The Death of an Irish Consul (16 page)

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 both 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.

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 he
licopter 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’ve 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?”

“Just another humble toiler in this vale of tears.” McGarr smiled at Gallup, but the comment was not appreciated. Actually, McGarr wished he had a couple of days to pore over the mass of information.

“You better get going,” said Gallup. “You’ve only got Lieutenant Simpson for the day. After that, somebody’s got to start paying the RAF for his time and the use of his aircraft, and that somebody is not going to be Scotland Yard.

“And remember this, McGarr.” Gallup spun around. He was nettled. “If the world contained only irresponsible administrators with the yen to play sleuth and let the paperwork, the budgets, the recruiting, and the procedures go to hell, then we wouldn’t have any decent police protection.”

Sheepishly, McGarr opened one of the folders, only to have something to do with his hands. He said, “My contention is that one must learn to delegate authority. If you thoroughly understood this position, Ned, you’d realize you don’t really have a job at all. That, then, would free you to do only those things which please you. That’s the secret to all innovative and imaginative administration. They put you in this job not because they thought you were a gifted administrator alone, but because, first and foremost, you are a gifted policeman. Why not be that?”

“Delegate authority, he says! Delegate
authority!
” Gallup began roaring at the map of pins. “He has the brass to say that when he delegated all the boring work to me and toured Italy in doubtless high style!”

McGarr quietly shut the door. He didn’t think it politic to point out the high style of his upper lip and black eye.

Gallup’s secretary was staring at him.

“Pressure, pressure,” McGarr whispered to her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the secretary. “This place runs itself.”

McGarr made a mental note to try and convince Gallup to let his secretary take over the s.o.p. aspects of his job.

McGarr rather enjoyed riding a helicopter across the rolling fields of southern England. What with the steady beat of the rotor blades, the sensation was like
that of being mounted on a winged horse, as opposed to being in an airplane that moved like a bird.

Thus, they charged toward Bath and Bristol, the area in which Lieutenant Simpson supposed any helicopter pilot not wanting to refuel in Ireland would have stopped, going and coming.

The sun kept trying to break through the cloud cover, so that below them the green fields and bordering oaks occasionally appeared through the mist, wet and sparkling, as though elements in an aquarium of fog.

They tried the airports in Bath and Bristol, a heliport in Bristol, and an emergency runway that also had a fuel pump in Weston-super-Mare. Then airports in Cardiff and, pushing down the Welsh Peninsula, Barry, Neath, Swansea, Llanelli, and Pembroke.

Technological architecture, McGarr speculated—like airports or petrol stations or cities that had been redesigned to accommodate the automobile—had no human history. All the airports, of need, were the same. The only changes the physical plant could tolerate were those of an advancing technology, whence the older elements would be chucked out or the entire airport abandoned.

One such place was the airport in Fishguard. Built as a Spitfire base to attack German bombers on their way to destroy the shipyards in Belfast, the concrete runways had been reclaimed by the pasture from which they had originally been carved. At several points, as the helicopter clipped in low over windbreaks, they
saw cows grazing on the grass that burgeoned between the separations of the concrete slabs. A wind direction finder, once an orange-and-white-striped sock, was a tattered brown rag, blown out. Rusting Quonset-type hangars lined the unused sections of the runway. They touched down near the office of the present airport. It too was a corrugated metal structure.

It was five-thirty in the afternoon now, and McGarr had to zip his jacket when he stepped outside the toasty bubble of the helicopter.

The office door opened and a man hopped down the steps. One leg was stiff. “What’ll it be, mates—fuel, directions, or the time of day?” He spoke with a thick Welsh brogue. He was wearing gray coveralls, which were spotted, and he smoked a pipe.

McGarr, as he had done at all the other airports that day, explained that he was interested in learning if a helicopter, piloted by a small man—he showed him Rattei’s and Battagliatti’s pictures—had stopped there on the nineteenth and twenty-sixth of June.

“If they did, I can tell you certain. I keep a record of such things. You’ll have to step into the office, however. Can I get you anything first?” His face was smudged with grease, and he had needed a shave yesterday.

In one of the old hangars they had passed on landing, McGarr had seen a gleaming Spitfire. He imagined the man had restored the airship. Here, he probably had a great deal of time on his hands.

Lieutenant Simpson said their helicopter needed nothing.

A tea kettle was beginning to whistle on top of a cylindrical coal stove. The man placed it on a trivet. “Tea?”

“No, thanks,” McGarr said. “We’ve got to push on.”

“A little snort then?” The man opened a file cabinet, pulled out a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine Scotch, and handed it to McGarr. Rummaging around a bit more, he picked out four short glasses. Many greasy fingerprints were impressed upon the exterior surfaces of the glasses.

“That’s an interesting filing system you have there,” O’Shaughnessy said, helping him set the glasses on top of another dusty sheet-metal cabinet.

“The best. The very best,” said the man, winking. “Never misplace a thing. If I think for a moment I have, I consult my ‘inspiration.’”

The rest of the office was similarly dusty, but neat and warm. There was a mark on the top of an old wooden desk where the man placed his feet. From that seat the traffic control radio was a reach away. McGarr sat.

“Here it is.” The man pulled a folder from another drawer of the cabinet.

O’Shaughnessy poured liberal drinks of the Scotch and handed the glasses around. When Lieutenant Simpson began examining the glass, the Garda superintendent said, “Sure and there’s enough antiseptic in the glass to cure a thousand evils.”

The man placed the folder in front of McGarr and opened it. “Seems that the only helicopter I had in dur
ing that week stopped twice. Let me check the dates.” He ran the black nail of a finger across his list on the dates McGarr had mentioned. “Yup—same ship. But this one is piloted by a woman, not a man, and not the men you showed me in your pictures. Them I’ve never laid eyes on before.

“I remember her because she stops in here often. Horse-racing woman, she told me she was. Does a lot of training and racing in Ireland, where you’re from, no?”

McGarr bent his head to acknowledge the question.

“Often she’s accompanied by a black man. Big as a house, he is.”

O’Shaughnessy glanced at McGarr, who asked, “Balding, close-set eyes, Jamaican accent?”

“Aye—and he’s got a taste for good whiskey. Once drank a whole bottle while I greased the main bearing on the rotor of their ship. And generous, he was. He paid me handsomely for the pleasure.” The man was eyeing O’Shaughnessy, who, having drunk off the first glass, was pouring himself another.