“My name is Serafina Florio, but most people call me Donna Fina. I’m here on rather urgent business to see Monsieur Étienne Gaston. You remember me, I’m sure. I was here a few weeks ago, and this is a continuation of that meeting with him. If I may say so, you’re wearing a lovely shirt, the lace exquisitely crafted.
The butler simpered. “Won’t you come in, Madame? I’ll see if he’s in. This way, please,” and he led her into the receiving room. She remembered it from a few weeks ago, the stuffy atmosphere and the musty smell.
“You didn’t tell her I’m busy?” She heard Gaston’s irritation coming from the hall.
Looking harried, Gaston entered the room and gave her a curt nod. “Madame, I have very little time, very little time indeed. What is it? I’m about to give a lecture at the Académie des Sciences.”
“Again?” She doubted it. She looked at his face. It was wan, the skin yellowed, more wrinkled than she remembered. She stared at him until she saw the small compress on his face and everything fell into place.
“Sit please. I’m much in demand and can spare you only a brief moment or two.”
“You helped Elena, didn’t you?”
“Pardon?”
“You helped Elena kill the woman in the Rue Cassette, didn’t you?”
He looked at her, his eyes frozen. “How dare you!”
“She couldn’t have done it without you. She needed you. She loved you, then she despised you, but she was passion personified and you soared in her arms. Hers was sparkling conversation, a world of parties and salons, of artists and poets. She made a heaven of your hell, and she carried your child. And when she needed your help, needed you to find an expendable body, you had one at the ready, didn’t you? And it was perfect for you, wasn’t it, because you found the woman who’d given you that wretched disease—the disease you then passed on to Elena.”
“Enough!”
“And when she needed your help to pull the trigger, you pulled it, didn’t you? Elena was too short to reach the woman’s head, so you stood in back of the duped soul and fired into her brain, the bullet angling downward. What was the name of the woman you shot?”
“I ... don’t know.”
“You slept with her then shot her and you don’t even know her name.”
He looked from left to right, backed away from Serafina and hit the arm of a chair, teetering off balance. “Fabrication!”
She moved in his direction. “Fabrication, indeed,” Serafina said. “You’re lying. Lied to me before and you’re lying to me now.”
She took a few more steps toward him.
He shook his head. “N-no, not true.” He backed away.
“You lied about how long Elena stayed with you on the night she disappeared and when I asked you if you had a gun, you told me it was a revolver and it was missing.”
“Yes, missing, I tell you!”
“But you keep a set of pistols in the wooden box right here, don’t you? Why did you go upstairs to check?”
“I needed to be sure ...”
She walked over to the box and opened the lid. Lifting it, she showed him the green felt, the empty depressions made for a pair of pocket pistols.
His eyes darted around the room.
“Take the bandage from your face.”
“How rude!”
“Remove the bandage. Show me the lesion.”
“Enough.!”
“You don’t have much time. Confess. Ease the burden. Grant yourself some peace.”
He darted left, right, and in a few steps bounded to the hall, opened the front door and stared into the faces of Valois and his assistant.
Chapter 43: Glace au Four
The Loffredo’s were settled in their apartment—at least for the most part—and with some exceptions, they began to enjoy Paris. The children spent time exploring the city, wandering the many parks, attending the expositions at the Palais de l’Industrie, treating themselves to pastry, switching from Sicilian to Italian to French without realizing it. They were always accompanied by Assunta who met friends in the many parks. She told Serafina that she must be in heaven. “Pinch me, please, Donna Fina.”
All the bedrooms were sorted. Loffredo had his study. Although she missed her mother’s sitting room, Serafina spent her thinking time in the ladies’ parlor or for particularly knotty problems, in the conservatory where she could look out over the city and let her mind wander.
Serafina and Loffredo were dressed and sitting in two of the parlor’s Louis XV chairs waiting for their guests to arrive.
“Where did Rosa get that fancy butler?” Loffredo asked.
Serafina smiled. “Jacques? He adds a certain je ne sais quois to her teas, don’t you think? He worked for Gaston. Last week she knocked on his door, looked the butler up and down, and offered him a job on the spot.”
Because of their move to Paris, as well as her happiness, Serafina’s figure had returned to a more youthful appearance and she wore her favorite dress, a deep French blue with organdy flounces for the occasion. Loffredo was Loffredo, gorgeous as always in formal attire. To celebrate the longest day of the year, they had invited the Valois family and Levi Busacca, the first dinner guests in their new home, although Busacca had visited on prior occasions and stayed for tea. An old man, aging rapidly after the death of his daughter, he accepted the invitation with pleasure but stated he’d leave soon after the meal. Except for Carlo, the whole family would be together. And Rosa and Tessa, of course.
Serafina hadn’t seen Giulia or Carmela since the afternoon of their arrival nearly a month ago. As she stared at the glass above the mantel, she couldn’t help thinking of Oltramari and Carlo. No word from him, but it was too soon for his reply to the letter they’d written two weeks ago, all of them penning something. She fought the churning pit in her stomach. Perhaps her oldest son had been right. She should have paid Don Tigro his protection money. It was the idea of payment for no services rendered that she found abhorrent, and Loffredo agreed. She couldn’t pay him, wouldn’t do it. But it was also the visit to Paris that drew her away from the increasingly meager joy that life in Oltramari had become.
The mystery surrounding Elena Busacca’s death and disappearance was over as far as the police were concerned. Not to Serafina, however. The absence of one truth continued to nag. “I need to ask him a few questions tonight. I hope you don’t mind.”
As soon as the press got wind of it, the news of Étienne Gaston’s arrest for the murder of a streetwalker made the front page of La Presse. Parisians wallowed in the story for two weeks.
“He was a minor figure with some following, a scholar, known to university professors and the Académie des Sciences perhaps, but he wasn’t generally known by the public,” Loffredo said, “until the journalists got hold of him. They blew him up into a personality, aggrandizing his importance.”
“You mean those inky fingers created Gaston out of newsprint,” Serafina said.
“Precisely. Turned him into someone the public loved to hate. People swore they’d followed his career for years, although a month ago he was unheard of. It was brave of Valois to imprison him.”
“The inspector found it distasteful, I could tell by the way he held his mouth,” Serafina said. “But I’ve grown fond of Alphonse.”
Some of the lesser papers gave juicier accounts of Gaston’s affair with Elena. Others treated it as a cautionary tale, mentioning Elena Busacca’s disappearance and her role in falsifying her own death, her life as a demimonde, her rapid dissolution, and her ultimate suicide.
“When Tarnier told me why he treated her, I knew she was doomed,” Loffredo said. His eyes roamed the walls looking for comfort, finding it, she hoped, in her eyes. They kissed.
“Weren’t you frightened? I mean, she was your wife.” Serafina had longed to ask Loffredo whether he worried about his own physical wellbeing but was afraid. If in a moment of loneliness, he and Elena had taken comfort in each other—only natural, they were after all husband a
nd wife—then Elena may have passed on a disease that might mean her own demise. But Serafina believed there were areas of a person that should remain private even in a marriage, and she wouldn’t invade that part of Loffredo, not ever. She had no hesitation about asking her children anything, their most secret thoughts, for instance, but that was another matter.
“I was frightened for her, not for me. She was my wife in name only. We never ... I couldn’t manage to ...”
“Not even on your wedding night?”
He shook his head.
“You mean you were celibate all that time until we began to ...?”
He nodded. “Over twenty years.”
Serafina felt the hot stirring of her blood. She dabbed her forehead with a linen, not daring to touch him. She consulted her watch. Their guests would be here any minute. Best to fan herself and change the subject.
She rose and kissed the top of his head, contenting herself with drawing a circle round his ear. Lest she take a deeper step in that direction from which there’d be no return, she strolled into the dining room where the table had been set with linen, silver, crystal, and Limoges.
Rosa had settled in. By now she knew half the arrondissement. Her afternoon gatherings were quite the thing, and not just for their tea and delicate sweets. A growing number of guests frequented her apartment to be entertained and to be seen. They listened to her talk with hushed attention, some adding a salacious detail or two they’d picked up, but all realizing that Rosa, with her first-hand knowledge of the more sordid details of society—the Busacca incident for one—had little compunction in telling her tales.
How their lives had changed. Serafina and her family were used to sitting at a plain round table in a familiar setting, the kitchen in their home in Oltramari. But she looked around at the opulence of the dining room, its polished mahogany table, the crystal chandelier suspended high above it, the shiny parquet floors that Totò loved to slide on, the oriental carpets, the damask drapes, and began to feel at home.
Their expenses were far greater here than in Oltramari and she knew they’d increase, but that didn’t seem to bother Loffredo who managed the ledger now that Vicenzu worked for Busacca. In the fall there’d be schooling for Totò and they must engage a femme savante dedicated to Maria’s non-musical education. And of course they’d need more servants—Assunta couldn’t keep the apartment by herself. So Rosa who’d made friends with all of the building’s residents, found Serafina an out of work butler, a parlor maid, and a young maid to help out in the kitchen.
Through Rosa’s new butler, Jacques, they’d found a music teacher for Maria, one who would prepare her for entry into the Paris Conservatory where she would study piano and composition. The school was located in the ninth arrondissement, one of the first conservatories in the world to admit females, but it was a long trek for a ten-year old. Loffredo had taken her there every day, walking with her along the Seine until they reached the Tuileries, then northeast to the far corner of the ninth arrondissement where Maria would stare at the building that housed her new passion. The move had been good for Maria, Loffredo told Serafina. She was no longer a queen bee, but just one of thousands with musical talent, determined to make her way. Soon she knew the route by heart, and they’d take shortcuts and detours, roaming the streets, nodding to the neighborhood, but Maria would always find her way to Rue du Conservatoire. “Closed for the year,” Loffredo told her the first time they’d found it, but he told Maria to imagine the students filing in and out. She told him she could feel the longing in her fingers. Mornings and afternoons she practiced on the grand piano in the second-floor ballroom, never tempted by the breathtaking view of Paris.
But there were moments when Serafina thought they’d made a mistake moving to Paris, a few times when she’d lain awake tossing, turning, smelling again in her mind the charred remains of the apothecary shop or the sweet fragrance of the public gardens. And she’d have a few pangs of regret even in the sumptuous parks of Paris when she’d listening in vain for the sounds of her native tongue on the boulevards and streets. Then the longing for her native land took her breath away and she’d have to sit.
Last week when she began planning the meal, Renata had asked for Serafina’s help with the menu, the wine list, and the seating.
The seating was the easiest part, Serafina told her, “Loffredo and I at either end, seven on each side. We’ll begin with Loffredo’s right where we must seat Busacca.”
Renata nodded and began drawing a diagram. “Opposite Busacca, we must put Vicenzu, and next to him, Carmela.”
“Perfect,” Serafina declared. “Let’s put Teo and Arcangelo close to Busacca as well. He’s a man with many connections in this town.”
“Too many men on one end of the table I think,” Renata said when she looked at their first seating diagram.
“Then you’ll sit next to Busacca across from Arcangelo and we’ll put Carmela next to him. I hope for your sake he’s changed the bandages on his foot and ankle, but the aroma of your cooking will mask its sourness, I hope.”
“Mama!”
“Who should we place next to you?” Renata asked.
“Françoise Valois on my right, the inspector on my left.”
“I’m beginning to see the reason for this dinner, Renata said.
“Connections and work, of course. What else is there?” Serafina asked.
“What about friendship and conviviality, the love of food and wine, the celebration of light?” Renata asked.
“Of course, my sweetness, but we must also make room for conniving. We have to live, don’t we?” She threw this last part out to Rosa who had entered.
“What are you so worried about? Loffredo’s loaded and he’s your husband now. That makes you a countess. Better start acting like one. The French love aristocracy, you know. You need a new wardrobe and you should be frequenting the parks with your nose held high and show a little more of your décolleté, especially now that the weather is warm. You cover everything up. Countesses don’t do that. What’s wrong with Giulia, she should be designing daring frocks for you? Instead, you wear a long face and sit inside hunched and fretting. Leave Oltramari behind you and live. And by the way, I’ve just had a letter from Scarpo who watches both our houses and takes care that the guards are properly stationed. All is well.”
“Except for Carlo,” Serafina said. “I feel it.”
Rosa said nothing.
“Then help us plan the meal.”
The madam rubbed her hands together and spoke to Renata. “Create something worthy of Paris in the summer, but of course you will. And no pasta, please. Not a time to show off Sicilian cuisine. You’ve been to Les Halles, haven’t you?”
“Every day. The vendors tip their hats to me now.”
Serafina stopped her reverie and looked at her watch. Two minutes to eight. Time to receive her guests. She walked back and whispered in Loffredo’s ear. “Bet on the first to arrive?”
“I say the Valois family.”
She shook her head. “Giulia, perhaps, or Busacca, but of course never Carmela.”
“Not fair, choose one.”
“Busacca, then.”
He kissed her. “And we bet for what?”
“The usual,” she said.
“Either way, I win.”
The Valois were the first to arrive, followed quickly by Busacca. The butler took their things and showed them to the parlor and there were introductions, hugs and kisses and more commotion when Carmela and Giulia arrived, then Rosa and Tessa.
“The last to arrive are those who travel the least.”
“Who said that?”
“I just did.”
They formed small groups or looked out the window at the view, the bustle of traffic below, in awe of the luminous quality of the summer sky. Valois took Loffredo aside and began a conversation. Serafina watched Loffredo nodding as Valois spoke but was too busy to hear them. Presently Valois laughed and clapped Loffredo on the back and the
two men shook hands. She complimented Françoise on her dress, a blue silk in summer weight that matched her eyes. For her part, Françoise admired the view and the furniture.
“You had to kill for this room, eh, Serafina?” Valois said, stroking his lapel.
“Not me, but someone had to.” She introduced Françoise to Carmela and Giulia.
“Giulia is the designer at the House of Grinaldi.”
“Madame, your dress is stunning,” Giulia said. “So light and summery,” she said, hugging Tessa who joined the group and wore a dusky pink of light silk with overskirts of organza. “I don’t think it’s one of ours, but quite lovely and fits you perfectly.”
“And Mama, have you nothing better to wear?” Giulia asked.
“But you made it, Giulia. Now you don’t like your own work?”
“It’s seven years old.”
Serafina shrugged.
Rosa was wearing a new gown of green linen and made room for Busacca.
“Good to see you, Levi. You’ve been up to no good, I can see by your eyes.”
“Why is it that La Grinaldi will not recommend my millinery to her clients?” Busacca asked, a twinkle in his eye despite his arm band.
“Now she does,” Carmela said and Giulia nodded. “We took care of that, Levi, and intend to pay our respects to all the houses of fashion. Time to go back to Palermo. Your wife misses you.”
“I leave a week from yesterday, now that my business is in the competent hands of your family. Vicenzu and Ricci work well together and David is learning to spend in order to make.”
“And Sophie?”
He shook his head. “Not a dinner subject, but she’ll come around. She insists she and her oldest son are innocent of all wrongdoing.”
Serafina, Rosa, and Françoise worked together to change the subject.
“And Tessa?”
“The summer of course but she’s making the conservatory into her studio and hopes to join Académie Julian as soon as she has a portfolio. My girl is happy; I’m happy. We bask in the gaiety of Paris.”
Murder On The Rue Cassette (A Serafina Florio Mystery) Page 28