Death of a Dutchman (6 page)

'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.

The Marshal, who had been calling out the
Misericordia
for years without giving them much conscious thought, was impressed.

'Very efficient,' he murmured.

'We've been practising,' the Servant reminded him, with just a hint of a complacent smile, 'for a good seven hundred years. Now . . . two o'clockish, you said . . . Here we are.'

He took out the call slip and turned back a page in the ledger, running his finger down the signatures.

'I hope I'm not breaking any rules . . .' The Marshal was turning his hat round and round in his hands. 'I'm not a Florentine myself so I don't know all that much . . .'

'Don't worry. Anonymity is the ideal where charitable work's concerned, but in a case like this . . . Here we are: Piazza Santo Spirito, I remember the call—in fact, I'm glad you got in touch with us because we were wondering... the man died and there seem to have been no members of the family there so that we couldn't ask if there was money needed . . .'

'You can help in cases like that?'

'Certainly, if there's need.'

'In this case money isn't a problem.' But he made a mental note to come and see them about Signora Giusti. 'The problem is whether he committed suicide.'

The Servant looked up. 'That's a heavy accusation to make.'

'I think so, too. That's why I'd like the opinion of the Brothers who were there. The only suicides I've dealt with have been the people the fire brigade fish out of the Arno. This is very different.'

'I understand.'

He looked again at the ledger. 'But I'm afraid you won't find them here today. Most people only do one hour a week. With fourteen thousand of us there's no need for them to do more and most of them are working men. I'll give you the names and addresses of three of them, the new boy won't be able to help you ..."

The telephone rang before he could write them down.

'Here . . . perhaps you could do it—these three.'

He reached for the red telephone which was a direct line to Police Headquarters:

'Misericordia . .
. yes . . . the angle of Via Martelli and . . . ?'

On the steps outside, the Marshal paused to put on his sunglasses and look at the three addresses in his notebook. Across the road, beyond the row of ambulances, tourists were swarming in the shade around the base of the octagonal blue and white Baptistry, and the Cathedral bell was ringing the Angelus, reminding him that he had better get back to Pitti. The lads would soon be back from the mensa with the lunches stacked in the back of the van.

'Suicide
.
. .
? I'm sorry—do sit down. Martha! What about bringing another cup for the Marshal?'

'No, no . . . there's no need, really . . . I've already had ..."

'I'm having one myself so you'll join me. One coffee a day is all I ever have. In the mornings I find it too strong, I take tea, and after supper it would keep me awake. You have a cup with me now and it'll do you no harm. You've eaten?'

'Yes, but I've had . . .'

. 'Right then. Two coffees. Here we are. Sugar?'

'A little. You're a Florentine?'

An unnecessary question with just a hint of irony in it, for the Marshal was quite used, by this time, to being ordered about by a wagging Finger, and to sentences that began 'That's as may be, but we Florentines . . .'

'Florentine? Three hundred years my family has lived in this street. Have a bit more sugar, it'll be too bitter like that.'

'I don't . . .'

'There. Now, what were you wanting to ask me—I don't want to be rude but, the thing is, I'm not one of those that takes a four-hour lunch-break, even in the summer; two hours is plenty for me because I don't sleep. It's my nerves.'

'Or the coffee?' the Marshal couldn't resist saying.

'How do you mean?'

'Nothing, nothing. All I want is your opinion. You were the senior Brother on that call?'

'That's right. I joined during the war when I was sixteen, nineteen-forty, that was, and then, of course, I was called up two years after that. Bad days, those were. Young ones today have no idea. I started work for my father as a printer's apprentice at age twelve, right here in this building—not that I regret it, I don't hold with all this staying at school until you're twenty; it's too late to start learning anything by the time they get out. I was a qualified printer by that age. The trouble with Italy—'

'I know,' said the Marshal. 'Nobody can find an apprentice anymore, and when you find one they have to be paid a full wage right away when they can't do anything, not to mention insurance ..."

He hoped this precis would dispose of what would otherwise be a two-hour discussion.

'What I'd like your opinion on is the death of that Dutchman, Goossens, his name was, and like yourself he was a craftsman. The Substitute Prosecutor seems inclined to set it down as a suicide, as I said . . .'

'Suicide?
said the printer again, shaking his head and tutting knowledgeably. 'No no no no no.'

'You must have attended a number of suicides over the years, I suppose?'

'A fair number, yes, but never one that looked anything like that.'

'You think there may have been foul play?'

'I'm not saying that. It had the look of an accident, in some ways, as if he'd taken something by mistake and then gone rushing about trying to remedy it, cutting his hands and so on. But really, I should have thought the autopsy would tell you more than I could in that line.'

'Yes, of course, but given that it's an odd case, I wanted to know what you thought.'

He didn't say that he was unlikely ever to see the autopsy report.

'Have you ever known a man to commit suicide with sleeping pills?'

'Once. Oddly enough it wasn't on a
Misericordia
call, he was a neighbour of ours, a cobbler. Even so, when he'd taken the pills he put a polythene bag over his head, to make sure. It was after the flood, you know, and he'd lost everything, absolutely everything; his shop was on the ground floor and he lived behind it—we suffered a lot of damage ourselves, down in the workshop, but at least we were all right up here. There was compensation, of course, we got new equipment throughout, but old chaps like that who had worked alone all their lives, they just couldn't believe that anybody would help them, and so . . . Anyway, old Querci killed himself, and he used sleeping pills perhaps because the family he was staying with got them for him to try and calm him down, but more likely because he hadn't a tool left in the world with which to harm himself. To tell you the truth, in the case of the Dutchman yesterday, it was something very simple that made me think it was an accident; he was dressed, you see . . .'

'Yes, he was . . .'

'And fully dressed, with his tie properly tied. He'd put his slippers on, but otherwise . . . Somehow it's natural, if you're going to die in your sleep, to go to bed—even if he took an accidental overdose it means he must have been going to bed. But there he was fully dressed, and the bed wasn't even made up. He didn't live there, they say?'

'Who says?'

'The paper. There was a couple of lines about it this morning.'

He picked up the newspaper from beside his coffee cup, and put on a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles.

'Here: "A man found dying of an overdose of sleeping pills in a fourth-floor flat in Piazzo Santo Spirito was identified as Ton Goossens, a businessman from Amsterdam. The body was taken to the Medico-Legal Institute for a post-mortem." '

Nothing else. No journalists had turned up at the time so they must have got their information from Headquarters, along with the daily quota of handbag snatches and road accidents.

'We always look for the bottle, you know,' the printer said, folding up the newspaper, 'because we have to take it with us to the hospital or the morgue.'

'The bottle , . . the bottle that contained the sleeping pills?'

'Exactly. We didn't find one in this case ... Of course, your people were still there when we left.'

'I rather think that they didn't find one, either— though it could be amongst the broken glass they collected from the bathroom.'

'Well, once you know what the drug was . . . But, you know, the technical cause of death is probably going to be heart failure, don't you think so? And if he turns out to have been known to have a heart problem, whether he took the drugs on purpose or not, it would be kinder to his family ... He did have a family?'

'Yes. He had a wife who's expecting a baby any day now. And a stepmother.'

'Expecting a baby? Poor creature . . .'

'Dreadful tragedy,' said the young Count softly, with the slight lisp peculiar to his class. 'The trouble is, all our servants are in the country so I don't know what I can offer you ... let me see ... oh dear, not even a coffee . . .'

The Marshal blinked with relief.

'A little drop of vinsanto, yes . . .'

'No, really . . .'

But the Count was on his feet and rambling away in the direction of some distant dining-room.

The Marshal sighed. He'd had another coffee, his third, plus a large ice-cream, forced down him by the second Brother he had visited, who owned a bar where they made their own ice-cream and where it would have been taken as an insult had he refused to try it.

He sat, holding his hat, on the edge of a dust-sheeted and very hard chair, surrounded by a sea of miscellaneous white-shrouded shapes, like someone marooned on an ice-floe, staring our of the enormous window at an unaccustomed view of the city. It was spread out below him, a noiseless, dreamlike tapestry of mellow terracotta out of which rose confections of blue and white marble whose gilded decorations reflected the low sun. The river, where it was visible, was dissolving from olive to gold in the evening light. Only a couple of hours ago, the Marshal had talked of fishing desperate citizens out of that same water that lay there smooth as oil, and every day that week the paper had carried letters suggesting ways of controlling the increasing population of rats . . .

The vision was framed by long, sweeping curtains of faded blue silk. Looking more closely, the Marshal saw that what appeared to be a pattern of darker horizontal stripes was caused by the silk having rotted with old age.

'Beautiful, isn't it?' The Count was back, carrying a silver tray with a bottle and two dusty glasses on it. He looked about him, trying to decide which of the ghostly shapes might be some sort of table, eventually placing the tray on the broad wooden step running along beneath the window.

'We have one of the best views in Florence. I like the country well enough but I'd as soon stay here all summer if my father didn't insist we all go . . . You're very lucky to have found me, you know, because I only came down to collect some more books. I read a great deal in the country. Here you are, try this. It's from our own vineyards but we make so little of it that we never sell any . ,.

'Very nice,' murmured the Marshal, sipping a little unhappily at the dusty rim but appreciating the dryness of the liqueur wine that was so often stickily sweet. He wondered where he could put his glass down, and eventually decided to keep hold of it, balancing his hat on one knee to make room.

This is not, as I said before, an official call exactly. I'm just trying to satisfy myself in my own mind as to what happened . . .' The Marshal was sweating a little, and his free hand groped for a handkerchief in his trouser pocket. He had no right to be here, and if, however inadvertently, he annoyed this young man who looked so blandly pleased to see him, it would only take a brief telephone call.. .

'I just thought your experience as a Brother of the
Misericordia
might help me . . .'

'Yes yes yes . . . but of course I'm not a Brother, not yet . . . But you're not a Florentine.'

He had noticed that the Marshal looked baffled.

'I understand.' His tone implied that it could happen to anybody; just bad luck. 'There are only seventy-two Brothers, as there were originally: twelve prelates, twenty priests, twelve nobles, and twenty-eight artists. The rest of us are only assistant brothers, really. My father thought I ought not. . . he's one of the twelve nobles, as I shall be, eventually . . . but I wanted to join as soon as I could. It's a great tradition, you know . . . and then, one can talk to the other Brothers. While we're waiting for calls. I've had a number of interesting conversations •. . . I like to meet people, don't you?'

The Marshal was too bemused to think of an answer, but he noticed, when the young man bent down to refill their glasses, that he was balding a little on his crown. He wore a pair of worn-out slacks like the Marshal used for pottering in the kitchen, and the childish striped T-shirt, buttoned up at the collar, was much too small for him.