“The explanation came to me today when she went to see her husband. The orchid was Edward Moran’s favourite flower and he’d ordered all his gang members to use it as a sign. I learnt this from the book I just told you about, and Ileana Sage knew about it from the case heard in Rutland court. So when she found the orchid in her room next to Valerio’s body—and because she’d already recognized Anna Sage in her showrooms—she didn’t doubt for an instant that the crime was the work of her husband, who was using it to begin his revenge against her. And the killer had been counting on precisely this logical and inevitable reaction in order to get at Edward Moran—ensuring that suspicion fell on his wife. Isn’t that so, Prospero O’Lary?”
The man sneered. “If you say so! But you’ll have to demonstrate that I really wanted to strike down Edward Moran, when I didn’t even know him.”
De Vincenzi took from his pocket the newspaper cutting he’d found in Valerio’s papers and set it down in front of O’Lary.
“Read that.”
Prospero glanced at the cutting with a hideous grimace.
“So?”
De Vincenzi turned to Verna Campbell.
“Signorina Campbell, will you tell me who introduced you to Cristiana O’Brian, known then as Ileana Sage?”
Prospero broke in vehemently.
“I did! So?” He turned to Verna, his eyes gleaming demonically. “Careful what you say, Verna!”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“You’re done for, Lester Gillis! And don’t be angry with me. They’d have found out anyway.”
Anna Sage stood up, astonished.
“Lester Gillis?” She peered at the little man. “Lester Gillis? But he’s dead. My brother—” She swayed and had to reach out to the desk to steady herself.
“Yes, Signora Sage, your brother believed Lester Gillis was dead since he’d ordered his killing, and because Gillis’s clothes and identification were found on a bench near the East River docks. Everyone believed it, as a matter of fact, and that’s how Lester Gillis became Prospero O’Lary. But you see, like all such criminals, he couldn’t definitively let go of his former personality, the one that earned him a place in your brother’s gang.”
“But he betrayed him!”
“Yes he did, and that’s why Moran gave orders for him to be killed. However, the person settling scores threw what they presumed was his dead body into the river after they shot him in the right shoulder. But Gillis was still alive… so much so that when he got to the shore, he was able to make a run for it and disappear. You can’t deny it, Lester Gillis, not only because we’ll soon have your prints and photograph from the New York police and the Kansas City penitentiary—where your long sentence must have been reduced—but also because you have only to expose your right shoulder to reveal your scar.”
Prospero was still staring at Verna, his eyes burning with savage hatred.
“Bitch!”
“Leave it, Gillis. Verna Campbell took you in when you were injured and helped you stay hidden, allowing you to transform yourself into Prospero O’Lary. She hasn’t betrayed you even now; instead, she tried to divert my suspicion from you by telling me she’d seen a vase of orchids in Valerio’s room.” He smiled. “It was actually that lie that led me to suspect a link between you, but I would have got there all the same. And more than likely, Edward Moran reached the same conclusion today at three o’clock, when he called for me to go and see him. The orchid was the clue. Your great mistake was to orchestrate such a clever and theatrical revenge against the man who’d tried to do you in, and to frighten Cristiana O’Brian with a sign from her past she’d hoped never to see again—a mistake so great that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.” He paused. “And this one won’t be like the one in Kansas City, where you can get out as soon as you’ve brought up more than your quota of coal.”
15
It was nine-thirty when De Vincenzi wrapped it up.
“Let me recap, Lester Gillis. After you discovered Edward Moran hiding in Miami behind the name of Russell Sage, you found a way to make yourself indispensable to Ileana Sage. The Feds had just taken her husband away and it’s my theory that it was you, rather than she—as Anna Moran believes—who put them on his trail. You advised Ileana to take the hidden loot and flee to Europe. When you got to Paris and found out that Edward Moran was looking for his wife, you were quite probably terrified at first. But you recovered soon enough, and made up your mind to get rid of him for ever, this man who not only inspired a hatred born of the desire for revenge, but who also posed a serious threat to you. You helped Ileana escape from Paris in time and establish herself in Milan under the name of Cristiana O’Brian, never letting your enemy out of your sight. Somehow—I’m not sure how, but probably by having him tailed by a private detective—you knew when he arrived in Milan. You then conceived your criminal plan, without worrying about the other victims and with the cold intention of allowing suspicion to fall on Ileana Sage. If you killed Moran and got rid of Ileana too, you would in fact also achieve your goal of getting all the money she’d stolen from Moran and then multiplied.
“You sent John Bolton an invitation from the O’Brian Fashion House, care of the Albergo Palazzo, along with a floor plan for the building on Corso del Littorio—all the directions he’d need in order to show up in the signora’s room, while Valerio’s body was lying on her bed. From your point of view, Valerio’s murder was a masterstroke. That irrepressible Don Giovanni had promised to marry Verna Campbell, just as he had so many others, and he got the newspaper cutting about you from her. He had the measure of your true personality, and having started down the slippery slope of blackmail, he didn’t hesitate to try the same game with you after seeing how it had worked with Cristiana. A terribly dangerous game for him it was, and a fantastic chance for you to get rid of a troublesome blackmailer, ensuring in the process that suspicion would fall on the very person who had every reason to be rid of him herself!
“You killed him in the ‘museum of horrors’ and carried his body from there to Cristiana’s bed. But you weren’t willing to take any risks, and just in case the investigators should find the real crime scene, you left one of Cristiana’s medallions from the dog track next to the overturned mannequin; it had been easy enough for you to come by it. I’ll say it again: magnificent!”
Prospero O’Lary abandoned the farce of being the glossy and decorative “Oremus” and reverted to being Lester Gillis. He listened to De Vincenzi with a smirk.
“That’s how you got things moving, and everything went according to your plan. Bolton actually did come up to see Cristiana and you hid in her wardrobe. It would have been very unwise to let him catch sight of you or observe you up close. You used your time and situation in the wardrobe to perfect the evidence against Cristiana: you tore the dress she’d been wearing that morning to make it look like she’d actually struggled with Valerio while strangling him. I’ll admit that this little detail actually fooled me at first, when I found out about Valerio’s physical condition. That is, I thought it really had been Cristiana O’Brian who’d accidentally killed him by unintentionally pressing too hard on his throat.
“But let’s continue. The rest is pretty clear. Your second victim, Evelina, was forced on you by circumstance, and you made the best of it with some truly phenomenal quick thinking. At the moment, my reconstruction is only a process of deduction, but I’m sure it’s not far from the truth. I’d sent Cristiana away. Upset by her husband’s appearance, terrified by the orchid, confused by how Valerio had come to be killed in her bed and worried about the police intrusion, she goes down to the administrative offices. There she sees Evelina, who’d just been questioned by me. Aware of the deals her boss has been striking with some of her clients, and sure that it was Cristiana who murdered Valerio, she accuses her of the crime and threatens to tell me about all the blackmailing.
“Cristiana becomes even more terrified. She finds you in the director’s office,
pulls you into the window recess so that Madame Firmino won’t hear, and tells you what Evelina said. You act decisively. You leave the office for a couple of minutes, strangle Evelina in the safest and easiest way, and go back to Cristiana—saying nothing about what you’ve done, of course. When I discover the body I’m already on the trail of Cristiana’s blackmailing, and knowing what I do about Evelina’s meddling at Commendatore N—’s, I can only attribute the second crime to her. I’ve said it before, Gillis: the planning and execution of your crime were top-notch, brilliant! What’s left? Now everything is ready for you to kill Edward Moran, and it’s certain that his death will also be attributed to Cristiana. You just have to find the right opportunity, and it presents itself soon enough. As soon as you learn that Cristiana has gone out in the early afternoon, you tell yourself: now’s the moment. You go to the pasticceria on via Santa Margherita where Cristiana actually used to meet her friends and the clients she was blackmailing. You stay there long enough to be able to tell me you’d gone to wait for Cristiana and then you call Moran… I have no idea what you said to induce him to come to Corso del Littorio, and no doubt you’ll never tell me.”
Gillis’s smirk grew more pronounced.
“Oh, no, I’m a good lad at heart, and if I can do someone a favour… Since I’m a goner, I may as well satisfy your curiosity. I told him a friend was waiting for him in Cristiana’s room and that he should come to the via San Pietro all’Orto entrance and use the service stairs.”
“And he believed you?!”
“Of course! I added that his friend would be wearing an orchid in his buttonhole, and that he should wear one too as a mark of identification, just like he did in America.”
There’s no one left in De Vincenzi’s office apart from the inspector himself and Sani. Sani looks at De Vincenzi.
“Now this is over, too. Are you tired?”
De Vincenzi smiles at him in resignation.
“You can call this The Mystery of the Five Orchids.”
“Five? No, three. One was my trick, the other a trick of fate. Edward Moran shouldn’t have put that flower in his buttonhole. He really shouldn’t have. He told me he’d changed his ways…”
Did you know?
In 1929, when the Italian publisher Mondadori launched their popular series of crime and thriller titles (clad in the yellow jackets that would later give their name to the wider giallo tradition of Italian books and films) there were no Italian authors on the list. Many thought that Italy was inherently infertile ground for the thriller genre, with one critic claiming that a detective novel set in such a sleepy Mediterranean country was an “absurd hypothesis”. Augusto De Angelis strongly disagreed. He saw crime fiction as the natural product of his fraught and violent times: “The detective novel is the fruit – the red, bloodied fruit of our age.”
The question had a political significance too – the Marxist Antonio Gramsci was fascinated by the phenomenon of crime fiction, and saw in its unifying popularity a potential catalyst for revolutionary change. Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime were also interested in the genre, although their attitude towards it was confused – on the one hand they approved of the triumph of the forces of order over degeneracy and chaos that most thriller plots involved; on the other hand they were wary of representations of their Italian homeland as anything less than a harmonious idyll.
This is the background against which Augusto De Angelis’s The Murdered Banker appeared in 1935, the first of 20 novels starring Inspector De Vincenzi to be published over the next eight years. This period saw the peak of the British Golden Age puzzle mystery tradition, and the rise of the American hardboiled genre. However, De Angelis created a style all his own, with a detective who is more complex than the British “thinking machine” typified by Sherlock Holmes, but more sensitive than the tough-guy American private eye.
His originality won De Angelis great popularity, and a reputation as the father of the Italian mystery novel. Unfortunately, it also attracted the attention of the Fascist authorities, who censored De Angelis’s work. After writing a number of anti-Fascist articles, De Angelis was finally arrested in 1943. Although he was released three months later, he was soon beaten up by a Fascist thug and died from his injuries in 1944.
So, where do you go from here?
If you’d like another De Vincenzi mystery, get hold of a copy of The Hotel of the Three Roses in which our detective delves into a series of macabre murders in a seedy Milan boarding house.
Or if you’d prefer some northern grit, follow debt-collector Harry Kvist through the underworld of 1930s Stockholm as he tries desperately to clear his name in Martin Holmén’s hard-hitting debut Clinch.
AVAILABLE AND COMING SOON
FROM PUSHKIN VERTIGO
Jonathan Ames
You Were Never Really Here
Augusto De Angelis
The Murdered Banker
The Mystery of the Three Orchids
The Hotel of the Three Roses
María Angélica Bosco
Death Going Down
Piero Chiara
The Disappearance of Signora Giulia
Frédéric Dard
Bird in a Cage
The Wicked Go to Hell
Crush
The Executioner Weeps
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Pledge
The Execution of Justice
Suspicion
The Judge and His Hangman
Martin Holmén
Clinch
Alexander Lernet-Holenia
I Was Jack Mortimer
Boileau-Narcejac
Vertigo
She Who Was No More
Leo Perutz
Master of the Day of Judgment
Little Apple
St Peter’s Snow
Soji Shimada
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
Seishi Yokomizo
The Inugami Clan
Copyright
Pushkin Vertigo
71–75 Shelton Street
London, WC2H 9JQ
First published in Italian as Il mistero delle tre orchidee by Aurora in 1942
Translation © Jill Foulston, 2016
First published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2016
ISBN 978 1 782271 86 4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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The Mystery of the Three Orchids Page 14