“I deny that this is the will of my husband. There’s been a substitution. I know the real will of Harry Alton.”
Flemington put the large document on the table in front of him. “It’s true,” he said slowly. “Major Alton did draw up another will before this one, and he entrusted it to me. But the authenticity of the present will cannot be doubted, and since it is dated later, the previous one is annulled.”
Mary Alton was quivering. But she sensed the inspector’s eyes on her and kept quiet. Her features softened, and she recovered her air of inscrutable innocence.
“What was the date of the preceding will?” asked De Vincenzi.
“It was drawn up on the same day as the wedding in this hotel. The witnesses were me and an English doctor who was passing through Milan and whom the pastor had asked to attend Alton’s wedding.”
“Do you remember the terms of that will, Mr Flemington?”
“You see!” the widow interrupted again. “The second will is invalid. It doesn’t bear the witnesses’ signatures.”
“You’re mistaken, Mrs Mary. You’re mistaken!”
The lawyer showed her the document, pointing out the signatures of two other people following the major’s.
“There are the witnesses’ signatures. There’s also a codicil.” He read:
This will annuls any preceding will and constitutes the “surprise” I announced to my wife.
“Do you remember the instructions of the previous will?” De Vincenzi repeated.
“That one divided the inheritance four ways: three parts went to Vilfredo Engel, Douglas Layng and Carin Nolan. The fourth was destined for Mary Vendramini. In case of the death of one of the heirs, the survivors inherited the part of the deceased.”
He watched the widow approach the table, put down the doll she’d been clasping in her arms till then, and slowly retreat. She continued to look as cool as a cucumber, and her extreme pallor, heightened by the harsh light of the lamp, was frightening. Everyone stared at her. She moved like a zombie.
“Mrs Alton!” ordered the inspector.
“My presence is no longer necessary now I know what the surprise is.”
“You’re forgetting that there are two bodies you must step over in order to leave here.”
She raised her head and turned on them a look strangely rapt and luminous. “What do they have to do with me? It’s the dolls who inherit!”
For the first time she laughed: a low, broken, inhuman laugh. Chilling. It was impossible to believe she was the one laughing, so still had she remained, her look so pure and innocent.
A piercing scream rang out. “Murderer! You are the murderer of my son!”
Diana Flemington leapt from the sofa and started for Mary. Her husband was the first to stop her, seizing her in his arms. He took her away, still squeezing her against his chest and holding her head against his own shoulder with a tenderness that was new and surprising for such a large, gruff and sarcastic man.
Mary Alton heard the scream but didn’t even draw back. She gave a faint shrug and shook her head at the tirade. She looked at the inspector and said with deep pity, “Poor Mrs Flemington.” By now she’d completely recovered her remarkable equilibrium, and was calm and assured. Her eyes were no longer shining; they’d returned to their deep, dark violet colour. The accusation had not hit home, and she appeared to find it too absurd to consider.
“What do you intend to do now, Signora Alton?”
De Vincenzi spoke to her in Italian because he wanted to spare Diana Flemington the torment that would result in her hearing everything Mary was about to say.
“Get away from here! There’s nothing more to keep me in this place.”
“Yes, something and someone can keep you here! Your accomplice, for example.”
Mary stared at him. One might have said she looked amused.
“I don’t understand!”
“Wait a moment and you will.” He walked past her into the lobby. He signalled to the two officers to stand guard by the blue room: “No one must leave! Keep them from leaving here, even if you have to shoot.” He then hurried up the main stairs and ran into Sani at the start of the corridor. “Did you hear any movement?” He pointed to Room 7.
“No. Nothing. I even put my ear to the door, but couldn’t hear a breath.”
“What?” This time the shout was De Vincenzi’s. He grabbed the handle and flung open the door. He uttered a curse, a terrible curse against himself. How had he not foreseen this? There, on the floor beside the bed, lay Al Righetti. He’d been shot as he got out of bed, since he’d pulled the sheets and the bedcover along with him when he fell. He was bent over, with his forehead against the bedside rug and his arms flung open.
De Vincenzi leant over to lift him up and laid him on the bed with Sani’s help.
“He’s dead,” said Sani.
A spot of blood on his breast had stained his light-coloured pyjamas purple. Another spot could be seen on the rug, darker and thicker. He hadn’t bled much.
“But he was shot with a revolver, this one!” Sani exclaimed in terrified surprise. “Almost point-blank.”
Indeed, his silk jacket was haloed with burn marks from a shot just out of the barrel. The revolver lay on the floor—they saw it only now. A small revolver with an ivory grip. De Vincenzi bent to pick it up, and Sani made a move to deter him.
“The fingerprints!”
“There aren’t any,” the inspector muttered. “There can’t be any.” He picked up a little yellow satin cushion lying nearby. “See? She had the revolver hidden inside this cushion. She came up to Al Righetti, who wouldn’t have suspected her and probably wanted to embrace her, and she pressed the cushion to his chest as she fired. That’s why no one heard the shot.” He indicated burn marks on the satin identical to the ones on the pyjamas.
“Her?” Sani’s eyes widened. “But whom do you mean?”
“Yes. It was the only way for her to have the entire inheritance and to prevent her accomplice from speaking.”
He was scowling, his jaws clenched, his lips pursed. He studied the body: the wide-open eyes expressed nothing but enormous shock.
“Go and get Bardi and bring him back here.”
Sani had given up asking for explanations. He left.
Alone again, De Vincenzi studied the room. He was gripped by feverish excitement. He knew the whole story now! The spark that had been missing for so long had lit up his brain. A horrific drama… He ran straight from the bed to the window. The shutters had been thrown back and the first light of day was coming through, dulled by the rain. He began examining the windowsill, knelt down on the floor. His intuition had been right. He could see that the edges of the wooden windowsill and the floor tiles were still damp, and someone had tried to dry them. In order to kill Novarreno, Al Righetti had gone out of his window and come in through the Levantine’s window. The simplest gymnastic feat. He hadn’t needed the stairs to get down to the courtyard or climb out of it, not at all! He’d held on to the cornice that circled the building, continuing the line of the windowsills along the wall.
De Vincenzi turned back to the bed. In a corner between the wall and the wardrobe he spotted a small oil stove. It would have served to overheat the air in Douglas Layng’s room so that his body hadn’t gone rigid. The one he had been looking for…
He’d guessed it all, he had, in every detail. The only thing was, he hadn’t managed to see it all at once. But how could he? How could he have known that Julius Lessinger was dead? His very name on each person’s tongue; that ghostly avenger whom everyone named as if fearing he were behind them. The actual existence of Julius Lessinger, in whom he’d had to believe, had derailed him, forcing him to look in every other direction. It was true that he’d suspected Nicola Al Righetti, and for that very reason he hadn’t wished to question him further, or enter his room. After Carin Nolan had been injured it didn’t seem possible that the man could attempt any other crimes, and he hadn’t wanted to put him under
suspicion before he had the evidence.
But how could he have guessed that she would kill him? Yet now he would have said that her killing him was unavoidable. Mary Alton absolutely had to prevent her first husband from speaking. A nagging sense of unease or remorse plagued him. He had sent her alone to get the dolls, precisely because he wanted her to betray herself. Yes, when it came down to it, Al Righetti’s death was his fault. And when he’d run to the first floor and met her on the staircase with the two dolls in her arms, she’d seemed so calm, so completely innocent—and beautiful—that he’d reproached himself for having set her up and told himself again that he was on the wrong track.
He continued searching the room. He opened the wardrobe and saw a silk shirt on a hanger. He looked at the sleeves. A bit of broken stitching hung from the buttonhole of one of the cuffs—and there was the golden disc with its three blue and red enamel circles; the other disc—the one he’d found in the built-in wardrobe on the third floor—was in his pocket. He closed the wardrobe and looked in the dresser drawers, then in the table drawer. Nothing. There were linens, clothes, boxes for collars and ties. Hidden under the shirts in the first drawer was a big Colt, black and sinister, with a silencer on the barrel: an American gangster’s weapon. But no letter, no papers. He continued looking, increasingly agitated. What he hoped to find, even he could not say.
He noticed a suitcase and went over to open it. His movements had become clumsy. Only his nervous excitement kept him from wilting, from keeling over after that diabolical night. He’d come to the hotel at ten last night and now it was almost eight in the morning—ten hours. He was afraid of totting up the hours, of imagining that something worse might lie in store for him…
He kept seeing that pure, oval face before him, white as wax and framed by a mass of shining golden hair… two deep, violet-coloured eyes… a simple, graceful, fragile body. He emptied the suitcase onto the floor. Ties, linens, some men’s jewellery. Another, smaller revolver. So, nothing. But what was he hoping to find?
Finally he found it. A few yellowed pages, some of them torn and some covered with directions and names written in pen. Just what he’d dimly guessed as soon as the old Bernasconi had told him about the young man who always met Mary Vendramini in Milan. Nicola Al Righetti had secretly married Mary Vendramini in Chicago in 1911, and those yellowed sheets were the documents that certified their marriage.
By now, it was all clear. Realizing how rich Major Alton was, Mary hadn’t hesitated to contract a second marriage—in agreement with her first husband—in order to get her hands on the money, and to inherit it when the time came. The time had come. De Vincenzi jumped as if someone had whipped him—he felt a sigh, a sort of wheezing, behind him. He put the papers in his pocket and turned round.
The hunchback was standing at the door, looking at the dead man on the bed, his eyes wide with fear.
De Vincenzi got up. “Signor Bardi, do you recognize this man?”
He looked at him.
“What? What do you mean?”
“This man was in this hotel in 1914. Do you recognize him?”
The hunchback had a brainwave. It was just as if his pale, yellow, angular face had suddenly lit up.
“Yes,” he shouted. “Yes! That’s it! He’s the man who was with Mary Vendramini.”
“Fine. That’s all.” De Vincenzi signalled to Sani to take him away. “Make sure he does not leave his room.”
“Who killed him?” asked Bardi in his strident but firm voice.
“It doesn’t matter right now. You’ll find out. Go.” And he followed the two, closing the door behind him and starting down the stairs. Oh to be done with this, and to be done with it as soon as possible. What was waiting for him down below in the blue room?
The two officers stood at the door.
“Nothing?”
They shook their heads and moved aside. Inside, everyone was as he had left them. The widow, who turned to watch him, was also still waiting.
“Mrs Mary Alton, you are under arrest for the murder of Nicola Al Righetti, your first and only husband since the second marriage you contracted with Major Alton is null and void; and for complicity in the murders of Douglas Layng and Giorgio Novarreno, and for wounding Carin Nolan.”
The woman continued staring at him. After their initial shock, the others around her—George and Diana Flemington, Vilfredo Engel, Carlo Da Como and Pompeo Besesti—sat in suspended silence, as if pinned to the floor by a new anxiety, by the sensation that something awful, unexpected, even fatal was about to happen.
De Vincenzi repeated the charge. Mary Alton moved towards the table, picked up the two dolls, clasped them to her breast, kissed them and then sat down, where she began gently cradling them, caressing them and speaking to them in her measured voice, as harmonious as music, as sweet and nostalgic as a love song.
“You’re mine… mine, both of you… I’ll keep you for ever with me… good sisters… With me for ever!”
They took her in the car, through the rain, through streets and avenues and over fields, with the two porcelain dolls. They went through a gate, and then the car stopped in front of a large white building surrounded by flower beds. Two men in dark-blue shirts came to take her from Deputy Inspector Sani. Shortly afterwards a gentleman with a large, aquiline nose and gold-framed glasses received her in a dazzling, all-white room, where he began to observe her with intense curiosity. And all the while she cradled her dolls, singing lullabies of innocence.
20
After speaking to the investigating magistrate and dictating the longest passages of his report, Inspector De Vincenzi went off with his two officers, leaving only one of them at The Hotel of the Three Roses to guard Rooms 5, 6, 7 and 9, which the magistrate had locked and sealed. Another stretcher had already carried away the body of Nicola Al Righetti.
In the lobby, Da Como and Engel were sitting quietly on the sofa. Some way away Pompeo Besesti was stretched out on a chair, staring into space. Engel was still wearing his white pyjamas under his overcoat. It was ten in the morning, and the rain continued to fall. From the window a parade of open umbrellas could be seen on the pavement.
“I don’t understand,” the harsh, deep voice came suddenly, “how the American kept Layng’s body hidden until that evening.”
“The inspector understood it,” Da Como replied. He’d been present when De Vincenzi had dictated his report and had his meetings with the magistrate. “The young man was killed at midday when he went up to his room after he returned from a walk. After stabbing him to death, the American feared that the blood would leave visible traces in the room, so he covered the body with sheets.”
“But why was Layng in his pyjamas? And why had he gone to bed?”
“He wasn’t feeling well. Maybe they made him drink something. He’d told Stella Essington that he wasn’t feeling well, and at eight that evening she came to his room and saw both the body and the killer. When she heard that Al Righetti was dead, she talked. The body stayed in Room 5 for the whole day, and the American locked the door.”
“But to get it upstairs?”
“He seized on the moment when everyone was downstairs in the dining room. Al Righetti ate, as usual, in the billiard room. Pietro served him, but of course Al Righetti was often on his own in there. So it was easy for him to go up the service stairway, which communicates directly with the corridor on the first floor. Only Bardi posed any danger to him, and only for an instant. But the American made it in time and took advantage of the moment of panic to go back down to the billiard room without being seen, and then to rush from there to the dining room.”
Silence. Then again, that deep, hoarse voice: “But how did they think they could get away with it?”
“She was the instigator—the woman. She knew the story of Julius Lessinger from Alton and she continued to keep the major’s fear alive, hoping to make use of the story with Al Righetti’s help. They didn’t want to kill him and they couldn’t, because Mary had read the f
irst will which the major made when he married her. She wanted to inherit the whole of it. When Alton wrote to tell her he was about to die, and Flemington then informed her of the meeting to be held in this hotel, she wrote the letter from Hamburg and conceived of the whole diabolical scheme.”
“What about me?” asked the deep, hoarse voice, broken by a hiccup.
“For you, old friend, they had in store an ‘accidental’ death caused by the sight of the man hanging on the landing. You can thank Bardi—he saved your life.”
Engel laughed in his thundering way, which caused Besesti to leap from his armchair. “I wouldn’t have died! I’m thick-skinned.”
Da Como firmly agreed.
A further silence followed. Virgilio crossed the lobby from the direction of the staircase. He was looser and more disjointed than ever, his legs going haywire and his arms in front of him, as if he were afraid of falling. He walked over to the desk and stopped. His wife, placid, white and matronly, was still drawing circles with her pencil on the back of that day’s menu. Mario went behind the bar.
“Mario, bring me an aperitivo,” ordered Da Como.
The four scopone players went back to their corner table in the dining room and started up their interminable games once more. They’d removed their collars and ties, their faces were exhausted and their eyes ringed with dark circles. They smoked and drank without let-up.
“I cannot understand how the sevens can be broken up in the first hand,” Verdulli squawked.
Da Como was just bringing the glass of liquor to his mouth when his hand stopped in mid-air. He stared at the door.
Three women had appeared in the entrance, one after the other. Each wore ribbons—claret, mauve or black—on an austere dress, and their profiles were exactly the same: beak-like under sequinned hats.
Da Como stood up and moved towards them cheerfully.
“What’s new, dear sisters?”
Claret Ribbons spoke. “Jolanda wanted to come back here.”
Mauve Ribbons pursed her lips in disgust.
The Hotel of the Three Roses Page 18