But tell me, Luigino, he began to ask himself, if now it is true that Saverio attacked the girl, how is it this Flagg is at the bottom of the Cardassi precipice with his head squashed in? Surely it was not stinking Saverio who was a betrayed lover. Nor was it he who avenged himself on the girl and then threw the American over the cliff. The lout might have ambushed the girl, alone, but never would he have been able to manage a twosome. Then could Flagg have committed suicide? Was that it? Possibly. But if so, why? Remorse? Guilt? He had ravished the girl that night, Francesca herself said that. There was no mistaking the force and brutality of his attack; had not Francesca instantly murmured the American’s name, rather than Saverio’s? A sign in itself of the savage way he must have gone about it. Was it not thinkable that a man might be so bedeviled by such a deed that he would become impelled to end his life? Yes, it was thinkable. But it was not likely, given the shady nature of this particular American. Quite certainly not a suicidal type, in any case not a man to allow a simple ravishment to torment him. Had he done what Saverio had done—most possibly yes. A man who might in frenzy or passion smash a girl’s bones, then rise to see that she was dying—this man might out of guilt or fear hurl himself from a cliff. But it was Saverio who had broken the girl’s body, not the American.
The American. But of course: there was the other American. And now suddenly it became clear to him that the two crimes, though possibly linked together in a fashion beyond his power at the moment to divine, were independent of each other, and that it could only be Cass who had killed Flagg. Cass was the lover Parrinello had suggested, after all. For Cass had been Francesca’s lover, plain as the nose on your face. Flagg had ravished her, and Cass had taken his vengeance. And of all the participants—Flagg, who was dead; Francesca, who was dying; Saverio, a blank mindless space beyond reach of pain or punishment; and Cass himself—only Cass remained to endure or suffer more.
It was at that moment, when a clanging at the garden gate aroused him and he turned to see Parrinello trundle forward in company with the august Captain Di Bartolo, that he recalled the tenderness in Francesca’s voice as she first murmured “Cass,” and that he decided that there had been in Sambuco this day entirely too much suffering. He sucked wind into his lungs, senselessly, trying to rid himself of a feeling of insanity.
Then he saluted. The expression on the investigator’s face was businesslike, grim.
“The girl still lives, Corporal?”
“She is still living, Captain. At this moment she is—asleep. The nurse—”
“Has she spoken?” Di Bartolo said, cutting him off. There was something moderately thrilling and auspicious about this at- tenuated, priestlike man, with his raked-down fedora and belted trench coat. He had doubtless seen many films about Scotland Yard, which accounted for much of his manner; his record, though, had been spectacular, and more than made up for his professional style, which inclined toward an elaborate and stagy casualness. He withdrew a small yellow pack from his pocket, holding it out to his two inferiors.
“Wrigley?” he said.
The sergeant accepted a stick of gum, as did Luigi, and for a moment the three of them stood there in the garden, gratefully yet rather uneasily masticating.
“Well you see, Captain,” Luigi temporized, “she started to tell me that—” In desperation, so as to gain command over his galloping thoughts, he tried to stall for time.
But providentially the captain interrupted, slanting an eye skyward as he said with a thin smile: “È proprio strano. But you may always expect it. Lombroso had the theory that the most violent of crimes will occur at early morning, in fine weather—spring or early summer. What a day!” He turned to Parrinello. “What did you find at the place where the girl was attacked?”
The sergeant stirred uneasily within his elephantine self, and shrugged, and looked at the investigator. “I beg your pardon, my Captain. But I do not seem to understand what you mean by—”
The investigator’s expression became impatient and stern. “Tell me, Parrinello,” he said in a voice already icy with censure. “You mean you did not go carefully over the ground where the girl was attacked?”
“No, my Captain,” the sergeant began futilely to explain, “you see, I was so concerned by this American when his body was discovered that I—”
“And you posted no guard over the place?”
“Why no, Captain, you see—”
“And in other words that means that at this very moment every gawk and hayseed and souvenir hunter in the comune is now on the spot, carefully obliterating any footprint the attacker might have left, pocketing any personal item he might have dropped. Eliminating any valuable clue. Had this not occurred to you at all? Did you take the General Course for security officers, Parrinello?”
“Why yes, my Captain, I mean—” The sergeant’s face was as red as a rose; his jaw trembled and, like some gargantuan infant, he seemed to verge already on tears. “It had occurred to me—”
“It had occurred to you nothing,” Di Bartolo snapped. “Overlook a fundamental like that and I can only say that you are demonstrating incompetence.”
“Oh, my Captain!” the sergeant began to protest.
“Quiet!” Di Bartolo commanded. “Look. Time is passing. Where is that list you made?”
“What list, my Captain?” the sergeant groaned.
“The list of suspects, names and addresses. The list I told you to make.”
Fumbling in his breast pockets, Parrinello brought forth only his fingers. He seemed close to disintegration. “I left it in the office,” he muttered hopelessly.
“Very well,” the captain said, removing pencil and notebook from his coat. The inflection in his voice was cool, noncommittal, yet at the same time, for Parrinello, somehow freighted with disaster. “Very well,” he repeated, “give me the names.”
“The addresses I don’t have, Captain,” he said with misery in his voice.
“Give me the names!”
Feverishly, the sergeant tried to regain his lost ground. “Well first, my Captain, there is Emilio Giovanelli. He comes from Atrani. A tough character with a record. A big loud-mouth. He has had a lot of woman trouble. I would venture to say that he is the prime suspect. You have his name down, sir? Then these three. Salvatore Marzano. Nicola Cosenza. Vincenzo Torregrossa. All three are bums. Cosenza served time in Avellino for assault upon a woman. The other two are general no-goods. Torregrossa is a wife-beater. Marzano used to procure in Nocera. So, my Captain, I would say those four. Also, there is this fact. The girl Francesca is on what you might call good terms with the other American who lives in the lower part of the palace. She used to work for him before Flagg. I have heard that he has taken great interest in her father, who is dying of consumption in the valley; also, that he and the girl were seen together several times in what might be—how would you say it?—a friendly relationship. I do not think this lead could amount to much, my Captain, but it is perhaps worth looking into. His name is Kinsolvin. C-h-i-n-s-o-l-v-i-n—”
Throughout all the interchange between Di Bartolo and the sergeant, Luigi had felt his heart begin to pound madly, and his mouth had gone so dry that the disgusting wad of chewing gum had rattled around inside it like a marble. He had wanted in some way, in any way possible, to divert suspicion from Cass, but until the sergeant had spoken Cass9 name he had had no intention of actually lying on his behalf. With Cass’ name still unmentioned, a lie would have been purposeless; besides, despite his inner conviction that Cass had slain the American, he could in no way be one hundred percent certain, past all risk, that Cass was connected with the crime. Parrinello’s startling gambit, however, changed all this. While the sergeant again spoke Cass’ name, Luigi coughed and, as subtly as he was able, intruded upon the conversation. He felt his scalp tighten in fear. Implicating Saverio would still lead to the problem of Flagg, and then to Cass; only an extravaganza would do. He knew that what he was about to say might be—was indeed very probably—the most i
mportant thing he ever said to anyone; if it failed, lacking plausibility in the ears of this illustrious detective, or if he betrayed by his manner the quality of fabrication which formed the very texture of this story he had so recklessly invented, he knew that he would not only not save Cass but send him that much more rapidly to prison, besides bringing total ruination, disgrace, and years of jail to himself. He thought of the jails he had seen—the filth and the slop buckets, the bugs in the beds and the weevils in the pasta, the sour wine or no wine at all, the gray and crushing years—and his mouth became so dry that he could barely speak. But he forced his lips open and, gagging back a sort of croak, said in a level and intelligent voice: “If it may please the captain, I do not think that it is necessary to go on with this list.”
“What do you mean, Corporal?” said Di Bartolo.
“I mean, sir, that the girl herself has told me what happened.”
“And why did you not speak up before?” the investigator said impatiently.
Luigi’s eyes roved meaningfully to the sergeant. “I tried, Captain, but—”
“Well, go on with it! What did she say?”
“She said this, Captain.” He thought a prayer of forgiveness for himself, for the shame he must bring to Francesca. “She implied that for several weeks she had been having an affair with her employer, Flagg. She had wished to break it off, for the disgrace it was causing to her soul. Flagg was insanely jealous of her and refused. They had been having many liaisons up on the valley path, away from Flagg’s other mistress. He took her up there last night, and she refused to submit to him. Once again she spoke of her determination to break off the affair. He tried to force her to submit, but she refused. He went insane with fury and hit her with something hard. He beat her repeatedly, her arms and head and legs. She of course lost consciousness but she came briefly to once, and he was standing over her, weeping with guilt and remorse. He must have understood then that she was dying. She told me that she remembered hearing him cry out—in English,’ of which she understands a little—‘Oh, I will kill myself! I will kill myself!’ And before she lost consciousness again she saw him run up the path toward the Villa Cardassi… .
“This is what she told me, Captain, in God’s truth. It seems very plainly to be murder and suicide. I would respectfully venture to offer the captain my opinion that a fall from such a height might alone cause the head injuries—”
Parrinello’s big mouth began to work. “A fiction!” he said. “A fantasy! It could not be! The girl’s in shock!”
“Quiet, Parrinello!” the detective commanded. He turned back to Luigi. “Tell me, Corporal. Tell me. Did the girl appear to be lucid when she told you all this.”
“She was of course quite weak, sir. But she was lucid. She was telling the truth. On that I would stake my life.”
“A preposterous tale!” Parrinello said. “She was only covering up for her other lover. Women do that all the time. And the disgrace it was causing to her soul!” he mocked. “An American millionaire was getting into her little peasant crack, and it was the best thing she ever had in her life. The idea of—”
If Di Bartolo had had at that moment any inclination toward doubts about Luigi’s story, certainly the fact that they were dissipated may be hung upon Sergeant Parrinello and the vileness of spirit which emanated from him at the moment like some wet ignoble mist. He would have scandalized a pimp. Di Bartolo wheeled on him savagely, and for an instant Luigi had the impression of some lean wild beast—a wolf, a mink, a weasel—all teeth and claws, unimaginably fierce. “Silence!” he said to the sergeant, in a voice like a whisper. “Silence! Not another word from you! Understand? Not another word! When I want your opinion I will ask for it. In the meantime, Parrinello, remember this. While you have done everything possible to be derelict in your duty, this corporal has been doing his job. Now keep your mouth shut!”
Then they were gone, and Luigi sat down next to a camellia bush, head in his hands, trembling, weak as water… .
Francesca died at ten o’clock that night. Luigi had other duties to perform during the day, but he kept coming back to her side as often as he could. He wished to be absolutely sure. Several times she roused from her deep sleep, and each time she was more troubled and distant than the last, but he came to understand, finally, exactly what had happened.
For she had indeed encountered Saverio on the path sometime during the early morning, in the brightest part of the valley when the clouds had passed from the moon. She knew him well, and was not in the least afraid of him, but what Mason had done to her just that same evening clung to her flesh like some loathsome disease which she was fated to endure forever. So it was that when she met Saverio in the shadows and he put out his fingers harmlessly—perhaps no more than as a simple greeting—to stroke her, the intense male hand on her arm brought back, like horror made touchable, the touch and the feel and the actuality, and she found herself shrieking. She shrieked, and she scratched madly out at the flat lopsided face which now itself was stricken with panic. He began wailing like an old man bereft. Then he drew back and hit her, and she fell, yet still she heard herself shrieking, unaware now that this was Saverio, or anyone, aware of nothing save that the whole earth’s stiff, protuberant and insatiate masculinity had descended upon her in the space of one summer night. Still she screamed, and the frenzied half-wit clouted her again, this time with a rock, or with the weight of all the firmament, and she must have kept screaming then as she lay broken among the weeds, and long after Saverio had gone away, for even in her delirium she screamed, and she gave one last scream which was in truth only the faintest of sighs, when the two farmers happened upon her in the dawn.
Crickets danced about her head among the weeds. She lay next to a bed of wild roses. And that is how Francesca met the light of a new day.
There was the day following the morning that he killed Mason, and then the night after that. Of this time Cass can recall almost nothing. He is certain that (for the last time in his life) he got drunk, and he has the vague recollection of a seedy little cantina on the outskirts of town, where he bought two bottles of wine. Now he is certain too that he convinced himself, despite all intuition that told him otherwise, that Mason had killed Francesca ( “Remember this,” he told me, “remember how often you read in the newspaper some such line as slayer shows no remorse, or perhaps feels no regret for his crime, and you can be sure that this is true. Because something has happened inside, the same thing that must have happened to me that day. He isn’t necessarily cold-blooded or callous. Instead the chances are that he has been rocked to his very foundations. And he begins to believe in the lie he must tell himself in order to preserve his sanity or maybe even his life. He convinces himself that he is in the right, and that whoever it was that he did in had it coming to him like no one since Judas Iscariot.”), because that night, after a day spent somewhere in the hills where he stalked alone in drunken rage and sorrow, he had a witness. Would I ever forget that moment when he staggered into the palace, ravaged by ten years of age, seized me by the arm as if I were the Wedding Guest, and with holy vengeance in his eye spoke of Mason standing there grinning in the midst of eternity, fatally beyond reach of more and deserved punishment? Madness was skulking after him at that moment, of this he is sure, and now he knows something else. He knows that when he went forth from the palace, past a swooning Poppy (he does not recall even seeing her, though he does remember his tirade to me), he was headed for the pharmacist’s house, for it must have occurred to him that Francesca might still be living after all, and that he might see her before she died. But he was half an hour too late. Luigi told him this, standing alone in the shadows of the house. She had already been taken away. Was it then that, turning his eyes from Luigi’s dark face, he looked past the house and saw fires burning mysteriously and strangely far down on the surface of the sea? He can no longer be sure. He knows that Luigi, comforting him, was trying to tell him something else, drew him aside secretly into the garden
, in his soft melancholy voice fumbled for words to tell him that truth which he had allowed himself to know only at the instant of Mason’s death: his victim was not the killer. Then who was it, Luigi? he must have asked. And when Luigi spoke of the idiot, conjuring the image of the harmless flat-faced lout he had seen almost every day—that must have been the instant when, again, gazing down through the sultry night, he saw the fires quicken and blaze up there in the very bosom of the sea, and saw smoke rise toward the stars, as if from some dark titanic pyre, and knew that he was utterly deranged.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 108