The Death of an Irish Consul

by Bartholomew Gill

  “What are your plans?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. Everything has made me so confused. First, Colin’s death, then Enrico’s involvement in it, then Francesco’s strange behavior. Do you know he wants to marry me?”

  “No.”

  “He insists on it. Now, right away, so soon after Colin’s death. It’s unthinkable, unseemly, but he’s like a crazed person. One can’t talk to him any longer. I wish——I wish that business with the police and Enrico would clear up. It’s made him so strange.”

  “It will,” said McGarr. He could hear loud talking in the hall, orders being given. He imagined Battagliatti had arrived. “You just stand right where you are, ma’am, and don’t move when your friend enters the room,” he advised.

  “Why so?” The sun had caught in her hair, as it had during the Palio when her husband had been killed. She was dressed in black, and the plain suit became her tall and trim figure. One earring, just a gold band, glinted where her hair had been drawn into a bun at the back of her neck.

  “You’ll see.” McGarr reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a pair of glasses no different from those Francesco Battagliatti had left aboard the rented helicopter in London. It had taken the Florentine police and Falchi, who was in the next room monitoring the conversation by means of a microphone that McGarr wore under his coat, all morning to find Battagliatti’s optician. The prescriptions of the lenses matched those of the glasses O’Shaughnessy had picked up at Heathrow and returned with only an hour before. McGarr then removed his Walther from its shoulder holster and placed it in his lap. He covered it and his right hand with a newspaper.

  Enna Cummings’s eyes were wide now. “Please, no violence. No violence again. Not to Francesco, too. I don’t think I can stand any more violence.”

  “Don’t worry. There isn’t going to be any if I can help it. Just act as if I’m not here.”

  But she couldn’t. When Battagliatti opened the door and stepped into the room, saying, “Enna, my darling—how are you today?” her eyes were still wide with fright. “What’s wrong, what’s the matter?” Battagliatti looked around.

  There in back of him in the chair and smiling was McGarr with the bizarre flight glasses wrapping his face.

  Battagliatti’s hand jumped for his lapel and he pulled out his small pistol.

  Not before Enna Cummings had grabbed for the gun, which fired into the ceiling. “Don’t!” she screamed.

  “Where’d he get those? I’ll kill him, the meddler!”

  “Just like you killed Hitchcock and Browne, like you had Colin Cummings killed?”

  Battagliatti fought with her to lower the gun.

  McGarr could hear Falchi and his carabinieri in the next room scrambling to get out the door of that room and into the hallway.

  That was when the door leading to the hall burst open and Enrico Rattei appeared in it. He too had a gun in his hand.

  Before McGarr had time either to call out or to turn his own automatic on Rattei, Il Condottiere squeezed off a shot that struck Battagliatti right in the throat. The force of the slug lifted the little man right off his feet and dropped him on his back.

  O’Shaughnessy appeared behind Rattei and promptly relieved him of his weapon.

  Hands to his throat, Battagliatti lay on his back on the floor blinking up at Enna Ricasoli and McGarr. In spite of the helpless and pitiable look on his face as he tried to gasp for breath through the blood, McGarr saw that his eyes seemed calm. He was a man who had seen much and had doubtless experienced the deaths of many others.

  The air stank of gunpowder and scorched blood.

  McGarr then wondered if Rattei’s hitting him there in the voice box was just a wild or lucky shot. Rattei’s dossier mentioned that he was a championship quality marksman with most weapons. Carlo Falchi had told McGarr only a few minutes before that the man who had been following McGarr worked for Rattei.

  “Francesco, Francesco,” Enna Ricasoli Cummings was saying. “Why did it have to be like this?” Like McGarr, she was kneeling by his side.

  “That’s enough, Enna,” Rattei said. All his features were animated, but most especially his eyes. They were coal black and fierce. “Get away from him.”

  McGarr turned to Battagliatti. “You can still blink. Help is coming, but I don’t think you’re going to make it.” In a similar situation, McGarr wouldn’t want anybody lying to him. “Did you have Cummings killed?”

  Battagliatti just looked at him.

  “How about the others?”

  Again the little man stared straight into his eyes.

  “Did you think Rattei was behind Cummings’s murder? Is that why you began carrying this gun? Is that why you shot at him in Pisa? Did you think he was trying to get rid of all rivals?”

  Battagliatti blinked once.

  McGarr picked up the gold-plated .22-caliber automatic. It looked like an expensive child’s toy or a cigarette lighter.

  “Do you know how these glasses got to Heathrow?”

  Battagliatti blinked.

  “Were they planted there?” But Battagliatti didn’t blink again. His eyes had glassed. McGarr felt for his pulse. He was dead.

  McGarr turned and looked at Rattei, who, although still being held by O’Shaughnessy, looked proud and self-satisfied. The corners of his mouth just below his moustache had creased in a cruel, superior smile.

  Enna Ricasoli Cummings was sobbing now, rocking on her knees, her head in her lap. Suddenly she raised her body and turned to Rattei. Her face was streaming with tears. “You’re really a dreadful person, Enrico. Blood-thirsty and cruel.”

  “Well, if I am, you had a part in making me that way, Enna.”

  “This is so awful, so horrible. I never want to see you again. Never.”

  “Why? Because after all these years I’ve finally triumphed? Remember that he had shot at me before and had a gun in his hand too. And not just any ordinary gun either. Take note of the gun, Mr. McGarr. You’ll find it very interesting.”

  McGarr looked down at the automatic and wondered yet again how Rattei could possibly know so much about it.

  But Enna Ricasoli Cummings was on her feet now. “Do you call this a triumph? You must be ill, depraved.” She had to grasp the mantel to keep from falling. “I’m tired of killing and men. Colin was so gentle, so trusting, so——” She began sobbing again. Her servants had pushed into the room and now surrounded her, helping her into a chair.

  McGarr slid the little automatic into his pocket and started toward the door. O’Shaughnessy and Falchi had Rattei in the hall now. McGarr shut the door behind him.

  Rattei was saying, “It was self-defense. You saw so yourself. I’ve got a license to carry the gun which is signed by a cabinet minister himself. He would have shot me, had he been quicker.”

  Falchi replied, “But you must come to my office to fill out a report and make a statement. It’s a matter of form, signor.”

  McGarr gestured to O’Shaughnessy and the two of them walked down the hall toward the stairs.

  “But why did Rattei go to the trouble of framing himself?” O’Shaughnessy asked him as they started across the sunny piazza toward carabinieri headquarters.

  McGarr hunched his shoulders. “So the world would know that Enrico Rattei’s vow was binding, perhaps. And maybe to put Battagliatti—that nothing of a little man—in his place, to show him that he had neither the cunning nor the strength of will to dare to compete with”—McGarr waved his hand and trilled—“Il Condottiere Rattei.”

  “Sounds like some explanation a little boy would give for beating up the kid next door.”

  McGarr was then reminded of what Rattei had said at his villa—that a person is happiest who fulfills his boyhood ambitions. Surely to a northern European the swagger and bluster of Latin males always seemed childish and absurd. It had nothing to do with real worth. “I’m sure we’ll never really know. He’s a smart one and daring. He’s given us only the implication that he engineered th
e whole dirty business. Unless——”

  “The gun?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “If it is the Slea Head murder weapon, then he must have had it pinched from Battagliatti at some point or other. Maybe we can get a line on it.”

  Less than twenty minutes later, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy were deep in the basement archives of carabinieri headquarters. Falchi had placed his entire clerical staff at McGarr’s disposal, and the chief inspector had six men sifting through theft reports beginning a day before the Hitchcock murder, or June 18, and running back at least a year. In particular, he had them looking for the surname Battagliatti in the vicinity of Chiusdino and the report of a housebreak. McGarr figured that if Battagliatti’s staff had been surprised when it heard the party chairman had been carrying a gun of late, then the gun could not have been stolen from his car or traveling bags. The carabinieri fired the gun twice into sand. The barrel markings on the bullets were the same as those on the bullets taken from Hitchcock’s and Browne’s skulls. It was the murder weapon.

  But after an hour passed, McGarr grew anxious. He wanted to talk to Battagliatti’s sister before the news of her brother’s death reached her on the family farm, which was, coincidentally, in Chiusdino and quite close to Enrico Rattei’s villa. Thus, he and O’Shaughnessy hopped into the Alfa rent-a-car and drove to the little town in the hills at speeds that made the Galwayman cringe.

  At the Chiusdino barracks, McGarr explained what he wanted to the seniormost official present. He was an utterly bald old man near retirement. With a toothpick in his mouth, he was sitting, as though in state, at a massive oaken desk. His complexion was so golden that the shadows beneath his chin seemed green. Also, his eyebrows were auburn and a shade McGarr could not quite credit as real. O’Shaughnessy seemed unable to look at anything else. They were wide and bushy, and the commandant used them histrionically, raising one and lowering the other when McGarr made his request for directions to the Battagliatti farm, repeating the process when McGarr also asked for information concerning possible thefts there during the past year, then knitting both before saying he didn’t think he could help the Irishmen, and finally stretching both very far when they agreed to share a small glass of cognac with him at the café across the street.

  There, after much preliminary conversation, in which the policeman ascertained McGarr’s background and at last placed him as the very same McGarr who had run the Italian Interpol operation for over five years, to whom, it turned out, he had had occasion to telephone once, and whom he admired, along with the great mass of his compatriots, for arresting the leaders of the drug rings which “had corrupted and debased the young people of Naples.” He then repeated the old chestnut which alters Byron’s quote to “See Naples and die.” Finally, he said, “Why bother with records? I don’t trifle with such things. Scribbling on paper is the pastime of schoolteachers, priests, and other idlers. I keep all of my records here.” He tapped his golden cranium with a finger. “And have been for over thirty years. Chiusdino to Siena to Sovicili to Massa Maritima is my beat. Nothing escapes me.”

  O’Shaughnessy and McGarr looked at him hard. Their patience was wearing thin.

  “For instance, on—let’s see—the eleventh of December last year, Maria, who is Francesco’s sister, called me to say——” He broke off and looked at their empty glasses. “Would you care for another small cognac, gentlemen?” He raised his eyebrows nearly onto his forehead.

  “After,” McGarr said, “after,” in a way that impressed upon Commandant Alfori the urgency of the request.

  Alfori straightened up and glanced at McGarr as though the Irishman had offended his sensibilities. “——to say her house had been broken into while she was in Siena shopping. Of course, I went right over there. One doesn’t ignore the needs of so important a personage.”

  “What was missing? In particular,” asked O’Shaughnessy, who, having caught the barman’s eye, gestured to the brandy bottle which was then placed on their table.

  “A coin collection, their silver, an antique clock, some small pieces of crystal, the old bicycle that Signor Battagliatti had been wont to race with when he was much younger, some fowling pieces, a rifle, and some other small arms. Nothing much, really. Il Signor is a true Communist. He lives very simply.”

  “Including a gold-plated Baretta special, twenty-two caliber?” asked McGarr.

  The phone in the café was ringing.

  “Yes—I think so. Wait.” Alfori tapped his forehead and arched his right eyebrow. “Yes, and not only was it stolen, but later, just about a week ago, it was recovered in a stolen automobile near the Communist party headquarters in Siena.”

  The phone call was for McGarr. Falchi’s men had found a Chiusdino barracks report and a later avviso deleting the gun from the original bill of particulars stolen.

  When McGarr returned to the table, Alfori asked, “Do you want the serial numbers of the gun?” as though he could recall them from memory.

  “Don’t need them now, signor”—McGarr put his hand in his sport coat pocket and pulled out Battagliatti’s handgun, which he had again pinched, this time from the lab staff, and would only turn in on threat of arrest—“since I’ve got the gun itself. Have you ever been to Ireland?”

  “Why, no.” Alfori motioned toward McGarr’s cognac glass with the neck of the bottle.

  McGarr stayed him. “We’ve got to run, but perhaps you’ll soon get the opportunity of visiting us in our country—all expenses paid, of course. Then we can share another drink together.”

  O’Shaughnessy was paying the barman.

  “I didn’t realize your inquiry was so important. If I had, certainly I would have expedited your request.” Alfori stood. “Where are you going now?”

  “To Signor Battagliatti’s house. Can you point me the way?”

  “Better—I can take you.”

  McGarr consented readily. With Alfori present, he wouldn’t have to explain his own identity as a police official of a foreign country.

  From the top of the hill above Francesco Battagliatti’s small white house, McGarr could see Enrico Rattei’s villa in the distance.

  It was late afternoon and the Battagliatti house sat in the deep shadows of the former zinc excavation. The entire area surrounding the house had been sodded and Battagliatti’s sister was working in a vegetable garden.

  She was a frail woman in her sixties with a remarkably thin face and a long, pointed nose. She wore a bright red babushka and rubber boots that reached her knees. Her dress was plain gray, obviously a utility item. Her hands were black with dirt and seemed too large and coarse for her stature.

  She sat on a tomato crate and offered others to McGarr, O’Shaughnessy, and Alfori.

  “I’ve come about this gun.” McGarr handed her the automatic.

  “It’s Francesco’s!” She was alarmed. “What’s happened to him? He’s been carrying this with him since the Palio. I found it in his coat pocket several times. I knew no good would come of it.” She searched McGarr’s and O’Shaughnessy’s faces, which were impassive, and then she looked to Alfori. “How did they get this? Where’s Francesco?” She started to rise.

  McGarr put his hand on her thin arm and eased her back onto the tomato crate.

  Behind her McGarr could see a large hare loping slowly toward the fringe of the garden. Strange, he thought to himself, how funereal were the purple shadows the cliff cast over the house while the western slopes of the hills beyond were brilliant with the same startling ocher light of the dwindling sun that he had noticed some days before.

  Alfori was saying, “To tell you the truth, Maria, I don’t know how these gentlemen obtained the gun. Can you enlighten us, sirs?”

  “What can you remember about the theft of the gun, ma’am?” O’Shaughnessy asked. “Thinking back on it now, is there something you can remember that you forgot to tell Signor Alfori at the time? It’s important.”

  But she just kept staring at the two Irishmen, trying to read their
faces. “I don’t know. I don’t like this. Who are these two men?” she asked Alfori.

  “As I told you before, Maria, they’re policemen from Ireland.”

  “Why Ireland? I’ve never been to Ireland. Where’s Francesco? I want to talk to him first.”

  McGarr said, “This gun has been to Ireland. It killed two people there.”

  Her hand jumped to her mouth. “I don’t believe it.” She looked at Alfori.

  He said, “It’s true. These men don’t lie.”

  “But Francesco’s never been to Ireland. If he had visited that country he would have brought me something from there. That’s his way whenever he goes someplace new.”

  “The gun killed those people while it was stolen, before it was found in the automobile again.”

  Her neck jerked and she glanced down into the valley and at the bright hills.

  Alfori said, “We’re too well acquainted, Maria, for me not to know that you’ve got something to tell us.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s not right. I’m not really sure. That’s why I never said anything before, not even to Francesco. And he’s a poor man anyhow, a mere servant.”

  “Who?” asked Alfori.

  “I must talk to Francesco first.”

  McGarr picked up a stone and tossed it at the hare so it scampered out of the garden. “You can’t talk to Francesco anymore.”

  She lowered her head. “I thought that’s what you’d say.”

  “It’s why we’ve come,” McGarr explained. “We need to know about that gun. If we act fast——”

  “His name is Cervi.” She looked up at McGarr. She was not crying. Her voice was clear and strong. “He has a three-wheel van, a Lambretta, I think it is. The day we were robbed I saw him going down the hill,” she pointed over her shoulder. “I was in the bus. It’s high. When he passed, I looked back and I thought I saw the hilt of the sword Francesco brought back from Russia. It was one of the things stolen from the house. I couldn’t be sure because of all the dirt on the windows of the wagon and the dust from the road. And then we were going fast. I only got a glimpse of it. Anyhow, it wasn’t ’til much later that I remembered it, and I thought all of the things taken we could easily do without. We don’t——” She paused. “——we never needed much.”