Death of a Dutchman

by Magdalen Nabb

  Slowly he put down the receiver and sat down heavily on the bed. The silence closed in around him. He hadn't said one kind word to her... it was always so difficult on the telephone. He hadn't even asked after the boys. Now she would be apologizing profusely to Don Torquato, hurrying down the ill-lit street, wondering whether Nunziata had managed to get the boys into bed.

  They put the old lady to bed at seven-thirty, she and Nunziata carrying her enormous, barely sentient body between them. At six-thirty each morning they carried her back to the sitting-room, after washing and dressing her, or sat her out on the little terrace until the sun got too hot. When Nunziata had gone to work, Teresa got the children up and then stripped the old lady's bed and began washing the soaked sheets. In the evenings she shopped while Nunziata stayed at home. That was her best time of the day.

  Sometimes the old lady whined for hours on end, asking to be taken home. Nobody knew why; she had lived in that same house eleven years. But she had no idea anymore of who or where she was. Teresa would go about her housework saying, 'That's enough now . . . hush.'

  She was still a young woman, his wife. She needed a rest, a bit of pleasure. He knew that when she got frustrated and unhappy, instead of complaining uselessly she would throw herself into her housework, cleaning everything three times over in her fury. Then the two little boys would keep well out of the way and not dare put a foot wrong.

  He couldn't phone her back. On Thursday she would be at Don Torquato's by nine o'clock, waiting for his call. There was nothing to be done till then . . . and he hadn't said a kind word . . .

  Back in the kitchen, the film on television was well under way and he stared at it for some moments without bothering to turn up the sound, knowing that he hadn't the patience to try and pick up the thread of the story.

  'Hmph,' he grunted, and turned it off. Perhaps, in some obscure way, he was trying to apologize to his wife by doing what she would have done, feeling oppressed as he was feeling. At any rate, he suddenly threw himself into work, splashing about with his pots in the sink. Had he been wrong to give up trying for a post down in Syracuse? It had always been assumed that that was what he would do, but then they had talked about schools for the children, opportunities . . . but his mother had been too old to move, and then the stroke . . .

  When the kitchen was in order, he went through to the office, switched on the desk lamp, and began to type up his notes on the Dutchman. He typed fast, with two fingers. When he had finished, he pushed his chair back from the desk and began to read them through. The whole thing seemed as if it had happened a hundred years ago to somebody else. He shrugged, slid the papers into a buff folder and switched off the lamp. With his mind quite empty and numbed, he went to bed and fell asleep immediately.

  CHAPTER 3

  'Oh, Gigi! Amore mio!' shrieked Di Nuccio in a strangulated falsetto.

  'Only yooou! can make my dreams come true ... I'

  That was Lorenzini's baritone.

  'Why was he-e born so' beautiful . . . !' they sang in unison, and the clumping of boots on the boards overhead finally induced the Marshal to climb the stairs, puffing, and appear in the doorway.

  'Now then, now then!'

  Stumbling a little, Di Nuccio and Lorenzini set Gino back on his feet and fell silent.

  'Sounds more like a schoolroom than a barracks,' grumbled the Marshal, trying to look annoyed. But he couldn't help smiling at the sight before him. Gino stood between the other two, who were in rolled-up shirt sleeves and open collars, ready for a hot day's work, but Gino himself was resplendent: his khaki trousers were carefully creased, his jacket and tie immaculate, his yellow hair sprouting like a chrysanthemum, still damp from the shower. Even his collar was more or less straight beneath his shining round face.

  'You get off with you, if you're going out. It's time these two were busy, it must be eight o'clock. Where are you going, anyway?'

  'With my brother.' Gino's smile, which had faded into apprehensiveness on the Marshal's arrival, reappeared. School was finished for the summer and when Gino's leave started this weekend, the 'boys from Pordenone' would make the long journey north together.

  'We're going round the shops for some presents to take home . . .'

  The Marshal didn't ask why Gino should be going out in uniform on his day off, knowing well that they were the only decent, new clothes he had ever had. In any case, his uniforms were his one vanity, which made it all the more comical that he could never quite organize himself inside them. Winter serge or summer khaki, battle-dress or braided and feathered parade dress, they all bulged, wrinkled and popped, defying his dogged efforts to wear them worthily. Today's effort was his most successful yet, but by lunch-time he would look as though he'd been under siege for a week.

  The other two clattered off downstairs to do a routine ammunition check in the store behind the Marshal's office.

  'Aren't you going?'

  'Yes, Marshal. But I'm going down into the piazza first to get the others some cigarettes—and we need some bread and mineral water, so if you need anything . .'.'

  'Always running everybody's errands. It's your free day.'

  'But I don't mind going. Really.'

  It was true that he got real pleasure out of every little thing he did, especially for other people.

  'All right, but I don't need anything—wait, yes I do—bring me some matches, will you? I opened the last box when I made the coffee this morning.'

  Gino accepted a thousand-lire note and saluted solemnly. The Marshal returned his salute and followed him, shaking his head, smilingly, down the stairs.

  The report on the Dutchman was lying on the desk where he had left it last night, and he stood a moment, alone in the office, with his thick fingers resting lightly on the buff folder. The episode still seemed very remote, so much so that the Marshal felt he wanted to go round to the flat again and give the deadened images some life. It wasn't curiosity, and he was in no way duty bound to in- vestigate the matter any further without having received orders from the officer in charge.

  Perhaps it just didn't seem right that the man should be so instantly forgotten, that his death, so prolonged and painful, should be labelled a suicide and then dismissed. Had his wife been informed? Had anyone been to get more information about him from Signora Giusti? The fingers on the buff folder began to tap impatiently. After a moment he sat down, filled in the date on the daily sheet, and then took up the post that had been left out for him the evening before and at which he had only glanced before typing his report. All internal circulars . . . There were two new names on the list of wanted terrorists, both thought to be in Rome. Three names had been taken off. The Marshal took a copy of the old list out of his breast pocket, substituted the new one, and pinned a second copy on to the notice board. The phone hadn't rung. If they insisted on the suicide theory . . . but they couldn't do that, surely, or not until the autopsy report came in . . . and even then there would be formalities. Would his wife come to identify the body? He wondered now what had happened to Signora Giusti's set of keys.

  When the phone still hadn't rung at nine o'clock, the Marshal stared blankly for a moment at the short-circuit television that covered the entrance to the office, showing him a gardener pointing out a way through the Boboli Gardens to a group of tourists, then he got up and prepared to go out.

  'Take over at my desk,' he told Lorenzini. 'I'll do the first half of my hotel round.'

  He picked up the buff file and looked at his watch.

  'I should be delivering this at Headquarters at about eleven, so if you need me . . .'

  'Right, sir.'

  'And I'll take my car.'

  Lorenzini looked surprised but said nothing. It was true that neither the jeep nor the van were of much use on a trip when you had to find a parking space in the shade every few minutes, but usually the Marshal walked.

  Driving slowly down the crowded forecourt in his Fiat 500 it occurred to him to wonder why he hadn't mentioned the Dutch
man to the lads. It wasn't like him to be secretive. Afterwards, he thought it must have been because, for once in his life, he intended to stick his neck out, and hadn't wanted to involve them. But he was to need Lorenzini's help before very long, as it turned out.

  Waiting at the bottom of the slope to join the traffic going by, he scowled to left and right. It was no way for a man to die, alone in a dust-sheeted house. There was something pitiful, too, in his attempt to bind up his bleeding hands when there was so much else wrong . . . But then, Signora Giusti had said he was a jeweller and goldsmith, so his hands were important to him. Or maybe he just wasn't in full possession of his senses by that time. It was no way to die, anyhow . . .

  'What's the matter with you? Marshal!'

  It was the car park attendant who had saluted him, saying good-morning and waving him .out, receiving nothing for his pains but a gloomy stare. Well, there was no time to explain. The Marshal nodded briefly to him and drove away, leaving the attendant staring after him and muttering:

  'What a face ..."

  'It seems, anyway, as if we're finally getting somewhere.'

  'It's usually a question of patience and routine,' offered the Marshal politely.

  'Quite. Even so, with two deaths in three weeks we've had to step things up . . .'

  Most of what the Marshal knew about the case he had read in the paper, although he had received a notice about it from the drug squad and been asked to keep an eye open for certain signs. It all started when it was noticed that the usual places where heroin was distributed and injected were being used less and less, and a systematic check throughout the city had revealed no new centre, which could only mean that some indoor place had been set up and was doing good business.

  Then, one night, a boy of eighteen had been found dead, not of an overdose but of blood poisoning. He had been found many hours after his death in a public square where he would have been spotted immediately during the daylight hours when he had died. Somebody had certainly dumped him. It was a very young, plain-clothes man who, making the round of all the dead boy's friends and haunts on the pretext of looking for a fix, had found the place whose existence the drug- squad had so long suspected. It was in a condemned palazzo with no running water or electricity,' but in its sordid way it was well equipped. There was a large supply of heroin and cocaine, a drawer full of new hypodermics from the supermarket, and a filthy bin full of bloody, used ones. There were pharmacist's scales, a purpose-made burner, and even styptic pencils. The big dusty room had six beds on which, having paid between thirty thousand to fifty thousand lire inclusive, the customer could lie down until the flash effect was over.

  The second death brought in men from homicide to assist the drug squad in their manpower-consuming surveillance of the 'hotel' and its proprietors. The arrests were imminent.

  'What's really incredible,' the young Lieutenant continued, 'is that there haven't been more deaths. They're cutting the heroin with whitewash scraped off the walls of this filthy den!'

  The Marshal murmured something suitable, wondering how on earth he could bring up the Dutchman business if the officer didn't mention it first. In the end he simply indicated the buff file that was lying on the desk between them.

  'Ah, the Dutchman, isn't it? You brought it over specially?'

  'I was passing,' lied the Marshal noncommittally.

  'Of course. Yes . . .'

  He had opened the file and was scanning its contents.

  'You're a friend of the old lady, I remember . . . and that's how you came to discover ..."

  He fell silent, reading.

  The Marshal did not contradict him. There was a framed photograph of the Commander-in-chief on the wall, and a small crucifix, so he stared at those. Every few seconds, the door across the corridor opened, and a noise like that of a beehive swelled out from the operations room, stopping abruptly as the door closed again.

  'Hm.' The Lieutenant looked up. 'We've managed to contact his wife.'

  'But you didn't say you thought—'

  'That it was suicide? No, of course not. The autopsy report should be in this afternoon—we asked for priority under the circumstances. They will probably want to take the body home for burial, and in this heat . . . well, we don't want a repeat of the exploding coffin episode. Unfortunately the young woman is expecting her first child very shortly. We must do our best to deal with everything as smoothly and as quickly as possible.'

  'A funny time to choose . . .'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'A funny time to choose to commit suicide. He was expecting his first child, too.'

  'Other considerations must have been stronger.'

  'They must have been very strong indeed if they were stronger than that.'

  'Listen, Marshal, I can see from this report that you don't think he committed suicide, but in fact he quarrelled with his wife and his mother-in-law before he left. I understand that this was supposed to be a business trip he was making and that both women suspected it was unnecessary and objected to his leaving home with his wife's pregnancy so advanced. He may well have felt remorse.'

  'Yes, sir. Funny he didn't catch a train . . .'

  'A train?'

  'A train back to Amsterdam, sir, and go home. If he felt remorse . . .'

  The young officer was not amused. The Marshal went on, avoiding his eyes:

  'Forgive me, Lieutenant. It's just, as you say, that I'm taking rather a personal interest in the matter, as a ... a friend of the old lady, Signora Giusti. Suicide is a hard burden to bear for those who are left behind.'

  'And you think this burden would be lessened by our telling this young, pregnant wife that we think he had a woman in the flat with him? You think that would make his trip to Florence more palatable to her?'

  'To be honest,' admitted the Marshal, 'I hadn't thought of that . . .'

  Why hadn't he? He realized that, for him, the woman in the flat just didn't have that significance because . . . because he had thought of her all along as an old woman, as the face he had invented in his dream. What was there in Signora Giusti's account that would explain that? Nothing that he could offer as an explanation now, at any rate.

  'You know,' said the officer more gently, seeing the Marshal's confusion, 'murderers don't attack people with sleeping pills. Sleeping pills usually mean suicide or an accident. And if it's at all possible, we'll set this down as the latter.'

  'It's usually women, though, isn't it?'

  'Women?'

  'Who use sleeping pills to commit suicide. Men tend to choose a more active, violent method . .. the river, a high building, a razor . . .'

  His eyes rolled quickly across the officer's face and away again. That's better, he was thinking, I've got him worried now, at least.

  'That's true,' the officer admitted.

  After a pause he went on: 'There's one thing that bothers me, I don't mind telling you, and that's his clothes . . .'

  The Marshal was almost holding his breath.

  'The clothes in his suitcase, I mean, not the ones he was wearing. There was a dark suit, quite unsuitable for this time of year, and a black tie . . . as if he were here for a funeral. His wife couldn't enlighten us because, after the quarrel, he did his own packing. It doesn't make your woman theory any more likely, I must say ... Of course, if there was a woman it could just have been a prostitute, given that he was alone in the city . . .'

  'I'll inquire,' offered the Marshal quietly, watching the other's face.

  What would he say? Only the Substitute Prosecutor could order the scope of this inquiry to be widened. The Marshal devoutly wished that this officer were not so young, so obviously inexperienced. In these cases it was always better if nothing had to be said. Although an officer had no power to change the direction of an inquiry, should any information come to light in the course of routine duties, he could take action on it.

  The Lieutenant was still thinking it over. Perhaps he needed a little help.

  'Nothing
we can really do, of course,' said the Marshal, rising, 'unless the Substitute Prosecutor decides there's a case to answer, but I'll just keep an eye open on my usual rounds and if I find anything interesting I'll let you know . . .'

  'Yes, do.'

  The young man was evidently relieved. But it was better that way, the Marshal reflected as he left the room with a salute, because he may have been convinced for the moment but it wasn't a conviction that would stand up to even one scathing remark from the Substitute Prosecutor. He'd be a fool to stick his neck out publicly without a scrap of real evidence, and up to now there wasn't a scrap of evidence, or even a witness ... let alone a suspect!

  'I wonder how right I was,' he mumbled, repeatedly banging his car door as he always had to do to make it shut, 'about a man not using sleeping pills to commit suicide. Who would know . . . ?'

  'Yesterday at about two o'clock. I'm afraid I can't be more exact about the time.'

  The long, dark-tiled room with its ecclesiastical white walls and grey and white striped vaulting was dim and gratefully cool, and the Marshal was glad to take off his hat and sunglasses.

  'That's all right. The call slip will have the exact time on it along with the name and address—excuse me a moment . . .'

  One of the seven telephones on the desk was ringing, and the Servant, a solemn, middle-aged man in morning suit and white tie, picked up the receiver and spoke quietly into it.

  'And the address? Yes, immediately, don't worry. Stay with her and try to keep her calm ..."

  He pressed the emergency bell and stepped down from the glass-enclosed platform where his desk stood.

  Two steps away was a long mahogany bench on which a huge ledger lay open under a wrought-iron lamp. By the time the Servant reached the ledger, two dozen Brothers had appeared before it and were waiting in silence. The Servant read out four names and then handed the call slip to the most senior of them. The four pulled on their hoods and went quickly out to where the ambulance driver had already started his engine on hearing the bell. As the siren started up and then faded into the distance, the rest of the Brothers dispersed to benches in dim corners and resumed their newspapers or quiet conversations. The only sound had been the rustle and click of their black gowns. The whole operation was over in much less than a minute.