by Piero Chiara
While Sciancalepre studied the ground like an old Sioux, Fumagalli looked over the coach house, which was near collapse. It was evidently a place where two or three horses and a couple of carriages had been kept some fifty years ago. On the top floor were two rooms, now missing their shutters, where the coachman had perhaps once lived.
Fumagalli saw that with just a few modifications, the building could be used as a garage for his car. It wanted only a rolling shutter in place of the fence, which had itself perhaps replaced an old door. A circular courtyard, now grassed over, opened out in front of the coach house, and was divided down the centre by a path that began at the gate and went as far as the middle of the park. There, it became two smaller paths in the form of a semicircle that joined up at the grotto created in the hollow at the base of the double staircase.
He could see in a glance how little work was necessary to complete the project; he’d also resurface the path between gate and courtyard with pressed gravel. As for the courtyard, he felt there must be some paving stones under the grassy covering that had sprouted up from the soil. To find out, he took a pickaxe from the coach house and hacked at the ground here and there. All at once an arrangement of old, round paving stones came to light, damp from having been covered up for so long.
Sciancalepre, who’d been walking around all this time, was curious to see the engineer swinging the axe. He came closer. ‘What the hell are you digging up, Fumagalli?’
‘I was just looking to see if there might be some paving underneath this grassy area. And since there is, all I have to do is uncover the rest of the courtyard so I’ll have someplace to put the car that won’t get muddy when it rains. I want to turn this coach house into a garage. Good idea, no?’
‘Great,’ said the Commissario. His voice was sharp, his eyes half closed.
‘But really!’ Fumagalli went on. ‘I have to make two turns to get through the entrance on via Lamberti, and even then I have to leave the car under a portico. Much better to come through the park gate and use this coach house.’
Sciancalepre wasn’t following Fumagalli’s explanation. In one sweeping glance he took in the paving stones, just uncovered, and the powerful hands still holding the pickaxe. He looked up at Fumagalli’s face before letting his eyes drop back down to the ground.
Not long afterwards the gardener went to Fumagalli’s office early one morning. Closing the door, he told him that he’d recently noticed someone had been clearing the ground in front of the coach house, and against the external wall he’d found a pickaxe normally kept inside with the other tools.
Fumagalli let him go on and Demetrio, with the air of having made a discovery, said he’d suspected some sort of intrusion in the park. For two nights running he’d had a look round at varying times. The first night he’d noticed a man near the coach house. He hadn’t had the courage to confront him and had turned back in the direction of the greenhouse. But he saw the shadow come towards him and, frightened, he’d hidden behind the trunk of a magnolia. Peering out from behind it, he noticed that the man went into the greenhouse and moved around inside with an electric lamp he turned on now and again. Demetrio had remained still, waiting, and after a good quarter of an hour he could see the shadow once more, now stretching out towards the coach house. He’d made for the courtyard and left the property by the entrance in the via Lamberti and retreated to his own home. The next night he saw the shadow near the gate, facing outwards as if waiting for someone, but before it moved he thought better of it and stayed away.
‘You did well to let me know,’ Fumagalli said. ‘I’ve noticed myself that someone’s walking around the park at night. But rest assured that sooner or later, one of these nights we’ll catch him.’
‘I don’t want to imply anything,’ the gardener added, about to go, ‘but I have a suspicion…’
‘You think you recognized the shadow?’
‘I think so.’
Unwilling to hear another word, Fumagalli tapped his index finger against his nose and shot Demetrio a meaningful look: keep your mouth shut.
He clapped him lightly on the shoulder and dismissed him.
When Sciancalepre was told about the gardener’s discovery, he immediately arranged to stake out the grounds on the next moonlit night. There was still a week until the right moment and the new moon; the autumnal sky held only the barest, milky hint of it.
Fumagalli didn’t want to put off his work on the garage, so the following day he hired two builders. They prepared the whitewash, began fixing a frame for the rolling shutter and resurfaced the internal walls on the ground floor of the coach house. Having unloaded three carts full of gravel, they set to work taking up the lawn in the courtyard.
The stakeout was set for the night before the full moon, which Sciancalepre thought good enough. It would continue every night until something decisive happened. As a precaution, the Commissario was invited to supper on the night in question so that he wouldn’t be seen coming to the house later on.
Silence reigned at table. Although she hadn’t been told everything, Signora Emilia seemed very troubled; Sciancalepre tried in vain to make her laugh with a few Neapolitan wisecracks. Teresa, serving that night, was also very anxious. But everyone was hoping for a final conclusion, even a comical one. If things went on as they were, there was some danger of its all turning into a ghost story – featuring some old, long-buried Lamberti, or else the ghostly apparition that had concealed Signora Giulia for the past three years…
So that she should feel able to sleep, Emilia had been told that tonight they would simply try to establish where the nocturnal visitor entered the park. The arrest would take place on another occasion.
By ten, dinner had been over for some time. Teresa had cleared up in the kitchen and gone back home. A little while later Emilia went to her room. She’d been advised to turn out the lights at eleven and not to turn them back on until her husband returned.
At eleven on the dot, Sciancalepre stationed himself on the inside of the gate towards via Lamberti, ears pricked. The moment he heard a faint tap, he silently opened the door to his officer, the young and seriously sturdy Salvatore Pulito, used for operations whenever brute force was called for. Pulito took his place in the hallway with a Coca-Cola, while Sciancalepre and Fumagalli went to the dining-room to drain a bottle of Barolo and smoke a last cigarette before the action.
It was eleven-thirty when they went outside and into the park, Indian file. The moon was already throwing clear shadows. The three of them made for the coach house, avoiding the central pathway and walking along the dividing wall towards the villa Sormani. Pulito stationed himself against one of the gate’s pillars in total darkness, in order to block the nightly visitor’s retreat; they reckoned he’d end up instead in the beefy arms of the young officer. Sciancalepre and Fumagalli crouched down amongst the low branches of an enormous poplar, ready to leap out at the shadow as soon as it appeared in the courtyard, where it would make as usual for the park’s central pathway, and from there to the greenhouse.
After a quarter of an hour they were still cramped under the tree. Fumagalli was itching to move when both of them heard a faint thud, as if someone had leapt over the wall of the villa Sormani, not far from the gate.
‘So that’s where he comes in,’ thought the Commissario. What an ass he was, not to have considered it before!
Time seemed to drag – until the shadow appeared at the edge of the lawned area in front of the coach house. Sciancalepre and Fumagalli both saw him, and instinctively nudged each other in acknowledgement. The black shape appeared in the unlit area and stayed there, as if frightened by so much moonlight falling over the lawn. It wasn’t yet midnight; the visitor could consider himself ahead of his usual hour. After a few minutes he started to move, walking over the lawn, in and out of the shadows, straight towards the coach house. He stopped in front of the entrance for a moment, then disappeared inside.
The two men under the tree were impatient. Fumagalli whis
pered to the Commissario: ‘Let’s block him inside.’
‘No! We must wait until he leaves,’ Sciancalepre replied firmly.
The wait continued. Another half hour passed, the shadow neither moving nor making the least bit of noise.
‘What do you bet,’ Fumagalli whispered again to the Commissario, ‘that we’ve fouled up? It’ll be some poor devil, a homeless guy who comes to sleep on the straw in the coach house. And before he falls asleep, he takes a stroll around the park.’
Sciancalepre kept quiet. Without taking his eyes off the entrance to the coach house, he signed that they should go on waiting.
Finally he became impatient and told Fumagalli to cross the glade to the border opposite, right into the moonlight, and then return to their hiding place the same way. Maybe this would encourage the shadow to move.
Content to have something to do, the engineer followed orders. He went out into the clearing and stepped lightly across the lawn, heading for the gate. He stopped for a moment in the shadow, before turning round and beginning the reverse journey, moving just slightly towards the entrance of the coach house so he could hear any sound or sign of life coming from it.
He’d gone about three or four metres beyond the coach house, and was walking back towards the tree where Sciancalepre was waiting, when he caught the sound of a hurried step behind him. Before he could turn round, he saw two flashes from under the poplar and heard two shots. Far away, from the direction of the palazzo, a shriek pierced the air.
Instinctively he threw himself to the ground. He heard running from two or three sides, then the Commissario’s voice calling Pulito and, in the sudden silence, one more shot from the revolver.
As soon as Fumagalli could move, the Commissario and Pulito were already helping him up from the ground, afraid that he was wounded. He wanted to know what had happened, but Sciancalepre hurried him towards the villa.
They ran up the stairs and into the house. Fumagalli realized that the scream had come from his wife, who must have been on the balcony and heard the shots. In fact, Emilia was in the hallway, pale and panting. When she saw her husband she felt brighter, but despite all the encouragement to go back to bed, she wanted to hear what had happened.
Sciancalepre was the only one to have seen anything, and he was disinclined to offer much in the way of explanation. He would only say that while he’d been following Fumagalli’s return across the lawn, he’d become aware that the shadow had reappeared at the door of the coach house. In a flash, he’d seen it throw itself towards Fumagalli, a powerful club held aloft. He’d immediately shot into the air, arresting the follower’s intentions – or he’d certainly have smashed Fumagalli’s skull in with the club.
The shadow had fled towards the wall of the villa Sormani, still holding on to his weapon. A few moments later the Commissario had shot blindly in that direction. Then, uncertain whether the heavy blow had hit home, he felt he should help Fumagalli up.
After this brief summary, Sciancalepre was off in a hurry. He took Pulito with him, refusing the offer of a final sip of cognac, and immediately ran to the piazza to look at Esengrini’s windows. There, on the second floor, over the office, one light was on in the apartment where the lawyer lived alone.
The Commissario rang the bell, said his name into the entryphone, and immediately heard the click of the automatic entry latch. He left Pulito downstairs while he went up and rang at the door of the flat.
Esengrini came to open the door without making Sciancalepre wait. He was in pyjamas and dressing-gown. Passing through the hallway on his way to the drawing-room, Sciancalepre saw a lamp alight on the night table in the bedroom, and a newspaper on the floor. The lawyer, meanwhile, had sat down in the armchair and welcomed his visitor as if this were a normal visit in the middle of the day.
Sciancalepre was a bit lost for words. ‘I’ve come at this time of night, rather inconsiderately, but to put my mind to rest. Esengrini… it’s come to my attention that every now and again, someone creeps into your daughter’s villa at night. Since we know it’s not thieves, I thought perhaps it might be you? I knew someone who suffered from insomnia and at night, he used to walk about in other people’s gardens in order to pass the time – until he took a bullet from a guard. Could it be that you go there from time to time with the key to the gate? Who knows – perhaps to imagine that you’re still the owner of the villa?…’
‘My dear sir,’ the lawyer replied, stretching out in the armchair, ‘I understand your suspicions and your concerns, and I realize that you’ve had to go beyond what was requested in my first charge of abandoning the marital home. Besides me, my wife’s disappearance has involved the police, the law, public opinion… Three years have gone by and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why she’s never shown any sign of being alive. I myself have thought about everything you have, albeit from another point of view, and with the confidence to exclude myself from a list of probable murderers – if there was one. So I completely understand this visit of yours at one in the morning.’
Sciancalepre seemed relieved. He got up and took his leave. As the lawyer accompanied him to the door, he noticed a huge cherrywood club with a bone handle in the umbrella stand – a solid tool, with which one could kill an ox.
He stopped, took the club from the stand, held it up, tried it out as a walking stick and then brandished it, grasping it near the head. Esengrini watched him calmly.
‘Fine club,’ Sciancalepre commented.
‘I take it whenever I go out at night,’ the lawyer explained. ‘It was my father’s: the stick is cherrywood and the handle’s from a deer. A deer’s horn!’ So saying, he arched his brows and watched the Commissario, his smile forced.
Sciancalepre put the club back in its place, said his goodbyes – excusing his intrusion once again – and left.
In the street he began going over the events of the night and wondering how he should put them in the report he’d have to write up. More than a report, it was his duty to file a charge for attempted murder by persons unknown. He almost regretted that he hadn’t had the courage to confiscate the lawyer’s club, which might constitute a piece of evidence. If he had, however, one could no longer have spoken of ‘persons unknown’.
So how could one show that the nocturnal visitor was Esengrini? The legal authorities would in any case make this conclusion. But with what proof?
SIX
Sciancalepre had more or less completed his report by around eleven the next morning and was just polishing it off with the phrase, ‘This record will be followed by further investigations, still ongoing, to establish the identification of the suspect, etc., etc…’ when the door to his office swung open and Fumagalli literally ran into his desk. Pale as death, he gasped out the astonishing words to Sciancalepre’s face: ‘Signora Giulia… she’s been found! Found! There’s no doubt that it’s her. Even her suitcases are there.’
It was five minutes before he’d caught his breath enough to continue.
‘This morning,’ he said, ‘the builders went into the grounds as usual to continue their work on the garage. I came down late because I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until dawn, and I went to see last night’s scene of the crime. I picked up the three bullets you’d fired from off the ground, then went to look at the wall of the villa Sormani where our secret guest entered.
‘I noticed that around six or seven metres from the gate there’s an iron stirrup fixed at the height of one metre on the boundary wall. I climbed up the wall and saw that the ground on the Sormani side of the park is at least one metre higher than it is in our part of the park. It would be easy, even for an old person, to cross over from the villa Sormani into ours using the protruding iron stirrup to jump over the wall, and then return the same way.’
‘But Signora Giulia?!’ The Commissario was at the very limit of his patience.
Fumagalli went on. ‘While I was trying to scale the wall, one of my builders called me. I went over to the clearing in front of the coa
ch house and saw that they’d finished uncovering the paving stones. The builder took me to a square manhole they’d opened by removing a large stone fitted with a ring. Demetrio, who was there, said it was a cistern for collecting rainwater. The cistern and its manhole had been hidden for at least thirty years by the grass that had grown over the old courtyard.
‘Looking down into the cistern, you could clearly see a large suitcase. The builders told me that as soon as they’d removed the manhole, an intense smell of fungus and mulch came out of it. Nearer the opening, there was an odour almost like a damp forest floor. I sent someone to fetch an electric lamp and I went down into the cistern where there were five centimetres of water. A little further on, a human form appeared under the beam of light. I saw two feet in women’s shoes, two thin shin-bones… and, as I shone the light along the body… the face of Signora Giulia, easily recognizable. It didn’t seem possible that I could make her out so well when she’d been in that grave for three years. They had to pull me out of the cistern because my own legs wouldn’t hold me up. I had them shut it up again immediately and I ran right here.’
They remained silent for a few minutes. Sciancalepre was thinking.
The report stood in the typewriter, wanting only a few concluding lines. Now he knew how he should complete them. Speaking more to himself than to Fumagalli, he reconstructed the facts: ‘The lawyer Esengrini, having discovered his wife’s affair with Barsanti, wrote him the famous letter in order to persuade him to get out of the area. When Thursday came along, realizing that his wife was preparing to leave for Milan and that the situation was ongoing, he came back from court and confronted his wife, telling her everything he suspected. I can almost hear him: “You go to Milan, you run to Emilia’s school, then you take a taxi to viale Premuda to such and such a number where Luciano’s waiting for you…”
