The Flying Boat Mystery
Page 14
‘Sabelli then goes to the office in Corso Re d’Italia, where he has his appointment with death. Please, try to enter into his accomplices’ minds while they wait for him: his phone call has shown the total collapse of their optimistic plan. Not only did the police not immediately buy the suicide-accident hypothesis they tried to sell, but they also discovered and correctly interpreted the phone number of one of Italy & Argentina Bank’s top managers. Furthermore, good old Pagelli, who was travelling on the Do-Wal 134 on behalf of the same bank, was immediately recognised by Commissario Boldrin as an ex-convict. So they understand that they must completely change their tactics. And Sabelli has intervened to create new complications, with his arrogant demands of the gang. The useful minor accomplice is now very dangerous, with his threats and blackmailing demands. They originally intend just to kidnap him, but he fights back with unsuspected energy, and the violent quarrel becomes a violent murder.
‘So, the killers now have a completely new problem to solve: they must hide any clues to the murder, and dispel any suspicion about Sabelli’s murder and Agliati’s disappearance. It’s obviously no easy task, but they have on hand a very good scapegoat, ready for use: Giovanni Marchetti waiting with his suitcases in the hall of the railway station. With daring swiftness they execute the plan they have just devised. They buy two identical suitcases, fill them with Sabelli’s grisly remains, exchange them with those of Sabelli and Marchetti, and wait confidently for Marchetti to put one of them on the Palermo train and take the other with him to Rome, ready to be caught red-handed by the police. They fill the other two suitcases with what remains of poor Sabelli and leave them on the Brindisi train.
Signorina Arteni asked shyly:
‘But you had already determined that Marchetti was innocent....’
‘Without informing the public, needless to say! The killers tried too hard to force Marchetti’s apparent guilt on us. They made some minor mistakes, and these tiny details were very revealing if you weren’t dazzled by the too-flashy clues the murderers had put under our noses, fearing that we wouldn’t notice them. But the first tiny chinks showed immediately that their armour was made of cardboard and paste. The killers’ deft move had the opposite result and they ended up caught in their own clever trap. Marchetti wasn’t accused of Sabelli’s murder or Agliati’s disappearance and the failure of the trick demonstrated clearly their own involvement both in the murder and in the disappearance. They had been eager to show a connection in order to accuse Marchetti of both crimes, but in doing so they were actually revealing their own hidden game, rendering their own position more and more dangerous and unsafe. Connecting the murder to the disappearance gave to Agliati’s vanishing act a far more tragic and definite meaning, with the result that, amongst all the plausible options, only one became the obvious real solution: murder! ’
‘It was murder, of course,’ exploded Vallesi, ‘but how was it done? And why? Marsigli wasn’t even on the plane!’
Luigi put down his hard-working fork and raised his hand to calm his friend:
‘That was the situation after my Sicilian trip, where I could at least narrow the field, scratching off many unjustified suspicions and far-fetched hypotheses. Before my return to Rome, my dear Giorgio, I really couldn’t have answered your questions. I had only a vague idea about the culprits, but it seemed quite clear that the Italy & Argentina Bank was the evil spider in the centre of the deadly web. But two very different events permitted me to solve the other mysteries, thus discovering the killer’s motive and method. The first event chronologically was a consequence of the second grave mistake, the attempted murder of Signora Agliati. The second event happened purely by chance: Marcella’s joke in the Adamoli Sisters’ shop in via Lucrezio Caro.’
Vallesi smiled at Marcella, and instantly his eyes softened in warm intimacy, whilst he remembered with tenderness their first wanderings in the Rome streets, after the dark shop and its rubber menagerie.
‘The attempted killing of Signora Agliati was a disaster, a catastrophic move dictated by a grave error in psychology. The first mistake was the preceding phone call: the phony blackmail threat was instead a clumsy trick for trying to discover if the banker’s widow knew anything about her husband’s past in Italy before 1917. The widow’s answer was unwittingly ambiguous and they began to think, quite wrongly, that she did in fact know everything about her husband’s past.
‘So, they decided to kill a very dangerous witness before she could set the police on the right track, and that was the motive for the via del Muro Torto shooting. That attempted murder was a grave mistake, and it gave us almost immediately several clues about the real reason behind Agliati’s disappearance. We suddenly understood that we had to investigate what Agliati had been doing in Italy before leaving for Greece in October 1917. Certainly, “Francesco Agliati” was an alias he assumed when he left Italy for good. The banker was apparently from Milan, but the Milan police couldn’t find any trace of a Francesco Agliati before his emigration to Greece. Widening our field of investigation, we asked the Milan police for news about every big business deal before October 1917. The other morning, whilst working my way through the files they supplied, I came across Antonio Marsigli’s name. He had been involved in a major case of war profiteering, and immediately the strong suspicions I had about him (he had sent Pagelli to Tunis; his assistant manager’s phone number was in Sabelli’s suitcase; his bank controlled the Metropolitan Bank, who had so mysteriously sent Larini on that very plane to Palermo) suddenly became a rock-solid certitude.’
‘But why did he hate Agliati so much? Why did he commit all those murders?’ asked Marcella.
Luigi smiled at her:
‘To answer your question, I will begin, as in the best fairy tales, with “Once Upon a Time.” Once upon a time, there were three big, bad wolves, named Antonio, Francesco and Giovanni. They became very, very rich by selling sub-standard goods to our Army during the war: cardboard shoes for our soldiers; woollen uniforms being woollen in name only; poor or spoiled food for their mess. Everything was going swimmingly for them, until they decided to cheat each other, despite the fact that their profiteering in that sad age before the big Caporetto defeat, when Italy really risked being invaded by Austria, was making them as rich as any crooked Croesus of this cruel and dark world. They could have continued to share their ill-gotten gains quietly and happily, but instead Giovanni and Antonio decided to enhance their shares by denouncing Francesco to Italian justice. Of course, Francesco had no intention of paying his toll alone, but the others had powerful political friends who hushed up the scandal on their behalf. But poor Francesco could at least enjoy the offer of a new, clean, tailor-made passport, and the imperative advice to leave Italy for good in the next twenty-four hours with a good padding of big, green notes. It’s hardly necessary to tell you that the name on the new passport was Francesco Agliati. But along with the green notes, very unfortunately for the others, our Francesco thought to take with him some highly compromising papers and receipts, rendering his dearest friends’ sleep not so quiet and peaceful.
‘These papers certified some unsavoury contact with the enemy and could have ruined the lives of a long list of political bigwigs. Although Francesco couldn’t use them during the war, the politicians being too powerful at that time, he just had to wait for the right political moment, with his ready-to-use papers always near to his greedy, vengeful hand. When the war ended, Giovanni decided to end his own miserable life as well. That left Antonio to face Francesco’s revenge alone. In the meantime, of course, both adversaries invested their loot wisely: Francesco became Francesco Agliati, CEO, owner and founder of thriving Italy & Greece Bank, and Antonio became Commendatore Antonio Marsigli, top manager of Italy & Argentina Bank Group. Of course, Antonio knew only too well who Agliati was, and, fearing more and more the papers in his possession, he began a fierce secret financial war, almost terminally wasting Francesco and his bank. Then he contacted his ex-partner in crime, proposing a gen
tleman’s agreement which was in reality a deadly trap. Thus did he entice the wary Signor Agliati to Rome, where the trap worked perfectly, and he was killed right on schedule, as Marsigli had planned. ’
‘In Rome?!’
Both Renzi and Bertini smiled at Vallesi’s amazement:
‘Yes, my dear Giorgio, in Rome. And now I will answer your last question: how was it done? It was the most important, artistic and difficult part of the whole plan. I admit that for a long time I was completely in the dark, how could the banker have vanished into thin air from that small alcove on the flying boat? For a fat man like Agliati it was completely and utterly impossible! But the rubber toys in the dark menagerie in via Lucrezio Caro provided the solution for me, and ultimately a rubber crocodile cracked the case with its rubber jaws. It was a very promising discovery, but, as we quickly discovered, all it did was to send us back to square one, with the four options having the same, equal, identical degree of possibility. Had Agliati escaped, had he been murdered, had he killed himself by his own hand or had he died in an unfortunate accident?
‘For many practical considerations, the accident was swiftly discarded as a plausible option: the body was not seen in its deadly fall by any of the passengers, it had not been found on the coast, even if the plane had followed it in its route, and an accidental death couldn’t explain Sabelli’s murder and the attack on Maria Agliati. We discarded suicide as well for the same considerations, even without pointing out the ridiculous absurdity of the means Agliati was supposed to have chosen for killing himself!
‘We also discarded murder, because it would have been a random, senseless, meaningless crime, very difficult, if not impossible to execute. The murderer could only have been Franceschi the mechanic, the only person who had the opportunity to see the banker after his daring escape from the toilet, but Franceschi had no apparent motive for Agliati’s murder. Furthermore, the body had not been found, and it would have been quite impossible for Franceschi to make it disappear from the luggage compartment.
‘Even Vallesi’s theory about Agliati’s wilful escape, a very promising and interesting hypothesis, had to be discarded. It was a plausible mechanism, but it was too complex, too difficult to be executed with the necessary precision. The proverbial grain of sand would have immediately stopped that infernal clockwork machinery. But it was not a grain of sand which blocked and terminally damaged Giorgio’s very clever clockwork theory. It was a peach nut, a simple peach nut. Vallesi’s theory was that Agliati had escaped from the plane in Naples from the luggage compartment hatch, disguised in the mechanic’s overalls which Franceschi had taken into the cockpit in the famous parcel the passengers had seen under his arm. A very simple and effective disguise, yes, but the mechanic had affirmed that the parcel contained only his lunch, a lunch made of bread and fruit, or more precisely of bread and peaches. When I phoned Boldrin he confirmed to me that in his very thorough search of the plane he had indeed found peach nuts in the luggage compartment, which had certainly not been present at the departure from Ostia. And I had separate confirmation myself from the Ostia airport cleaning crew.’
‘But these nuts.... ’
‘Don’t think too much about them; Franceschi had some juicy peaches for lunch, and that was it. In any case, Agliati would have had to have been very lucky to escape unscathed and unobserved from a wharf completely surrounded by wary, eagle-eyed policemen! And his escape would render completely inexplicable and senseless both Sabelli’s murder and Maria Agliati’s shooting. And, of course, the very presence of Agliati’s dead body in the crate Marsigli had transported in his Lancia Dilambda from Rome to Pozzuoli scratches your theory off our list of possible options.’
The high commissioner had smiled at the destructive energy of his assistant against poor Vallesi’s theory, but now he decided to deflect the other’s impetuous assault with a prudent diversion:
‘But by discarding all four options, you end up in a blind alley with no possible way out, exactly like poor Agliati in his toilet, my dear Renzi!’
‘Actually, I confess that, for a moment, I thought that the rubber paunch discovery had dragged us from a blind alley into a blinder one. Agliati could have got out of the toilet, but afterwards where would he have gone? Passing through the skylight onto the plane’s fuselage, he could only go to the luggage compartment, through the hatch on the roof. And after that? I tried to reconstruct the actors’ movements on stage and the variations that happened on board after his vanishing act, with this simple diagram. Permit me to show it to you....
MOVEMENTS DIAGRAM
A
B
C
D
1
Situation on departure
3
0
12
1
16
2
Agliati goes to the toilet
3
1
11
1
16
3
Possibly Agliati escapes to luggage
3
0
11
2
16
4
Situation on arrival
3
0
11
1
15
A is cockpit; B is toilet; C is passenger cabin; D is luggage compartment.
‘From this diagram, it’s easy to understand that, not including the possibility of Agliati’s presence in the luggage compartment after his visit to the toilet, the only person to have been alone and unseen in a part of the plane, completely out of the passengers’ control behind a wooden door, was Franceschi the mechanic. And this diagram allowed me to solve The Great Flying Boat Mystery, the flying boat that Francesco Agliati was never in! ’
Luigi watched Marcella and Giorgio’s faces with enormous pleasure and self-satisfaction. Vallesi could barely splutter out:
‘But... but... but we all saw Agliati on board the plane!’
‘You only saw Franceschi the mechanic,’ replied Renzi quietly.
‘Franceschi... the mechanic? ’
‘I think that it would be best to begin again from the beginning. Marsigli had enticed Agliati to Rome—Agliati with his damning papers. We don’t have a lot of precise details about Agliati’s visit, but I think I can reconstruct it accurately enough using my peerless imagination. Marsigli welcomed Agliati, trying to allay his suspicions. They had a couple of meetings, and in the second one, early that Tuesday morning, Agliati was promised a fat check by way of payment for the dangerous documents in his possession. Possibly the original meeting was planned to be in Naples, as the return ticket to Brindisi found in Agliati's briefcase, where it had slipped due to a grave error by the killer, suggests. But they moved the meeting to Rome, because the greater distance to the airport offered Marsigli more possibilities for his clever plan. Of course, Agliati never had any intention to go to Naples by plane, he simply wanted to return to Brindisi quietly by train. So, Marsigli promises Agliati a fat check and he lures him into a trap. He drives him in the Dilambda to the D’Azeglio Hotel, where the banker must collect the shipment receipt for his luggage; after this last precaution, Agliati will be completely in his foe’s hands. In the Dilambda, Marsigli drives him to his mansion outside the Porta Cavalleggeri. In a secluded corner of the park there, we have just found traces of the recently dug pit where the body was hidden before its last trip to Pozzuoli.’
‘But... the mechanic?’ asked the impatient reporter.
‘He was at the Ostia airport, waiting for his accomplices. They took him the various elements of his disguise: the rubber false paunch; the glasses; the suit; the banker’s briefcase. He was also awaiting another actor of our little play, Larini the teller, who was to be rushed very urgently to Palermo by Santini, the Metropolitan Bank’s Vice Commendatore, acting of course under Marsigli’s orders. Please don’t forget that the Metropolitan Bank is owned and controlled by the Italy & Argentina Bank Group.’
‘I’m very sorry to say that with your silly question you are demonstrating that you haven’t understood a whit of their so-clever plan,’ replied Luigi peevishly. ‘Larini’s presence on the Dornier Do-Wal 134 was mandatory, absolutely necessary. They couldn’t have done it without him on board. Just as it was absolutely necessary that Pagelli, Sabelli and Marchetti be on board, too. The deadly trio of phony country tradesmen were called to occupy the last available seats, so that a last moment passenger like gullible and reliable Larini couldn’t find a place on the plane. Larini was sent to Palermo at the very last moment with strict orders to be absolutely in Sicily that evening at any price, so they knew very well that he would have used every possible trick to get aboard the only available plane. Of course, Franceschi, the oh-so helpful mechanic, was ready to present himself and to apparently accept the bribe he was in reality forcing the other to offer. And so Larini would travel in the cockpit with the pilots, and Franceschi would be secluded in the only invisible and uncontrolled part of the plane. There, alone, invisible and uncontrolled by anybody, he could swiftly change his own appearance and happily play his double role in the flying boat drama. But now it was actually only a comedy, the real drama having happened before, far away, in Marsigli’s mansion outside Porta Cavalleggeri, where he had cold-bloodedly killed his ex-associate and blackmailer, the only true and authentic Francesco Agliati.’
‘But when did the mechanic become the banker?’
‘These are the facts in strict chronological order: a few minutes before take-off, Franceschi is seen by everybody, in his mechanic’s overalls, talking to Larini, thus creating a perfect alibi for himself. The passengers are led to believe that he will be secluded in the luggage compartment, where he will quietly remain on his own until they see him exiting from it an hour later. But he doesn’t go into the luggage compartment, he doesn't even board the plane then. Instead, he goes into the adjacent empty hangar where his accomplices have surreptitiously brought the banker’s disguise in a limousine. With a good rubber padding and Agliati’s glasses, suit and briefcase, he perfectly looks the part. So, in a jiffy, the humble mechanic can become the powerful banker. Nobody on the plane knows the real Francesco Agliati, so he can rush on stage, ready to seat himself in Agliati’s reserved place, delivered by limousine behind the remains of the crowd around the plane. So, our little diagram is absolutely and totally wrong: the twelve seats are all occupied, but nobody is in the luggage compartment. You can imagine the phony banker’s disquiet when Giorgio reveals to everybody that Larini and the mechanic have traded places. And what if somebody, for instance Giorgio, the professional nosey-parker, should go into the luggage compartment for a peek? So he decides to accelerate the plan and rush into action. He locks and bolts himself in the toilet; he discards out to sea the false paunch and the rest of his clever disguise; he climbs onto the fuselage through the skylight, closes it, and goes on a little walk along the fuselage to the luggage compartment hatch, an easy task for a mechanic, used to acrobatic emergency repairs during the flight; the hatch is easy to open from the outside, he descends through it into the luggage compartment, and he’s ready to dress in his usual overalls and to go into the passenger’s cabin for another little comedy act. He takes his lunch in the cockpit, he returns to his closed compartment and quietly awaits the shocking ending , eating, to my great envy, bread and juicy peaches. ’