The Measure of Malice

by Martin Edwards

  “Taste!” he said. “What beautiful clear water! Rome water is not good to drink, but out of my English filter—ah, then one may drink with pleasure and safety. Lavorello, empty this ashtray and give me some matches!”

  Expressionlessly Lavorello obeyed. Then Ribotta told him to get the cigars out of a drawer, and the old man offered them to A. B. C., Dorsi, and me—we refused them—and lit one of the rank things himself. He did not trouble to offer one to Lavorello, I noticed.

  “Now you have seen the filter,” he rattled on. “Next you must see the English microscope. Lavorello, bring the microscope and show it to Professor Hawkes.”

  It was, even as I could see, a very ordinary piece of laboratory apparatus, but the old man gloated over it as if it were a marvel.

  “Very interesting indeed,” murmured A. B. C.; “but have you any new results in your work on magnetism, sir?”

  “No, I have not them here at the moment. I do not make the experiments myself these days; I leave them to the young men. Lavorello shall show you them in his laboratory. It is good work—I showed him how it should be done. The brains are mine; the hand is his. That is how it should be, is it not?”

  For politeness’ sake, we agreed.

  “Do have another glass of water. Professor Hawkes. No? Ah, but it is good, thanks to my English filter. Your friend, then? Oh, you must! Lavorello, bring another glass of water! Quickly! If you drank more of this water, Lavorello, you would not be so fat! There is no water like this in Rome.”

  It tasted to me like any other water, but I thought it incumbent on me to express loud admiration.

  “We must not take up any more of your time, sir,” said Hawkes, rising from his chair. “With your permission, we shall just glance at Mr. Lavorello’s work, and then we must be going away.”

  “Delighted to have seen you, professor,” said Ribotta, shaking our hands. “I am always glad to welcome foreign scientists to my laboratory, especially from England. Lavorello, you are to show these gentlemen your work—our work—so that they may see that we old men can still keep pace with the young. Ah, but first give me some more matches.”

  As we left the laboratory through the little ante-room, the attendant hurried in. He was, I noticed, a sinister-looking fellow, the sort of man one would instinctively avoid on a dark night. He went past us into the professor’s room, the door of which he opened with his pass-key, and we heard the old man greet him with a storm of angry words.

  The corridor led us round towards Lavorello’s room. Dorsi in a whisper called my attention to the cupboards and bookcases that were placed against the doors leading to the rest of the building—another example of Ribotta’s insistence upon isolation. As we passed the barred window, we saw the attendant standing by the desk, gazing at the professor with a malicious glance. The old man was shouting and gesticulating, but, as he heard us go by, he turned and waved.

  We reached Lavorello’s laboratory, the whole atmosphere of which was very different from the old professor’s, and A. B. C. and he were soon bent in eager interest over note-books and curves, with an occasional reference to some proof-sheets that lay on the table.

  They forgot all about Dorsi and myself. The subject was far beyond either of us and we passed the time chatting.

  “It’s pretty clear,” Dorsi said, after a long and bitter attack upon the old man in the next room, “with whom Mr. Hawkes finds himself more at home.”

  I sympathised with his denunciation of Ribotta’s selfishness, his ridiculous pride in the very ordinary filter and microscope, and his bullying treatment of Lavorello, but, as a stranger, I thought it best not to be drawn into the expression of an opinion, and I looked round for an opportunity to change the subject.

  “Hallo,” I said, thankfully, “here is something I do understand a little about.”

  I walked over to a cabinet in the corner of the room, in which were ranged objects that I recognised as Italian and Greek-Italian antiques. There were coins and little statuettes and rings and toys and other trifles.

  Lavorello happened to see us gazing at his collection. He smiled and unlocked the door of the cabinet.

  “A hobby of mine,” he said to me. “My country—I am a Sicilian, you know—is especially rich in such things.”

  “What are these?” asked Dorsi, pointing to some small white objects, which were familiar enough to me.

  “Knucklebones,” answered Lavorello, “with which I suppose our ancestors used to play. The queer glasses behind them are for another game, cottabos; and those square things on the same shelf are tesserae, the counterparts of modern dice.”

  A. B. C. called him back to the papers and Dorsi and I discussed the customs of the ancients and their survivals in modern times.

  It was a long time before Hawkes was ready to leave. Then the three of us took leave of Lavorello and tip-toed along the corridor so as not to attract Ribotta’s attention, for we had no desire to be called in to hear another harangue. We glanced in through the barred opening, and saw him at his desk, with his beloved filter beyond him underneath the clock. Fortunately he was absorbed in a newspaper and did not notice us pass.

  “Shades of Cavendish!” whispered A. B. C. “It’s three o’clock already!”

  We hurried past the porter’s lodge, to whose occupant the laboratory attendant was declaiming fiercely.

  “The attendant’s opinion of Ribotta,” A. B. C. said to me when we got outside, “is not much higher than our own, I’m afraid. If my knowledge of Italian, or at least of the Roman dialect, is not in error, he was expressing a wish that the old professor might be devoured by hungry wolves. He added that, if they or some similar agents of destiny did not perform this necessary action, he himself would have to attend to it. I must confess, after comparing Ribotta’s and Lavorello’s capacity, I have some sympathy with the attendant’s desire.”

  “Lavorello is a good man, is he?” I said.

  “First-rate,” said my friend. “A brilliant, ingenious brain with a magnificent grasp of scientific possibilities! If he has a fault, it’s a tendency to rush at conclusions, to go the short way to a result when a longer and more patient method would be more suitable. But he’ll go far! It’s a crying shame that he should be held back by that old charlatan. And for the latter to steal the credit of Lavorello’s researches is an insult to science.”

  For a moment Hawkes’ round, good-natured face looked quite angry, but his usual smile soon reappeared.

  We made a short call on Castagni, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the Forum. Not only did we visit the usual sights there, but, as honoured guests, we were invited to view various collections and excavations not open to the general public.

  For once I was able to display more knowledge than Hawkes, and, to his mock awe, I traced resemblances between some of the exhibits and various specimens I had unearthed on the more successful of my archaeological expeditions in England. A. B. C. was in his element, however, with some ancient scientific instruments, and his identification of their uses has now, I understand, been officially adopted. I learned from the director of the excavations that Lavorello had performed a similar service at the time of some earlier discoveries.

  We were to meet Dorsi for dinner at the “Ulpia,” which he recommended as the most picturesque restaurant in the city. We found it in an ancient basilica, whose curved brick walls, arching to the roof, made a curious and sombre background for the bright napery and electric lights. The blend of old and new—so typical of Rome—was carried down to the smallest details; the lamps, for example, were fixed in amphorae of antique form, and the menu was rolled like an old parchment scroll. The place amused us, and we settled down patiently to await our guest.

  An hour after the agreed time we despaired of his arrival and decided to begin. At ten o’clock, just as we were about to leave, he came in.

  “Forgive my absence,” he said, “
but a terrible thing has happened. Professor Ribotta has been murdered!”

  “Murdered!” I exclaimed.

  “He was found poisoned in his laboratory this afternoon,” Dorsi went on. A pallid smile flickered on his lips as he added, “The poison was apparently administered in the filter of which he was so proud.”

  “Who did it?” A. B. C. asked.

  “The attendant has disappeared, and the police are in search of him. The chief of police is in the laboratory now, and, as you were among the last people to see the professor alive, he wishes to interrogate you. He was going to send to your hotel, but I volunteered to come here and fetch you.”

  We called for the bill and left the restaurant in silence. We walked through the warm night to the laboratory, and found it ablaze with lights. A group of men were standing in the dead man’s room, among them Lavorello and the porter, both much moved.

  The body had been removed to a neighbouring mortuary for examination. They told us that the professor had been found sitting upright at his desk, just as we had seen him as we tip-toed out that same afternoon. Tightly grasped in his hand was a glass of water, of which he had drunk perhaps a half; and his eyes were fixed in a rigid stare.

  The chief of police asked Hawkes a string of questions, writing the replies in a note-book.

  “There seems no doubt,” Dorsi said to me, “that the attendant is the villain. We all heard the quarrel and the threats he uttered against the old man. He, the attendant, was seen to leave the building a few minutes after three o’clock; in fact, he did not go back into the laboratory after we left. Lavorello says that at a quarter past five, on his way out to the baths that he visits every afternoon to try to reduce his weight, he spoke to Ribotta through the barred window from the corridor. The porter confirms that Lavorello went out at that time. Now comes the important evidence: at half-past five the attendant came in—not too sober, the porter thinks, and still muttering threats against the old man—and entered his little room, through which alone, as you know, it is possible to enter this laboratory.

  “He came out ten minutes later and has not been seen since. At six o’clock, twenty minutes after the attendant went away, the porter knocked on the inner door to give the professor a message. Alarmed at receiving no reply, he went round to the barred window and called to him. When he saw that the old gentleman did not move, he called some students who were passing by. They had, of course, to smash down the door to enter, and they discovered old Ribotta dead with the glass in his hand.”

  I was considering these facts when a stir outside was followed by the appearance of a couple of policeman with the attendant.

  The villain was even more unprepossessing than before; he was both drunk and frightened.

  The chief of police told him that he was suspected of causing the professor’s death, and the man, moistening his parched lips, vehemently denied the charge. Ordered to account for his movements that afternoon, he said the professor had driven him past endurance and he had gone away in a temper. He thought this must have been about three o’clock.

  He went to a wine-shop and had some drinks and then made up his mind to go home to his village, a few miles out of the city, but on his way he remembered that he had left some personal belongings in his room and came back to fetch them. After making a parcel of them, he said, he went away again, without entering the laboratory at all. Then he took the tram to his home, where the police had just arrested him.

  He repeatedly denied that he had gone into the professor’s laboratory during his short return. He had, he insisted, stayed in his own little room and made his parcel.

  Asked whether he had not uttered threats against the professor’s life earlier in the afternoon, he at first said he had not. But, confronted with the evidence of the porter and ourselves, he had to admit that in the heat of his anger he might have done so.

  His account in other respects certainly tallied with the previous statements. But the damning facts remained that only he and the dead man had keys to the laboratory and that he had admittedly been in the ante-room between the time Ribotta was last seen alive—by Lavorello, at a quarter past five—and the time of his being found dead at six o’clock.

  Suddenly the chief turned to the porter. “And you?” he said. “Did you enter the laboratory during that period?” A. B. C. interpreted all this to me.

  “The professor never permitted me inside,” answered the porter. “And I had no key. No one had a key, not even Signor Lavorello, except the professor and the attendant.”

  “Perhaps the professor opened the door to somebody else, or the murderer had provided himself with a third key?”

  “Even so,” was the reply, “my lodge is opposite the door of the ante-room, and I should have seen anyone enter it. Nobody did. There is no other entrance to the laboratory.”

  The chief went round the room examining it. As he showed us, there was indeed no other entrance than by the door from the attendant’s room. The door to Lavorello’s room was still bolted, and it was clear that it had not been opened. The dust on the skylight and on the windows proved that they, too, had not been tampered with. As for the window to the corridor, the bars were firmly fixed in the mortar; a baby could not have climbed between them.

  We were asked to accompany the party to the mortuary. A sheet was reverently pulled back and the dead man’s face revealed. I watched the attendant. He shuddered and crossed himself surreptitiously. One might have said that his very emotion testified to his guilt.

  The unnatural rigidity of the dead man’s features seemed to interest Hawkes. He took a glass from his pocket and intently examined the staring eyes for some minutes. Then he entered upon a conversation with the doctors in a corner of the room, where they were working.

  When the rest of us went out, glad to leave the presence of death, A. B. C. did not immediately follow. Dorsi and I waited outside, after seeing the prisoner removed, protesting violently, by the police. My friend came out at last.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must excuse me. Johnstone, take Mr. Dorsi back to the hotel and entertain him—and Mr. Lavorello too, if he will accompany you. I am going to help with the medical examination.”

  “What a gruesome idea!” I said.

  “My erudite friend,” he replied, “you ought to know my interest in the border-line between physics and physiology. Good night.” And he hurried back inside the mortuary.

  We walked to the hotel, discussing the terrible event.

  “I suppose,” I said, “it is certain the poor man was poisoned?”

  “Of that there is no doubt,” said Dorsi. “The doctors suspected it from the first, and Mr. Hawkes, who seems to know everything, agrees with them. They all think it is a poison of the strychnine class, although probably not strychnine itself.”

  “It ought to be easy to find where the attendant procured it,” I suggested.

  “In England it might be,” smiled Lavorello, “but not, I fear, in Rome. However, as no one but the attendant could possibly have entered and dropped it in the filter, the question where he obtained it hardly seems to matter.”

  “Can it possibly have been introduced through the walls or the roof or the windows?” I asked.

  “Impossible,” said Dorsi. “Stupid and deaf as the old man was, he was very keen-sighted, and, sitting at his desk with the filter right in front of him, he would have noticed any attempt to tamper with it. Besides, how on earth could anyone have done so, when it was in the very middle of the room?”

  I had to admit that they were right.

  They would not come in with me, and we parted at the entrance to my hotel. I sat in my room for some time, but I saw nothing to shake my conviction that the attendant was guilty. This seemed established beyond the possibility of doubt.

  Hawkes did not return all that night, nor was he in the hotel when I left it the next morning to visit St. Peter�
��s and one of the Vatican galleries. I lunched in a little restaurant near the Cathedral and returned to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon.

  I found A. B. C. waiting for me. From his look I guessed that he had spent the whole night on his researches.

  “Well, what news?” he asked.

  “I look to you for that, A. B. C.,” I replied. “Has the attendant confessed?”

  “Not yet; but things are very black against him.”

  “You look tired,” I said. “Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

  “I am little fatigued,” he admitted. “Between you and me, Ribotta dead presents more scientific interest than he did alive, but he is equally wearying in both states. I fear you will think that remark in bad taste. I don’t think I’ll lie down, however. What would you say to taking a Turkish bath—a Roman bath, I suppose I ought to call it here? Our full-bodied friend Lavorello patronises the baths every afternoon, it seems, like the lover of antique Roman customs that he is, and I have arranged to visit one of them with him today. I hope you will accompany us.”

  I readily agreed, and we drove off to the laboratory and picked up Lavorello. We took the opportunity to glance in at the dead man’s room, and I confirmed my impressions of the case. Nobody could possibly have entered it except through the attendant’s room.

  The three of us were soon in the baths enjoying the delights that Lavorello, lying on a slab near us, assured us were the daily pleasures of the ancient Romans. His admiration for my friend was so evident, and he addressed his conversation so exclusively to him, that A. B. C. seemed to fear that I was being unduly relegated to the background.

  “Cease to emulate the modest violet, friend Johnstone,” he smiled. “Discourse to us upon topics suitable to the occasion. An archaeologist like you ought to welcome the society of a fellow-enthusiast like Mr. Lavorello—Professor Lavorello, I suppose his friends will call him now. Expound to us, my able adjutant, the pastimes of antique Roman society in the baths they frequented.”

  “Surely, A. B. C.,” I said, “Mr. Lavorello is better qualified than I? His collection shows him to be a specialist.”