The Disappearance of Signora Giulia

by Piero Chiara

  He remembered having overlooked something. Given that Teresa Foletti had received a letter from Barsanti after Signora Giulia’s disappearance, then Barsanti could have received some of her letters in viale Premuda after he’d left for Rome. In which case the doorkeeper, not knowing Barsanti’s new address, should have kept the correspondence. Sciancalepre therefore decided to return to viale Premuda, in spite of the three-year gap.

  Meanwhile, he wanted to look again into the nocturnal visitor’s route of entry into the property. He went to the villa, climbed over the wall with the aid of the iron stirrup, and dropped into the Sormani property. Just there, the ground level was higher than it was in the Zaccagni-Lamberti property, something Fumagalli had already pointed out.

  But how did the visitor get into the Sormani property? Sciancalepre asked himself. The villa Sormani also had iron railings on the side facing the country and on the via Lamberti side it was closed off by the palazzo. For anyone not coming from inside the Sormani house, it had to amount to one and the same: climbing over one set of railings or the other. So why the Sormani gate and not directly from the Zaccagni-Lamberti side? It was a little conundrum to add to all the others. And as if that were not enough, Sciancalepre encountered yet another: walking round the Sormani grounds, he found the handle of a new pickaxe under the dry leaves that slid underfoot; a veritable club, with squared edges on the part that entered the iron head. He picked it up, scaled the wall once more and went to the coach house where the workmen were still busy. He asked them if they were missing the handle of one of their pickaxes.

  Several days before, they responded – in fact, the day that the cadaver had come to light – they’d discovered that a new axe, one they’d brought along with the other tools, was missing its wooden handle. They showed it to Sciancalepre and he matched it with the handle he’d found under the leaves, noting its perfect fit with the iron part. Was this handle, then, the club he had seen the shadow figure holding over Fumagalli’s head? He confiscated the axe and took down the builders’ names.

  Serious doubts began to creep into Sciancalepre’s mind. The same wearisome delays in the investigation and certain inquiries about which he’d heard rumours gave him a hunch that Signora Giulia’s killing could have an entirely different explanation from the one he’d settled on.

  Like Hamlet, he kept asking himself, The axe or the club? A club with a handle of horn – or the wooden handle of an axe? And why did Esengrini go through the Sormani grounds? He thought about Domenico Sormani, unmarried brother of the head of the family, a gambler and ladies’ man known for his love affairs. For half an hour, he tried to reconstruct a secret dalliance between Sormani and poor Signora Giulia. But then he remembered that for the whole of the year concerned, Domenico Sormani had been in South America, where his brother had a business. He abandoned that line of thinking and decided to take up the thread on the viale Premuda once more.

  The following day he was in Milan. He recognized the same doorkeeper, still there. He identified himself and tried to get her to recall his visit of three years ago.

  ‘It seems to me,’ she said coldly, ‘that three years ago someone did come to look for the tenant on the top floor, that young man who was always seeing women.’

  ‘That was me,’ Sciancalepre pressed on, ‘with some officers from the police station. But tell me, that tenant who went to Rome without leaving his address, did he receive any more post here?’

  ‘I have a stack of letters for tenants who’ve left and have never come back to claim correspondence. Sometimes it arrives a few years after they’ve gone,’ the doorkeeper said. ‘Let’s see…’

  She went down to the lower ground floor, where she had a living-room, and returned with a packet of letters. She let Sciancalepre go through them and to his astonishment there appeared, among the last three, an envelope which read:

  Signor Luciano Barsanti

  There, on a yellowed envelope covered with fingerprints, was Signora Giulia’s handwriting, somewhat faded with time.

  Sciancalepre sat down and recorded the discovery, asking the doorkeeper to sign the report. He hurried to M—— and rushed like lightning through his office in order to grab the packet containing the axe and its handle. He gave it to officer Pulito to carry, and the two of them headed to the chief’s office.

  The letter burned in his pocket. He’d thought it prudent, at this stage in the inquiry, not to open it, and to place everything in the hands of the investigating judge.

  ‘Let’s open it together,’ said the judge, after hearing the results of the Commissario’s latest efforts.

  The letter was dated the Thursday of Signora Giulia’s disappearance and said:

  My dear Luciano,

  Perhaps today I’ll wait in vain. Just when you’re leaving, things are getting more complicated. From the beginning of our affair, someone has known about it. I never said anything to you because I knew that any kind of difficulty bothered you. But maybe today, what I’ve always feared will come true. Do I wait for everything to be discovered? Face the consequences? If my husband throws me out, it will actually be liberating. Don’t be afraid of anything. I’ll never give him your name, and no one will ever know how happy I was in your arms. And if some day I’m free and feel sure that I won’t drag you down, I’ll come and find you… I’ll go and see your sister in Tuscany, and she’ll tell me where you are. It’s the only dream I have left.

  Your Giulia

  ‘Poor woman!’ murmured Sciancalepre.

  The judge, however, exclaimed, ‘Fantastic! Wonderful! Now I’m sure Esengrini is innocent.’ And turning to Sciancalepre: ‘Let’s go get the killer.’

  ‘But what killer?’ asked Sciancalepre.

  ‘Oh, that’s right. You’re not au fait with Esengrini’s declaration and petition. Here – take this file and read the whole thing while I go and hear a couple of witnesses. Then we’ll drive to M—— and on the way you’ll tell me the killer’s name. I think we’ll be in agreement.’

  Sciancalepre wouldn’t even have read the will of an American uncle with such delight.

  When he found the famous apocryphal letter from Esengrini to Barsanti and repeated the experiment with the overlay at the window, his face lit up. But confronted with the signed notes in the lawyer’s diary, his thoughts once again became muddled. He turned his mind back, and tried to imagine how and when Signora Giulia could have written the letter to Barsanti that Thursday. Evidently at around nine that morning, when she’d sent Teresa Foletti back home. But who had ‘known about it’? Surely whoever had traced the signature of Esengrini. And if they’d traced it from the document containing the request for Marchionato’s provisional liberty, the operation must have taken place in Esengrini’s office in his absence. But when? The previous Saturday. And that explained why Esengrini had put forward the request for the sequestration of his office. That Saturday morning, the request for Marchionato’s provisional liberty had lain on Esengrini’s table, typed up and already signed. The lawyer Berrini had already been in Esengrini’s office and the surveyor Chiodetti would be there later, when Esengrini returned from court…

  Who else was in the office during that half hour? Had Esengrini left it for just a few moments, giving someone enough time to trace his signature onto a prepared letter?

  Sciancalepre closed up the file, lost in thoughts that now had a sure focus. A little later the judge came back with some other people. Sciancalepre said nothing. He continued to think, starting involuntarily every now and again.

  As he sat beside the judge on the road to M——, he whispered a name in his ear so that officer Pulito, who was driving, wouldn’t hear it – or maybe just because he still feared being wrong.

  The judge nodded. They didn’t say anything else to each other, and for the rest of the journey they continued their silent scheming, eventually attaching a specific name to the findings Esengrini had dangled before the magistrates for a month.

  As they entered the district prison fo
r M——, the judge halted for a moment. He looked up at Sciancalepre. ‘What if we’re wrong? If this devil of a guy pulls out another name? If it’s all been an infernal game?’

  ‘We can expect anything,’ Sciancalepre admitted, shaking his head. ‘Even that mysterious man entering the game – the one who was in Esengrini’s office on the day of the crime, according to the witness Rossinelli.’

  ‘It’s been nearly a month since we’ve seen each other,’ Esengrini said to Sciancalepre after greeting the judge.

  ‘We’ve moved Sciancalepre on to other things,’ the judge explained, ‘but he hasn’t been sleeping on the job, and this morning he brought me a new key to the mystery, we hope.’ So saying, he held out Signora Giulia’s last letter for the lawyer to read.

  ‘It is to my great fortune,’ said Esengrini after reading it and reflecting, ‘that Barsanti has always been a terrible guardian of his own correspondence. He loses one letter and for three years leaves another with the doorkeeper. But in addition to my mind, there’s a hand keeping things in order here. A mysterious hand, scooping everything up. Now that we’ve got this letter, finding the jewellery isn’t so important. But we shouldn’t neglect anything.’

  ‘Now,’ the judge observed, ‘I too have a request: I’d like to interrogate your typist and Demetrio Foletti in order to ascertain who was in your office on the Saturday morning when the letter with your forged signature went off to Barsanti.’

  ‘The suggestion is a good one,’ Esengrini admitted, ‘but perhaps it’s better to put it off; it could turn out to be useless. Let’s try instead to reconstruct the crime, supposing, for example, that Demetrio Foletti had committed it. Just to check a possible theory.

  ‘So: my wife, overcome by a serious Madame Bovary complex and emotionally needy, takes advantage of her weekly visits to our daughter at the convent school in order to escape the atmosphere of our town. On her way to Milan, she has the fatal encounter with Luciano Barsanti. After the first few meetings in various spots, Barsanti finds the right place in viale Premuda. They’ve already exchanged letters, as we know.

  ‘My wife has the great idea of receiving letters through Teresa Foletti, with the simple ruse of envelopes addressed by her in order to encourage the belief that they’re coming from her daughter. Teresa believes in it, but her husband, who opens one of the initial letters – the second or the third – doesn’t. Maybe more than one, but definitely the one which says that the little longed for nest is ready, and giving its address in viale Premuda. Like the true rep he is, Barsanti signs some of the love letters with his name and surname. Which means that Demetrio Foletti knows about my wife’s liaison, knows the name of the lucky one and his exact address.

  ‘He doesn’t wait long before deciding on blackmail. It’s easy to imagine how his desire, no doubt of long-standing, takes shape when he sees that the woman he once considered unattainable is within his grasp. With the mind of a gardener, he thinks that women, like flowers, yield their fragrance as often to the one who tends them as to the one who places them in the drawing-room; and sometimes more intensely to the one who tends them. One need only reach out one’s hand to such a flower, using, if necessary, a little strength, and one has one’s own share of the perfume… We can imagine the approach and the rejection. Demetrio, the family’s right-hand man, goes in and out of the house at any hour; and my absences are continual and often last the entire day.

  ‘Poor Giulia pays dearly for her evasion. At a certain point Demetrio becomes jealous, just like a husband, or even more so. And he dreams up the stratagem of sending the letter, purportedly from the husband who knows everything. He’s used the system of tracing my signature a few other times, with my approval, and when signatures of little importance were necessary in my absence.

  ‘Whether Barsanti keeps the letter to himself or whether he shows it to my wife, it must seem authentic. In both cases, and especially in the second one, it has the effect of halting the relationship. Foletti doesn’t know that the affair was about to finish anyway, and that Barsanti is already sated with the perfume for which Foletti pants increasingly jealously.

  ‘Barsanti was out of the picture, but he couldn’t hope to take his place on that account. He had to realise that, the affair interrupted, his arguments for blackmail are weakened. But passion has no sense, and we have to imagine Demetrio overwhelmed and blinded by passion – and also by a desire for revenge. He came from a town near Bergamo, and started working as a gardener in my wife’s house at the age of twenty-five. When I joined the Zaccagni-Lamberti house and transferred my offices there, I saw that he didn’t have much to do in the garden, so I began to use him sometimes as an assistant and sometimes as a clerk. He went to the bank, to the post, to various offices. I saw that he was intelligent: when he had nothing else to do, he’d read copies of trials, study the statute book and literally immerse himself in criminology treatises. He ended up being my right-hand man, and I have to say that he has always behaved properly and served me willingly, occasionally managing to suggest theories for the defence that I had to reject only because they were too subtle. Demetrio is a relentless logician, gifted with imagination and intuition. Too much for a clerk or a gardener. He married the maid of my sister-in-law, who’s dead. Teresa wasn’t bad-looking in her youth but she’s become an old woman in the last few years. We mustn’t forget that she’s ten years older than he is.

  ‘At the time of the crime, Demetrio was only a little over forty, a lot younger than me: he considered himself a good-looking man, someone who’d begun to feel like something in between a clerk and my right-hand man. He could, in fact, aspire to my wife, all the more so after discovering that she’d already strayed from the straight and narrow.

  ‘That Saturday he sends the letter and hopes the response will come via the usual means before Thursday. Thursday morning, when he sees that no letter with my wife’s signature has arrived, he supposes Barsanti has not given any thought to the warning or the news he’s received. It’ll be necessary, therefore, to put pressure on Signora Giulia.

  ‘He must already have suggested to my wife that morning that she shouldn’t be going to Milan in the afternoon, and she would have been afraid. So she writes the letter that Sciancalepre found in viale Premuda a few days ago. It arrives in Milan a few days late, perhaps misdirected, and by that time Barsanti has already left for Rome. My wife would have gone out to post it at around ten that morning. Demetrio, sensing something’s up, enters the house an hour later to press home the threats. He shoves her down the hall and she screams – Demetrio loses his cool and shuts her up for ever…

  ‘The body is taken into the cellar via the internal staircase. The button I found under the wood on the cellar floor must have been torn from her dress when the killer dragged the body by the shoulders. The proximity of the cistern to the coach house is known only to Foletti; and he thinks he’ll put the lifeless body there. The route from cellar to cistern is hidden from sight. And the house is empty except for the typist, who’s in my office, which faces via Lamberti.

  ‘I’m in court for a trial and won’t be coming back before midday. Teresa is home and won’t know anything. Foletti has time to return to the house, take the suitcases, jumble some of my wife’s clothes and linens into them and hide them in the cistern, not forgetting a purse or two. Inspired by Barsanti’s letter, which he’s intercepted, and in which the scrupulous rep discourages my wife from any such action, he fakes the flight.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten about the jewellery. When a wife leaves she always takes her jewellery with her. He knows, does Demetrio, that her jewellery constitutes a small fortune in itself. For this reason, he makes sure he doesn’t put it in the suitcases, which neither he nor anyone else will ever unearth. He hides the jewellery, locked in a travelling case the size of your palm, by burying it in the greenhouse under a large urn used as a planter.’

  The judge and Sciancalepre listened to the account without batting an eyelid. But at that point the judge excla
imed, ‘So it’s there, the jewellery!’

  ‘It was,’ Esengrini went on. ‘A few months ago, when I was going back to the park every now and again at night, it was precisely as a result of having found the body that I was more than ever convinced I’d find the jewellery. Demetrio had followed all my searches. He’d noticed that I was looking underground for my wife in the park, and maybe he guessed that when I’d explored all other corners I’d find the cistern. But he needn’t have worried: all the proof I found was against me. Evidently, I was the one with a reason to follow through with the killing – and I had no interest in stirring the law, which, fortunately for me, was dozing.

  ‘The simulated flight and the missing body saved me from incrimination. The jewellery was the way he’d implicate me, by providing proof against me when necessary. When he realized I was looking for it seriously and that I’d started to explore the greenhouse, he was forced to move it. He didn’t want to lose it. One day, maybe ten or fifteen years hence, he’d sell it. But the moment might come when it would help him to put the blame on me, and deflect suspicion from himself. It would be better to have the jewellery found in my office.

  ‘One night I noticed that a huge urn had been moved in the greenhouse. When I moved it, I found that the earth underneath it was freshly disturbed. Demetrio had been forced to take the jewellery out of the park. I hoped he’d taken it to his house. But he had the entire Sormani grounds at his disposal – and this is an important point – grounds to which he’d had free access for years, since the Sormani had entrusted him with looking after their few flowers. And that’s why the shadow trying to kill my son-in-law came from the boundary wall between the villa Sormani and our park. Demetrio entered the grounds at night by the door in via Lamberti, to which he had the key, and went into the park to supervise my movements, while for my part I entered by the same door a bit later and went into the garden. As soon as he found out that my son-in-law wanted to turn the old coach house into a garage, and that he’d be exposing the paving stones by taking up the grass in order to put down cement, he knew the cistern would come to light, and my wife’s tomb would be discovered. I knew it too, and prepared myself for some difficult days.