The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  Noah silently cursed the tedious process of translation. Carlo Piperno was the kind of interpreter who richly enjoys and intends to get the maximum effect from his role. It took him a long time to make clear who and what Major von Grubbner was.

  The Major was one of the men assigned to the Panzer division quartered along the Tiber. But unlike the German officers around him, Major von Grubbner was cunning as a fox, smooth in his manner, ingratiating in his approach. Others came with a gun in their hands. He came with an attache case, a black leather case with a handsome gold ornament on it, a double-headed eagle which was a reminder of the greater name of his family. And in the case was money. Bundles of money. Packages of lire, fresh and crisp, a fortune by any estimate.

  Give the devil his due. This von Grubbner was a brave man as well as a cunning one. He walked alone, contemptuous of those who needed guards to attend them, the money case in his hand, a smile on his lips, and he invited confidences.

  ‘After all,’ he would say, ‘we are businessmen, you and I. We are practical people who dislike trouble. Remove the trouble-makers and all is peaceful, no? Well, here I am to do business. Look at this money. Beautiful, isn’t it? And all you have to do is name your own price, expose the troublemakers, and we are all happy. Name your own price, that’s all you have to do.’

  And he would open the case under your nose, showing you the money, fondling it, offering it to you. It was more than money. It was life itself. It could buy the few scraps of food remaining to be bought, it could buy you a refuge for your wife and children, it could buy your safety for another day. Life itself. Everyone wants life, and there it was in that little black leather case with the doubleheaded eagle in gold marking it.

  Only one man was tempted. The day after the three partisans were taken, Ezechiele Coen was seen fleeing with that case through the alleys, running like a rabbit before the hounds of vengeance he knew would soon be on him. Only Ezechiele Coen, the devout, the honorable, the arrogant, fell, and died soon for his treachery.

  Vito Levi’s words needed translation, but not the emotion behind them. And the crowd around Noah, now staring at him in silence, did not need its feelings explained. Yet, the story seemed incomplete to him, to Detective Noah Freeman, who had learned at his job not to live by generalities. The evidence, that was what had meaning.

  ‘Ask them,’ he said to Carlo, ‘who saw Ezechiele Coen with that case in his possession,’ and when Carlo translated this, Levi drove a thumb hard into his own chest. Then he looked around the crowd and pointed, and a man on its outskirts raised his hand, and a woman nearby raised hers, someone else raised a hand.

  Three witnesses, four, five. Enough, Noah thought to hang any man. With difficulty, prompting Carlo question by question, he drew their story from them. They lived in houses along Via del Portico. It was hot that night, a suffocating heat that made sleep impossible. One and all, they were at their windows. One and all, they saw the doctor running down the street toward the Teatro Marcello, the leather case under his arm. His medical bag? No, no. Not with the golden eagle on it. It was the doctor with his blood money. This they swore on the lives of their children.

  During siesta time that afternoon, Noah, with the connivance of Signora Alfiara, drew Rosanna out of doors for a walk to a cafe in the Piazza Navona. Over glasses of Campari he told her the results of his investigation.

  ‘Witnesses,’ she said scathingly. ‘Have you found that witnesses always tell the truth?’

  ‘These people do. But sometimes there can be a difference between what you imagine is the truth and the truth itself.’

  ‘And how do you discover that difference?’

  ‘By asking more questions. For example, did your father live in the ghetto?’

  ‘During the war, yes.’

  ‘And according to my street map the Teatro Marcello is outside it. Why would he be running there with the money instead of keeping it safe at home? Even more curious, why would he carry the money in the case, instead of transferring it to something that couldn’t be identified? And why would he be given that case, a personal possession, along with the money? You can see how many unanswered questions come up, if you look at all this without prejudice.’

  ‘Then you think—’

  ‘I don’t think anything yet. First, I want to try to get answers to those questions. I want to establish a rational pattern for what seems to be a whole irrational set of events. And there is one person who can help me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Major von Grubbner himself.’

  ‘But how would you ever find him? It was so long ago. He may be dead.’

  ‘Or he may not be. If he is not, there are ways of finding him.’

  ‘But it would mean so much trouble. So much time and effort.’

  The way she was looking at him then, Noah thought, was more than sufficient payment for the time and effort. And the way she flushed when he returned her look told him that she knew his thought.

  ‘I’m used to this kind of effort,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, it may be the last chance I’ll have to practice my profession.’

  ‘Then you’re not going back to your work with the police? But you’re a very good detective. You are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, very good. And,’ he said, ‘honest, too, despite the popular opinion.’

  ‘Don’t say it like that,’ she flashed angrily. ‘You are honest. I know you are.’

  ‘Do you? Well, that makes two of us at least. Anyhow, the vital thing is for me to locate von Grubbner if he’s still somewhere to be found. After that, we’ll see. By the way, do you know the date when all this happened? When your father was seen with that case?’

  ‘Yes. It was the fifth of July in 1943. I couldn’t very well forget that date, Mr Freeman.’

  ‘Noah.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rosanna. ‘Noah.’

  After returning her to her desk at the pensione, Noah went directly to police headquarters. There he found his credentials an open sesame. In the end he was closeted with Commissioner Ponziani, a handsome urbane man, who listened to the story of Ezechiele Coen with fascination. At its conclusion he raised quizzical eyebrows at Noah.

  ‘And your interest in this affair?’

  ‘Purely unofficial. I don’t even know if I have the right to bother you with it at all.’ Noah shrugged. ‘But when I thought of all the red tape to cut if I went to the military or consular authorities—’

  The Commissioner made a gesture which dismissed as beneath contempt the clumsy workings of the military and consular authorities. ‘No, no, you did right to come here. We are partners in our profession, are we not, signore? We are of a brotherhood, you and I. So now if you give me all possible information about this Major von Grubbner, I will communicate with the German police. We shall soon learn if there is anything they can tell us about him.’

  Soon meant days of waiting, and, Noah saw, they were bad days for Rosanna. Each one that passed left her more tense, more dependent on him for reassurance. How could anyone ever find this German, one man in millions, a man who might have his own reasons for not wanting to be found? And if by some miracle they could confront him, what would he have to say? Was it possible that he would say her father had been guilty?

  ‘It is,’ said Noah. He reached out and took her hand comfortingly. ‘You have to be prepared for that.’

  ‘I will not be! No, I will not be,’ she said fiercely. Then her assurance crumpled. ‘He would be lying, wouldn’t he? You know he would.’ The passage left Noah shaken. Rosanna’s intensity, the way she had clutched his hand like a lost child – these left him wondering if he had not dangerously overreached himself in trying to exorcise the ghost of Ezechiele Coen. If he failed, it would leave things worse than ever. Worse for himself, too, because now he realized with delight and misery that he was falling hopelessly in love with the girl. And so much seemed to depend on clearing her father’s reputation. Could it be, as Rosanna felt, that Ezechiele Coen’s spirit really w
aited here on the banks of the Tiber to be set at rest? And what if there were no way of doing that?

  When Signora Alfiara called him to the phone to take a message from the police, Noah picked up the receiver almost prayerfully.

  ‘Pronto,’ he said, and Commissioner Ponziani said without preliminary, ‘Ah, Signor Freeman. This affair of Major von Grubbner becomes stranger and stranger. Will you meet with me in my office so that we may discuss it?’

  At the office the Commissioner came directly to the point.

  ‘The date of the unhappy event we are concerned with,’ he said, ‘was the fifth of July in 1943. Is that correct?’

  ‘It is,’ said Noah.

  ‘And here,’ said the Commissioner, tapping a finger on the sheet of paper before him, ‘is the report of the German authorities on a Major Alois von Grubbner, attached to the Panzer division stationed in Rome at that time. According to the report, he deserted the army, absconding with a large amount of military funds, on the sixth of July in 1943. No trace of him has been discovered since.’

  The Commissioner leaned back in his chair and smiled at Noah. ‘Interesting, no? Very interesting. What do you make of it?’

  ‘He didn’t desert,’ said Noah. ‘He didn’t abscond. That was the money seen in Ezechiele Coen’s possession.’

  ‘So I believe, too. I strongly suspect that this officer was murdered – assassinated may be a more judicious word, considering the circumstances – and the money taken from him.’

  ‘But his body,’ Noah said. ‘Wouldn’t the authorities have allowed for possible murder and made a search for it?’

  ‘A search was made. But Major von Grubbner, it seems, had a somewhat—’ the Commissioner twirled a finger in the air, seeking the right word ‘—a somewhat shady record in his civilian life. A little embezzling here, a little forgery there – enough to make his superiors quickly suspect his integrity when he disappeared. I imagine their search was a brief one. But I say that if they had been able to peer beneath the Tiber—’

  ‘Is that where you think he ended up?’

  ‘There, or beneath some cellar, or in a hole dug in a dark corner. Yes, I know what you are thinking, Signor Freeman. A man like this Doctor Ezechiele Coen hardly seems capable of assassination, robbery, the disposal of a body. Still, that is not much of an argument to present to people violently antagonistic to his memory. It is, at best, a supposition. Fevered emotions are not cooled by suppositions. I very much fear that your investigation has come to an abrupt and unhappy ending.’

  Noah shook his head. ‘That attache case and the money in it,’ he said. ‘It was never found. I was told that when Ezechiele Coen was found shot by partisans and left lying in the Teatro Marcello, the case was nowhere to be seen. What happened to it?’

  The Commissioner shrugged. ‘Removed by those who did the shooting, of course.’

  ‘If it was there to be removed. But no one ever reported seeing it then or afterward. No one ever made a remark – even after the war when it would be safe to – that money intended to be used against the Resistance was used by it. But don’t you think that this is the sort of thing that would be a standing joke – a folk story – among these people?’

  ‘Perhaps. Again it is no more than a supposition.’

  ‘And since it’s all I have to go on, I’ll continue from there.’

  ‘You are a stubborn man, Signor Freeman.’ The Commissioner shook his head with grudging admiration. ‘Well, if you need further assistance, come to me directly. Very stubborn. I wish some of my associates had your persistence.’

  When Rosanna had been told what occurred in the Commissioner’s office she was prepared that instant to make the story public.

  ‘It is proof, isn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘Whatever did happen, we know my father had no part in it. Isn’t that true?’

  ‘You and I know. But remember one thing: your father was seen with that attache case. Until that can be explained, nothing else will stand as proof of his innocence.’

  ‘He may have found the case. That’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hardly possible,’ Noah said. ‘And why would he be carrying it toward the Teatro Marcello? What is this Teatro Marcello anyhow?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen it yet? It’s one of the ruins like the Colosseum, but smaller.’

  ‘Can you take me there now?’

  ‘Not now. I can’t leave the desk until Signora Alfiara returns. But it’s not far from here. A little distance past the synagogue on the Via del Portico. Look for number 39. You’ll find it easily.’

  Outside the pensione Noah saw Giorgio Coen unloading a delivery of food from a truck. He was, at a guess, ten years older than his sister, a big, shambling man with good features that had gone slack with dissipation, and a perpetual stubble of beard on his jowls. Despite the flabby look of him, he hoisted a side of meat to his shoulder and bore it into the building with ease. In passing, he looked at Noah with a hangdog, beaten expression, and Noah could feel for him. Rosanna had been cruelly wounded by the hatred vented against her father, but Giorgio had been destroyed by it. However this affair turned out, there was small hope of salvaging anything from these remains.

  Noah walked past the synagogue, found the Via del Portico readily enough, and then before the building marked 39 he stood looking around in bewilderment. There was no vestige of any ruin resembling the Colosseum here – no ruin at all, in fact. Number 39 itself was only an old apartment house, the kind of apartment house so familiar to rundown sections of Manhattan back home.

  He studied the names under the doorbells outside as if expecting to find the answer to the mystery there, then peered into its tiled hallway. A buxom girl, a baby over her shoulder, came along the hallway, and Noah smiled at her.

  ‘Teatro Marcello?’ he said doubtfully. ‘Dove?’

  She smiled back and said something incomprehensible to him, and when he shook his head she made a circling gesture with her hand.

  ‘Oh, in back,’ Noah said. ‘Thank you. Grazie.’

  It was in back. And it was, Noah decided, one of the more incredible spectacles of this whole incredible city. The Teatro Marcello fitted Rosanna’s description: it was the grim gray ruin of a lesser Colosseum. But into it had been built the apartment house, so that only the semicircle of ruins visible from the rear remained in their original form.

  The tiers of stone blocks, of columns, of arches towering overhead were Roman remains, and the apartment house was a facade for them, concealing them from anyone standing before the house. Even the top tier of this ancient structure had been put to use, Noah saw. It had been bricked and windowed, and behind some of the windows shone electric lights. People lived there. They walked through the tiled hallway leading from the street, climbed flights of stairs, and entered kitchens and bedrooms whose walls had been built by Imperial slaves two thousand years before. Incredible, but there it was before him.

  An immense barren field encircled the building, a wasteland of pebbly earth and weeds. Boys were playing football there, deftly booting the ball back and forth. On the trunks of marble columns half sunk into the ground, women sat and tended baby carriages. Nearby, a withered crone spread out scraps of meat on a piece of newspaper, and cats – the tough-looking, pampered cats of Rome – circled the paper hungrily, waiting for the signal to begin lunch.

  Noah tried to visualize the scene twenty years before when Ezechiele Coen had fled here in the darkness bearing an attache case marked with a doubleheaded eagle. He must have had business here, for here was where he lingered until an avenging partisan had searched him out and killed him. But what business? Business with whom? No one in the apartment house; there seemed to be no entrance to it from this side.

  At its ground level, the Teatro Marcello was a series of archways, the original entrances to the arena within. Noah walked slowly among them. Each archway was barred by a massive iron gate beyond which was a small cavern solidly bricked, impenetrable at any point. Behind each gate could be se
en fragments of columns, broken statuary of heads and arms and robed bodies, a litter of filthy paper blown in by the winds of time. Only in one of those musty caverns could be seen signs of life going on. Piled on a slab of marble were schoolbooks, coats, and sweaters, evidently the property of the boys playing football, placed here for safety’s sake.

  For safety’s sake. With a sense of mounting excitement, Noah studied the gate closely. It extended from the floor almost to the top of the archway. Its iron bars were too close together to allow even a boy to slip between them, its lock massive and solidly caked with rust, the chain holding it as heavy as a small anchor chain. Impossible to get under, over, or through it – yet the boys had. Magic. Could someone else have used that magic on a July night twenty years ago?

  When Noah called to them, the boys took their time about stopping their game, and then came over to the gate warily. By dint of elaborate gestures, Noah managed to make his questions clear, but it took a package of cigarettes and a handful of coins to get the required demonstration.

  One of the boys, grinning, locked his hands around a bar of the gate and with an effort raised it clear of its socket in the horizontal rod supporting it near the ground. Now it was held only by the cross rod overhead. The boy drew it aside at an angle and slipped through the space left. He returned, dropped the bar back into place, and held out a hand for another cigarette.

  With the help of the Italian phrase book, Noah questioned the group around him. How long had these locked gates been here? The boys scratched their heads and looked at each other. A long time. Before they could remember. Before their fathers could remember. A very long time.

  And how long had that one bar been loose, so that you could go in and out if you knew the secret? The same. All the ragazzi around here knew about it as their fathers had before them.

  Could any other of these gates be entered this way? No, this was the only one. The good one.

  When he had dismissed them by showing empty hands – no more cigarettes, no more coins – Noah sat down on one of the sunken marble columns near the women and their baby carriages, and waited. It took a while for the boys to finish their game and depart, taking their gear with them, but finally they were gone. Then Noah entered the gate, using his newfound secret, and started a slow, methodical investigation of what lay in the shadowy reaches beyond it.