Elena steadied the gun on Loffredo.
“Put down the pistol or we fire!”
The police moved forward.
Serafina watched in horror. Her fault, all her fault. She should have realized Elena was a madwoman and yet she had persisted, put them all in danger.
“Put the gun down, Elena,” Rosa called from the rear of the room.
“Yes, please show me what you paint, your brush strokes, I’d like to learn from you. I came to Paris because I love art and perhaps you can teach me,” Tessa said.
Elena paled, brushed hair from her face, her eyes distraught.
The police were in sight now, their firearms drawn.
“Let us help you, Elena,” Serafina said.
But it was useless. The more they pleaded with her, the more distraught Elena became. She was wild.
Loffredo stepped forward. “Give me the gun, Elena. It’s not good for the child you carry.”
She aimed, the gun shaking in her hands. “Don’t come near me.” Elena clenched her teeth. She was trembling, her eyes other worldly.
Suddenly Elena became aware of the police. She fired.
A blinding light. A blast. An acrid stench.
Serafina watched as Loffredo lifted in the air. Suspended for the briefest of seconds, he flew backward as if he had wings.
Serafina saw the red appear on his white shirt, a rose suddenly blooming.
She heard herself wail as she flew to him, helpless, holding him in her lap, his eyes staring, his face fixed.
One of the policemen rushed to him with strips of cloth, pressing them into the wound and holding it while the medics ran in with a gurney. Loffredo looked at her and smiled, pressed her hand and closed his eyes.
Through tears, Serafina looked up in time to see Elena stick the barrel into her mouth and fire again.
Chapter 34: Praying to the Virgin
“We came prepared,” the policeman explained. “Valois warned us of a madwoman.” He introduced himself as the friend of Valois. They’d been students together years ago in Paris. “He gave us the address and told us to take all necessary precautions, and so, you see, we did.” His men wrapped the body of Elena in a muslin sack and it was taken to the morgue in a wagon dispatched for that purpose.
Medics lifted Loffredo into an ambulance drawn by two horses.
“They’ll take him to the central hospital in Aix,” a policeman told them. “It’s an old building on the main square near the Cathedral Saint Sauveur run by an order of nuns.”
“I’d like to ride with him,” Serafina said.
He shook his head. “We’ll need statements from everyone present. A brief description of what you saw and heard, and perhaps someone give me some background on the woman.”
“You’ll send a copy of your report to Valois?” Serafina asked.
“Of course.”
When they’d each written an account of the events in Elena’s studio, they rode in the carriage, making arrangements for rooms at a hotel recommended to them by the driver, clean, pleasant, and close to the hospital.
The afternoon was hot, the air, still.
“It’s all my fault. I should have known how mad she was,” Serafina said. She rocked back and forth.
When they arrived, she vowed she would keep him alive, staying by his side without sleeping or eating, except during the cleansing of his wound.
“His chances, Doctor?” Serafina asked.
“We’ll know more after the operation,” the chief surgeon said. He was a kind man with a round face and half-moon glasses. “Pray, my dear.”
Serafina watched the procedure from the gallery, praying to the Virgin, impressed by the staff and the cleanliness and efficiency of the hospital.
After the operation, Loffredo, looking like a flattened version of himself was wheeled back into the room. Serafina followed.
The doctor paid a visit. “It entered his far right side, mercifully avoiding the major organs until it reached the stomach where we were able to extract it.”
He smiled and held the deadly thing between his thumb and forefinger. “The bullet is small, but he was standing relatively close to the shooter and the lead was propelled at a rapid velocity. It ricocheted off his ribcage, tearing through muscle and came to lodge in the wall of the stomach. The quick action of the police helped to prevent too much loss of blood, but he’s had internal bleeding.”
Serafina bit her lip. “His chances?”
The surgeon shook his head. “The next seventy-two hours are critical, but he seems in excellent health otherwise. So far, he’s been lucky. If it had entered his left side, well ...”
“Oh, thank the Virgin.”
“Thank modern medical practice,” the doctor said, “and thank a poor shot. A woman shot him, I understand. Close range. Maybe she got the sides mixed up.” He smiled.
“Why isn’t he awake?”
He shrugged. “His body has had a shock. Each person reacts differently. Right now, he’s in a deep sleep. We believe he can hear. Talk to him. Sing to him. Last year we had a woman who was shot by her husband, a similar circumstance, but in reverse. The bullet lodged in her lung. It collapsed. We removed the bullet, and she was in a coma for days, but pulled through. Today the man is in prison, not for long unfortunately, but she is doing fine.” The doctor paused. “Your friend has how many years—forty?”
Serafina nodded. “More or less.”
Nuns in blue habits and starched cornettes moved soundlessly and made sure Loffredo was clean and comfortable.
“When will he wake up?” Serafina asked a tall, plump sister.
The nun shrugged. “We don’t know, my dear. Pray. I’ve seen far worse survive and walk out a few weeks later.”
Doctors came in and listened to Loffredo’s pulse. Most did not stop to talk with Serafina.
For her part, Serafina continued a long monologue. She told Loffredo how much she loved him, how she always had. She told him what the weather was like, what she saw out the window down the hall, how many beds were in the ward, how many patients with bandaged legs, whatever she could think of. She told him how sorry she was that this had happened. It was her fault, all her fault, but the care was so good here. Indeed life was so good, not at all like it was at home. In Oltramari, Serafina told him, life had become untenable. No response.
Later, she squeezed Loffredo’s hand, but felt no response.
Two days later, he hadn’t awakened.
“Keep talking to him,” the plump sister said. “The worst thing you can do is give up. Patients who wake up tell us they were soothed by the voices of their loved ones.”
Serafina sang to him, and laughed at her singing. She read to him from a book Teo lent her about Notre Dame and gargoyles and love. She squeezed his hand.
No response.
“Read the paper to him,” Rosa said. “And by the way, Carmela and Giulia are packing up our things from the hotel. We’ll take a boat from Marseille as soon as Loffredo is well enough to travel. No need to return to Paris.”
“Oh, but I want to talk with Busacca and Valois. There is much unfinished business. I think we still must talk with Gaston and Sophie’s oldest son. We need to find out more about the dead woman. And what about the stolen photos?”
“Busacca you can see at home. Valois is on his way. No doubt he’ll have all the answers.”
“Hear that, Loffredo? Valois is on his way. He must like you.”
No response.
Three nuns came in and told Serafina to take a walk down the hall while they changed and washed the patient.
Two days later, the chief surgeon paid a visit. He seemed concerned. He frightened Serafina.
“Pray, my dear.”
“I’m praying to the Virgin all the time. I haven’t prayed so much in all my life, eh, Loffredo?” She squeezed his hand. “Maybe I’ll call you Otto. You hate the name so, it might wake you up.”
No response.
Rosa bent to him. “Time to get up
for school, Loffredo,” she said and squeezed his hand.
He squeezed Rosa’s hand.
The madam looked like a cat who’d landed in a bowl of liver. “There. Did you see that? He squeezed my hand. Just got to use the right words. He’s waking up.”
Serafina’s heart began to pound. She thought perhaps Rosa was imagining, so she squeezed Loffredo’s hand.
She felt no response from him and her heart sank.
Then he squeezed her hand.
Serafina laughed and cried at the same time. “Time to open your eyes.”
In a moment, his eyes blinked and he smiled at her. “Where am I?”
“In a hospital.”
“I must have slept.”
Three days later, Loffredo was walking up and down the ward, anxious to leave. He and the doctor had become friends and exchanged addresses.
“I’m impressed with French hospitals,” Loffredo told him. “We have a lot to learn from you, and I am grateful for your care. When I get back to Oltramari, I’ll talk to my surgeon friends and see if we can’t arrange an official visit.”
Serafina teared up. She missed home. She missed her family, but she was grateful indeed for the miracle of Loffredo.
A few days after Loffredo was released, Serafina’s group sat in the hotel garden enjoying the sunshine and one another when Rosa, who’d returned from shopping with Tessa, said, “We have a visitor.”
It was Valois. “I wanted to thank you in person for your work. I’ll admit there were times I doubted you, times I thought you’d overstepped your bounds, many times I didn’t agree with you, but you are a fine detective.”
“Bravo,” Loffredo said.
“You’ve forgotten something,” Rosa said. “She is maddening, truly maddening at times.”
“Elena’s body was shipped to Versailles and laid to rest after Busacca identified it,” Valois said, “And now we can close the case. You agree, of course.”
“Not so fast, I’m afraid,” Serafina said. “We have more work. I’ll write to you from home. Won’t the insurance company press charges?”
“Perhaps, but that’s separate and their concern. We’ve released the Italians who followed you.”
She nodded. “I must take care of the don in Oltramari, I’m afraid. Do you know the identity of the woman murdered in the Rue Cassette?”
He shook his head. “A streetwalker. A woman of thirty years or so. We think she was living in a poor neighborhood without husband or children. She hadn’t been seen in quite some time. What she was doing on the Rue Cassette, we don’t know.”
Serafina pursed her lips. “So, at the very least, we need to find out more about her.”
“Before Haussmann redesigned Paris, there were terrible slums, but now the displaced have to live somewhere, don’t they? And so they find little warrens in which to congregate. I’m afraid there are establishments which attract them, and Café Odile is one, but we haven’t found her identity as yet, and so we buried her in a common grave.”
Serafina frowned into the distance, lost in thought.
“And I have something for you from Busacca,” Valois said. “Two thick envelopes. In one, your tickets for your passage on the pack boat, Niger, leaving Saturday from Marseille for Palermo.”
“How many tickets?”
“Six. Carmela stays in Paris for the moment, but there’s one for Loffredo, your husband to be, I think?” He smiled. “At least that’s what Françoise tells me. She said to say hello and hopes we’ll meet again soon.”
Serafina looked at Loffredo. He smiled.
Valois continued. “There is a second envelope, and Busacca asks that you not read it until you’re home and surrounded by your family. But from what he tells me, I have a feeling this is not the last time we’ll be working together.”
For a while Serafina was alone with her thoughts of Don Tigro and the reckoning that awaited her in Oltramari. Despite the warmth of the Midi, she felt a chill. “Another thing I don’t yet know is who took the photographs from your desk. I’d like to see them. I wonder if I would have known from those images that the dead woman was not Elena.”
“We believe men who had access to my office and the photographer’s rooms were thieves hired by Elena.” Valois shrugged. “Beyond that—”
“So there’s another unknown,” Serafina said.
She tapped the side of her nose and winked. “Look to Elena’s nephews, Ricci or Beniamino de Masson, Sophie’s youngest and oldest. The middle son, Tessa tells me, is too busy mismanaging one of Busacca’s stores. And Ricci owed his aunt gambling debts.” Yet somehow she thought Ricci an innocent.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation until they drifted again into a discussion of Elena.
“I still think that if I hadn’t goaded her, she wouldn’t have shot you,” Serafina said to Loffredo.
“Perhaps, but she was the one who shot me, not you. I would never blame you. You needed to find out the truth.”
“And sometimes the truth is buried deep and must be pried out of us,” Rosa said.
Serafina opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it.
“Elena wasn’t always like that,” Loffredo said. “Most of us mellow with age, either because we grow wiser or we are closer to our God.”
“Or we cannot debauch the way we used to in our youth,” Rosa said.
“But Elena,” Loffredo continued, “became a caricature of herself. She became less, not more.”
“So do people change?” Serafina asked.
Valois shook his head. “Definitely not. They carry their unique stamp from birth to their grave, and cannot change.”
“Oh, but I think we do, we grow and we change,” Serafina said. “Most of us for the better, even though, perversely, we long for the past. When we mourn for others, we long for a part of us we’ll never have again.”
“There you go, talking convoluted nonsense,” Rosa said. “Perhaps it was the disease from which Elena suffered that spiraled her downward. It drives people into madness, makes them blind, you know.”
“How did you know about her disease?” Valois asked. “You couldn’t have read the autopsy.”
“It was obvious to me,” Rosa said.
Loffredo rubbed his chin. “Dr. Tarnier told me she had syphilis. It was the reason he agreed to care for her. Normally women who are with child hire midwives, but because of Elena’s complications—”
“And because she made a generous bequest to La Maternité, he took her case,” Rosa said.
Rosa continued. “Elena was a syphilitics who’d gone mad. Did she know she was going to die, I wonder?”
Serafina shook her head. “We all know we’re going to die, but somehow we fool ourselves into thinking that our death is a long way off—maybe tomorrow or next week, but certainly not today.”
Chapter 35: Wind, Light, Water
Wind, light, water and the unending sound of the sea helped to mute the shattering events of their final week in France. Serafina and Loffredo sat alone with the setting sun onboard the Niger as it plowed through the Straits of Bonifacio and into the Tyrrhenian Sea steaming toward Palermo. Rosa had taken charge, declared that Fina and Loffredo must be left alone for the voyage, a brief honeymoon after they’d said their vows before a wizened priest in Cathédral St. Sauveur.
“Time enough for thoughts of home.”
She closed her eyes and let the sun play on her face, smelled seaweed and salt and tried to erase the images that pierced her mind over and over—standing before the heavy door to Elena’s studio, Don Tigro’s man cupping his ear in Marseille, Valois stroking his lapel, Loffredo lying on Elena’s studio floor. Instead she deliberately pictured him as he walked toward her in Véfour. She looked at him, stronger each day, but in need of more rest. If she couldn’t obliterate the sight of Elena swallowing her gun, how could he? Would the memory of her treachery ricochet throughout their lives? A shaft of light shone through a hole in the clouds and the wind picked up. They were spr
inkled with sea foam, like a priest shaking holy water onto them. She remembered their simple wedding—Tessa and Rosa clapping, the crackers set off by Teo and Arcangelo. Despite the doctor’s orders, they’d consummated their love again and again.
“Think I should open Busacca’s letter?”
He stroked her hand and smiled. “Wait until we’re home.”
“I wonder ...” She adjusted her scarf. “Not one letter from Vicenzu or Renata. Something in the air.”
“Fish.”
“Silly.”
They were quiet.
“But if I open it now, in this peaceful setting, I’ll have two days to prepare.”
“If you want. Perhaps it would be better. We’ll feel displaced when we arrive, I think. I always do when I return. We’ll see our town and it will be ... other than what we’ve always known our home to be. It’s changing for the worse, I’m afraid, Fina. Soon it won’t be a fit place to raise our children, and we’ll need to make a decision. We must start thinking of it now.”
She thought for a few minutes. “I’ve decided. I won’t open Busacca’s letter now. I’ll offer it up for the repose of the soul of ...”
“Praying for she-devils?”
“For her unborn child who never had a chance. For the unknown woman dying alone in the Rue Cassette. How many lives did Elena take?”
“Everyone she ever met.”
They were silent, watching the molten ball sink behind the coast of Sardinia. Its fire licked the mountains and made their shadows dance while Serafina talked of style and dresses, the advanced state of French detection. She sucked in her stomach. Loffredo talked of France, the cuisine, painting, the state of French medical practice, their prisons.
“I never asked. Where did they keep you?”
“Prison de Mazas, near the Gare de Lyon. Most of us were awaiting trial. But the prisoners were treated with respect, at least I was, a more advanced system than ours.”
“Of course. Oltramari’s prison is a rat hotel built during the Bourbon rule.”
Their silence comforted and stretched beyond the blackened waters. The wind grew fierce. Her feet were cold.
Murder On The Rue Cassette (A Serafina Florio Mystery) Page 24
