“They laughed at me, those worthless half-baked students, good for nothing more than to teach schoolchildren to daub. Laughed at me because of him. The professor, the man who should have taught and helped me. The man who, had he understood my talent, would have thrown down his brush like Verrocchio, never to paint again. But I made them pay, I made them all pay, pay with their cheque books, pay by making fools of themselves, pay by giving me a lifetime of laughter at their expense—pay—”
“When did your father die?”
“What …?” Benozzetti halted, breathing heavily, aware all of a sudden of the Marshal’s presence.
The Marshal wandered away from him, looking carefully along the workbenches and shelves at the brushes, bottles, pestles and strange tools he couldn’t recognize. He looked at everything but touched nothing, his big hands still grasping his hat.
“Oh, you know how it is. A person as interesting and talented as you are … it makes you wonder where it all came from. Was your father a painter, too, for instance—this stuff here, what is it?”
“Ashes. For making ink.”
“Ah.” The Marshal wandered on, still looking at everything except Benozzetti, who followed him uncertainly, asking questions without waiting for an answer. He knew that when he hit the right question there would be no wait for an answer. Benozzetti would react like a wounded animal. The Marshal’s heart was beating fast, he could hear it in the long, silent room, as though he were afraid the reaction might be a physical attack rather than a verbal one. It even occurred to him to wonder whether the man might have a pistol by his bedside in case of burglars, but it was too far to wander casually over there. Besides, there was the screen. He wasn’t armed himself.
“Mind you, I don’t know why I should think of your father—unless I had young Marco Landini in mind. He’s artistic like his father, isn’t he? Not like you, of course, not to the same level. But perhaps you inherited some of your talent from your mother.”
“No! Don’t!”
The Marshal jumped as if the other man really had fired a shot. He wanted to look at him now but didn’t.
“I’m sorry. Should I not be looking at these jars? I haven’t touched anything—”
“No. No, it’s all right.”
Even without looking, the man’s painful breathing told him he was close to the mark. Should he go on or wait. Wait. His back was prickling as though he were expecting claws to be dug into it. Dangerous. He’d known from the start that the man was dangerous and yet he’d come here unarmed. The voice behind him spoke again, but it wasn’t Benozzetti’s voice. A smaller, weaker sound.
“I don’t care. I don’t need—” It tailed away.
He’d lied about that too, then, to Marco. She was dead now but if she’d died when he was small, he wouldn’t even remember, let alone say, “I don’t care.” He wished fervently that he hadn’t got himself into this situation, trapped in this great big tomb full of treasures with its mad occupant. But he was here now, and it was too late. The tension of the man behind him was so great as to be unbearable. Distract him. Distract—
“Ah.” He gave a deep sigh and silently begged his dead parents’ forgiveness for what he was about to say. “I suppose you must have gone through something on the lines of what I had to go through. My mother left when I was small. The usual story, another man. Of course, these days, a mother would never abandon her child, but then no woman who could be called immoral could ever claim custody. And we victims have to try and understand their dilemma, especially …” The scar, the scar on his ear … “Especially when there’s cruelty involved. How is a woman to defend herself?”
“And how is a child to defend himself?” It wasn’t that other, childish voice now but Benozzetti’s own. The Marshal turned and looked at him. His face was quite changed. The mask through which his snake’s eyes had looked at him was gone, dissolved. The tight muscles were flaccid. He was looking at an ordinary man now, or what was left of him. Benozzetti pointed slowly at his own ear. “It wasn’t just this, this sort of thing wasn’t the worst of it, Marshal. The hatred was the worst of it because, you see, I looked like her, and as you very cleverly guessed, I inherited her talent. His second wife hated me, if anything more than he did.”
“So you were taken away from them?”
“Nothing so vulgar, Marshal. My father was a wealthy man and a man of some importance in the pharmaceutical industry. Nevertheless, when this injury which has left me deaf in one ear brought me near to death, something had to be done. My father agreed to send me away to an expensive college where the monks kept me, even during the holidays, and there was no prosecution.”
“I see. You must have suffered a great deal. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you by mentioning it. It’s just that, as I told you the first time we met, I rarely get to meet anyone as fascinating and as talented as you. You’ve never told anyone all this before? I mean, you didn’t mention it in your piece for the paper, although you gave the impression you wanted people to understand you. Shouldn’t you tell—well, someone competent, of course, not the general public?”
His face was hardening again and he now regarded the Marshal with smiling disdain. “You’re surely not talking about a psychoanalyst? I’d thought better of you. Those people are as foolish and arrogant as the art experts.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re right. But it might come in useful to you, just the same, without your taking it too seriously yourself. After all, this confession you’ve published—”
“That wasn’t a confession! Did I call it a confession? Am I responsible for the idiocies of the newspaper world?”
“No, no.” He was back to normal again, then. “I hadn’t thought. It was just a headline, of course. But even so, there’ll be a reaction and if you should be prosecuted—”
Benozzetti laughed bitterly. “How little you understand these things, Marshal. Who do you imagine will throw the first stone? The auction house? You think they’ll admit they’ve let a forgery through their hands? No one would buy there again. The buyer, then, you expect him to admit he’s spent fifty million on a fake. I know who that buyer is, though he wasn’t present at the auction himself, and I can promise you that he will never admit that he’s been made a fool of!”
The Marshal had no answer to that. He still felt sure the painting had been genuine, but what difference, after all, did that make? If it were, then the one sold years ago to the American museum would be a fake and the same arguments remained. Besides, wasn’t he, like everyone else, wanting to believe the painting was real for Marco’s sake? They were all in the same boat, weren’t they?
“Well, Marshal?”
“I understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m glad of it, because your young friend Marco isn’t going to throw the first stone, either, is he?”
“No, I suppose not. What about that American museum, though? Won’t they want to check up on their picture now?”
“Ha! When I was preparing my little denouncement I wrote to them, warning them that another version was about to go to auction in Florence and sending them the photo of me with the third one that you saw in the papers. What do you think they replied?”
“I don’t know … They asked for further proof?”
“Further proof! Further proof is just what they don’t want. Further proof of their stupidity, their ignorance, their wasted dollars? They didn’t reply, Marshal. They will never reply to anyone on the subject. They will lie low, keep quiet until it’s all blown over and their Antonio Franchi will remain just that. You’ll see that every picture I ever painted will remain somewhere in its museum or private collection.”
“In that case—” He mustn’t make a mistake now. “In that case, why did you stop? You did this because you’re giving up, didn’t you? But why? What will you do?”
“Do? I’ll do whatever I feel like doing! I don’t need all this! He waved an agitated hand around him. “I don’t need anything. Or anyone.”
“You n
eeded Landini.” That was it. That was what explained it.
“Landini! A critic! Another fool! He used me to further his career!”
“Yes, I believe you.”
“Let me tell you, that man—”
“He understood you, didn’t he?”
“Nobody is capable of understanding me or my work.”
“All right. But as far as it was possible he did understand you. He told you what to paint, didn’t he?”
“Nobody tells me what to paint.”
“He suggested, then.”
“If you mean he knew the market, then yes, he suggested.”
Yes, thought the Marshal, and I can’t say it, I can’t say he knew the clients and you didn’t. I can’t say you’ve fallen flat on your face because he wasn’t there to stop you.
“And now he’s dead. Well, no doubt you’ve worked hard all your life and have as much right to retire as the rest of us.”
“Quite.”
What would he do? Go on living with his failure in this vault? The Marshal shivered. He put on his hat to go, then paused. Without looking at Benozzetti he asked, “The painting you showed me the last time I was here. You wouldn’t let me look at it again, would you?”
“So you can say it’s not by Titian?”
“No, no …”
“So you can say it’s faultless? It isn’t. I’ve destroyed it.”
“Ah …” As he left, he avoided looking Benozzetti in the face, not wanting to see what was there. He only touched him briefly on the arm as he went out.
The afternoon was fading to darkness, but only the freezing wind made the outside world colder than the studio. Benozzetti wouldn’t kill himself, he felt sure of that. If he were the sort to blame himself for his failures, he’d have done it as a young man, the young man who failed as a painter. What would happen to him? Perhaps it was only to cheer himself up that the Marshal muttered as he opened the car door to the welcome blast of the heater, “Perhaps he’ll try and paint.”
“What?” Di Nuccio asked.
“Nothing, nothing.”
“I kept the engine going—it’s so cold.”
“You did right.” At any rate, he’d found out all he needed to know. As to why he needed to know, he was quite unconscious of the reason and he wasn’t one to ask questions of himself.
Eighteen
“And what I’m wondering is …” It was always difficult explaining things to Ferrini. Explaining wasn’t the Marshal’s strong point, and then you never knew what mood he would be in. “I mean, it’s difficult enough being an adolescent … I don’t know if you remember.”
“Oh yes. I thought about sex all the time, day and night.”
The Marshal, full to bursting from dinner out in the country where they had “not lingered” until after eleven, seemed to remember thinking more about eating. He’d spent half his adolescent life in search of food and the other half worrying about being fat. He decided against admitting to this.
“Well then, how would you have felt if you’d known—known, not suspected, that your father was homosexual?”
“I’d have been terrified.”
“Exactly.” They looked at the three photographs in the open files on the Marshal’s desk between them.
“They used to take Nicolino with them down to the Cascine for their orgies,” the Marshal said. “He’ll have known, or realized later when he grew up. Amelio, from all accounts, saw it going on in the house.”
“And Salvatore Angius? We know less about him, but we do know Silvano picked him up from the gutter and ‘adopted him.’ It’s a different situation, but who’s to say he really was homosexual? That might have been the price of Silvano’s help.”
“That’s what Di Maira wondered. And a good reason to detest him, too. Well, these three lads start out even, then:
“Previous convictions for Amelio and Salvatore. Theft mostly, possessing flick knifes, both, illegal detention of arms … and … this!”
Ferrini pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper article recounting the arrest of Salvatore Angius for armed robbery together with two other men.
“No,” he said, seeing the Marshal scan the small column once and then twice. “It doesn’t specify the type of gun and I thought I’d be sticking my neck out if I asked for the file.”
“You were right …”
“But look at the date.”
“Only three months after the sixty-eight murder.”
“You still think he was there?”
“I can’t prove it. But if he took the child away to protect Silvano, he may have taken the gun, too.”
“He’d have been pretty stupid to use it in a robbery when it had been used to kill,” Ferrini pointed out.
“He may not have fired it, or even intended to fire it. Besides, he doesn’t look or sound too bright to me. He got caught.”
“Yes, he did. And he got put away. And he tipped up in the next cell to Sergio Muscas who was waiting trial for the sixty-eight murder. Now, listen to this: his lawyer contacted Muscas’s lawyer to tell him his client had made a statement of sorts about Muscas. He said, ‘That poor goop didn’t do it. I know who did. It was Flavio Vargius.’ Here we go round in circles again.”
“Not really.” The Marshal was unperturbed. “Not now that we understand the relationship between these men. All that means is that he was still dependent on Silvano and putting his oar in to protect him when he saw the chance.”
“Even so, you have to admit that Silvano had a lot of the right symptoms. I mean what you’ve been telling me about how he murdered his first wife when she tried to leave him, and this business Di Maira was telling you about. His second wife taking off in seventy-four and then in nineteen eighty …”
“So why didn’t he kill her?”
“How d’you mean?”
“He started off on the same track, going to the carabinieri and reporting her for desertion. He killed his first wife when she betrayed him. He killed Belinda Muscas when she betrayed him. So why didn’t he kill his second wife if he was feeling murderous? You honestly believe that, at his age, he suddenly changed character and, instead of attacking the person who’d offended him, he went out and murdered a bunch of total strangers? And he didn’t change. You can see the pattern. His first wife and her brother, Belinda and her husband. The second wife and the men he brought home. To the last, before he was arrested, he had a live-in woman and a regular man friend, apart from his usual extra orgies and pick-ups. He never changed. Besides, he was too clever to use that Beretta twenty-two again and risk incriminating himself for the sixty-eight job. Nobody would do that unless they wanted to get caught.”
“But they do, don’t they?” Ferrini insisted. “We’ve learned that much from Bacci’s stuff. A lot of them do want to get caught.”
“Some of them. But Silvano didn’t confess when Romola accused him of being the Monster and tore his house apart looking for proof. Far from confessing, he left the country.”
“All right. I was just provoking you. Here.” Ferrini grinned and handed over whatever remained in the large envelope.
The Marshal slid the contents out, wondering as he did so how it could be that he had spent the last two or three days in a state of total deflation, suspecting Silvano, but that the minute Ferrini put that suspicion into words …
“What’s this?” He stared at the sheaf of papers, then at Ferrini.
“Just a few notes of mine. I thought I’d surprise you. Well, go on. Read.”
“But—”
“Read.”
The Marshal read the first few lines but his glance at the first line had been enough, though there was nothing to indicate the source.
“Ferrini, how in God’s name did you—?”
“A few notes of mine, as I said. By the way, our little chirruping friend Noferini was feeling a bit down last time I saw him. It seems that, in his enthusiasm, he took it upon himself to get in touch with the council for confirmation of the roadworks tha
t caused one of our prize witnesses to take a certain detour one Sunday night and see the Suspect near the scene of the crime.”
“And I suppose there weren’t any roadworks?”
“How did you guess? He made out a report for Simonetti and got a rocket in return.”
“I thought as much. But it’s ridiculous,” the Marshal pointed out. “The defence will check.”
Ferrini shrugged. “That’s what Noferini tried to say and all he got for that was, ‘The council is no doubt mistaken.’ Anyway, we should worry. It was pretty convenient for us that he was feeling disillusioned—oh, he still thinks the Suspect’s guilty, he just doesn’t think the end justifies the means. I promised I’d look into it and into one or two other things. Relieved his conscience for him. That”—he indicated the notes—“was the price. He doesn’t know what he’s given me. It was in English. He typed it on to the computer without understanding more than two words. I got on to Bacci, who read it to me, translating as he went and I wrote my notes. Now”—he sat back and lit a fresh cigarette—“read them.”
The Marshal read.
FBI BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE UNIT
NCAVC, QUANTICO Va.
Profile based on information received related to 16 murders committed between 1968 and 1985 in Florence, Italy.
Scene of Crime
The scene of all these murders, an isolated country lane among vines and olives, could be said in all cases to have been “chosen” by the victims who parked there. Nevertheless, it tells us a lot about the offender. It suggests previous activity as a Peeping Tom, as does the fact that most of the victims had just finished sexual intercourse when attacked. Couples who habitually have sexual intercourse in parked cars tend to frequent the same place regularly. The offender probably stalked couples on a Saturday night until he found one parking habitually in a spot which suited his purpose—this meant having somewhere discreet to leave his own vehicle for fast removal from the scene, a sheltered spot where he could operate on the female without his activities being visible to a passing car, and perhaps water available if he needed to wash himself.
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