Death of a Dutchman (9 page)

'What do I know?' he asked himself again. 'I know that the Dutchman came down from Holland on the train—the Professor let that slip, so I suppose they must have found his ticket on him. He bought some food... did he go anywhere else before the flat? I need a train timetable ... I need to see that ticket. If I'd any concrete evidence to offer I could ring the Lieutenant and he'd tell me . . . but I haven't.

'Anyway, if by any chance he picked a woman up on his way from the station, Franca will let me know tomorrow. Myself, I doubt it. So, he goes to the flat and eats alone. There was only one plate, I remember that. Then he has coffee. The woman must have been with him then... about eight, according to Signora Giusti. Did she make the coffee while he was still eating, I wonder?
It wasn't
her •
. . Well, what if he was mistaken, or didn't want to believe it? That's not the same as lying. The woman goes away after a quarrel—what about? Don't know. Maybe he falls asleep. At any rate, before too long he starts vomiting, loses consciousness and then wakes up choking, scrabbles through the medicine cabinet—no, I forgot, he took some aspirin . . . with the coffee, I suppose, and he'd been smoking all the time . . . and yet, he did eat, after all, so even if he was anxious he couldn't have been exactly panic-stricken, or expecting to meet a dangerous enemy. Expecting someone, though . . .

'After cutting himself and trying to stop the bleeding, he goes to the kitchen and messes with coffee, can't cope, falls asleep . . . Next day he wakes, makes for the sink, maybe to vomit, finds the remains of the other coffee and drinks it . . . flavoured with figs, what an idea! Then where does he go? To the bedroom . . . the other rooms seemed untouched, and he was bleeding, would have bled on all those white dustsheets ... to the bedroom, then. Why? To go to bed? No, he was trying to keep awake. Why, then? He had keys in his hand, but I heard one of the Lieutenant's men saying they weren't the keys of that flat. They could have been the keys of his house in Amsterdam, but what would he want with those?

'There must have been a third set then . . .
He always
left me his keys so that . . .

'The keys to Signora Giusti's flat! She has his keys, so why not? It was the obvious place to go for help but he probably had no clear idea of what time it was and he knew that unless the social worker had been, she wouldn't be able to get out of bed and let him in. If they turned out to be Signora Giusti's keys and he had been going for help, surely that proved that he didn't want to die?'

It didn't, of course, prove that he hadn't wanted to die the night before. People who commit suicide with sleeping pills expect to die quietly in their sleep, not to go through what he'd gone through.

Even so, the Marshal wrote something on the sheet of foolscap: the word 'keys'. He drew a circle round it and looked at it.

My dear Marshal. . . the fact is that people do behave
oddly-and it isn't always possible
.
.
.

It didn't prove anything, anything at all. Even though he was alone in his own kitchen, the Marshal blushed with shame and embarrassment. If a man like the Professor, an educated man, practically a genius, who could reconstruct a man's life from a few marks, was unwilling to commit himself about whether it was suicide, who was he to insist . . .

A whole army of competent, educated people rose up in the Marshal's imagination . . . the Lieutenant, young, yes, but he had studied at the
Liceo,
had done his officer training and knew foreign languages, he could telephone to Amsterdam if he needed to; he had men at his disposal for checking every detail, not to mention computers. He could talk to the Substitute Prosecutor or Professor Forli as one educated man to another. He didn't sit at the kitchen table with a bit of paper and a pencil, after bumbling around the city all day in a Fiat so small you could hardly get in it and a door that shut only if you banged it three or four times.

The word 'keys' stared up at him mockingly. Surely, the first thing you were supposed to find was a motive, or something like that? And how could he find out whether anyone benefited from the Dutchman's death? He couldn't. He had no right to. The Lieutenant was an officer, while he ... he was just a guard, he had no business . . .

Why had the Dutchman come to Florence in the first place? A business trip ... to see whom?

There he went again! And it was none of his business. He wasn't competent . . .

A fly lit on the formica table and started to feed on a crumb that the Marshal's hurried wiping had left behind. Squalid. His glass and plate were still in the sink, dirty. Slapping heavily but uselessly at the fly in his distress, he got up and began rinsing his crockery. Then he wiped the table again, excessively. If his wife were here at least there wouldn't be this to upset him on top of everything else . . . he hated squalor; it stopped him from thinking in peace.

If you could call it thinking . . .

The sheet of paper lay there with 'keys' and the pointless ring round it that tried to give the word more importance than it had.

'You're ignorant, that's what. Ignorant . . .'

He tossed the paper into the rubbish bin, switched out the light and went through the living-room and out to the office to switch the phone through to his bedroom. Automatically, he flicked on the close-circuit television for a moment to check the entrance. A laurel hedge and a stretch of gravel, pale in the moonlight . . . the back fenders of his little car, the van and the jeep. He switched off. There was no sound from upstairs; Gino's radio had been switched off an hour ago. They must all be asleep. Before turning out the light he noticed a little stack of matchboxes and a pile of loose change next to the telephone. It took him a few moments to register what they meant, then he picked them up and switched out the light.

'Ignorant,' he repeated on his way to the bedroom, thinking of the humble Gino who took pleasure in doing small things for other people, readily admitting that he had no brains. He did nothing but good in the world whereas somebody as presumptuous as . . .

You know, murderers don't go round attacking people
with sleeping pills . .
.

The Lieutenant could have given him a rocket for his cheek, and yet he didn't. He had been quite kind. Self-controlled. An officer and an educated man.

'She was right, was my mother,' he told himself as he cleaned his teeth, scowling at himself. 'She was absolutely right . . .'

In bed, he lay a moment looking at the photograph of two plump little boys that stood on the chest of drawers opposite, before switching out the light.

'The thing is,' he remarked to his absent wife as he turned over and sank into the pillows, 'I feel as if I would have liked him. He was well off and yet he still worked with his hands ... a craftsman . . . that's what I would have liked to be if I'd had any talent for it . . . and he didn't forget the old lady who'd looked after him when his mother died. There aren't many like that, these days. And yet, I really don't know anything about him, at all . . .'

CHAPTER 5

'So you thought you'd ask me—the same as your friend who came yesterday. You thought I was the one who knew him better than anyone, and it's true that I do. He was born in this building, and for a few years after his mother died I was the only mother he had, his
mammina.'

'Somebody . . . somebody was here yesterday?'

'You know as well as I do. The officer you sent for that day. He came back here yesterday, asking questions. Just before lunch it was . . .'

So the Marshal had made some impression on. the young Lieutenant, after all. Though perhaps he had been of the same opinion all along, and had only wanted encouragement. Signora Giusti was chuckling wickedly among her cushions.

'I don't mind saying there are things I'd tell you that I wouldn't tell a young whippersnapper like that — I don't mean him any ill, but fancy coming to see an old lady like me empty-handed.'

The Marshal's offering, a little cardboard tray of profiteroles with three colours of icing, lay open on the occasional table between them, its gold and white paper wrapping and yellow ribbons strewn over the telephone.

'I've always had a sweet tooth, I'll admit . . .'

The tiny, soft-boned hand reached out to the tray. 'And these days I can manage to eat so few things—look! Look at that! It's the same every morning.'

A rug was being shaken from the window below. Signora Giusti leaned forward until her forehead was touching the glass, and counted the billows of dust that floated out over the gloomy courtyard.

'Three, four, five, six! And she calls that clean! I'd have fired her the first day but that old witch downstairs has money to burn. She's only seventy, you know, but she claims to have a bad leg that stops her ever coming up here to see me. Does she think I don't see her from my bedroom window, hobbling up Via Romana? And do you know where she's going? The cinema, that's where! But her leg's too bad for her to come up two flights of stairs and spend an hour with me—so how is it she can manage to go up and down the six flights to her own flat? Who does she think she is, that's what I'd like to know! Does she think that when my husband was alive I'd have even thought of inviting a woman like her into my home? I've told her so, too. Oh, if you'd seen my drawing-room then J . . and now it's empty . . . even the carpets have gone, and they were Persian and good ones, too. Who does she think she is, just because she can afford a cleaner for two hours a day—and one who doesn't even clean properly—not that those rugs are worth anything, you can see that from here. Well, she needn't think I want her. I was doing her a favour, asking her up here, but people don't realize, they don't realize . . .'

She cupped her hands under her sunken face and cast about her in despair at the pathetic remains of her prosperous, bourgeois world; the photographs in their silver frames, the sad decorations round the picture of the Pope, the rickety kitchen table with its checkered oilcloth cover.

'I'm too old, too old,' she wailed. 'I ought to be dead ... this is what it comes to in the end, if you outlive your time.'

'Now, now, Signora. Now, now . . .'

'You don't know. You can't imagine what it comes down to. I'm nobody. I'm just an old woman, any old woman. I've no social position, no place in the world, no personality. There's nothing left of me. There's nobody left who knew me when . . . There's nothing to be said about me except that I'm ninety-one.'

'It's not true that you've no personality,' said the Marshal truthfully, for her viciousness was known and sometimes even feared. But then, he realized, that was probably deliberate, her bid to be recognized as a person instead of patronized as just another 'old dear'.

She was weeping now. The handkerchief she pulled from her pocket was an old lace-edged one, badly torn and stained but with her initial still visible on it. He pushed the cakes towards her, not knowing what else to do.

'I don't like the chocolate ones,' she snapped.

'Then here—' he turned the tray round—'there's a vanilla one left.'

She sniffed and took it, pushing it down between sobs.

'What sort of things did you not want to tell the officer yesterday?'

'Just little things, family things. Things that were told me in confidence, you understand. A youngster like that . . . well, you're a family man, I can tell. A good family man, not the sort to dump his old mother in a hospital, the way they do nowadays—is your mother still alive?'

'Yes, yes, she's still alive,' murmured the Marshal, although she's in very bad health . . .'

'But you're not the sort to dump her in a hospital and go off on your holidays?'

Her wily old eyes, glittering with tears, were piercing right through to his conscience. It was uncanny the way some women knew by instinct where to prod so as to cause the most pain, even when they knew nothing at all about a person.

'No, of course I wouldn't . . .'

That sort of instinct was perhaps what made a good detective, an instinct for which questions to ask of a suspect, where to put the pressure. But in any case, he didn't have a suspect. He didn't have the instinct, either; but Signora Giusti did, and she knew-more than anyone about the Dutchman and his family. If he could only keep her to the. Subject! But no, she was off again on her reminiscences.

'I suppose you've got children. I never had any. How she gloated over that! It was the one thing that induced her to speak to me at last. The husband was no better— I suppose he was jealous because we were rather well-to-do, and that bitch of a sister of mine wouldn't be likely to let him forget it. He was a railway clerk, nothing more. Oh, he became some sort of head of department in the end, but they always had to be careful about money, while of course my husband was an engineer and was very highly thought of, as well as highly paid. There was money in the family, too, naturally; I wouldn't have had him otherwise. I could take my pick, I can tell you, with my looks. We inherited all our silver, apart from wedding presents, it had been in his family for years. And now it's almost all gone ... If I'd had children who could have supported me . . . I'll never forget the baptism party, and that pompous little idiot of a husband of hers in his stiff collar that looked as if it was going to choke him . . .

' "We're grateful to Our Lord, Maria Grazia, that he's sent us a son to comfort us in our old age." What a fool! And she just stood there simpering with the child in her arms, not troubling to hide her triumph. The son was killed during a bombing raid when he was in Rome during the last war, anyway . . .

'We left their wretched baptism party as soon as we decently could, but although you could say the big quarrel ended that day, we never became close.'

'What started the quarrel?' asked the Marshal, not at all sure who she was talking about but hoping somehow to find an opening.

'Jealousy. They say money's responsible for most of the trouble in the world, but if that's true then jealousy comes a close second, and jealousy between sisters is the most vicious of all, and the most unreasonable. After all, I couldn't help having the looks I was born with. Oh, but I was beautiful!'

She glanced across, bright-eyed, at the photograph of herself, as though it were of someone else.

'And the offers I had! Do you know I'd received five proposals of marriage by the time I was seventeen? What do you think I should have done? Refused the man I wanted to marry just because my sister, who was three years older, couldn't get herself a husband at any price? Was my life to be ruined, I ask you? It wasn't that she was ugly, you know, but she had a sour temperament, no gaiety in her. Eventually she took to being pious, never away from church and forever doing good works. Then she takes the first man who offers himself. He looked like a draper! I ask you! I couldn't resist calling him her draper when I went home to visit —never directly, you know, just a little teasing. I'd ask her how he was and then bring the conversation round to the new season's silks, asking her advice and then asking her what
he
thought and whether she couldn't get something for me at a discount!'

She went off into peals of laughter, rattling among her cushions, and the Marshal wondered how the unfortunate sister had kept from strangling her. On and on she went, and each time he tried to bring up the Dutchman, she would make some tantalizing remark and then plunge into more unpleasant reminiscences. He began to wonder how the Lieutenant had fared yesterday. It seemed unlikely that he had got anything out of her, but the Marshal was willing to bet that she hadn't dared play with an officer the way she was playing with him now.

There seemed little doubt that she was doing it quite deliberately, for she was unquestionably sound of mind and not rambling inadvertently. It could be, of course, he thought more charitably, that she was just trying to spin out his visit as much as possible. The social worker had been leaving when the Marshal arrived, having left a cold lunch prepared. It was only ten o'clock now, and a day of sitting alone, looking out at the gloomy courtyard, was all the old lady had to look forward to. If she had anything to tell, she would make the most of it, spreading the information over as many visits as possible.

He had hoped, at first, that her distress at the death of her beloved Toni would induce her to help him find out what had happened, but now he was beginning to understand a little of what it meant to be ninety-one years old. She had buried all the members of her own family, and seen off all her friends and enemies one by one. She was ready to die herself. For her, the division between the living and the dead was not the same as for a young person; the dead who had been part of her own world and who had known her in her hey-day were more alive for her than the living generations for whom she didn't count. It didn't distress her that the young Dutchman should be dead so much as that, once again, she had been left behind . . .

'It was the same thing there, you see, jealousy.'

'I'm sorry . . . ?'

'I thought you wanted to hear about Toni's family. You said that's what you came for.'

She
was
teasing him, now he was sure. She had noticed his gaze wandering and had immediately begun to talk about the Dutchman. She evidently intended to drift off again, now, but the Marshal suddenly leaned forward with his large hands on his knees and stared at her fixedly, saying very deliberately:

'Jealousy of whom?'

His sudden change of attitude disconcerted Signora Giusti, and she answered him obediently:

'I was talking about Toni's stepmother, Signora Wilkins, as she was before she was married to Goossens. All that trouble she had with her sister, her elder sister, there was a year between them, it was all jealousy and I told her so. It could have been my story over again, only with them it happened twice, in a manner of speaking. Not that Signora Wilkins took it the way I did; she wasn't one to tease or take advantage—oh, you needn't look surprised, I know my faults; I've always been selfish and I've always had a sharp tongue in my head, and I might as well admit it now that my life's over and it's too late to reform. But Signora Wilkins is a very different sort of person. She was good-looking in her younger days, but never played on it, if you know what I mean. She married first, just as I did, but she married a man who had virtually nothing except ideas and energy. I don't think her family was too pleased and the sister was downright scornful. Reading between the lines, I'd say that she was sweet on young Wilkins herself but she wasn't going to marry anybody without money and position, not she. Well, the wedding came off and I gather that the young fellow did all sorts of jobs before he got his idea.'

'What sort of idea?' Would they
ever
get to the Dutchman?

'I'm telling you, if you'll listen. It seems that in the northern part of England they make cloth, something like Prato, I imagine, an industrial area, cotton and so on. Well, like in Prato, the local people could buy cloth for almost nothing, buying straight from the factory, the end pieces and pieces with a tiny fault, whole bales sometimes. Anyway, Wilkins was up there travelling for a firm and he got this idea of buying up this stuff and taking it south to where they lived—don't ask me to pronounce it, I couldn't begin to try. He could sell it down there for twice what it cost him and it would still be a good bargain compared to shop prices—I used to laugh to myself when Signora Wilkins talked about it. After all,
she
really did marry a draper, didn't she, of a sort? That's why I've never mentioned to her about the jokes I used to make about my sister. It might have offended her . . .'

The Marshal pondered on the Englishwoman who had managed to bring out what good there was in Signora Giusti's selfish little heart. She must have been something special because nobody else seemed to escape that sharp tongue.

'And did he do well?'

'He did more than well, he made a fortune. It was an awful risk at first, because of course he had to give up his job. She had savings but not much; they only had a few months in which to make a go of it. He started off by carting the stuff down on the train in -suitcases, and she would go with him and help him—and she hadn't been brought up to a life like that, I can tell you; I think her father was a solicitor. They travelled to the north and back three times a week and then he stood in the marketplace with his suitcases open on the floor; they didn't even have a stall. But people fought to get at it, she used to tell me, fought to get at it! It was all fine quality stuff, you see, usually with some tiny, almost invisible fault running through it. There was brocaded upholstery, sheeting, towelling, everything . . .

'Before long they got a stall and then a little van. They never had children but as soon as they were comfortably off he insisted that she stay at home. She was more sorry than glad because those first few hectic years when they were always exhausted and often hadn't enough to eat were happy ones. Even so, she agreed to stay at home and they soon had such a large house that she was kept busy. The business got bigger and bigger and he took on some assistants so that he could cover more than one market at a time. But he still did all the buying himself; he had no desire to be just a businessman who left all the active work to others.'