Of course. And it’s the key to the mystery. Now you see why I told you the killer had written the letter. That’s the signature of the killer! And it was signed that Saturday!’

  ‘But where are you leading me, Esengrini?’ cried the judge. ‘Talk! Out with the name! My patience is limited. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I’m not going any further in the dark.’

  ‘I can’t yet tell you the name. First I must find the jewellery. And I want to find it without leaving prison. Help me out a bit longer. Not even the attorney general of the court of assizes can uphold the charge without the jewellery.’

  ‘Esengrini,’ said the investigating judge, ‘after this experiment with the two signatures, which I’m going to submit for an expert opinion even though there’s no need for it, you need only come out with his name and I’ll order your release.’

  ‘Not on your life! I’m going to stay inside until they find the jewellery. I’m going out when “he” comes in. If “he” knew I was out, he’d know his time was up and he might make some unpredictable move.’

  EIGHT

  The judge went off to await further requests from Esengrini.

  In the meantime, Sciancalepre hadn’t been sitting on his thumbs. By this time the case had been referred to the investigating judge, but no one was stopping Sciancalepre collecting more information.