The Hotel of the Three Roses

by Augusto De Angelis

  He pulled himself together, went to the door and turned off the light—those two switches, one at the entrance, the other beside the bed, were a luxury he’d arranged for himself. He walked into the narrow corridor, which immediately turned a corner. The light from the lamp there, which reached both parts of the corridor, was even weaker than that in his room—and pinker. In that dim light he stopped in front of the closed door to the other little room, which shared a wall with his and opened onto the landing.

  “Vilfredo!” he called, and then more quietly, “Engel! Engel!”

  When the ensuing silence reassured him that the room was empty, he turned to glance at the other two doors opposite, beyond the stairway, where the kitchen boy and two maids slept. They were closed, of course. He hesitated before going to rap on them. There too: silence. So he turned towards Engel’s door, and warily—his every move was stealthy, and he took infinite care to prevent the hinges from squeaking—opened it. He entered the dark room, closing the door behind him. He remained there no more than a few minutes, and when he left a sarcastic smile was creeping over his lips. He started down the stairs, whistling softly.

  When he came to the last step before reaching the main staircase—the small stairway that led to the attic rooms joined up with the larger one on one side by way of a small door, which to anyone unaware of the hiding places in that old house seemed only to lead to another room off the first large landing—Da Como took his hand out of his pocket to adjust his tie. Then he stepped onto the brightly lit main staircase and started his descent. The rear part of the building had only one floor, so there were only two flights. From below came the distant hum of the card-players, the sound of bottles and glasses and the audible voices of one or two people in the entrance hall.

  Da Como stopped and looked up. A slight woman was coming down from the guest rooms dressed in black and draped with a heavy widow’s veil, her golden hair flaming out from beneath a black crêpe hat. Her face was pale, but lit by two enormous eyes with wide blue irises. Her lips were such a bright coral they looked like a gash. Da Como waited for her to go by before resuming his descent, and continued to observe her. The woman did not notice him and moved slowly, looking straight ahead, her face calm and those two bloody lips half open as if in a smile.

  “Where the devil has this one come from?” murmured Da Como, and he kept behind her as he descended.

  The widow crossed the lobby with the same robotic steps. When she got to the lounge, she spotted an empty table near the arch by the door and went to sit at it. Now she kept her eyes lowered, seemingly unaware of the curiosity she’d aroused. Monti immediately headed towards her, his eyes sparkling more maliciously than ever, his ears keen and straining, an obsequious smile on his lips.

  “Is it still possible to eat?”

  “But of course. Anything the signora desires.”

  The signora nodded yes to everything they offered her, refusing only the wine and asking for mineral water instead. Monti started for the kitchen, but as he passed the front desk he stopped.

  “Room number?”

  “Twelve,” said Maria.

  Monti grabbed a register and quickly consulted it. He read: Mary Alton Vendramini.

  “She’s foreign?”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “Single?”

  “Yes. Ooph! What a nosy parker!”

  The waiter disappeared down the short corridor towards the kitchen. The card-players immediately went back to work.

  “Pass.”

  “Chip.”

  “A terza reale and three aces,” Engel’s deep voice announced. He was as large and heavy as an elephant.

  Da Como played with a prosciutto sandwich in one hand and his cards in the other.

  “It’s idiotic to put down your seven in the first round, when you could easily have got rid of your four,” Verdulli yelled, his face as red as a cockerel’s. The scopone table was the loudest. Those four seemed obsessed, and Verdulli—a theatre critic who was by nature always green with bile—seemed keenest. He was actually just the most strident because of his high-pitched voice.

  There was already a body in the hotel, and not a single one of the people playing, eating or talking in those rooms knew it. Or at least no one had admitted to knowing anything. So men and women alike reacted with horrified amazement and concern when, at 10.31 precisely, the hunchback Bardi came virtually cartwheeling down the stairs, screaming in his high, cracked voice: “A man has been hanged upstairs! A man has been hanged upstairs!”

  He’d actually seen him, poor Bardi. A body dangling from the last level of the stairway that led to the furnished attic rooms, to those garrets from which Da Como had come down not an hour before with that sarcastic smile on his lips. Still yelling, Stefano Bardi crossed the lobby and went into the dining room. As soon as he’d gone past Maria, sitting enthroned under the arch, he had to stop. And he would have fallen had Mario not suddenly leant across the counter and grabbed the lapel of his jacket, pulling him up like a limp puppet. As he did so, the sound of plates loaded with prosciutto and marinated eel could be heard crashing to the floor, shattering at the hunchback’s feet.

  3

  De Vincenzi looked up from the papers in front of him. “Sani!”

  “I’m coming,” the deputy inspector responded, and straightaway his chair was heard to move.

  The inspector went back to his reading: a handwritten sheet of foolscap in clear, well-formed letters such as you’d see in a primary school handwriting exercise. On the sheet was a long list of names. He started to peruse them and then stopped and picked up a smaller piece of paper, typewritten: an unsigned letter, which he slowly reread.

  Sani stood waiting in front of his superior’s desk. The light from the table lamp—the only one in the head of the flying squad’s room—fell from a large green shade in a circle over the papers. The deputy inspector remained in shadow.

  “Ah!” De Vincenzi raised his head. “You’re here.” He showed the letter to Sani. “Have you read it? What do you think?”

  “I read it. You left it open on your table.”

  “You did the right thing.” De Vincenzi smiled.

  He was younger than his subordinate, but Sani deferred to him with something more than respect. Sani had had him as his immediate superior at the flying squad for only three months, and already he’d learnt to appreciate every one of his merits. Because Carlo De Vincenzi was undoubtedly a man of quality. Rather reserved, and somewhat dreamy, but that faraway air of being absorbed in something hid an exquisite sensitivity and a deep humanity. Sani understood him, and his respect derived chiefly from his friendly devotion, an unforced attachment to him.

  “Well? When the chief constable gave it to me this morning, I said to myself somewhat contemptuously: an anonymous letter. But when I read it, I had a strange impression…” He stopped, then added, “It’s anonymous, and it was written by a woman.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Every sentence of this letter reveals an unwholesome hysteria which couldn’t possibly be a man’s. Listen.” He read slowly, stopping after every sentence:

  There’s a place in Milan where people gamble furiously all night. And that’s not all: everyone who frequents the place or lives there is hiding a secret he cannot confess, one that informs all his actions, and leads to terrible things.

  He looked up. “No man would have used a phrase like that. Only a woman could have written it. It’s obviously nothing but a passage from a romantic novel.”

  A gathering of addicts and degenerates live at The Hotel of the Three Roses. A horrible drama is brewing, one that will blow up if the police don’t intervene in time. A young girl is about to lose her innocence. Several people’s lives are threatened. I cannot tell you more right now. But the devil is grinning from every corner of that house.

  “And that’s how it ends. There’s nothing else, do you see? Just some typing on a half-sheet of paper.”

  “Is it a jo
ke?”

  De Vincenzi shook his head.

  “It’s not a joke. It cannot be a joke, precisely because it is ridiculous.”

  “It could have been written by some crazy person.”

  “Could have been, perhaps; but I’m not convinced. I tell you it’s my intuition, and nothing else. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something happened in that hotel. So much so that I immediately asked the Garibaldi station to let me have a list of the guests actually staying at The Hotel of the Three Roses. Here it is. I received it a short time ago.”

  “And what did you find there?”

  Sani couldn’t conceal his scepticism. It seemed to him for the first time since he’d started working with De Vincenzi that he was wasting his time. How could anyone take a letter like that seriously?

  “Their names, of course. What else would there be? Right now they don’t say a thing to me, even though the branch inspector, guessing what I might want, added all the information he could find on each individual after his or her name. There are about ten women and around twenty men, including the manager of the hotel, his family and the staff.” De Vincenzi now took the sheet of foolscap in his hands and studied it. “In any case, something is strange, and it strikes one right away. Look!” He counted quickly, running his finger down the list. “Five of the guests are from London and have been staying there for a long time. Vilfredo Engel, Carlo Da Como, Nicola Al Righetti—that one’s an American of Italian origin—and Carin Nolan, a fairly young Norwegian, not even twenty.”

  “The threatened innocent,” Sani joked.

  “Maybe… And another Englishman, also quite young: Douglas Layng. He’s twenty-five.”

  “There’s nothing that strange, is there, about five people from abroad running into one another in the same hotel in Milan?”

  “Quite. Not if they knew one another beforehand or if the hotel they’d descended on were one of those known to foreigners. But how do you think anyone in London would ever have heard of The Hotel of the Three Roses?”

  Sani kept quiet. De Vincenzi’s logic wasn’t convincing him.

  Meanwhile, De Vincenzi continued to scan the list of names. “What an odd assortment of people,” he murmured. “And do you know who the last traveller was to arrive in this hotel, just this morning? It’s a woman, and she, too, came from London. Signora Mary Alton Vendramini.”

  “An Italian—”

  “—with an English name. She’s the widow of Major Alton.” The inspector folded the report from his colleague at the Garibaldi station in four. “I wonder why this lady has actually come to such an unknown third-rate hotel, however centrally located it may be—it’s certainly not the kind you just stumble upon.”

  “Someone must have told her about it. Or maybe she knew about it before she went abroad.”

  De Vincenzi got up. “It could very well be that my so-called intuition is playing a dirty trick on me by getting me to chase after shadows. In any event, it won’t hurt me to go and look in on that hotel tonight.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven…”

  “… and you still have to eat.”

  “You’re right! I let Antonietta know I wasn’t coming and she poured all her complaints down the phone. Poor old thing! She loves me like a son, and I am rather like her son, actually, since she fed me with her own milk.”

  He went to the corner and took his overcoat off the rack. Just then the telephone rang. He turned round as Sani picked it up.

  “Hello! Yes, he’s coming right away. It’s the Garibaldi station asking for you.”

  De Vincenzi put on his coat and went to the phone.

  “Good evening, Bianchi… Oh!” He listened carefully, his face intent, eyes shining. “Yes, of course. Ask for the chief constable and report it to him. And let him know that you’ve told me. I’ll go up and take a look.”

  He put the receiver down and stood still for a few moments, staring at the table. Sani watched him. He’d gathered that it was something extremely serious. De Vincenzi suddenly started as a thought popped into his head. No. It couldn’t be.

  “De Vincenzi!”

  The inspector shook himself and smiled at his companion. “Something’s happened rather sooner than I expected.”

  “What? You’re not going to tell me…”

  “Yes,” said De Vincenzi. “There’s a dead man at The Hotel of the Three Roses. And he—he’s one of the five we’ve been talking about.”

  “No!” Sani protested. “Dead… how did he die?”

  “By hanging.”

  “Suicide?”

  “It seems so. But I…” De Vincenzi shook his head vigorously and raised his shoulders. “No. I don’t believe anything any more. I don’t want to believe anything.” He walked around the table, grabbed the report with the list of names and the anonymous letter and put them in his pocket. “I’m going up to see the chief constable. They may give me the case. Don’t think I’m asking for it to get ahead… It’s not that.” He paused. He sounded deeply troubled. “But I have a feeling, I have a feeling—do you understand?—that the devil is truly grinning from every corner of that house and it won’t be so easy to prevent more deaths.” He headed for the door.

  “Wait for me, Sani. I’ll return and then you’ll come with me.”

  The chief put down the receiver and ran a hand through his shiny hair, which was perfectly parted down the middle of his head. He moved his hand down from his hair to the boutonnière of his jacket to touch the flower: a red flower on a heavy grey suit, perfectly cut. Small, pudgy and very precise in his appearance, he might have seemed anyone other than the chief constable of a big city. But his quick, piercing eyes sometimes gave him away. They were constantly moving, even when they seemed to be laughing in his smooth, rosy face. At that moment, those eyes were sparkling. He reached up to press the buzzer, but a knock at the door stopped him.

  “Come in! Oh, it’s you. I was ringing in order to alert you, in the hope that you hadn’t gone yet.”

  De Vincenzi bowed, closed the door behind him and walked towards his boss’s desk.

  “Did you know I’d be calling you?”

  “Bianchi told me what’s happened at The Hotel of the Three Roses and I thought you’d like to take a look at the anonymous letter that arrived this morning; you sent it on to me.”

  “Yes.” The chief’s eyes were laughing now. “But that’s not the only reason I called you. I mean for you to take charge of this incident, De Vincenzi.” The inspector bowed. “It may be that it’s only a suicide…” De Vincenzi shook his head and the chief regarded him for a few minutes. “Maybe. But even if it is a suicide, we’ll need to get to the bottom of things. There’s gambling in that hotel. The letter may be the product of someone’s imagination, or it could be some unthinking person’s idiotic joke. But the fact that a man ends up dead there on the evening of the day we receive that letter makes one think. You’ve been in Milan only three months. Very few people know you. The Hotel of the Three Roses is frequented by literary types, journalists, industrialists, bankers—notable people, as it happens. And by several women… You have no relationships with any of these people. I prefer it that way. You’ll have free rein. Are you with me?”

  De Vincenzi understood perfectly, including the fact that quite a few of those people were probably known to his chief, who preferred to have someone between himself and them.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get in touch with the investigating magistrate regarding urgent procedures, but make sure they let you act on your own for several days. That’s easy enough to understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, then. If it wasn’t a suicide…” He ran his hand through his hair, touched his flower. “Well, if it wasn’t a suicide, you’ll let me know tomorrow morning.”

  De Vincenzi smiled and left. He hurried down the stairs and crossed the courtyard. As soon as he got to his room, where Sani was waiting, he picked up the telephone and called the Porta Garibaldi station. Sani rose fro
m his own desk and went to stand beside him.

  “Inspector Bianchi…”

  He was told that Bianchi was at The Hotel of the Three Roses. So he grabbed his hat and said, “Come with me. As we go out, tell Cruni to come along.”

  Not one of the three spoke while waiting on the tram platform. Officer Cruni put a half-cigar in his mouth but didn’t dare light it, hoping the inspector would tell him to do so. He had no idea where they were going. Sani looked at De Vincenzi from time to time, but he remained silent and preoccupied.

  De Vincenzi himself was profoundly disturbed. He had a vague presentiment that he was about to experience something dreadful.

  4

  When the three men appeared in the ill-lit entrance of The Hotel of the Three Roses, a tall, sturdy man in a grey hat came from inside the lobby to open the glass door. His overcoat was done up and he had a stick in his right hand. He waited for them.

  “Good evening, De Vincenzi.”

  “Good evening, Bianchi.”

  Inspector Bianchi shook his colleague’s hand and then Sani’s; he nodded at Cruni. De Vincenzi entered the lobby; it was deserted. A plainclothes officer stood at the door to the dining room, two others at the bottom of the stairs. Through the dining room windows one could see a few alert faces, eyes shining, and the reflections of a blonde woman’s hair. But nothing was stirring in there. Someone, however, was coming downstairs from a long way up, and the sound of their heels rang out on the steps.

  De Vincenzi stopped to listen as he looked about. One might have said the entire house shook with those steps. A heavy man, he thought, with all his weight on his heels as he descends. Obese, perhaps. Why was he so focused on this sound? He noticed a fibre suitcase on the chair in front of the table; a wicker armchair was overturned near the sofa in the large halo of light coming from the pink lampshade. He stood still in the midst of that vast lobby, while Sani and Cruni, perplexed, remained at the door. Bianchi came forward.