She joined him and put her arms around his waist, gazing at him she said,
“That’s enough! I don’t want to spend my nights making love to a ghost.”
“I promise,” he said kissing her.
“If he left on his yacht, he will almost be in Spain,” said Thérèse.
“Who knows? Anyway, what does it matter? Perhaps it is better like this. That coin really frightened me.”
Someone knocked on the door and Carlo, thinking that it was the waiter bringing their breakfast, said, “Come in.”
When the door opened, he was surprised to see the director of the hotel with an extraordinarily solemn air.
“Monsieur Fantone, Madame, I very much regret that I must give you terrible news. I am told that last night your friend Mr Bertrams insisted on leaving on his yacht, although the weather conditions were not favourable. Unfortunately, he hit a storm and, I am sorry to say… we are certain that the yacht sank. The coastguard has sent a motor boat out, but they have only found flotsam: he is registered as missing, but we fear that in fact…” he stopped, visibly upset, “… there is no hope. He was a wonderful person. For all of us, it is a very sad morning: please accept condolences on behalf of myself and the hotel staff for the loss of your friend.”
He turned to leave the room, but then he stopped.
“Ah I almost forgot, Monsieur Fantone. Please forgive me, but my feelings are getting the better of me. A person from the marina came this morning with an envelope for you. He told the concierge that Monsieur Bertrams handed it to him just before he sailed.”
Nice – January 27th 1930
Mr Carlo Fantone
Hôtel Ruhl
Nice
My dear friend,
The events that occurred this evening have clarified many things for me. It is an old story and I hope that I can explain
I am very sorry that I had to flee taking with me the coin, that evil object but I considered it a question of honour, mine and that of my dynasty, to taken on myself this burden.
It is a very old story that I hope I will be able to tell you explain, when we meet again.
In the hope of
To compensate you for the material loss and with the profound hope that I will not offend you, you will find a cheque, please do with it as you wish
Do not be surprised by the signature: Bertrams is not a stage name, but my second surname.
Respectfully,
Baron Francisco Maria Ardiles y Bertrams
June 26th 1930
Locarno – June 30th 1930
Siro had now read for the third time the agitated missive, packed with corrections and second thoughts and signed by the Baron Francisco Maria Ardiles y Bertrams that Carlo and Thérèse had brought from Nice.
His gaze had become, if that were possible, even more penetrating than usual. His eyes were narrowed to two thin slits fixed on Carlo above the gold rims of his spectacles.
“So, he was a relative?”
Then he turned to Thérèse, whom he had already observed with ill-concealed satisfaction and in a gallant tone he said,
“Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak only to my son, but this concerns matters of which only he and I are aware.”
“Father, she already knows, I told her the whole story. She nearly had a heart attack, poor thing, when I started speaking in that strange voice. Do you think I could keep it from her?”
Siro opened the drawer of his desk and took out a small volume that he handled with great care, almost devotion. When he found the page he was looking for he turned to Carlo and Thérèse, who were waiting in silence.
“Ardiles was the Spanish captain who commissioned the coins and… some years later, got rid of the witnesses by burning the house of the Benassi family, our ancestors. The professor, or rather Baron Francisco Maria Ardiles y Bertrams, was a descendant of the captain and I wonder how he came to know the story. Perhaps the captain had left an account and the professor found it. Perhaps it was reading this memoir that stirred his recurrent dream of a burning house.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Carlo “is how he found the coin. What could be the connection?”
“Perhaps his ancestor had made a cast of it: like this,” said Thérèse, taking a five franc coin, covering it with a sheet of paper and rubbing a pencil over it.
Carlo watched her in surprise and then said, “Well, yes. What is so strange about that? I was taught to do it at primary school.”
Siro sniggered complacently, then he took an object from the drawer and placed it in his waistcoat pocket, saying to Carlo,
“Well, now that you have all that money you can finally set up home on your own – my apologies Madame, together – and leave me in peace.”
“When I come to think about it,” said Thérèse seriously, “I don’t want anything to do with that money. There is something evil about it.”
She lit a match from the box that Carlo had left on the table and put it to the cheque.
Siro, who had been waving an antique fan, swiftly closed it and tapped Thérèse on the knuckles. She dropped the cheque and gave a surprised and annoyed glance at the old man.
“No, Madame. I would, although unwillingly, let you do what you wish if the cheque were yours. But that is not so.”
“But Father, I agree,” whispered Carlo in amazement.
“But it is not even your cheque. It is mine!” exclaimed Siro, shifting in his chair. He looked at them both with an air that was both defiant and indulgent and he repeated,
“It is my cheque, because the coin, the one that was stolen, belonged to me.”
He took from his waistcoat pocket the object that he had previously taken from the drawer and placed it on the table before Carlo and Thérèse.
“This,” he hissed with feline calm, “is the coin that you call cursed. The one that Thérèse – I hope I may call you that my dear – brought from the United States. I substituted it with the one I found in the book, my coin, when you returned from that marvellous day on Monte Verità.
You see these tiny scratches. The other one, the one that had remained for three hundred years hidden in the book, was as smooth as glass.”
Carlo and Thérèse stared at him.
“Is this true? Then…” said Carlo, “the séance in Nice?”
“Carlo spoke…” stuttered Thérèse.
“It was all done with the wrong coin, we could say,” answered Siro.
“The professor Baron Francisco Maria Ardiles y Bertrams, had great skill in influencing not only those around him, but also himself. I am certain that he did not call down any spirits but, unconsciously, he hypnotised Carlo and induced him to tell the story, in the voice of poor Alfonso Benassi, a story that Carlo already knew.
I am convinced that the poor baron was afflicted by a psychological condition that made him take on the semblance of his ancestor: it was a professor from Zurich that I once met, Eugenio Bleuler, who called this illness ‘schizophrenia’. He invited me to one of his lessons where we studied a patient afflicted by this illness: I saw inkwells flung against the wall and pens shot into doors… without anyone going anywhere near them. That is what you saw in Nice! The psychological crisis of a poor sick man. How sad!”
Carlo tried to contradict him, then he stopped and shook his head.
“But what about all those historical cases that you yourself told me about, Rasputin, Marie Duplessis, not to mention poor Nick van Buren?”
“Sad coincidences, my dear children, or at worst self-suggestion. If, for example, to play a nasty trick on him, you had made a gift of the coin to that Polish gentleman at Drouot, that half-Neapolitan, well, I imagine that he would have breathed his last almost immediately.”
Siro leaned over the desk and picked up the cheque that Thérèse had dropped.
“So, in conclusion, since the coin that was stolen by the baron belonged to me, the cheque is mine and I will do what I want
with it.”
He opened the desk drawer, took out an envelope, placed the cheque in it and with his fountain pen, a beautiful speckled Aurora, he wrote something on it.
“You know,” he said calmly closing and sealing the envelope, “at my age, what I wish for most is peace and quiet. What better use for this cheque than to ensure that my son can finally buy a house and leave me in peace?”
He got up and ceremoniously handed the envelope to Thérèse.
“This is my wedding present.”
Carlo and Thérèse stared at him in surprise.
Siro looked at them, pretending to be concerned.
“Don’t tell me that you have changed your minds? It’s not possible.”
“But, how did you know that we had decided to…?” asked Thérèse smiling.
“I have no idea,” he answered, moving towards the window, “perhaps I have the skills of a medium. Come on, let’s go and eat, it is almost midday and I am hungry. You, Thérèse, must tell me your story as we go, because you know that we old ones like love stories. It is incredible how sentimental one becomes with age.”
“Very, very sentimental!” concluded Carlo as he locked the door and Siro walked away, arm in arm with Thérèse.
Locarno – October 11th 1931
It had not been easy for Eugenio Fantone to convince the manager of the funicular railway, Locarno-Madonna del Sasso, to allow the exclusive use of the line between eleven-thirty and midday of that particular Sunday.
He had been particularly insistent, even involving some acquaintances in Bellinzona, so that the guests at the christening of his friend Carlo’s first child and the wedding reception of Carlo and Thérèse, could descend directly from the mountain sanctuary to the Grand Hôtel Locarno, where the gala lunch would be held.
The guests arriving from outside Locarno had been booked into the hotel since the day before. Michele had come from Paris. When he arrived, he had hugged Carlo and stared at him without speaking, as if to say ‘I told you so’.
Since Michele had forecast this event a year earlier, he had hoped to be named as godfather, but this honour was reserved for Eugenio. Michele thought about it and decided that the role was more suited to a practical person like Eugenio, and not a dreamer like him. However, Carlo kept his promise and the child was called Michele.
The only regret, for Carlo, was that his friend Lucas Cortes, who was busy preparing for a performance in Vienna, would not be able to be present. He had sent a thousand profuse apologies.
The weather, which in that season of the year was always changeable, was extraordinarily mild on that particular Sunday, so that the hundred guests were able to enjoy the panorama from the terrace before the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Sasso on a beautifully sunny day.
The lunch, set in the dining room of the Grand Hôtel Locarno, was coming to an end and some of the guests were leaving, when a small orchestra that had been playing quietly to avoid waking the child, suddenly fell silent. The couple and the other guests turned questioningly towards the orchestra but the conductor simply waved his hands, as if to say, ‘that is what I was told to do’.
Behind them, hidden by a screen came a song, first faint and then louder, Je crois entendre encore from Bizet’s opera Les pêcheurs de perles.
It was a surreal situation with the enchanted guests staring at the screen, the hotel staff stopped in their tracks and guests from the hotel peeking in at the door.
When the song died away with the last words … O souvenir charmant … Lucas Cortes appeared from behind the screen, wearing a beige morning suit, a white walking stick in his hand and a beige top hat on his head.
He swept off his top hat and ran towards the couple: first, he kissed Thérèse and then, with a laugh, he hugged Carlo and finally he took the child from its cradle, looked at it tenderly and returned it to its mother.
“Why this is too wonderful, are you sure it is you?” asked Carlo laughing.
Then, to the applause of everyone present, Lucas ran out of the room and climbed into the white Isotta Fraschini waiting for him at the hotel entrance, and was driven off towards Locarno.
By now, only a few close friends were left, Eugenio with his wife Chiara, who had been asked to be godmother were playing with their godchild. Siro, who was sitting beside Thérèse, with a particularly satisfied air, leaned forward and spoke to Carlo.
“I was forgetting something. This is yours now and you can pass it on to your son when he is older, he will pass it on to his son and so on.”
He took the famous coin out of his waistcoat pocket and flipped it over to Carlo. Perhaps it was the excitement of the day, or the champagne he had drunk, but Carlo missed the catch and the coin fell onto the marble table, bounced twice with a dull sound and stopped.
“What a strange sound,” said Eugenio, who had been distracted for a moment from his godchild.
“What is strange?” asked Siro.
“It is a doubly false coin. The person who commissioned it did so to play a trick, and the person who made it cheated on the metal. A bad penny always turns up!”
EPILOGUE
Seattle – April 24th 1974
The man picked up a newspaper from the pile, the Oregon Tribune, and threw a coin to the paperboy who thanked him with a wave.
He glanced at the headlines and stopped suddenly, saying to the friend who had been walking beside him and had stopped a few metres ahead in surprise.
“Hey! Did you see who is dead? That beer guy!”
“What, Old Joe?”
“That’s him, look here.”
The death of Uncle Joe
Tacoma, April 24th 1974
Jean-Luc Benoit, the well-known ‘Uncle Joe’ died yesterday at his ranch ‘La Maison de Jean’, surrounded by his numerous family. He had just turned 84 years of age.
He arrived in Seattle in the thirties, during the Great Depression and began working as a labourer at the Jehnsen flourmill, which supplied flour to the entire county.
When the mill failed, he had the idea of using the grain for a different purpose and he founded, here in Tacoma, the van Buren brewery, famous for the Uncle Joe label.
Mr Benoit, whom everyone knew by the nickname of Uncle Joe, died yesterday at 06:15 after a brief illness.
His son Armel, who has managed the more than twenty van Buren factories for the last fifteen years, stated that the company founded by his father…
A bad coin always turns up
is available free of charge for all MANYBOOKS readers.
I do please those friends who read it to let me know
if they liked the book as well as if they didn’t and possibly why.
Thanks a lot.
Alberto
[email protected]
The author
Alberto Guardia was born in 1955 in Biella a town in the north-west of Italy.
He is happily married to Annalisa.
Despite his tecnical formation, he holds a PhD in nuclear powerplants (dont'laugth...that's not a joke), he can read (believe me this is not very common in the category) and even write.
Most of his books are a blend of historical fiction and soft mistery.
In 2014, published ‘Una lunga storia’ a novel set in the Biella district.
The second novel "Come una moneta falsa" was first published in 2014 too.
A third novel, La Gàrdia, published in 2016, is based on a neglected historical fact:
the ethnic cleansing of a Waldenser minority in the south of Italy in the mid of 16th century.
The last novel, newly published in 2018, is a mistery plot.
*****
All books are available in e-book and paperback formats in all Amazon bookstores.
The only novel available in english is “A bad coin always turns up”
It is the english version of "Come una moneta falsa".
Index
PART ONE
PART T
WO
EPILOGUE
A Bad Coin Always Turns Up Page 12