A Rich Full Death

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Within, the darkness is of Cimmerian intensity-a very abyss of impenetrable obscurity which threatens to extinguish by its overwhelming preponderance the feeble rays of the watch’s lantern.

  ‘But stay! What is this other light? What this weird luminance which seems to emanate from the very walls themselves? And what, ah God! say, what is that fiery portal gaping there like the very maw of our Dante’s celebrated Inferno?

  ‘What a terrible scene! A citizen of Lucca, sure, would straightway turn and fly from such an awful apparition! Never would a faint-hearted Siennese or braggart Pistoian have stood his ground-nay, though it were broad daylight and they in five or ten, as one would they have turned and fled!!

  ‘No daylight here. No cheering companions. It is the witching-hour, when hell-hags roam. Our man is all alone. But in his breast there beats a Florentine heart!!! Unmoved, he boldly advances upon the terrific vision-which shrinks-dwindles-fades before his unquailing orbs, into another horror, no less ghastly for being of this world. Too much so!

  Within the wall he discovers a capacious oven, relic of those happier times when the fruits of Ceres were elaborated here for distribution to the populace. Once again a fire glows within, as when the baker plied his life-sustaining art.

  ‘But what dreadful sight is this? With what unnatural cargo is the oven now freighted? Not with bread, nor yet a fragrant pot of beans, but with a HUMAN BODY!!!! An unrecognisable and loathsome mass of carbonised flesh and bone! Whose unconsumed extremities appear more frightful still by contrast with the ruin of the rest!’

  It was in fact by those ‘unconsumed extremities’-which included a large hand sporting several unusual rings, one of them bearing the seal of his Church-that the authorities succeeded in identifying the victim, the Reverend Urizen K. Tinker.

  The unfortunate ecclesiastic was apparently lured to his death by means of a note which his wife-for, unlikely as it may seem, Tinker proved to possess an uxorial appendage-told the police had been delivered to their rooms at about ten o’clock the previous evening, but which had subsequently been burned by its recipient. Tinker had then left home, without tendering any explanation to his wife, who in turn had not dared request one.

  The official theory at present appears to be that Tinker was murdered late on Tuesday night, presumably by the author of the note: there is no indication of his identity, nor of the motive for the crime-the public prints made no mention of any puzzling inscription having been found at the scene, so there was no reason to think that it formed a part of the series of which only Browning and I were as yet aware.

  The assassin is supposed to have attempted to conceal the outrage by incinerating the corpse in a disused baker’s oven- which, however, does not explain why he failed to take the elementary precaution of removing the highly distinctive rings his victim was wearing. Indeed, it seems more likely that one hand had been left dangling out of the oven precisely so that Tinker’s identity mould be established. But in that case why was any attempt made to burn the body at all? The thing appeared a fathomless mystery.

  I had not seen or heard from Browning since the Friday night when I had crouched in the darkness at the head of the stairs outside Beatrice’s rooms, praying that he would not catch sight of me. However, the morning following the discovery of Tinker’s corpse I received the following note:

  Dear Booth,

  Heureka! The secret of the inscriptions is mine! Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, at the gate to the Boboli Gdns. ‘Recover hope, all ye who enter!’

  R.B.

  Of the many thoughts which streamed through my mind as I scanned these lines, the uppermost was simply a sense of shock at the realisation that Browning still had not the slightest inkling of what had happened. Here he was, dashing me off a hasty summons, quite as though he could dispose of my time and person in the same old free and easy way as ever; as though I were still his acolyte, to be ordered to appointments when it suited him, and then dismissed and scorned and sniggered at by his high-class friends when the situation changed!

  Well, he was mistaken, very much so-and the time had come to let him know, to make him feel it. For a moment I was tempted to return a delicately wounding letter in reply-as short and pointed as a stiletto.

  But I soon thought better of it. Not that I wished to spare his feelings-had he spared mine? — but rather I saw that I had to deliver much more than just a smart rejoinder, a neat snub. There was too much at stake for that. I had to cut all my involvement with Mr Robert Browning, to disassociate myself from his ‘investigations’ before it was too late.

  Playing the amateur police detective had seemed a worthwhile price to pay for sharing Browning’s company, back in the days when that had been the summum bonum of my existence-and when the truth behind poor Isabel’s death had been the sole object of our quest. How long ago and far away all that seemed now! My idol had proved to have feet not just of clay but of mud and grime and every sort of filth; while the jealous lover we had originally sought had swollen up, as in a dream, out of all proportion, and become a homicidal maniac whose atrocities were turning ‘our’ Florence into a slaughter-house.

  It was high time to withdraw, to get out from under-while I still could! And to do that-to make Browning understand that I was in earnest, and would not be swayed-I should have to see him one last time in person.

  I took a leaf out of Beatrice’s book, and arrived for our appointment dressed in my most sombre and formal apparel. If I hoped Mr Browning might be given pause for thought and reflection by this, I was quickly disappointed, for he just hailed me with all his characteristic gusto, and thrust his pass-a privilege which comes of living in the Guidi Palace-under the nose of the guard, who duly admitted us into the Grand-Duke’s domain.

  It soon became clear that Browning was in his most energetic form. He hurried me along a promenade, between massive shiny evergreen hedges, so fast that I thought there must be something he wished to show me at the end. Once we got there, however, he merely turned down another alley-this one covered in trellises, where in a few months the vines will bud and leaf — and I began to realise that my companion’s haste was an index not of any urgency in our goal, but of his state of nervous excitement. And so we went on, circumnavigating the magnificent gardens at a cracking pace, passing the bold vistas and romantic prospects so artfully arranged to catch the eye without so much as a glance, while Browning talked, and talked, and talked.

  I found it extremely odd to be trotting along beside the man, knowing what I knew; and odder still to think how recently I used to idolise him, and to dread nothing so much as the one thing I now sought above all: to be rid of him and his never-ending talk full of allusions in half a dozen languages I do not know to half a hundred books I have never read and do not wish to read.

  How his self-indulgent verbosity used to inspire me when I thought he was the real right thing I had found at last! And how it disgusts me now I know what manner of thing he is. Listen:

  ‘It was the word “manto” first set me thinking. The Italian of course means a coat, from the Latin mantellum, cognate with the familiar “mande”. Greek, on the other hand, has mantis: a prophet or soothsayer, whence all our compounds that terminate in “-mancy”. ‘By your necromancy you have disturbed him, and raised his ghost’ and so on-this of course being just what the late Miss Edith Chauncey was at when she met with her unfortunate accident. It is however unlikely, despite her fame, that our local soothsayer will have a city named after her-as was the case with the daughter of blind Tiresias, one of her predecessors. The city in question is Mantova Gloriosa, the birthplace of the Mantuan Swan sung by Cowper …’

  And so on, and so on. But do not fear-I shall spare you any more of the facetious riddles and learned references and pedantic explications I had to suffer, and bring you immediately where he in the end came out.

  ‘Does not this garden, on such a day as this, seem a vision of paradise?’ Browning rhetorically enquired. ‘And yet, in that note I sen
t you, I suggested it might bear a slightly-adapted motto from a celebrated account of another place. You took the hint, I trust? There is no need for me to explain further. No?’

  I did not speak.

  ‘Why, man, that’s the key!’ Browning cried impatiently. ‘Old Dante and his Inferno!’

  19

  Browning stood gazing triumphantly at me, his chest pushed out and hands working away in his capacious pockets-the very image of a provincial shopkeeper who has backed the Derby winner. What an odious little man, I thought. Him, great? Him, a genius? Never, plainly, had I been further from the mark than when I had somehow contrived to persuade myself of that.

  ‘Dante!’ he repeated enthusiastically, when I failed to respond. The thing is so plain now that it seems hardly possible I did not see it long ago-but who would have thought to look for such a freakish association? There is no longer the slightest doubt about it, however. Take Chauncey, for example. She was found, you remember, with a broken neck. The maid-a lass of imagination, evidently; I should like to meet her! — described her mistress’s head as having been turned around like an owl’s. Dante put it more prosaically:

  Come ‘l viso mi scese in lor piu basso,

  mirabilmente apparve esser travolto

  ciascun tra ‘l mento e ‘l principio del casso

  ‘ “As on them more direct mine eye descends, each wonderously seem’d to be reversed at the neck-bone … “: such is the poet’s terrifying vision of the soothsayers, who are punished in the eighth circle of his hell. The leader of this pack was a woman-Manto.

  The correspondence is clear. Miss Chauncey pretended to be what Manto was: one who seeks to push aside the curtain of mortality, to see further than God judges proper for His creatures-what Dante would have called un ‘indovina. The poet imaged such people grotesquely mutilated as a fit punishment for their temerity, their heads so wrenched out of place that they, who presumed to scan the secrets of futurity, could not even see where they were walking. Those who scorned man’s limits, mercifully imposed by a just and loving God to shield us from knowledge we are not strong enough to bear, are denied in eternity even that degree of foresight which is proper to man.

  ‘But now-and here’s the true devilry of the thing-what Dante imagined and wrote, someone in Florence is putting into practice! Thus Edith Chauncey is found dead, her neck broken like Manto’s, and a piece of paper thrust into her hand like the sign hung about the neck of an executed felon, spelling out the nature of her offence. On it appears the name of her archetype in Dante’s poem-MANTO-and the number of the circle in which that personage is to be found-8.

  ‘Once I had found this key, unlocking the remaining inscriptions was of course child’s play, and each served to confirm the pattern until all possibility of doubt was extinguished. Thus at the spot where Maurice Purdy was savaged by an enormous rabid dog we found the figure 3 and the word CIACCO. We were told that this means a pig, as indeed it does. But Dante employs it not as a noun but a name-it was the nickname of a notorious Florentine glutton, who also features in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the third circle of hell the poet saw him punished “per la dannosa colpa de la gola”, “for the pernicious vice of gluttony”-but how much better those yawning Tuscan vowels draw the gorging craw ever calling for more and more! There lay Ciacco, wallowing in the mud, his flesh ripped and flayed by the Hound of Hell itself-”red of eye and slimy black of pelt, his paunch distended and cruelly hooked his claws”. I think you will agree that the hydrophobic beast that savaged Purdy made a very acceptable Cerberus, all things considered. As for his victim, belly-worship was his religion-he lived to eat, and died eaten.

  ‘Cecil DeVere, on the other hand, devoted himself not to the inner but the outer man-a fact which did not escape the murderer’s ferocious irony. “Argenti”, he called him, “Silver”-the nickname of one Filippo de’ Cavicciuli, whose ostentatious extravagance was such that he had his horse shod with silver shoes: “equum ferris argenti ferrari fecit”, as the old chronicle says. DeVere, of course, did not go quite so far, but it cannot be denied that he spent a considerable amount of time and money on his appearance. Argenti ended up immersed in the mire of a dead channel in the fifth circle of Dante’s Hell; DeVere in the filthy slime of the Arno.’

  ‘I was not aware that dandyism was either a mortal sin or a justification for murder,’ I put in tardy.

  ‘It is of course neither,’ returned Browning, shooting me a look of some surprise. ‘As regards the author of these crimes, it is surely superfluous to state that we are dealing with a totally deranged mind, for whom the merest peccadillo can be used to justify any abomination. In that he is the opposite-or, better, the negative-of his model Dante hated not the sinners but the sin-the wickedness which shuts out that pure love-drenched intellectual light he sings in the Paradiso. He was a great hater because he was a great lover, and knew that a man cannot be one without the other.’

  ‘A great lover-him!’ I exclaimed contemptuously.

  ‘His work is full of love.’

  ‘It is full of the wordy certainly,’ I retorted. ‘But to know what manner of lover a man is, ask his mistress! I think I know what she would say. “He, a great lover? Oh yes, to be sure! One always glowering alone in the corner at a party, with never a word to say for himself; or lurking in the street outside my house, writhing in spiritual ecstasy-ready to swoon if I happen to notice him, and lock himself up in his room half-dead with grief if not. One whose secret wish is just to touch my hair, and kiss my brow-and nothing more! A great lover, him? Yes! Of himself!” That, depend upon it, is what Beatrice would say.’

  I had allowed myself to say far more than I had meant to, and had spoken with undue warmth. Browning gave me a long thoughtful look. I knew that he had not yet been to call on Beatrice, and thus could have no notion of what awaited him there, or of how his secret had been betrayed. But however he explained them to himself, my words had plainly struck home.

  ‘I’m not sure that I am very interested in what Beatrice would say,’ he replied with distaste. ‘Who was she, after all? A vulgar merchant’s daughter who married a banker and died young. It may be that she would have been rash enough to speak of the poet in the fashion you suggest, although give me leave to doubt it. But if he had not singled her out from all the other pretty children, no one today would have the slightest interest in what she had to say about anything. One might hope she would remember that before she opened her mouth to mock her benefactor.’

  I judged it expedient to bring these giddy conversational acrobatics down to earth.

  ‘I’m not sure that I see why Beatrice Portinari would have had any cause to consider Dante her benefactor. But let us leave Literature on one side, Mr Browning, for there at least I am no match for you. Tell me, what of the inscription we found at the Eakins’ villa? Riminese was the word, but who or what is of Rimini?’

  ‘Francesca,’ replied Browning shortly.

  I did not pretend not to understand this reference to the most famous canto in the entire Inferno: the tragic and moving tale of Francesca da Rimini, murdered by her deformed husband when he found her in his brother’s bed. She and her lover appear in the second circle, where

  the stormy blast of hell

  With restless fury drives the spirits on,

  Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy.

  The reference irresistibly brought to mind the memory of how the long white shape which had proved to be Isabel’s body had been pushed and pulled about by the storm wind in the garden of the villa. She then, had been adjudged one of those carnal sinners ‘in whom reason by lust is swayed’.

  I murmured some expression of appreciation for Browning’s achievement in deciphering these enigmatic graffiti which had so sorely perplexed us hitherto. But somehow the triumph was quite gone from my companion’s manner: he did not seem to care about the inscriptions any more, or his cleverness in deciphering them. When I enquired-as I was bound to do-about the fate of the hapless Ti
nker, knocked down in a slum and stuffed into a baker’s oven to roast, Browning once again contented himself with the briefest possibly reply.

  ‘Farinata.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘One of the heresiarchs tormented in red-hot tombs in Dante’s sixth circle.’

  ‘And the inscription?’

  ‘Was written up on the wall of the bakery, in the usual fashion.’

  ‘It is strange, then, that neither appeared in any reports of the crime. Are the authorities perhaps attempting to conceal the enormity of this murderous conspiracy, to forestall any panic among the foreign community?’

  ‘No, they are merely ignorant of its existence-just as they were of the marks left by the garden table beneath Mrs Eakin’s body, which no one but I remarked.’

  Mrs Eakin? I thought-need you be so formal when speaking of your former mistress?

  ‘I found them because I was looking for them,’ Browning went on, ‘and I found the inscription in the bakery for the same reason. Among the painted list of items for sale, still visible on the plaster, was the word for flour: farina. Someone had added two letters in white chalk and a circled figure six.’

  Browning was visibly regaining confidence as he recounted these further examples of his cleverness. It was time to prick the balloon again.

  ‘Very well,’ I commented wearily. ‘So we understand the messages this maniac leaves at the scene of his outrages. As an intellectual achievement this is no doubt something upon which you are to be congratulated. But forgive me please if I look at things from a more practical point of view. “The English in Florence are dying too much,” the police official told me. What hope is there of halting this process? Your discovery is very interesting, but what use is it? Where, in other words, does it get us? What are we to do?’