The Fiat, a 124, proved to be quick and sure-footed. Passing tank trucks and lorries, three-wheeled Lambretta farm carts and bicyclists, McGarr caught the Lancia halfway to Pisa.
Battagliatti and his associates kept looking back, worried, and twice tried to shake the Fiat, but McGarr stayed with them all the way to the center of the city.
There at the cathedral, which was near the university, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy parked and hustled to the hall in which the meeting would take place. They had just gotten inside when Battagliatti’s thugs established a post at the door to check student identification cards.
In the shadows of a stairwell, which led to a circular balcony, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy sat and waited for the hall to fill. McGarr tried to smoke, but the cigarette burned the separation in his upper lip.
“Christ—you look a sight,” said O’Shaughnessy.
“Consider it a dramatic mask,” said McGarr. “Not one of those kids will refuse to listen to me while I’m looking like this.”
“How do you mean? Surely you’re not going to debate the man.”
“Not actually. You just keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t get mauled.”
“Raped is probably a better word,” said the Garda superintendent. “Will you take a gander at those painted Willies?” He was a very conservative man in every sense, and the high-heeled shoes that the hairy male students wore along with the purses they carried shocked him. Wasp-waisted jackets with padded shoulders heightened the feminine effect of their garb. Most of them wore very tight pants.
The women, as in all past generations of smart city women in Italy, had adopted the present mode of dress in a manner that was hyperbolically feminine. Somehow they wore just slightly too much makeup and their hair, worn shoulder length or longer, seemed too pampered, too perfect in shape, too—soft. They had tiny waists that emphasized hips, navels, buttocks, to which bright, chemical-weave slacks clung. Tight sweaters to match revealed the aureoles of young breasts, punctuated by the short stubs of their nipples. They chatted nervously before Battagliatti’s entrance.
Here there was no drum beating, no preceding speakers. The students, McGarr imagined, wouldn’t have tolerated such obvious showmanship.
Through the narrow latticed windows of the hall, which was clouded with cigarette smoke, the dim light made Battagliatti seem older and smaller. Had McGarr succeeded in frightening him, or did he simply lack confidence here before this group? McGarr couldn’t credit the latter thought, and wanted to believe the former.
Battagliatti began with a noncontroversial topic: the growing strength of the party. He talked about the reasons for this—burgeoning discontent with the inaction of the regnant parties when faced with the twin devils of recession and inflation, and the fact that no other political party in Italy seemed to offer real alternatives to the many bourgeois approaches the Christian Democrats had taken over the years.
Reverting to rhetoric, Battagliatti tried to reinforce this theme. “Not the Fascists, not the Socialists, not the Conservatives, not the Liberals, but, as we always have told the Italian voter, only we, only the Communists, are the real force for change in this society!”
Nobody clapped. Stone-faced, the students stared at him. Their mood was sour.
In the moment that Battagliatti paused to compose himself, somebody yelled, “Change? Battagliatti changed his approach to the Chamber of Deputies, but the Chamber of Deputies didn’t change! It’s still the chamber of corrupt old horrors that it always was!”
Another student chimed in. “Battagliatti promised to change conditions in the universities, but the only thing he changed was his attitude to the barons of the lecture hall when he found he could use them!” He was referring to the outmoded system of university professorship, which made students and teachers in any one department subservient to the full professors. The students had to buy the books that the professors published themselves. The prices were scandalous. Stand-ins for the professors gave lectures, while the latter were in Rome acting as parliamentarians who had but one interest: that of increasing their own power and profits from this system.
“Battagliatti changed, Battagliatti changes, Battagliatti will change some more!”
All the students were shouting and jeering.
One of his aides now handed Battagliatti a microphone, “You ask what I am?” he roared into the mike. “You ask me? Most of your parents were bambini when I took this party from a group of resistance fighters and built us into a national organization. Sure—I’ve changed. I’ve had to. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here today. Remember when you read your books—this is not Russia or China. As yet, we haven’t had any revolution here. Maybe we won’t need one.”
“And you don’t want one!” a student shouted.
“That’s right. At this rate in five years we’ll have the first clear majority—sixty-five to seventy percent perhaps—of the electorate of any party in the postwar era. Why ignore the facts? We’re gaining new members every day. I call that a revolution in the political thinking of the average Italian voter. White-collar workers, small shopkeepers, the borghese themselves are voting for us nowadays. They all realize we’re in the same boat.”
Nobody shouted again. Battagliatti had succeeded in quieting them.
It was time for McGarr to act. He got up and O’Shaughnessy followed him down the stairway, his hand placed under the lapel of his sport jacket.
As soon as Battagliatti saw McGarr, he stammered. He had to restate a sentence.
McGarr walked to the first student he had seen question Battagliatti. Bending, he said to him, “You want to see Battagliatti jump, ask him if he knows how to fly a helicopter.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Sort of—but wait ’til you see what’ll happen. Pass it on.”
And McGarr then went to the other students, boy and girl, who had spoken out.
Battagliatti followed McGarr with his eyes. His thugs wanted to step into the audience, but they had seen O’Shaughnessy at the back of the hall.
Now all the students were watching McGarr. His puffy eye and split lip gathered their attention. He kept bending over students and talking to them in low tones.
Again Battagliatti lost his place.
When he tried to speak, a student yelled, “Question! Question! I’ve got a question! Signor Battagliatti, I’ve got a question!”
Sensing some ploy of McGarr, Battagliatti said, “Save your questions for later, I’ll answer all questions at the end of the hour.”
But, as in a chorus, the students began chanting, “Question, question, question, question!” until Battagliatti could no longer speak over them.
“Well,” he finally demanded, “who’s got the question? On your feet!”
And when a young man stood, Battagliatti shouted, “Get his name and address. What’s your question? I hope for your sake it’s important.”
The student, somewhat intimidated now, turned to McGarr, who nodded.
“Do you——”
“Louder, speak up. We can’t hear you,” Battagliatti said.
The thugs had started down off the stage. McGarr, clenching his fists, made for the first one.
Suddenly, the student plucked up his courage, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Do you know how to fly a helicopter?”
The disjunction of thought and the seeming absurdity of the question struck the students as comical. They began laughing.
Battagliatti’s head snapped in McGarr’s direction. “Get him! Get him!” he screamed, stamping his foot, pointing his finger.
“Do you know how to fly a helicopter?” all the students began shouting.
McGarr ducked the first punch and, kicking out with his foot, caught his assailant on the side of the knee. The man howled in pain and slumped to the floor. McGarr had broken the cartilage in the thug’s knee. The leg would require surgery before he would walk again.
Another thug, however, had hopped on McGarr’s back, and they b
oth fell into the audience of students, who started drubbing Battagliatti’s man.
McGarr could hear Battagliatti screaming.
Suddenly, Liam O’Shaughnessy had McGarr by the collar. He pulled him out of the melee, set him on his feet, and gave him a shove toward the back of the hall. The tall Garda superintendent then punched another of Battagliatti’s bodyguards. Without once turning his back to Battagliatti, O’Shaughnessy walked to the rear of the auditorium.
The students and Battagliatti’s aides were fighting in five separate places at the front of the hall.
“We’d better get the hell out of here before the police arrive,” said McGarr.
As they turned to leave, they heard Battagliatti scream, “Get him! The little one! There he——” But suddenly his voice died, for standing in front of the door was Enrico Rattei.
Suddenly, a shot rang out and a slug bucked through the door a few inches above Rattei’s head, yet the man stood there without moving as if nothing had happened.
Tackling Rattei around the waist, O’Shaughnessy dived through the doors, McGarr right after him.
The fighting in the hall had stopped.
Everybody was looking up at the stage where Battagliatti stood with a small automatic pistol in his hand.
McGarr said, “Jesus—I’d give anything to know what sort of gun that is.”
The three of them were sprawled face down on the sidewalk. Cars were slowing to look at them. A housewife leading a small child by the hand stepped around them.
Rattei sat up. “It’s a Baretta, twenty-two caliber, special issue.” He picked himself up. He straightened his tan suit coat, which was ripped and smoked with street dust.
“How do you know that?” O’Shaughnessy asked. “I thought you two weren’t that friendly.”
They could hear the klaxons of police cars in the distance.
“Just take my word for it. I know.”
A Bugatti limousine, the body cream yellow, the fenders jet black, had pulled up alongside them.
Rattei stepped in.
“Where are you going?” asked McGarr.
“Certainly not to jail.” Rattei slammed the door and the powerful car moved off in a hush.
“Let’s get out of here.” McGarr’s small body was a universe of pain. He had been kicked, punched, kneed, and gouged. His knees and elbows were scraped raw where he had fallen onto the street. Of course, his lip was split, a front tooth loose, and he could not open his left eye.
And McGarr needed a drink, Irish-style, very badly.
At the first roadside café they passed on the way to Siena, they ordered several rounds of whiskey and ice-cold Peroni beer. Several times McGarr asked O’Shaughnessy, “But how could Rattei know what sort of gun Battagliatti had in his hand?”
Finally, the Garda superintendent said, “Maybe it’s common knowledge.”
McGarr phoned Falchi. It was not common knowledge.
EIGHT
A DAY LATER, McGarr was sitting in Ned Gallup’s office, Scotland Yard. He had a bandage on his upper lip. His left eye was still swollen and the lid had begun to turn from blue to dark green. He was dressed in a tan windbreaker and dark slacks. A soft cap rested on a folder in his lap. O’Shaughnessy was sitting beside him.
Before a large map of Great Britain and Ireland, Gallup paced. Red pins had been stuck into the map at each airport or filling station where a helicopter might have landed to refuel on a trip from the Scottish oil fields to Slea Head in Ireland. Police of both countries had been thorough—the map was shot with red marks—but still they had not found anybody who could remember pumping high-octane petrol into a helicopter in which Browne or Hitchcock and a small man had been riding.
“So there you have it,” said Gallup. His moustache, wrapping about the corners of his mouth, made him seem dour. “We covered every possibility, but nothing. The chopper could have had jerry cans of fuel strapped to its underbelly or landing skids just to prevent our checking in this manner.”
“That’s not likely,” said O’Shaughnessy. He was wearing a heavy Aran sweater, tan slacks, and ankle-cut riding boots, a brilliant mahogany in color. “They probably guessed we’d have exactly this much trouble, if they thought about the need to refuel at all.”
“Even if they did, they had a great deal of trouble getting off the ground in an ordinary two-or four-passenger helicopter,” said a young man on the other side of McGarr. He was wearing an RAF lieutenant’s uniform. “That sort of machine just doesn’t have the lift for, say, a sufficient amount of fuel to permit a helicopter to fly from any place in Great Britain to the southeast of Ireland. By Great Britain I don’t mean Ulster.” He glanced at McGarr.
“The weight of a gallon of high-octane petrol is nine pounds. Say they burned fifteen gallons an hour because they ran at top cruising speed. That’s two hundred gallons, about eighteen hundred pounds. They’d never get off the ground, especially with the second chap you mentioned.”
“Sixteen stone,” said McGarr.
“Never,” said Lieutenant Simpson.
“So, they had to stop some place.” Ned Gallup dropped his hands so they smacked on his thighs. “But where? We’ve covered absolutely everywhere. We had bobbies stop at petrol stations to see if a helicopter might just have plopped down out of the sky for a quick fill-up. That’s been done before in a pinch, you know. We offered the representatives of all the petrol companies a hundred pounds’ reward if they could come up with the copter, small pilot, and either Hitchcock or Browne aboard on the days of their deaths. We made up batches of their pictures.” He pointed to his desk where two stacks of their portraits lay. “Passed those out around the country. Must have a couple thousand of them out there now. Lots of phonies, of course, but no real score.”
McGarr stood and approached the map.
A drizzle had blurred the window in back of Gallup’s desk.
“Maybe we’ve gone about it all wrong. Maybe our assumption that Hitchcock and Browne were ferried from Scotland to Dingle is wrong.”
“But Mrs. Hitchcock claims to have talked to her husband on the day of his death. He had said he was in Scotland. Browne’s butler had gotten a telephone call from him the night before. We’ve checked that. It had been placed from a Scottish exchange.”
“All right, even so, suppose each of them was lured to London by an offer of some sort. The caller said a meeting was urgent and perhaps met him at Heathrow. There, on some other pretext—the need for privacy in Hitchcock’s case, or the need to talk things over with Hitchcock in Browne’s—they boarded a helicopter and then set off for Slea Head. Hitchcock, of course, might have chosen the Dingle house for a meeting himself. After all, he did have a return stub in his pocket for a flight to Heathrow. Have you checked that out, Ned?”
“Yes—the Aer Lingus personnel process so many tickets every day, it’s impossible for them to remember faces.
“And, I must say, all of this sounds rather farfetched. Why, if what you say is correct, did the old woman see the copter come in off the ocean? Why did she think it came from the north?”
“If I had been the murderer,” said McGarr, “I would have flown out over the ocean in order to keep from being spotted by persons on land. A helicopter is a rarity in certain sections of Ireland, and the country is a small, familiar, gabby place. The assumption I would have made is that the police could place an advertisement in the newspapers and on the telly asking for information about helicopters on the stated dates.”
“What about her idea that the helicopter came from the north?” Gallup again asked.
McGarr hunched his shoulders. “Don’t know. Could be she made a mistake. Could be he made a mistake and flew too far up the coast. I’m not really too concerned about that since we’ve already checked the northeastern route to Scotland. I’d like to give this theory a go, however.”
It was now up to Gallup. The RAF officer and a helicopter had been detailed to him.
Gallup looked out the window. “We’v
e tried everything else, why not this? Gad, when I think of what this case is costing us—the man-hours, the special materials.”
“Now you’re beginning to talk like an administrator and not a detective, Ned,” McGarr remarked.
Lieutenant Simpson stepped to the chart. “Let’s assume the helicopter had full tanks of petrol departing from Heathrow. We have roughly four hundred forty miles between here and Dingle, that’s as the crow flies. Add another hundred or so to get around Ireland without flying over land. Then the ship would have to refuel here on the flight home.” He pointed to Waterford, in southeastern Ireland. “That is, if he flew over land on the return trip.”
“No reason why not,” said O’Shaughnessy. “Browne and Hitchcock were no longer with him, it was night on both occasions, only his lights could have been seen from the ground.”
“My guess,” said McGarr, “is that the murderer would not chance refueling in Ireland. There a helicopter is too extraordinary. He probably gassed up in the south of England before making the hop over the water to Hitchcock’s place. And then he would have had to stop again on the way back, right, Lieutenant?”
Simpson nodded.
McGarr opened the folder. It contained at least a dozen different facial shots of Rattei and Battagliatti, and dossiers of the men in Italian. Carlo Falchi had rushed these to McGarr before he returned to England. Below this folder was another which contained Scotland Yard reports on the two men. And below that was yet another folder from Dublin Castle. Somehow, he believed, something was escaping him and it had to do with his approach. Could it be that he hadn’t gotten to know the victims well enough? “Do you suppose you could get your hands on the Cummings, Browne, and Hitchcock dossiers from SIS?”
“No!” said Gallup without thinking. Then he turned his face to the window again. “I mean, yes, I suppose I could try to get you dossiers from which certain security information has been expurgated. But what in hell are you, McGarr—a research student or a policeman?”
The Death of an Irish Consul Page 16
