by Jane Langton
Homer was left alone with Zee and the forlorn remains of Ned Saltmarsh. Glancing at Zee’s anguished face, Homer put an arm around him, and they went indoors to call Inspector Rossi.
What was going to happen now? Everything had changed. The deaths of Franco and Isabella had been harrowing enough, but the school had pulled itself together and gone on as before. The very heights of Paradise had come almost within their grasp. Now they were right back in the middle of Hell.
CHAPTER 30
… Why dost thou rend my bones?
Breathes there no pity in thy breast at all?
Inferno XIII, 35, 36.
Next day everything was revealed in the newspapers of the city of Florence.
SUICIDA ALIA SCUOLA AMERICANA?
SCOPERTO LABORATORIO DI DROGHE
And it wasn’t only Ned’s death and the mysterious laboratory in the tower of the Villa L’Ombrellino that had become public knowledge. The Dante Game was part of the story.
CIOCO DI DANTE ALIA SCUOLA
Someone had told La Nazione about the game, and passed along a copy of the original sheet of clues. And now, by clever extension, the three deaths at the school had been tied to it in the press. Had there not been a Dante quotation in the hand of poor Franco Spoleto? Was there not another in the pocket of the dead ragazzo, Ned Saltmarsh, three lines about the shrieking harpies in the bleeding trees in the wood of the suicides?
The article was gleeful, pouncing. And the worst was still to come. Zee’s background as a convicted murderer had at last been exposed—
PROFESSORE CONDANNATO PER OMICIDIO.
Zee read the entire article to Homer, translating it into English as they sat in the loggia with their backs to the view.
“What sneak told them about your checkered history?” growled Homer. “What stool pigeon would do a thing like that? You didn’t tell Rossi yourself?”
“No, I didn’t tell Inspector Rossi. But it’s not exactly a state secret.”
It didn’t take long to learn that the blabbermouth was once again Augustus Himmelfahrt. “He’s proud of it, the ratfink,” said Tom O’Toole.
Homer laughed ruefully. “Interesting, the way the man loves to share juicy pieces of information with all the world. He’ll get his reward in the end. You know what happens to sowers of discord. They end up in the Eighth Circle of Hell with axes chopping them in half.”
In the newly rented Honda, Matteo Luzzi drove to the corner where Signor Bindo was waiting for him in his swanky Mercedes. Matteo beeped, then waited while the Mercedes pulled out to lead the way.
They were headed for the farm in the countryside where Matteo was now to take up residence. But no sooner were they out of the city than Signor Bindo pulled over at a wide place in the road where a driveway led into a field full of pottery.
Matteo parked behind the Mercedes and got out.
His employer was enraged. Striding up to Matteo, he blustered at him, rattling a newspaper, shoving it under his nose. “What the hell is all this? What the hell?”
Matteo shrugged, and made exclamations in his own defense. “But there was nothing else to do. Merda! The stupid ragazzo heard everything we said. We shoved him off the roof. It was easy.” Matteo swooped his arm to show the precipitous fall of Ned Saltmarsh, and clapped his hands for the fatal impact on the bricks below the tower. “It doesn’t matter. He was a fool. He won’t be missed.”
“But, Gesùmmaria, what’s all this claptrap about a game and the words from Dante Alighieri? Why take such chances? And, madonna mia, the laboratory, whose brilliant idea was that?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Matteo, lifting his palms to the innocent sky. “It’s Father Roberto. He likes to add his little flourishes.” Matteo rolled his eyes comically and made curlicues in the air. “He’s an artist. He’s attaching everything to the school. They have this game they play, the Dante Game. His little clues from the Divine Comedy, they incriminate the school, the students, the professor. As for the laboratory, he read a book about how it’s done. He bought the equipment in Lugano.”
“Lugano? In Switzerland?” Bindo stared with open mouth at Matteo, then burst out laughing. “Oh, my friend, it’s ironic—we choose Roberto because his motive is so bizarre, so different from our own, and now he protects himself with a false front of dealing in narcotics.” Leonardo Bindo couldn’t stop guffawing.
Matteo giggled doubtfully.
Turning back the front page of the newspaper, Bindo put his finger on a headline. “Well, Father Roberto is an ass. A lucky ass. He’s stumbled on an amazing piece of good fortune. Professor Zibo at the American school was convicted of homicide in the United States. He served a prison term for the murder of his wife. From now on the polizia will think of nothing else, vero? And there’s more. There was even a drug connection with Zibo’s crime. All this, it will keep them so busy at the Questura they’ll never notice our humble, inconspicuous, modest little endeavor.”
Drivers on the Via Faentina whizzed past them, wondering why two grown men were standing beside the road, slapping their knees, throwing back their heads and roaring with laughter.
CHAPTER 31
… pity’s sharp assault upon the heart …
Inferno II, 5.
The response by Inspector Rossi to the sensational news in La Nazione was immediate. Zee was brought to the Questura for further questioning.
It was an alarming summons. He knew that Rossi’s next move might very well be to send him to prison, sotto sospettato, non accusato—suspected, not yet accused—and then a decision about formal arrest would be made by a judge.
Homer Kelly was not invited, but he was permitted to go along in the cruiser that came for Zee. At the Questura he hung around in the hall, pacing from one end of the corridor to the other, peering in at open doors, exchanging greetings with a couple of cleaning women, pausing outside the inspector’s office to listen, hearing only a soft mutter of voices.
When Zee emerged at last, Inspector Rossi accompanied him to the office door and nodded courteously at Homer. Then he shook Zee’s hand and smiled soberly and said good-bye.
Homer and Zee walked downstairs in silence, and then Homer clapped Zee on the back, and said, “It’s okay then? Va bene?”
“Va bene.” Zee’s voice was shaking. “But it was very bad. He built up a case against me. You can guess how it went—my conviction for the murder of my wife, which was probably a drug-related death. The morphine conversion laboratory, which I could have set up in the tower more easily than anyone else. The Dante connection—who more obvious than a teacher of The Divine Comedy? His idea was that Franco and Isabella had discovered my lab, and therefore they had to be disposed of. And perhaps young Ned found out something, so I had to take care of him too.”
“But Ned’s body was still warm when Rossi showed up with the medical examiner, so you had an alibi, right? All of us were with you in the dining room at lunchtime and afterward in the classroom. He must have seen that?”
“Yes, I think I’m off the hook, at least for now.”
“Well, thank God.” Together they climbed on a bus at Piazza San Marco, and stuck their tickets in the punching machine and travelled across the river. At Borgo San Frediano they got off the bus and walked along the narrow canyon between the houses to the Trattoria Sabatini. Sitting down at a table with a crowd of noisy people, they drank a carafe of wine with lunch, and Zee was soon restored.
But the school was now in serious trouble.
The most painful event was the arrival of Ned’s mother. Her journey to Italy had been paid for by the trustees.
Mrs. Saltmarsh was a small dumpy woman, a female version of her son. Her face crumpled into pathetic tears as Lucretia embraced her at the station. “Oh, lordy,” she whimpered, “my poor little boy.”
Julia Smith tormented herself by accompanying Ned’s mother everywhere, making all the arrangements to send his body home, helping Mrs. Saltmarsh pack his belongings. By the time the bereaved mother left for the United Sta
tes, Julia’s face was vacant of expression. She was pale and thin.
“I give us three or four more weeks,” said Lucretia glumly. “Until Christmas, no longer. Two weeks for the airmail letters to reach the parents, two weeks for the parents to write and tell their kids to come home for good. After the holidays I’ll bet none of them comes back.”
But even this forecast was optimistic. The students belonged to a generation of telephones, not letter writers. They had mastered the technique of calling home from the telephone office on Piazza della Repubblica. Where once poulterers and pork vendors and flax merchants had sold their wares, where moneylenders had built the fortunes of the house of Medici, there was now a lofty arcade where you could change your traveller’s checks or mail a package or buy a lottery ticket or telephone to any part of the world.
Debbie Foster was in the habit of calling her boyfriend in Amherst two or three times a week: Even Dorothy Orme regularly called the United States, to keep in touch with her mother, who was in a nursing home in Worcester.
Now all three Debbies made a rush for the phone. And, as Lucretia had predicted, the natural thing happened. The three sets of parents were horrified, and called the school to insist that their daughters come home at once.
Kevin Banks didn’t bother to call his parents, but as he watched the three girls rush into a flurry of packing and embracing and shedding farewell tears, he too began to feel restless. The dormitory wing was half empty, and his sense of connection was fading fast. He told himself he didn’t give a shit about Dante anyway.
Dorothy Orme and Joan Jakes would stay on. There was no question about that. For her part Dorothy felt a commitment to the teaching staff, and she had no wish to leave. Joan was writing a learned paper, and she wasn’t about to sacrifice Zee’s praise.
The new revelation about his past life was of extreme interest to Joan, who suspected that Zee’s wife had been a stupid woman who was better off dead. Someday a better wife would come along, one who would truly understand the needs of his intellect, someone genuinely equipped to share his scholarly life.
Nor did Tom O’Toole show any sign of wanting to depart. Tom had become essential to Lucretia. Little by little he had taken over Matteo’s duties as secretary, and he was also carrying his weight in the kitchen, helping to clean up the daily mess of dirty pots and pans left by Signorina Giannerini. In gratitude for Tom’s helpfulness his second-semester fees were cancelled.
As for Julia Smith, no one knew what she would do. Zee lived in dread that Julia would follow the example of the three Debbies. Any day now she might announce that she was going home. Or perhaps she would go off at Christmas and never come back.
So far she had made no move. Solemnly she listened to his lectures on Dante’s Paradiso, earnestly she filled her notebook with the things he said. Lighthearted flirtation and handholding were things of the past. In class she sat apart from the others, almost as though she were choosing to sit beside an invisible Ned Saltmarsh, more loyal to the dead boy now than she had been to him alive.
“He didn’t commit suicide, you know,” Tom told her kindly. “Inspector Rossi says so. Ned couldn’t have written that note from the Inferno, not in Italian. Rossi says it was another homicide, certo.”
It made no difference. Ned was dead, and Julia had been cruel and unfeeling. She couldn’t forgive herself.
His empty seat in the classroom was upsetting to the others as well, and so were the three chairs in the front row where the Debbies had sat side by side. Sukey Skinner was gone, and so was Throppie Snow. Even more unnerving was the frequent presence at the villa of men from the Questura—Rossi from Homicide and people from the narcotics team.
The police had found no fingerprints in the laboratory in the tower. “But the criminals would naturally be handling all those toxic materials with rubber gloves,” said Homer to Inspector Rossi, “so it’s not surprising, right?”
Then he explained his theory about the laboratory to the inspector. “It was nothing but a hoax.”
Rossi listened carefully, and demurred. “But perhaps it is not all prepared, the laboratory, not finished, no? The stove, perhaps it come later.”
Then the inspector showed Homer his Xeroxed copies of the original Dante quotations, taken from the dead hands of Franco Spoleto and Ned Saltmarsh. He spread them out on the dining room table, and Homer bent over to take a look.
One glance was enough. “That’s a European G, with a long tail. And those Zs with crossbars, no American writes them that way.” He looked up triumphantly at Rossi.
“Si?” Rossi clucked in appreciation. Then he frowned. “But you have Europeans at your school. Tommaso O’Toole, he is part Italian, no? Professor Zibo, Professoressa Van Ott, they are not Americani. And Matteo Luzzi, who is not found.” Rossi made a wide sweep with his hands, to show that Matteo was still somewhere out there in the vast unexplored regions of the world.
“And Alberto,” said Homer. “Don’t forget Alberto.”
But they both knew Alberto was out of it. At first it had been reasonable to suspect him of murdering his wife and her lover in a fit of jealous rage, but on the day Ned Saltmarsh plunged to his death from the top of the tower, Alberto had been safely imprisoned at Sollicciano. There had been second thoughts in the mind of the judge. He had let him go.
One afternoon Alberto appeared at the school to pick up his things. He was melancholy and dignified.
Lucretia greeted him warmly. “Oh, Alberto, wouldn’t you like your old job back?”
But Alberto shook his head. He was through with the Villa L’Ombrellino and its passionate memories. From his room he took his clothes, his bird-shooting gun and the framed picture of himself with Isabella. From the kitchen he removed his own personal set of kitchen knives and his pasta-making machine, and then he left the villa forever to look for a job in some elegant restaurant in Milan.
Lucretia heard later that he had been unable to find anything but a counter job at a tavola calda, where the customers ate standing up. It was surely a comedown for Alberto, who was a master at cooking Tuscan specialties, those delicate traditional dishes made with beans or pork livers or tripe, or chicken from Val d’Arno simmered in Marsala.
During the last two weeks before Christmas, Inspector Rossi failed to appear at L’Ombrellino. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in the case. During working hours Rossi was diligently pursuing the whereabouts of his favorite remaining suspect, the missing school secretary, Matteo Luzzi. The rest of his time was taken up by his duties as a participating layman in his neighborhood parish in Sesto Fiorentino. Unlike most of his fellow male Florentines, a race of cynics, Inspector Rossi was devout. During Advent his parish priest called on him to be a lector at morning and evening mass. He had also asked him to offer a daily series of penitential meditations on the O-Antiphons. Both of Rossi’s sons were under his tutelage as altar boys, his daughter was preparing her first communion. During this season, he confessed to Homer, he could barely keep up with his official duties at the Questura.
CHAPTER 32
… he was a liar and father of lies.
Inferno XXIII, 144.
In Dante’s Inferno there is a terrible city with flaming walls between the levels of upper and lower Hell, the city of Dis. Within it heretics burn forever in fiery tombs.
In Florence most of the city walls were gone, but even there, even now, heretics still blazed. That passionate dissenter Roberto Mori, mildly composing official forms in the Department of City Museums, was surely just such a smoldering renegade against the revealed truth of the church.
Of course no one would ever dream of considering the genial banker Signor Bindo a candidate for the scorching sepulchres of the city of Dis—Leonardo Bindo, friend of the archbishop, supporter of the foundling hospital, the Misericordia, and many another worthy charity.
This morning Bindo glowed with sanctity as he crossed the square. He had just emerged from the church of Santissima Annunziata. Kneeling before the miracu
lous Virgin he had found something mysterious in the image of the Blessed Mother, something truly divine in the face that had been painted by an angel.
On the way to the bank he ran into Signora clementi, the wife of one of his principal depositors. He often saw the signora in Sarttissima Annunziata, wearing a mink coat just like the one he had bought for his wife. This morning she was walking her dogs, a pair of fluffy little Pomeranians.
Bindo knew just the combination of piety and worldly banter that appealed to Signora Clementi. “Do you know,” he said, smiling, “just now on my knees I had the sensation that the miraculous Virgin was about to turn her head and look at me.”
The dogs yipped and strained at their leashes, while Signora Clementi tugged and scolded. Turning back to Bindo she widened her eyes. “It’s true. I too have felt something extraordinary about her.”
“Did you know, Signora, that she is the real one?”
“The real one?”
Bindo laughed merrily. “It is a portrait of the real Virgin Mary. An old woman, a cleaning lady, she told me.”
“How charming! Isn’t that utterly delicious!”
They parted and Bindo continued across the square, elated by a bubbling sense of optimism. At breakfast he had seen a television report about the anti-drug crusade. It was rumored, declared the newsman, that some of the reformed addicts who had made pilgrimages to Saint Peter’s Square were returning to their old ways. They had taken up where they had left off. If the report was true, it was good news.
When the bank closed at one o’clock, Bindo took a cab across the river to Piazza Santo Spirito to check up on the story directly with the scum from Milwaukee. He found Earl crouched on a park bench. Sitting down beside him, Bindo addressed him in English, his voice hushed by caution. “How is business these days?”
“So-so.”
“So-so?” Bindo frowned. English was an impossible language!