The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

  “What?” said Homer, looking eagerly at Zee. “What does it say?”

  Zee choked, and whispered a translation, “Sinners who enslave reason to lust.”

  “Ah,” said Homer, the light dawning. “Paolo and Francesca?”

  Zee nodded. “Si, Paolo and Francesca.”

  “L’lnferno,” said Rossi gently, getting to his feet, brushing fragments of broken glass from the knees of his trousers. “Canto quinto.”

  “What a learned inspector,” murmured Homer.

  Rossi glanced at Alberto, then asked a question of Zee, speaking softly. “Adulterio?”

  Zee shrugged, and for a moment there was silence. Then Homer cleared his throat and told Rossi what he had seen last week in the same place, the lovemaking of Alberto’s wife and Franco Spoleto. He went on to describe the stranger who had also looked on.

  “A tall handsome man with grey hair and beard, and a powerful nose with a jog in it halfway down.” It was an inadequate description. Homer wanted to explain to Inspector Rossi that there had been an otherworldly quality about the man, something either holy or unholy. He wanted to portray the eeriness of the quiet afternoon. There had been no sound but the twittering birds in the undergrowth, the low chattering of the girl, the answering clucking of the boy, as though they too were birds. “He was quite splendid, in a way.”

  Rossi nodded. He seemed hardly to be listening. Lucretia joined them solemnly as Agent Piro spread lengths of plastic over the bodies of Isabella and Franco. Then the inspector looked up at Homer and asked, “When they talk, you hear the words?”

  “Yes,” said Homer. “But I couldn’t understand them very well.” He paused, wondering if he should report what Franco had said, Your husband will kill me. Deciding that Alberto was in plenty of trouble anyway, he repeated the incriminating words aloud. Lucretia and Zee listened, then looked over their shoulders at the crouched figure of the bereaved husband.

  Rossi took the news calmly, not bothering to glance at Alberto. “What other things they say?”

  “Oh, a lot of things, but the only word I understood was father. She mentioned her father.”

  Lucretia groaned. “Oh, her poor parents. I’ll have to call them. No, the telephone is too cruel. I’ll go see them myself.”

  “And Franco lived with his mother in Cerbaia,” said Zee quickly. He shivered with apprehension. “I’ll go to her.”

  They climbed the stairs and went indoors. Some of the students were clearing the tables in the dining room. Ned Saltmarsh stopped short with a bowl of fruit in his hand, and stared at Inspector Rossi in fascinated horror. Julia Smith silently swept crumbs off the table. Tom piled dishes on a tray.

  Lucretia swung open the kitchen door and called out for Matteo. “Where is he?” she said sharply. “Why isn’the helping?”.

  “He’s gone,” said Tom shortly. “We couldn’t find him anywhere. His door was open and all his stuff is missing.”

  Rossi was interested at once in Matteo. He asked questions, and for the first time he took a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote something down. “What he look like, this Matteo Luzzi? You have a picture?”

  There was a blank pause, and then Zee reached for the inspector’s notebook and made a rapid sketch of Matteo’s cherub face, his halo of curly hair.

  “Yes, yes, that’s Matteo,” said Homer, looking over his shoulder. “He looks just like that, like the angel Gabriel.”

  “Grazie,” murmured Rossi, taking back the notebook, looking at the picture.

  Matteo was missing, but Alberto was present, a prime suspect, front and center. Once again the room was cleared of students. Tom O’Toole protested, then gave in and walked out with Julia. Ned barged after them, the three Debbies wandered off with Kevin, and Joan stalked away with Dorothy.

  A chair was pulled out for Alberto, and the questioning began.

  It was interrupted by the arrival of three more police agents, accompanied by the medical examiner. Inspector Rossi turned them over to Agent Piro. At once Piro led them outdoors and down the stone stairs to the place where the bodies lay under their plastic sheets. The three policemen began searching the glass houses, exploring the abandoned sheds and cold frames, the rusted pipes and broken chimneys.

  In the dining room Rossi explained to Alberto in Italian that he did not have to reply without the benefit of counsel, but then he began at once to ask painful questions, his voice light and courteous. Homer got the gist of the first question—had Alberto known about his wife’s lover?

  Alberto merely shook his head, and stared at the jars of vinegar and oil in the middle of the table. His eyes were red. He clutched his arms across his chest as if to hold his shivering body together.

  “Lei, é un studente della Divina Commedia?” In other words, Homer guessed, had he written the words about Paolo and Francesca on the scrap of paper?

  Alberto’s moist eyes stared in fright at Rossi. He seemed genuinely surprised, as though wondering what this insane question could possibly mean. Was it a trap? “No, no.” Alberto turned to the others for confirmation, spread out his hands and spoke in English, “I do not read books,” and then he burst out in Italian, “Sono un tifoso della fiorentina.” He was a fan of the Florentine soccer team, that was all, not an intellectual, not a reader of books.

  But it didn’t take Rossi long to discover that Alberto had attended a school in which, as in most Italian schools, two or three years had been devoted to the study of The Divine Comedy. Prompted by Rossi, he was able to complete the first line of the Inferno.

  “Nel mezzo del cammin—,” began Rossi encouragingly.

  “—di nostra vita,” whispered Alberto, his eyes wild. To what was he confessing?

  “But everybody knows the first lines of the Infemo by heart,” said Lucretia, whispering to Homer. “It doesn’t mean he knew his Dante well enough to quote the part about Paolo and Francesca.”

  But Alberto’s credibility was sinking still further. He groaned aloud and smote his forehead, as one of Rossi’s assistants came into the dining room and laid an object on the table, slipping it from the newspaper in which he had been cradling it.

  It was a shotgun. He had found it in one of the greenhouses, leaning against a ruined furnace.

  The medical examiner came in too. Bending down over Rossi, he whispered in his ear.

  Alberto began to weep. The gun was his, he sobbed. It had been missing for a week.

  Zee spoke up suddenly in English, “But we heard the shots. We heard a gun go off early this morning, about six o’clock. Everybody heard it.” He turned to Lucretia with a wry smile. “Especially young Sukey.” Turning back to Rossi, he explained in two languages, “I thought it was just someone shooting birds.”

  Rossi looked mildly at Alberto, and asked him when he had got out of bed that morning.

  “Alle quattro e mezzo.” Alberto had arisen at four-thirty. He had taken his birdgun and driven to the countryside for birds. The shotgun on the table had been missing, but it was not for birds anyway. It was for bigger game, for deer. The projectile was a slug, not a cartridge full of pellets. Sometimes, said Alberto, he went with a friend to the Dolomites on holiday, to shoot deer. This morning his luck had been bad. He had returned without any birds.

  Rossi asked him if anyone could back up his story that he had been somewhere else this morning, not here at the villa.

  Alberto cowered, and stroked his bald head helplessly. He didn’t know. He didn’t think so. He had been alone on a hillside near La Quiete.

  The other police agents came in, their tasks completed. Rossi set them to work at once, inspecting the villa.

  “I will come with you,” volunteered Lucretia, holding up her ring of keys. Homer suspected she didn’t want barbarians blundering around in private places without her supervision.

  Rossi turned back to Alberto. He spoke in Italian, but the questions were simple. Homer could turn most of them into English in his head.

  “Your wife, was she still
in bed when you got back?”

  Once again Alberto’s eyes looked wild. Homer felt sorry for him. The poor bastard should stop answering questions. “No,” said Alberto. “I didn’t see her all day. I looked for her everywhere. Only now have I found her.” Once again he was close to tears.

  Rossi went on. His voice was polite, his questions deadly. “Signor Fraticelli, your wife died this morning at about six o’clock. How do we know you were shooting birds in La Quiete? Perhaps you were here, a jealous husband, killing your wife and her lover.” Rossi grinned pleasantly, but his narrow jaw with its prominent teeth was like a fox’s muzzle, snapping at Alberto’s torn flanks.

  Alberto raised his hands to heaven. “I didn’t kill her. I swear to you. She was my wife.”

  Alberto’s interview was over. Rossi turned patiently to the others. He questioned Zee.

  Homer listened, wondering if Zee would confess his conviction for homicide in the United States. Zee didn’t. Well, why should he?

  Lucretia had given Rossi a list of the residents of the villa. Looking at it now, he summoned Professor Himmelfahrt. It was apparent that the inspector was going to work his way patiently through the list, one at a time, staff and students alike.

  Zee’s turn was finished, and he beckoned Homer into the kitchen. Together they scrabbled around hungrily. When they came out again with a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee, the interrogation of Himmelfahrt was still going on. Rossi’s questions sounded bland enough to Homer, but Himmelfahrt was protesting angrily, threatening to go to the top in the Florentine police department to complain about the way his bedroom had been ransacked. The truth was that Himmelfahrt had been humiliated by the discovery of his collection of sex magazines.

  It was Homer’s turn. Smugly he informed Inspector Rossi that he had once been a lieutenant detective himself, back in Massachusetts.

  “Oh?” said Rossi, smiling courteously.

  Homer felt humble under his clear-eyed gaze. “Well, of course,” he confessed, “it was a long time ago.”

  But the inspector was cordial. Getting to his feet, he invited Homer to accompany him on an inspection of Alberto’s quarters and the bedroom of the missing Matteo.

  Homer was flattered. Apologetically he glanced at Alberto, who was cowering at the other end of the table in the custody of Agent Piro. He seemed lost in his own private misery.

  Upstairs they found Lucretia opening doors, displaying the office and the library to Rossi’s assistant policemen. Gravely she led Homer and the inspector to the bedrooms in the east wing.

  Matteo’s room was empty. The bed was unmade. Hangers lay tangled on the floor of the wardrobe.

  “It is strange that the secretary should leave today, vero?” said Inspector Rossi, shaking his head, writing tiny words in his notebook.

  Lucretia spread out her hands in a gesture of indifference. “He was a very bad secretary. I scolded him today. Perhaps he left in anger. I don’t know.”

  The Fraticellis’ room was next door, an untidy chamber, still haunted by the powerful fragrance of Isabella’s perfumes. Her pink powder still dusted the floor of the bathroom they had shared with Matteo.

  Slowly and carefully Rossi opened the drawers of the cupboard and stirred the contents, dispassionately examining the spidery black pantyhose, the lavender bras, the fluffy nightgowns. There was a pair of jeans on the floor, the two legs standing more or less upright just as Isabella had stepped out of them. Her sparkling T-shirts were scattered around the room.

  There was very little evidence of Alberto. His clothes were confined to the wardrobe. His bird-shooting gun leaned in one corner, empty of cartridges. In a picture frame on the table beside the bed was a snapshot of man and wife on their wedding day. The younger Alberto was thinner, his hair thicker. He grinned at the camera, his arm around a slender laughing Isabella in a white veil.

  “Guardi,” said Rossi. “Look.” He had found something in the pocket of one of Alberto’s jackets, a little polyethylene bag of white powder.

  Homer stared at it. “Heroin?”

  “Si.”

  “Dear God,” said Lucretia.

  One of Rossi’s assistants was at the door, speaking to him in rapid Italian.

  They had found something similar in Tom’s room. This time it was pills.

  Tom was summoned. “I can’t sleep,” he said, looking at them warily, glancing from Rossi to Homer to Lucretia. “I take them for sleep.”

  “You have the prescription?” asked Rossi mildly, turning the little bottle over in his hand.

  “No, I can’t get a doctor to give me another prescription.” Tom looked at Homer, who noticed for the first time the circles under his eyes, his air of cynical exhaustion. “I buy them from this guy at Piazza Santo Spirito.”

  “A dealer?” said Homer. “Does he also sell heroin?”

  “I don’t buy heroin,” said Tom angrily. “All I want is a good night’s sleep.”

  Homer went back to the dining room with Rossi and Lucretia, wondering about this newly discovered facet of young Tommaso O’Toole. He imagined Tom’s elemental matter spread out on the ground, a gluey mass of flesh with the bones lying randomly here and there, until God’s great whanging stamp had come down to imprint it with the seal of form, impressing the pulpy protoplasm with Tom’s essential being, his wit, his bitterness, his flashes of cleverness, and most profoundly, with whatever it was that smoldered inside him now, reddening his eyes and keeping him awake.

  The questioning of the students went on far into the night. One by one they were brought into the dining room. All of them claimed to have been asleep at six that morning, except Julia Smith.

  “I heard it,” she said. “I thought it was hunters.” Julia winced as she guessed what it had really been, the murdering shots that had killed poor Franco and Isabella. Dear, cunning Isabella, who always talked so gaily whenever she cleaned Julia’s room, gossiping in a charming mixture of English and Italian, fingering Julia’s earrings, her nail scissors, her hair brush, wanting to know if Julia had a boyfriend, if she wanted to get married and have babies.

  Ned Saltmarsh had heard the shots too, but he lied to Inspector Rossi. No, he hadn’t heard anything, golly! The truth was that Ned had crept out into the hall at dawn, because he knew Julia always took an early shower. The trick was to catch her when she came out, pink and fragrant, her hair tumbling down over her bathrobe as she pulled off her shower cap.

  Debbie Sawyer was thrilled at being questioned, but she had heard nothing. Neither had Debbie Weiss nor Debbie Foster. They had all been sound asleep. Kevin Banks too had been zonked out. So had Joan Jakes.

  Dorothy Orme had been awake and she had probably heard the shots, she said, but she had been thinking about something else, and had paid no attention. Dorothy, in fact, had awakened very early and stretched out her arm in the dark to encircle her warm husband, but he was not there because he had died a year ago, and after that she had been unable to go back to sleep.

  At last everyone in the villa had been questioned. But only Alberto Fraticelli was taken away. The reasons were perfectly clear.

  1. The murder weapon had probably been his.

  2. By his own confession he had been up and about and using a gun.

  3. His motive was overwhelmingly strong.

  4. He had no support for his claim that he had been out in the countryside shooting birds.

  “What will happen to him now?” said Homer, as Alberto was bundled into the front of the police van. In the back of the van Homer could see a thick package, the wrapped bodies of Franco and Isabella.

  Zee grimaced. “He’ll be formally accused by a judge, probably tomorrow, then shut up in prison at Sollicciano to await trial.” Zee’s shoulders sagged. He looked utterly worn out.

  They watched as the headlights of the cruiser and the police van swept around the driveway, illuminating the careless goddesses on the wall. The goddesses were still gesturing idly, irrelevantly. The matter was beneath their notice
—a breach of divine etiquette.

  Lucretia was furious about Alberto’s arrest. “The poor man is completely crushed.” She looked accusingly at Zee. “You know perfectly well he couldn’t possibly have done it. He’s a gentle soul. It’s not fair, it’s not just. And, look here, what are we going to do now for a cook?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Those men do violence to God.…

  Inferno XI, 46.

  Leonardo Bindo was thunderstruck by Matteo Luzzi’s horrifying report. They met in a little alley near the church of Santi Apostoli. “You ask me to pay you? For something I never ordered? Gesùmmaria! You kill them, you run away, you’re under suspicion?”

  “No, no, the husband, he is under suspicion. I used his gun, not mine.” Matteo’s feelings were wounded. Father Roberto had witnessed something menacing and dangerous at the school, he had told Matteo, full of anxiety, and Matteo had attended to it in the proper way. He had been careful, he had been resourceful, and this was the reward he got for it, this ingratitude. “It’s true, I was doubtful about the Paolo and Francesca stupidità, but, merda! I was there to obey orders.”

  “Obey orders? Whose orders? The idealist’s? It’s my orders you should be obeying. What was Roberto doing at the school in the first place?”

  Matteo looked sly. “He has a friend there.”

  “A friend? What kind of friend?”

  “He doesn’t tell me,” lied Matteo.

  “Listen,” said Bindo, “they’ll be looking for you.” He gazed past Matteo’s head at the narrow view of the hills across the river. His head was spinning. The whole thing had suddenly grown in magnitude and complexity. With his usual quick adaptability he jumped to a solution. “You must go to the farm. You can stay there. I’ll arrange it.”

  “That shitty little Fiat,” whined Matteo. “It won’t do. Everybody knows it’s my car. Rent something more powerful this time—a Mazda, an Audi Quattro.”