The Death of an Irish Consul

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Where?” McGarr wanted the information in case Gallup was too late in reaching Cummings.

  “Is that really any of your business?” Cummings was trying to act superior again, unafraid, on top of it all.

  McGarr knew, however, the stance was feigned. He sighed. “Let me tell you a thing or two, Mr. C. of SIS. I really wish it weren’t. Everything I’ve seen in this case leads me to believe that you are being set up. Enrico Rattei—do you know him?”

  Cummings paused. “Yes. What do you mean being ‘set up’?”

  “You are being set up to be murdered. Why would Rattei want to kill you?”

  “Well—all this is absolutely out of place over the telephone and I’ve got to rush, but I suppose it’s common knowledge in certain circles that, when I married Enna, Enrico Rattei vowed he would kill me if I ever dared return to Italy.”

  “And, have you ever?”

  “No, but I plan to soon. I don’t think I’ve told you, but I’m being named ambassador to Italy tomorrow. One of my first official acts there will be to represent our country—excuse me—the United Kingdom at the Palio. Which reminds me. I’ve got to hang up. The dinner engagement I spoke of is at the Italian embassy. They want to welcome me and all that. I must go.”

  “One more question,” said McGarr. “How long ago did you know you were going to be named ambassador?”

  “At least six months. It was then that the ministry began screening candidates to succeed me in my present post. Satisfied?”

  “One more.”

  “McGarr!”

  “How’s your investment in Tartan Limited working out?”

  “In what?”

  “Tartan Limited. You know—the Panamanian outfit.”

  “Really now, you’re beginning to become difficult.”

  “The oil company. The one that’s operating in Scotland.”

  Cummings sighed. “For official purposes, all my money—that is, the money my father left me and the money I received as dowry from Enna’s family—was placed in a blind trust some twenty-eight years ago. The only business that I concern myself with is that which might interfere with the operations of the British government in foreign countries.”

  “But unofficially, did you know that you are listed as an officer of Tartan Limited?”

  “Of course. It’s a splendid investment. My lawyer told me about it.”

  “Did you know that Hitchcock and Browne were the controlling officers?”

  “No—they couldn’t be. They work for ENI. My lawyer would have told me if they were.”

  “Does your lawyer belong to your club?”

  “Certainly. He’s an old school chum.”

  “May I have his name?”

  “It’s Croft. Sir Sellwyn Gerrard Montague Croft.”

  “How long will you be at the Italian embassy?”

  “I don’t know. Hours, I suspect—cocktails, dinner, and entertainment after that. Why?”

  “I’m going to stop ’round.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t embarrass you, don’t worry.”

  “You had better not. And I don’t want any talk about Browne, Hitchcock, or Tartan Limited, do you understand?” Cummings hung up.

  “What’s worse,” O’Shaughnessy asked, standing, “a little embarrassment or a little lead?”

  “Taken in the proper amounts, it only dulls the brain.” McGarr called a cab that took them to the airport.

  There, waiting for a plane to Heathrow, McGarr called Noreen, who had been staying at the Carlton since morning. Earlier in the day, McGarr believed that he would be busy in London for some time, at least until the Hitchcock and Browne murder investigations were solved or met some new impasse. Now, however, he wasn’t so sure. The Palio was only three days away. Besides getting a line on Foster’s whereabouts, McGarr believed Cummings was his only immediate lead, that is, if Foster tried to murder him. Also, McGarr firmly believed that Foster wasn’t alone in all of this, that he was just working for a payoff and no doubt a very large one indeed, some figure only a man like Rattei could afford. Thus, McGarr asked Noreen to put on her most formal gown and meet him at the Italian embassy in two hours. Noreen’s precise and diminutive beauty would make McGarr inconspicuous. He wouldn’t even be seen.

  Next, he called Bernie McKeon in Dublin and asked him to assign a detail of men to tail Rattei. He said they’d require the use of a helicopter, automobiles, and a sizable amount of expense money.

  Lastly, McGarr called the Irish embassy in London and arranged to have a limousine pick up Noreen at the Carlton and another one meet them at the airport. At the speeds McGarr planned to have the car move, they would require diplomatic immunity. Also, admission to the Italian embassy was probably no more than having arrived in a large, official automobile.

  And McGarr was right. The semicircular drive was lined with Rollses and Bentleys, Cadillacs, an antique Lamborghini, Lancias, and Citroëns. Noreen popped out of a Mercedes and met McGarr in front of the building.

  And McGarr was indeed correct about Noreen as well. She was wearing the satin dinner dress that had cost McGarr nearly a whole month’s salary when they had gone to Paris on holiday the year before. In a small country like Ireland, the second-ranking police official was often invited to state affairs. The dark blue dress complemented Noreen’s copper hair; the cut emphasized her posture and precise features. In all, she seemed to be a creature from a more refined age, when beauty was a delicate arrangement of proportion. On her chest she wore three strands of pearls. The effect was stunning. Immediately, Cummings himself engaged her in conversation.

  The dinner had just ended, and cigars and cognac were being served in the salon of the embassy. There, a small orchestra had begun playing a Scarlatti concerto.

  McGarr and O’Shaughnessy gave their coats to a butler, and the two men weaved their way through the guests to explain their presence to the Irish ambassador.

  Moments later, a woman approached the three men.

  “Enna,” said John Frances, the Irish ambassador to England, “I don’t believe you’ve met Peter McGarr, Ireland’s premier sleuth, and his Watson, Liam O’Shaughnessy.”

  The Garda superintendent blushed.

  “I’m certainly pleased to make your acquaintance, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Cummings said in a voice that was low, at once throaty but soft, and just slightly accented. “My husband has told me much about you and your associate. Your competence astounds him. Scotland Yard, it seems, now has some competition at last.” It had been Enna Ricasoli Cummings’s face that the masters of the Sienese school had been trying to paint, McGarr imagined. Perfectly oval with a long, thin nose and dark eyes, she looked like a Matteo di Giovanni Madonna to him. He had often accompanied his own wife to Siena in pursuit of her hobby, art history. McGarr could imagine the young Enrico Rattei, having lived among the hundreds of Duccio, Simone Martini, Andrea Vanni, Sodoma, Sanno di Pietro, Bartolo di Fredi, and Lorenzetti Madonnas during the nine years in which he pursued his dottoria in economics, suddenly looking upon the youngest daughter of the revered Ricasoli family and loving her with a passion that his country’s culture reinforced.

  McGarr said, “I’d prefer to think that we of Dublin Castle offer Scotland Yard skilled cooperation. And, speaking of cooperation, this morning, while investigating a crime in Scotland, I received a good measure of cooperation from Enrico Rattei. I believe he’s a friend of yours.”

  She lowered her eyes. Her eyelids seemed tanned, or at least a deeper brown than her olive complexion. “Yes, Enrico and I are close friends.”

  “I think he’s in love with you,” said McGarr. He knew such a statement was rude, but he wanted to see how she’d react.

  That pained John Frances. He looked away and shifted his weight.

  She smiled. Her eyes flashed at McGarr. They were brown, almost black, and appeared depthless. “Yes. I think he is.” A tall woman, she was wearing a lilac dress. The material was sheer and had been fitted with great c
are to her thin but angular frame. But it was her eyes that were most interesting to McGarr. They conveyed an overwhelming sense of serenity. She was indeed a woman a man could kill for. “You’re so direct, Mr. McGarr.”

  “It’s necessary in my profession.”

  “Which one is that?” asked a man who had just joined the group. “Police work, isn’t it? In Rome and Paris and now back home to Dublin.” He held out his hand. “I’m Francesco Battagliatti.” He was a man even smaller than McGarr. His light brown hair was close-cropped and bristled. He wore heavy metallic-frame glasses that shone.

  “The politician.” McGarr shook his hand.

  “Political leader, party chairman are more pleasant expressions.” Battagliatti meant the Communist party in Italy.

  Although this was the first time McGarr had ever met the man, he knew something about his past. Having lived in Tuscany for a time, McGarr had watched Battagliatti build the Communist party from a ragtag band of resistance fighters during World War II into the regnant political party of that province and the second most powerful force in Italian national politics.

  Having been a Communist ideologue during his university days—Siena also, McGarr believed—Battagliatti had had to flee Mussolini’s Italy. Rumor had it Battagliatti had participated in some of the most dreadful acts of Russia’s Comintern, and, when he returned to Italy as the American troops were advancing up the Tyrrhenian Peninsula, he proved to be the most capable of the guerrilla generals who stalled the German exit to the north.

  Battagliatti always appeared in public dressed in a double-breasted gray suit. He had an amiable chuckle and a sharp wit, but his charm was that of an intellectual. One was left with the impression that his mind was icily rational. “Do we have criminals in our midst?” he asked McGarr.

  The chief inspector thought he’d test the man’s vaunted intelligence. “The criminal lurks in everybody’s personality, signor. He is never really absent from our deliberations.”

  Battagliatti smiled and sipped from a snifter. “I trust you speak for yourself, Mr. McGarr. In spite of the innumerable occasions on which I have searched my own persona, I have never revealed a criminal element.” All the while he spoke, he was staring at Enna Cummings and not once did he look at McGarr. His eyes were sparkling and, although his smile was probably a permanent affectation of his personality, McGarr judged that at this moment it conveyed a genuine emotion.

  Whenever she looked at him, she too smiled, yet in no way did she seem to be coy.

  McGarr said, “Come now—each of us contains numerous possibilities within himself. We all have the seeds of greatness and banality in us. Robber, shaman, murderer, saint—we’re power obsessed at one moment, recluses at the next. Have you never imagined yourself a mobster, Signor Battagliatti, or a borghése in Milano, a fannullóne on the breakwater in Catania, a troubador journeying to Rome for the Christmas holidays?”

  “Never,” said the politician. “At all times, I am, sadly, Battagliatti.” He pronounced his name histrionically, gesturing his hand with a slight movement of the wrist. “A man with the same emotions as those which had surfaced in his pitiable personality when he was still a foolish student, young and in love. Most of those other personae whom you’ve named have never darkened his demeanor. And you didn’t mention unrequited lover.” He glanced once more at Enna Cummings.

  “Stop it, Francesco. You’re boring Chief Inspector McGarr. I’m sure that the set of personalities he deals with daily are much more colorful than those he’ll find in this room.”

  “Not so,” said McGarr.

  Noreen and Cummings now joined the group. The contrasting beauty of the two women—one diminutive with red hair and fine, white skin; the other tall and dark—created a most pleasant tension.

  McGarr continued. “It’s just that we’re less adventuresome than those we choose to call criminals. Society and its values have made too deep an impression upon us. We’ve quelled the grosser elements in our personalities. But we lose something all the same, don’t you think?”

  “Ah, yes,” Battagliatti said, “the freedom to loot and pillage. The license to kill and maim. But then again, Mr. McGarr, it’s easy for you to talk, since you have the license to kill.”

  McGarr smiled. A waiter presented O’Shaughnessy and him snifters of brandy. Taking a glass off the tray, he said, “Within limits, of course—those set by society.”

  “But what about the man who has led an exemplary life for, say, fifty-five years? Suddenly, he slays his mother-in-law. Surely, his is not a ‘criminal’ personality.”

  “Which is exactly my point. The balance of his personality has gone awry, the harmony has been broken momentarily. A psychologist, a sociologist, a——”

  “Policeman?” Battagliatti suggested.

  “——anybody with compassion and a little common sense,” said McGarr, “can discover the why and the how of the imbalance. It’s a simple paroxysm that the criminal is going through, that’s all.”

  “And not likely to happen again?”

  “If those conditions that led to this ‘journey to the end of one aspect of his personality’ no longer obtain, then it might not happen again.”

  “Then you don’t believe in capital punishment.”

  “Of course not. How could I, if I believe what I’ve just said?” McGarr smiled once more.

  “But surely you do.”

  McGarr shook his head. “Having to deal with ‘criminal’ personalities on a daily basis has made me envious of their freedom. What I’ve just said was a ‘journey to the end of the thespian element in my personality,’ and no more.”

  “Toccato!” said Battagliatti. “Beware of the policeman with wit. He may understand the deviations of a man’s personality and not despise him, thereby diminishing the value of the criminal’s emotional paroxysm. Crime then becomes a nasty little joke that the criminal has played on himself.”

  “But we must never lose sight of the victim,” said McGarr. “What part does he play in the crime?”

  “Some would say”—Battagliatti allowed a little, perhaps again his professional, smile to crease his smooth features—“the victim invites the crime, that some imbalance obtains in his personality that begs for an untoward act to be done to him. Some would say so, wouldn’t they, Chief Inspector?” He turned back to McGarr.

  “Some would, but not I. And then, of course, we would have to examine the motives of the some who would say that.”

  “Toccato ancora,” Enna Cummings said. “It’s a good thing you’re not a criminal, Francesco, or Signor McGarr would have you incarcerated in no time at all.

  “Have you met…” She then began introducing Noreen and McGarr and O’Shaughnessy to the other persons around them.

  Throughout it all, however, McGarr’s thoughts were preoccupied. All of these people seemed to be old Italian friends of Enna Ricasoli Cummings, either being from Siena itself or having attended university with her, and they were all quite successful persons in their own rights.

  For instance, besides Battagliatti, McGarr was introduced to Oscar Zingiale. He had formed the IRI (Istitúto per la Ricostruzione Industriale) during the depression and had almost single-handedly pulled Italy out of economic straits more dire than those most other Western nations experienced. Under IRI he created the Italian coal and steel industry, RAI, which was the state-owned radio and television network in Italy, Alitalia, and Finmare, the shipbuilding concern based in Genoa.

  His companies were archrivals of those that Enrico Rattei had created, but when McGarr asked Zingiale about his competitor, he answered, “In fact, we’re dear friends, when we can put business matters aside, which is seldom. I saw him last at the Palio two years ago. That’s where we met, you know.”

  “At the Palio?”

  “No—in Siena, at university. We roomed together, both as poor as church mice.”

  “And look at you now,” said Battagliatti, who had been standing next to McGarr all the tiine. “Two bloated cap
italisti.”

  Zingiale laughed. “Sometimes I don’t believe we attended the same university. You think too much in categories, Francesco. One bloated capitalista,” he pointed to himself. He was a bald, rotund man, with a heavy gold watch chain on his belly. “Rattei is a”—he moved closer to the two men and whispered—“Fascist. That’s an unpopular word nowadays, and one not to be said lightly.”

  “But when the Fascists ruled, what were you, Oscar?”

  Zingiale shrugged. “A Fascist, what else?”

  “Then a capitalist is merely a chameleon.” Battagliatti’s eyes flashed.

  Zingiale smiled benignly. “If he’s successful, he’s a bloated chameleon.”

  “What about Fascists?” McGarr asked Battagliatti. “How do you think of them?”

  “As any other intelligent man does, as individuals.”

  “There,” said Zingiale, “he’s learning, he’s maturing.”

  “Take Enrico Rattei, for an instance,” McGarr suggested.

  Battagliatti paused, sipped from his snifter, and said, “I admire him very much. I am also one of his friends from university.”

  McGarr wouldn’t swear to it, but he thought he saw Zingiale’s features glower a bit at that remark.

  Then there was Remigio Agnollo, the Turin carmaker. His family, like the Ricasolis, had always had money. He too joined the group and was introduced to McGarr.

  After him, McGarr met Umberto Pavini, the historian, and Maria Garzanti, a rotund, chesty woman who was a leading soprano with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They and some others, whose names McGarr didn’t recognize, gradually added themselves to the circle of people standing near Enna Ricasoli Cummings.

  And perhaps it was the orchestra, which had begun to play the stately air from Bach’s Concerto for Strings in D Major, or the ambience of the drawing room, which was furnished with reproductions of Quattrocento Florentine craftsmen, or the heat of his palms, which had freed the delicate yet heady aroma of the Luccan brandy in his snifter, that made McGarr wonder what it had been like to be young and at the university in Siena during the late twenties with this group of gifted and intelligent people, how it must have seemed that an interloper, Cummings, had plucked the rose of their coterie from their midst. McGarr now understood Rattei’s purported threat somewhat better. And he wondered how much Cummings himself figured in his recent appointment as ambassador to Italy. Friends as powerful as his wife’s might certainly be capable of engineering such an appointment.