The Removal Company

by S. T. Joshi

  “You mean she came here in 1923 alone?—at the age of eighteen? There was no family here with her?”

  “Ah, Mr. Scintilla, María was very capable of looking after herself.”

  I was getting to dislike Coryell’s wide smile and his perfect teeth. “So there’s no family member here I can talk to about María? And you don’t know where she now is?”

  Coryell felt only my last question was worth the bother of answering. “Mexico is a large country, Mr. Scintilla.”

  I had by now finished copying down the addresses of the ladies with whom María had worked. As I did so, Mr. Coryell looked at me a bit apprehensively.

  “I’m aware, sir,” he said, “that you have your investigations to pursue. But I do trust that you will not bother these ladies unduly....”

  “Why?” I said sharply. “What’s it to you?”

  Coryell was taken aback by the remark, but regained his composure instantly. “Nothing at all, Mr. Scintilla, nothing at all. But surely you know that an agency like mine has a reputation to protect....”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I won’t mention your company, or say where I got these addresses from.”

  Coryell was all smiles again. “You’re very kind, Mr. Scintilla.”

  I wasted as few additional words with him as possible and left the place.

  * * * *

  María was—if Coryell was telling the truth—not an easy pigeon to track down; but I began to think that she was the least of my concerns. What I really wanted to know was what—if anything—had happened to the various women who had employed her. If they were all part of Los Angeles high society, then I figured that one good place to start would be close to home—Mrs. Henry Vance.

  She peered at my list of names with interest and attention. “Priscilla...I hadn’t any idea she had hired María after the Hawleys had dismissed her.... Most remarkable.” Her brow was furrowed with a mixture of concern and puzzlement.

  “Priscilla James?” I said. “Do you know her?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” Mrs. Vance said. “Or, rather, we did. She... well, she left town rather abruptly, I thought.”

  A chill went through me.

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, only a few months ago. It was all a bit odd. She just up and left one day—leaving behind a very nice home and all her things.... Then a little later one of our friends, the Copleys, got a strange letter from her saying that she had fallen in love with a Frenchman and was now living in Lyons! It was quite extraordinary. And that’s the last we ever heard from her.”

  As I was mulling that over, I asked Mrs. Vance: “Do you know any of the other names on that list?”

  She peered at the list again, as if it were a kind of school examination. “Well, yes...Frances Grantham—a lovely person—and Helen Gold. Why, I just saw her a few weeks ago.”

  “Then she’s still alive?” I blurted out.

  Mrs. Vance looked at me with astonishment. “Oh, dear me, yes! Whatever can you be thinking?”

  “Sorry...I didn’t mean that. And Mrs. Grantham?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Vance, “I haven’t seen her in some months—she’s really not part of our set, you see—but I imagine she is in the land of the living!” She considered that a great witticism.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Vance.”

  I left the room, shaking a bit. Something was very wrong here. Who was this Priscilla James—and what had happened to her? I got to work on the case immediately.

  * * * *

  Results came quickly. Miss James’s house in Pasadena had, I learned, been put up for sale—furnishings and all—and at the moment was being looked after by a caretaker. Miss James’s lawyer, Marlon Wright, regularly received sums of money from a New York lawyer to cover the expenses. Wright was a bit puzzled by this arrangement, but he had received a handwritten letter from Miss James confirming them, so he had no option but to agree.

  I took down the name of the New York lawyer.

  I asked Wright only one more question: “Do you know whether Priscilla James was seeing a psychoanalyst at any time?”

  Wright looked up at me in surprise. “Why, yes—how did you know?”

  “Never mind that. Do you recall his name?”

  “I do indeed—I paid his bills myself. It was one William Grabhorn. I believe he was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Shall I find the address for you?” He began fishing among his papers.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said.

  * * * *

  Thanks to Mrs. Vance, the Copleys were only too happy to be of help to me. I didn’t mince matters, and asked them to show me the letter from Priscilla James telling of her supposed romance with the Frenchman.

  They brought out the letter immediately. I think it tickled them to be part of a private investigation.

  I took the letter out of its envelope. It said pretty much what Mrs. Vance had told me.

  “Is this Priscilla James’s handwriting?” I asked Mrs. Copley.

  “Oh, yes,” she said promptly, “there’s no mistaking it.”

  I turned the letter over indecisively. This could be on the level, although it seemed mighty suspicious. As with María Rivera, it would be difficult, and probably unprofitable, to try to track down Priscilla James in France—if that was where she was. Anyway, that would be taking me a bit far afield of my original inquiry.

  Then I looked down at the envelope. I myself rarely keep envelopes of letters I receive, but I was more than a little thankful that the Copleys had done so.

  It was postmarked from New York.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When I got back to the Vance house, Arthur was there.

  “What...?” I said. “How did you...?”

  Vance gave a self-satisfied smirk. “Scintilla, we have a good lawyer. And we have the money for bail. After what you told me this morning, I made it clear to my people that I was getting pretty tired of being cooped up in jail. So here I am.”

  “Very nice for you, I’m sure.”

  “I’m still under indictment, and I’m not supposed to leave the state, but I think those things will be taken care of pretty soon.”

  “I hope so.”

  Then, as if his own concerns were not of the faintest interest to him, he said: “Now tell me—did you find María?”

  “No, but I found out plenty about her.”

  I told him what I had learned during the long day. Vance’s eyes goggled as each bit of information slipped from my lips, and the Priscilla James matter caused him to utter a thunderous oath and begin pacing about the room. After that he merely muttered over and over, “My God...my God....”

  “I doubt that it would be worth pursuing María Rivera’s other employers,” I said. “Some of them seem to be alive, but we have at least one other instance where she is likely to have referred a person to Grabhorn; and then he may—I repeat, Vance: may—have passed on Miss James to the Removal Company. But we don’t know that yet.”

  “God, Scintilla, it’s obvious! That’s exactly what happened! This is becoming more hellish all the time....”

  “Yes, maybe. But this really doesn’t tell us a great deal more than we knew before. Okay, so Grabhorn has probably been caught in a lie—he may have referred more people than just your wife to Sanderson. But that’s a minimal point: I’d been suspecting that all along.”

  Vance wheeled around. “But the maid! Don’t you see? There was some sort of pipeline to the Removal Company! The maid—Grabhorn—and God knows who else—all these people were funneling likely clients to that devil Sanderson!”

  “Vance, I hate to keep throwing cold water on you; but there’s one problem in all this. We don’t know that anyone was forced to go to Sanderson, or forced to commit suicide. It all seems voluntary—so far.”

  “Jesus, Scintilla, what more is it going to take?” Vance blazed at me.

  “Look, man, we’re still nowhere near figuring out what—if anything—happened to your wi
fe. That’s the rub. There may or may not be anything sinister in this ‘pipeline,’ as you call it. The crux, now, is to find out what happened afterward.”

  Me and my big mouth.

  “That’s exactly right!” Vance almost shouted. “And that’s where you come in!”

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  “Why, Elena Cavalieri, of course! You have to find out if her story checks out! Find out if she is who she says she is!”

  “You mean...?”

  “Yes, Scintilla. You’re taking a trip to Italy.”

  * * * *

  I don’t like boats. I don’t like being off dry land. Somehow being in a plane is okay, because at least you’re back on the ground in a few hours. But spending days or weeks on some immense body of water, with no land in sight, is not my idea of a good time.

  I should have welcomed this trip to Italy, but I didn’t. My grandmother, to be sure, was pure Italian, and had come to America in the 1870s, bringing her young daughter—my mother—with her. But the moment she settled in New York she was determined to “assimilate,” and to have her offspring do likewise. My mother of course knew Italian, but spoke very little of it to my brother and me. I knew some words, but had forgotten the ability—if I had ever had it—to make coherent sentences. In my “native” land I would be as helpless as the most uncultured Midwestern tourist.

  The boat, passing by the awe-inspiring crag known as Gibraltar, took six days to reach Marseilles. There, even though I would have preferred to make the rest of the journey on land, I had to switch for another boat, which took me to the port of Rimini, on the Adriatic. Once there I hired a guide (who would also serve as a translator), and also an unbelievably rickety contraption that I was soberly informed was an automobile.

  The ten-mile drive from Rimini to Cattolica, along the coast road, was uneventful. If I had been less preoccupied—or less incensed with Arthur Vance for sending me on this wild goose chase—I might have appreciated the breathtaking vista of the Adriatic on our right, and the lush, rolling farmland on our left. I was not surprised that Mrs. Elena Greenway had compared her native region to California or Florida: there was a crispness in the air, a sharp, penetrating quality to the sunlight, a heat that seemed to radiate gently from the very earth, that brought the subtropics to mind. It may only have been late March, but it seemed as if summer was already in full flower.

  Cattolica was exactly what Mrs. Greenway had said it was: a beach resort—the Italian equivalent of Miami Beach. The main street, almost facing the shore, was lined with hotels, and even in this off-season they seemed fairly well filled—not with foreign tourists, but with Italians. This was the place where the locals went: to loaf on the beach, to get away from mundane reality, perhaps to pretend desperately that they were really in Nice or Monaco.

  I scarcely knew how or where to start my inquiries. I was pretty well acquainted with how American government—municipal, state, and federal—worked, but had not the faintest idea of their Italian equivalents. Also, it wasn’t likely that my various credentials—genuine, false, or fudged—would open many doors for me. My excitable Italian guide didn’t let me sit still for a moment, but took me directly to the town hall. It was as good a place as any to start.

  I first tried an office where visas were issued. If Elena Cavalieri had come to the United States in early 1932, she had to have had a visa. But I was informed by the military-looking clerk that I would not be permitted to look at the visas issued during the last ten years—or, really, at any time.

  How about phone books for the last couple of years? Another clerk informed me that none were issued, except a list of phone numbers of local businesses. The town was mighty small, and apparently everyone knew everyone else. Only those businesses catering to outside tourists could be easily found.

  I went through the motions of asking about city directories, but was met with a look of complete bewilderment on the face of a third clerk.

  I was not doing so well.

  But if this small town was so tightly knit, one would imagine that the Cavalieris had been well known to their neighbors. But who were their neighbors? I couldn’t knock on every door in the town and hope that someone knew them. The place wasn’t that small.

  It was my guide who came up with the brainstorm. Cattolica, it appeared, had only six Catholic churches. The Cavalieris would surely be—or have been—on the rolls of one of them. A detail like that would never have occurred to me. I guess there is a downside to being an agnostic.

  And so began the rather frenetic canvassing of the churches. They were all small, and if I had been a student of architecture I could have found much interest in them. But I wasn’t—or didn’t want to be at the moment—and so my guide and I pressed on efficiently.

  Once again, as with those employment agencies in Los Angeles, it took several misses before we hit upon the right one. But we did in the end. The chiesa di San Antonio was the place, and its priest distinctly remembered the Cavalieris. Wonderful people, he said; what a horrible tragedy to befall them. Mysterious are the ways of God. And so on.

  At the moment all I wanted was their home address, so I urged the guide to get that information out of the priest. The guide pressed the point as tactfully as he could, using abundant hand gestures, and finally the priest led us back into his study and opened an enormous book. Much flipping of pages at the beginning, and then this entry:

  Cavalieri, Ettore e Sophia. 23, Via dei Principi. Elena, figlia. Mor. 21 Agosto 1931.

  That third sentence had been added at a later time, the fourth at a still later time.

  I almost dragged my guide back to the car. “Let’s find the Via dei Principi. Right now.”

  The priest had offered minimal directions, pointing vaguely to the southwest. Still, it didn’t take long to find—the street was quite small and terminated in a dead end.

  Number 23 was almost the last house on the right. Incredibly, it was apparently still vacant: no one had occupied it in the year and a half since the Cavalieris had died and their only daughter left for America. I took a picture of the place with a small camera I had brought with me, but beyond that we weren’t going to get much out of it. We decided to go to the nearest neighbor, directly to the right.

  Our summons was answered by a middle-aged lady in loose-fitting clothing and a bandanna around her head. I had the guide get right to point.

  “Ask her if she remembers the Cavalieris.”

  The moment he did so, the woman almost burst into tears, covering her mouth with her hands and goggling her eyes out of their sockets. She then began speaking extremely fast in Italian—so fast that even my guide had trouble keeping up with her.

  “What’s she saying?” I snapped. “What’s going on? What is she telling you?”

  “Wait, wait...,” the guide said irresolutely, trying simultaneously to address me in English and the woman in Italian. Eventually he gained control of the situation, but could still only speak in fragments:

  “Yes, yes...Cavalieris, nice people...wonderful...so kind...horrible thing to happen...boat capsized in the Adriatic one day...nobody could reach them fast enough, and they were trapped underneath...house thought to have ‘bad luck,’ so nobody use it....”

  “Look, guy, this isn’t helping. I knew all that. What about the daughter? What happened to Elena?”

  The guide repeated my queries, but they only sent the woman into further lamentations. The guide tried to interpret as best he could:

  “Yes, Elena...lovely girl...tall, slim, beautiful...like a queen...poor thing....”

  I was almost consumed with rage and frustration. “Man, can’t you get her to tell you what happened to Elena? When did she leave for America?”

  But when the guide repeated my question, the woman almost gave a shriek and then slammed the door.

  “What the...?” I said. “What is going on? Is she crazy?”

  The guide merely shrugged sheepishly, as if apologizing for his country.
/>   “This is absurd,” I said heatedly. “Let’s go back and see if that priest knows anything more.”

  So we drove back to the chiesa di San Antonio. We had come from a different direction, and so I noticed something I hadn’t seen before—the surprisingly extensive cemetery abutting the church.

  “Wait a minute,” I said to the guide as he was almost flying by the cemetery. We pulled up with a jerk that almost thrust me through the windshield. With a glare of hostility at the guide I heaved myself out of the car.

  Many of the tombstones were quite old, so I knew they wouldn’t be of any use. After going about the cemetery almost in a circle I finally found some tolerably recent burial plots. In a few minutes I had located two still shining marble headstones placed in close juxtaposition:

  ETTORE CAVALIERI * SOPHIA CAVALIERI

  14 Aprile 1880 ***** 6 Decembre 1884

  21 Agosto 1931 ****** 21 Agosto 1931

  Well, that was something. I stepped back in order to get both of them in the photograph I wanted to take; but as I did so, I tripped backwards over another grave I had not seen before. It was new, but already nearly covered in tall grass.

  Irritated, I tugged away some of the grass. What I saw was this:

  ELENA CAVALIERI

  16 Gennaio 1907

  21 Agosto 1931

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Finally I had something. Finally I had come up with some definite clue that would allow me to say: “Something is not right here.” This was something that the perpetrator—whoever he was—had overlooked, disregarded, or didn’t believe would be noticed.

  And yet, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that I had.

  Elena Cavalieri had died with her parents in that boating accident—or had she? Who was in that grave that bore her name? Was there anyone there? Could that headstone be resting over an empty coffin, or undisturbed earth? What, really, was going on here? And who was responsible? Was the culprit really the shadowy Dr. Sanderson, or was it Grabhorn, or even Vance himself? Or was it some other party altogether? There were still too many missing pieces, too many places where inference had to take the place of evidence. The net was tightening, but it hadn’t caught a fish yet.