When the Marshal and Ferrini left at lunch time, the lights and cameras had just been switched off. A niche in the kitchen wall containing a statue of the Madonna had been dismantled and the brickwork behind it destroyed with an electric drill. Plaster dust was settling on the white hair of the Suspect, who lay with his head down in his arms at the kitchen table, sobbing. Outside his wife screamed abuse at an intruding journalist, managing to crack him over the head with a sweeping brush as he ran for his life.
“Later!” the Marshal mouthed at the face looking in at the window. It was the man from the house across the way, probably just back from work in the fields, as it was sixish. “You shouldn’t be here.” He waved him away. The man looked disgruntled but he went.
They were still searching the kitchen, looking now at a huge scratched sideboard, the drawers and cupboards of which were crammed with the stuff that always accumulates in the most-used room of a house. Simonetti himself and Di Maira were doing the actual searching. The Marshal’s part was simpler. It was his job to make a written description of anything they might decide to remove and to put everything exactly back in place when they moved on. As yet they hadn’t decided to take anything. They had filmed the area before starting and were now filming the open drawers as they were emptied.
“Excuse me,” the Marshal ventured to interrupt. “This postcard …”
“What about it?” Simonetti, crouched in front of the cupboard, didn’t look up.
“It’s a nuisance, but I think we’ll have to do the first part of the filming here again. It must have fallen on the floor or somebody knocked it off by accident.”
“Leave it there. It probably fell out of this cupboard.”
“No, no … it was propped up here at the back. I happened to notice it this morning.”
“All right, all right. Just leave it there. I’ll see that it gets filmed if it’s of any interest.”
The Marshal replaced the card carefully where he remembered seeing it earlier and the cameraman moved forward to do a close-up of a biscuit tin that Simonetti was trying to open. Di Maira stood back and as he did so the postcard caught his eye. He gave the Marshal a sharp glance and quickly turned away.
Behind them, the Suspect came in carrying a bucket full of new-laid eggs.
“I’m just trying to get on with my work,” he wailed, his meaty face as tear-stained as ever. “I’ve worked all my life, I’ve made myself ill. My heart’s done for, and this is what I get.”
He put down the bucket of eggs and, spotting what Simonetti had just succeeded in opening, his wail increased in volume:
“This is what it’s got me! Strangers going through all my belongings, strangers poking about in my private things, making a joke of the pathetic few lire I’ve scraped together over years and years of back-breaking work. I did my best to do as my father taught me and put that little bit by each week—thank God he’s not alive today to see what it’s all come to. But God’ll pay you back for this! He’s going to see to it that you burn in hell for persecuting an innocent man. A scapegoat! That’s what I am, a scapegoat, because I’m too old and sick and worn out to defend myself.”
“Oh God,” sighed Simonetti, sick of this diatribe, as indeed they all were. “That’s it. Tidy up here. We’ll move on next door …”
“My rabbits! You’re not touching my rabbits! The shock’d kill them like it’s killing me! Not my rabbits …”
He trailed after them, sobbing as they went out the kitchen door and in at the next door on the yard to where fat brown rabbits crouched in overcrowded cages in the smelly darkness.
The Marshal remained behind to put everything back in place. When he’d finished, he shut the cupboards and then tried to shut the drawer at the top, but it stuck. It was far too full and he tried to rearrange the stuff, thinking something must be sticking up. There were stacks of household bills, light bulbs in boxes, spare plugs and bits of wire, a hammer, tubes of glue, a holy picture, a screw-top jam jar with mixed nails in it, broken pencils and half-used ballpoints with no tops and a big roll of brown plastic sticky tape for parcels. The roll of tape looked the most likely culprit. The Marshal made a deeper space for it and laid it flat. The drawer still wouldn’t shut. Then he remembered a trick. It wasn’t something he’d discovered for himself. A colleague had told him about it after finding a hidden pistol and the sticky tape had reminded him of it now.
“Dead simple, really. They make a parcel of it, put it right at the back of a drawer and tape it to the inside back of the chest so that when you pull the drawer out it stays at the back. What happened was, I pulled the drawer out too far altogether. It fell down behind it, still taped to the back of the chest and the drawer wouldn’t shut. Not bad really. If I hadn’t yanked at the drawer because I’d lost my patience I’d probably never have found the thing.”
The Marshal didn’t lose his patience. He slid the drawer out carefully and put it on the table. Then he bent to look. The parcel was flat and oblong, wrapped in something black, probably a rubbish bag, and stuck to the inside back of the sideboard with the plastic sticky tape.
There was a sudden commotion followed by a piercing scream out in the yard. The Marshal straightened up and went to the door.
“He’ll kill me! He’ll blame me and he’ll kill me! He’s bound to blame me! Oh, Holy Mother of God!”
“Stay where you are, we’ll get them back.”
But the rabbits, a whole cage full of them, had no intention of being got back in without giving everybody a good run for their money. It was the first time in their lives they’d had the possibility of moving more than a few centimetres and they intended to make the most of it, scattering in a dozen directions at once in the pouring rain, ears down and bobtails up.
The Marshal assumed that Simonetti would not be joining in the chase and went next door to tell him what he’d found.
The parcel was filmed in its hiding place, before being removed and opened.
“Money …”
Wads of used notes, each with an elastic band round it.
They filmed it spread out on the black rubbish bag.
“Our friend obviously doesn’t believe in banks,” was Simonetti’s only comment. “Thank you. You may as well stick it back where you found it.” He left with the cameraman.
Outside, the rabbit hunt continued, with the Suspect’s wails and imprecations now added to his wife’s screams.
The Marshal counted the hundred thousand notes in one of the wads. Then he counted the wads and put them back in the bag. A hundred and thirty million lire. He closed the parcel with fresh tape and reached to the back of the drawer cavity to stick it back in place.
That was as much as he earned himself in four years. In the biscuit tin that Simonetti had opened there had been a savings book with another eighty million or so, and a pile of share certificates made out to the bearer. He hadn’t been able to see how much they were worth.
When he finished tidying, he went to the window and stood a moment watching the chaotic scene outside.
“Hmph,” he said to himself aloud. He didn’t add anything else, conscious of the bugs concealed in the room. Still, that didn’t prevent his thinking that, despite all his years of sweating on the land, his own father’s hens and rabbits had never resulted in wads of shares and bank notes.
As he walked out the kitchen door he encountered Noferini. The boy was wet and red in the face and clutching a soaked and trembling rabbit. Apparently he hadn’t been too tired to join in the chase.
“We’ve got them all!”
“Good. Because they must be worth their weight in gold.”
Noferini stared after him.
At the gate someone was waiting, hidden by a vast green cotton umbrella of the sort country people use.
“Marshal?” It was the man from the house across the road again.
“I’m on my way over to you. My gloves are upstairs.”
“It’s about my coat.”
“What coat?”
The Marshal kept walking. He’d had enough for today.
“My coat! I’m not asking for it. I’ll tell you the truth, he scares me. I’m keeping away from him.” He held the huge umbrella over them both as the Marshal crossed the dirt road. “I said to my wife, I said they’re bound to come across it while they’re searching his house. Am I right? I said I’m not asking him for it. You never know. Only it’s what I go to work in, so I could do with it. But I’m not one for taking risks and he frightened the life out of me going for me like that. Curiosity killed the cat, the wife said, but I’d just got up for a piss and I heard you going down. Anyway, it’s a green windjammer, if you take a quick look round you’ll find it. What was it he threw in the skip, anyway? It was something hard, I can tell you that much, but I hadn’t the chance for more than a quick prod at it before he grabbed me.”
The Marshal stopped, closed his eyes for a second and then turned back.
“Come with me.”
“You’re kidding!” On the other end of the line, the head of police laboratories couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“No. It’s true, I’m afraid.”
“Better keep that out of the papers.”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t look good.”
“No.”
“You’re taking it badly.”
“No, no … I’m exhausted, that’s all. I’ve just got back to my station after being on duty for over thirty hours.”
“Not much fun.”
“No.”
“And it’s not as though I’ve got anything interesting for you, though I must say it never ceases to amaze me what people throw away, even after all these years. I mean, a dead dog, for instance. I could understand it in the city, but in the country why not bury it? Pretty high it is, too. Now then … We’ve got a whole lot of Walt Disney films on tape and, in contrast to that, a rubbish bag filled with porn—that’s probably his stuff, wouldn’t you think?”
“Could be. Is it anything special?”
“Not really. Straight-up-and-down hard core. Sort you can buy at any newspaper kiosk. Then we’ve got half a sofa. Half of it! Is somebody still sitting on the other half, d’you think?”
“There was another skip. Perhaps …”
“All right. I was just trying to cheer you up.”
He was a new man and the Marshal had never met him, but he certainly was cheerful. Of course, he hadn’t been on his feet for thirty-six hours, most of it on an empty stomach. The Marshal had shown sufficient foresight to put some water on to boil in the kitchen before embarking on this call. The list went on and on …
“And … Let me see—right: I knew there was something that would amuse you. There’s a smashed video camera!”
Why should that be funny? The Marshal was nonplussed.
“You didn’t see the news last night?”
“I—no, no, I didn’t.”
“Ah, well. His wife has got it in for the journalists—not that you can blame her—and there was this bit of film of her on the eight o’clock news last night. All she’s doing is sweeping the yard, but all of a sudden she spots the camera and she’s coming towards it, brush raised ready to kill. You get just a few seconds of spinning image and then it goes black. Everybody thought the cameraman was running for his life but it looks like she got the bull’s-eye.”
“Yes.”
“After that we’ve got three chicken-feed bags, ripped, a rabbit’s head—probably the property of the dead dog—and five black sacks of everyday rubbish, all of which we’ve gone through carefully just in case. Usual stuff: coffee grounds, tomato tins, vegetable peelings. That’s about it. You would have preferred a Beretta twenty-two long rifle, or even a spot of grease from one, I know, but no luck.”
“Well, I wasn’t hoping for it.”
“I suppose not. It would have been too good to be true, wouldn’t it? As for what we did find … was he just up early spring cleaning, do you think?”
“It’s winter.”
“Oh well, I’ve done what I can for you. Make of it what you will.”
The Marshal, who could make nothing of it and was pretty well past caring, ate a huge bowl of spaghetti in front of the television and then went to bed.
The next morning was beautiful. The marble towers in the city washed by the heavy rain, glittered in the strong winter sunshine. In the country the sky was deep blue against the tall black cypresses in a way that never happens in the muggy heat of summer. The air was so cold and clean it was intoxicating and the Marshal felt more cheerful than he had for weeks. When they drove round the village square at Pontino he saw it was market day and the stall holders were setting out their wares, plastic flowers, buckets and brushes, cheeses, eggs and chickens, long johns and frilly knickers, bunches of tiny stored tomatoes, sacks of potatoes and barrels of salt cod under running water. The men of the village stood gossiping near the bars, the women near the stalls.
It took some time for the jeep to nose its way through it all and take the yellow stony road that led past a deserted villa to the little group of houses where the Suspect lived.
The road ran straight over the hilltops to the glistening horizon and so gave the impression of being very long. It ran between vineyards and olive groves and past the cypress avenue leading to a huge and crumbling villa on their right. Along the balustraded roof of the villa terra-cotta Roman ladies were silhouetted against the blue sky. The gate to the avenue lay rusting by the roadside, Just after the villa the road swung away to their left and they embarked very slowly on the stony track to the right. Within a few minutes they were back to the captured rabbits in their stinking darkness and the scowling red-faced Suspect sitting at the kitchen table, his trousers held up with string. He was furiously denying ever having set eyes on the pile of pornographic magazines that the smiling Simonetti had brought back with him this fine morning.
The Marshal listened for a moment, his eyes scanning the room. Something that ought to be there was missing but he wasn’t concentrating enough to remember what it was because he was also looking about him for Ferrini. That morning they were to search the vegetable garden, orchard and vineyard, so perhaps he was out there. He went out to see. He found Bacci and Noferini laying some old vine supports across the passageway which led between a barn wall and the house to the garden. The passage was almost knee deep in water and the supports would at least allow them to cross from one patch of thick mud to another.
“Ferrini arrived?”
Bacci straightened up. “He called in sick. Flu, I think.”
That was bad news. Well, there you are. The Marshal himself had got soaked to the skin yesterday and his wet clothes had dried on him during the long day’s work, and yet it was Ferrini, all correctly kitted out for the weather, who was now sick. He was really quite put out because Ferrini was the only person he felt at ease with and a word exchanged here and there helped to lighten things up a bit.
As it was, he passed his morning more or less in silence, replacing the thousand bits and pieces that had been moved from the potting shed, trying to remember to stand out of the way of the cameraman, taking notes to order. The one positive element of the morning, apart from the bright winter sun, was that during a short break for reloading the camera, he noted out of the corner of his eye Simonetti having a word with Bacci. It appeared to be a friendly word, given that he had a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and the Marshal was glad of it. However little he desired the man’s approval for himself, he recognized that it was a good thing for Bacci.
Because of this he was a bit surprised to see Bacci looking far from happy when they found themselves working side by side after the lunch break. They had been told to dig up a little pear tree which someone on the local force said he’d seen the Suspect change the position of for no apparent reason. The Suspect explained tearfully that it hadn’t been getting enough light and that if they moved it now it would die. Simonetti thought he might have buried something under cover of moving the tree, which
was now lying on its side near the big hole they’d made.
“Nothing here,” the Marshal said.
“No.”
“We’ll replant the tree but I’m afraid he’s right. It’ll probably die.”
Bacci picked up the delicate little tree and stared at it without answering.
“Is something the matter?”
Bacci went on staring at the tree. He looked dazed. Then, with a sidelong glance at where the others were working, he said, “Yes. There is. Can I talk to you?”
“Go on. Nobody can hear us from over there.”
“They could see us … They’ll notice. Do you mind if I come to see you this evening?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Still Bacci stood looking dazed. And if the Marshal wasn’t mistaken he was also a little frightened. When he made no move after a few more minutes, he suggested, “Shall we get on with replanting this tree, then, Lieutenant?” And they got on.
They had almost finished when the Suspect came panting up to them, purple and gasping in his distress.
“My little pear tree! My little pear tree! You’ve killed it!”
“I’m sorry,” the Marshal offered, “we’ve done our best …”
The Suspect raised his tear-stained face and his thick, cracked hands to the heavens.
“God help me! God help me! I’m an innocent man! Why is this happening to me? You’ll burn in hell for this!”
The last remark was addressed not to God or to the Marshal but to Simonetti who was crouched near the flooded passageway, too intent on something he was looking at there to listen. Only the cameraman behind him turned to look their way. His video camera was in one hand and not on his shoulder so it must have been switched off. He wasn’t interested in filming the Suspect’s rages but other people were. When the Marshal looked up in the direction of the nearby roof there were two or three newsmen filming. This was just the stuff for them. Then a shout went up:
The Monster of Florence Page 16
