The Death of an Irish Consul
Page 21
“Paolo Cervi?” Alfori asked.
She nodded.
McGarr and O’Shaughnessy stood.
Alfori said, “Are you going to be all right, Maria?”
“Of course,” she said. She was looking toward the garden.
The hare had reappeared.
McGarr could see at least two others.
“Perhaps Signor McGarr can tell you——”
“I don’t want to know. They’ll tell me soon enough, I’m sure.”
But as McGarr turned to go, she asked, “Was there pain?”
“No,” he lied.
“Do you mind if I use your phone, Maria?” Alfori asked.
She flicked her wrist toward the house.
While Alfori called his office for somebody to come out to the house and keep her company, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy watched her watch the lepri nibbling on the plants in the garden.
“You don’t think she’ll do something wild?” O’Shaughnessy asked McGarr. “She gives me that feeling.”
But she was on her feet now, shooing the hares out of the garden. She then began to replace the tall chicken-wire fence that kept them out during the night.
McGarr had not correlated the name Paolo with the man’s occupation, servant, and the butler from Rattei’s villa until the door of the hillside casòtto, more a shelter than a house, opened, and he saw him standing there, for the briefest moment that it took Cervi to react.
He slammed the door in McGarr’s face and threw the bolt. The chief inspector could then hear him rushing through the house.
One thing about McGarr, he could always run with the best of them. As a lad on Moore Street, he had not once been caught by the Garda after nicking fruit from vendors’ wagons, and as a wing on any football team he couldn’t be stopped once he broke clear.
McGarr shoved by O’Shaughnessy and Alfori and sprinted around the house, out of which Cervi had long since debouched. McGarr could see him up on the hillside, running through a herd of goats which were scattering, their bells clanking and ringing. A caged guard dog lunged at McGarr and then coursed from side to side barking savagely.
The air was cool in the shadows on the hillside, yet McGarr’s lungs burned. He smoked too much. He promised himself he’d quit as soon as he got back to Ireland, and he knew he was lying to himself. Anyhow, he wished he could quit.
The diminutive butler kept looking back, as McGarr gained on him. His eyes were wide with fright. McGarr could see he wasn’t carrying a weapon, since he wore only a light cotton shirt, which flapped as he ran, and tight black pants, no doubt his work garb, that would have shown the bulge of a gun had he been carrying one.
Just at the line where the setting sun peeked over the neighboring hill and struck Cervi, McGarr clapped his hand on the man’s neck and forced his face into the hillside. He pulled handcuffs from the small holster on his belt and jerked Cervi’s wrists into them. Then he pulled out Battagliatti’s Baretta Special. He held it so the sunlight glinted off the gold plating, so Cervi would see. McGarr figured that as long as Alfori and other witnesses were beyond earshot he’d try to frighten the little man. McGarr was sure Rattei would supply Paolo Cervi with his best lawyers the moment he was booked.
“See this, you little bastard?” he whispered in the man’s ear while leaning all his weight into the handcuffed arms. “You know what it is, don’t you? Twice you pulled this trigger and dispatched the old men. Did you know who they were? Did Rattei tell you? Or did you read about it later in the papers? They were big men, important men, and you’re in trouble now.
“Rattei told you they’d never extradite you, right?” McGarr jerked up on the handcuffs.
The man winced with the pain.
McGarr glanced behind him and could see O’Shaughnessy and Alfori weaving through the bushes and goat droppings as they started to climb the hill toward him.
“Well, he was right, like always. Your boss is always the man with the proper information. But this time he didn’t tell you one thing—the British don’t do things regular when it’s a case like this. No. The British are ruthless themselves, you know that. When I went to London they offered me a lot of money, whole piles of it, not—mind you—not to bring anybody back for a court trial—that’s too long, too messy—but to ‘solve’ the problem, get me? And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to ‘solve’ you. Down there in that chicken shack. It’s not a standard Irish chicken shack, but we’ll see how much you can course around after I put a bullet in your brain.”
McGarr flashed the gun in Cervi’s face, then, stepping off him and using the handcuffs, pulled the small man to his feet. McGarr started down the hill with him, rushing him toward O’Shaughnessy and Alfori so that Cervi stumbled and tripped and fell. McGarr just kept on tugging at the handcuffs, so that the little man seemed more to sledge down the hill on his chest than to use his feet. The front of his shirt and pants was smeared with animal slurry.
“He resisted arrest,” said Alfori, when McGarr passed the two policemen. He began tsk-ing. “More people seem to make that tragic mistake daily. Ah, well—it’ll save the Italian people the expense of a trial.”
McGarr twisted the wooden latch of the shed and tossed Cervi into the shadows without caring that the hutch was filled with chickens which burst out of the confinement with a flurry of wings and feathers and dust and squawking. It all added to the show, McGarr believed.
He shouted, “Son of a bitch—stand away from the building, Liam. I don’t want to hurt any witnesses to his resisting arrest. He’s got a gun, you know. The very same one he used to kill Hitchcock and Browne.” McGarr dropped the gun so that it lay close to Cervi’s nose. He then pulled out his own Walther, slowly checking the clip to make sure it was fully loaded. He pushed forward the safety, cocking it. Compared to the little gun in the dust of the chicken coop, the 9-mm automatic looked like a weapon of terror.
McGarr spoke all the while. “You’ve got the advantage over them though, my friend. I was remiss. I failed to remember to bring along any twenty-two-caliber ammunition. This gun”—he waved the Walther—“will blow the front of your head right off. Sorry about that. Nobody’s perfect. You’ll just have to be satisfied with a closed casket. Buona notte!” McGarr had only to place the metal barrel of his fountain pen on the back of the man’s neck and Cervi began to speak in a rush.
“He made me do it, signor. I had no option. I’m just a poor man. We don’t have complete control over our destinies. Sometimes we have to do what other men—bigger, richer men—desire. That’s the only way we can survive.”
“Why tell me?” asked McGarr. “After I kill you I’ll be a bigger, richer man.”
“Don’t!” he howled pitiably.
McGarr slipped the Walther into its holster and kicked open the chicken coop door. He waved O’Shaughnessy in.
The tall Garda superintendent already had his notebook out. Alfori had one too.
“Rattei’s responsible for the murders, then?”
“Yes. He hired the Negro, he asked me to accompany him.”
“And you did.”
“I had no choice. I know Rattei. It was not really a request. If I had said no, he wouldn’t have trusted me any longer. Then, because of other things I know, it would have been only a matter of time before—” his voice trailed off.
“How did you get to Ireland?”
“ENI company jet to London. I took the train from there. I stayed in a bed-sitter in Limerick for a week and a half. I met the helicopter outside the city in a field near the river.”
“Why you and not some bigger man?”
“I didn’t know at the time, but later I put it together. It was because Francesco Battagliatti and I were the same size.” Cervi broke down and sobbed. “And the Battagliattis have been so good to me. His sister used to send his old clothes and shoes—and not even when they were old or used either—over here to me.”
“And still you burglarized their home?” McGarr asked. He had lit up a
Woodbine now, which burned his throat. He tossed it into the dust.
“I had to, I had no choice.”
“Did you pull the trigger of this gun twice in Ireland?”
“I had to. Yes.”
“Did you murder Hitchcock and Browne, then?” O’Shaughnessy asked to get Cervi on record twice admitting to the crimes.
“I had no choice. I didn’t know who they were. They were just two old Englishmen. It was them or me, really, signor. The way Rattei asked me, I saw how it was.”
“What did Rattei give you to kill Hitchcock and Browne?”
“Some of his private shares in ENI. Believe it or not, he has little else. He’s gambled everything on the new drilling.”
“And you were willing to go along with him?”
“Don’t you see I had to? And in a few years the shares would be worth millions. Signor Rattei is never wrong.”
O’Shaughnessy said, “He certainly was when he asked you to kill two men.”
“I mean, in business.”
“Who was the man who ‘played’ Rattei in Ireland?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him before, I never saw him again. He let it slip that he worked for ENI in Spain, though.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find,” O’Shaughnessy said to McGarr.
“Where was he when you pulled the trigger?” McGarr asked.
“Right outside the building.”
“And Foster?”
“Standing alongside me.”
Alfori, who had gathered enough information to conclude that this was no ordinary burglary arrest, asked, “Where did Rattei make this request, here in Chiusdino?”
“Yes. Can I sit up now?” Cervi’s face was still in the dust of the chicken shack.
McGarr undid the handcuffs and pulled him to his feet.
McGarr had often noted in the past that people who didn’t really like the taste of whiskey could in no way appreciate the flavor of Irish whiskey. He was sitting in the breeze of Falchi’s air conditioner. On the window ledge were also a telephone, a bucket of cracked ice, some tumblers, and a bottle of fourteen-year-old Jameson whiskey that McGarr guessed was at least twice that age. The café owner across the street had found it down in the farthest recess of his wine cellar, or so he told McGarr’s runner when mentioning the premium price; and now McGarr and O’Shaughnessy sipped tall cool glasses of the peat-smokey liquor. Even over ice, the crisp whiskey flavor and musky aroma were unmistakable. Alfori, who entered the room now, had had to cut his whiskey with water. But McGarr figured the Chiusdino barracks commandant would have drunk the mixture if it had been laced with hemlock, for the glass itself gave him high status here in Siena headquarters. Only Falchi, who was standing on the other side of the door, had been offered a drink and had refused.
In the middle of the room sat Paolo Cervi and some ten feet away from him Moses Foster, who was reading the statement Cervi had given McGarr, O’Shaughnessy, and Alfori.
After a while, Foster folded the statement and motioned it to Falchi, who took it from him. Foster then turned to Cervi. “That’s your signature at the bottom of the pages?”
Cervi nodded. He did not once look at Foster.
“And you gave that statement freely, not under duress?”
Cervi glanced at McGarr. He was still somewhat frightened. “What’s the difference? It’s the truth.”
Foster too glanced over at McGarr, but he smiled. He shook his head. “Do I get a touch of that thing?” He meant the bottle of Irish whiskey.
“After,” said McGarr.
“O.K.—but I did not pull the trigger on those guys in Ireland, get that? Even he”—Foster indicated Cervi—“swears to that. I just went along for the ride.
“Now, don’t put any water in that glass, just booze and right to the top.” He added, “Please,” and smiled broadly.
While Foster drank, he recounted the details of the assassinations of Hitchcock and Browne. Everything matched Cervi’s story perfectly. Foster signed the statement. McGarr gave him another drink. Foster said, “You little runt—I don’t know why I should like you, but I do.”
McGarr said, “Sure, you’d say that to any old leper brandishing a whiskey bottle.”
That was when Rattei was brought into the room. For a moment the sight of Cervi and Foster together seemed to disconcert him, but he quickly regained his aplomb. Two lawyers carrying briefcases flanked him.
Falchi handed him Cervi’s statement.
From the outer office McGarr could hear a typewriter clacking. When Foster’s statement was ready, a copy of that was handed Rattei. He and his lawyers never took seats but just stood like a triptych under the bare and dim light bulb reading the statements.
All the while Foster kept sipping from the glass, keeping his eyes on Rattei. One thing that Foster had never mentioned was how much Rattei had paid him or where the money was. McGarr knew that Foster, unlike Cervi, would never have accepted any payment but cash.
When, at length, Rattei looked up from the second document, he looked right into Foster’s eyes, which were shining now. Foster was smiling the same smile McGarr had seen in the Siena train station before the Palio—that of a large black house cat smiling down into a saucer of milk.
Rattei said, “This means nothing.” With a flick of the wrist he tossed the copies at Falchi. They fell on the floor by the carabinieri commandant’s foot. “The testimony of two scarafaggie—one a killer, the other a common thief. I denounce these statements as nothing but inept attempts at character assassination. Some one of my enemies has put them up to this.”
Rattei’s lawyers were watching him, admiring him. One began smiling.
As did Foster, but more fully. “A what assassination?”
Rattei turned to him sharply. “A character assassination—that of me, Il Condottiere Rattei, the founder of ENI, chairman of AGIP,…” he began to enumerate his titles and accomplishments.
But Foster’s laugh drowned him out. It was stunning and contagious. Even Rattei’s other lawyer managed a thin smile by the time Foster had exhausted himself.
McGarr poured him yet another drink. He had earned it.
Rattei’s face was flushed. He tried to leave in a huff, but Falchi stopped him in the outer office. For the third time in a week, new charges had been lodged against him. This time it was conspiracy to commit the murders of Hitchcock and Browne. Rattei had hatched those plans in Chiusdino.
McGarr imagined it would be many months before the Irish Republic brought the four men to justice.
About the Author
BARTHOLOMEW GILL is the author of fifteen Peter McGarr mysteries, among them The Death of an Irish Sinner, The Death of an Irish Lover, The Death of an Irish Tinker, and the Edgar Award nominee, The Death of a Joyce Scholar. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Mr. Gill writes as Mark McGarrity for the Star-Ledger. He lives in New Jersey when not in Dublin.
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Resounding praise for
Bartholomew Gill’s
award-winning Peter McGarr novels
“Gill’s books are both earthy and elegant. The cadence of Dublin life sings in [his] pages, and the wit is ready and true.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“The beauty of Bartholomew Gill’s Irish police procedurals has as much to do with their internal complexity as with their surface charms and graces.”
New York Times Book Review
“Gill’s novels are quite a bit more than police procedurals…They are distinguished by the quirky integrity that makes McGarr a vivid individual, by Gill’s ability to render the everyday speech of Dublin as music, and by the passions so keenly felt by his characters on both sides of the law.”
Detroit News
“Gill’s descriptive powers paint a vibrant landscape peopled by well-drawn characters…From cover to cover author Bartholomew Gill packs a plot with punch and poignancy.”
Boston H
erald
“[A] splendid series…Gill shapes wonderful sentences and zestfully evokes the scenery and the spirit of his former homeland. He is also an imaginative portrayer of character.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Also by Bartholomew Gill
DEATH IN DUBLIN
THE DEATH OF AN IRISH SINNER
THE DEATH OF AN IRISH LOVER
THE DEATH OF AN IRISH TINKER
THE DEATH OF AN IRISH SEA WOLF
THE DEATH OF AN ARDENT BIBLIOPHILE
DEATH ON A COLD, WILD RIVER
THE DEATH OF LOVE
THE DEATH OF A JOYCE SCHOLAR
MCGARR AND THE LEGACY OF A WOMAN SCORNED
MCGARR AND THE METHOD OF DESCARTES
MCGARR AT THE P.M. BELGRAVE SQUARE
MCGARR AT THE DUBLIN HORSE SHOW
(to be published soon as THE DEATH OF AN IRISH TRADITION)
MCGARR ON THE CLIFFS OF MOHER
(to be published soon as THE DEATH OF AN IRISH LASS)
MCGARR AND THE POLITICIAN’S WIFE
(recently published as THE DEATH OF AN IRISH POLITICIAN)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DEATH OF AN IRISH CONSUL. Copyright © 1977 by Mark McGarrity. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.