The Death of an Irish Consul (9 page)

McGarr said, “I’d prefer to think that we of Dublin Castle offer Scotland Yard skilled cooperation. And, speaking of cooperation, this morning, while investigating a crime in Scotland, I received a good measure of cooperation from Enrico Rattei. I believe he’s a friend of yours.”

She lowered her eyes. Her eyelids seemed tanned, or at least a deeper brown than her olive complexion. “Yes, Enrico and I are close friends.”

“I think he’s in love with you,” said McGarr. He
knew such a statement was rude, but he wanted to see how she’d react.

That pained John Frances. He looked away and shifted his weight.

She smiled. Her eyes flashed at McGarr. They were brown, almost black, and appeared depthless. “Yes. I think he is.” A tall woman, she was wearing a lilac dress. The material was sheer and had been fitted with great care to her thin but angular frame. But it was her eyes that were most interesting to McGarr. They conveyed an overwhelming sense of serenity. She was indeed a woman a man could kill for. “You’re so direct, Mr. McGarr.”

“It’s necessary in my profession.”

“Which one is that?” asked a man who had just joined the group. “Police work, isn’t it? In Rome and Paris and now back home to Dublin.” He held out his hand. “I’m Francesco Battagliatti.” He was a man even smaller than McGarr. His light brown hair was close-cropped and bristled. He wore heavy metallic-frame glasses that shone.

“The politician.” McGarr shook his hand.

“Political leader, party chairman are more pleasant expressions.” Battagliatti meant the Communist party in Italy.

Although this was the first time McGarr had ever met the man, he knew something about his past. Having lived in Tuscany for a time, McGarr had watched Battagliatti build the Communist party from a ragtag band of resistance fighters during World War II into
the regnant political party of that province and the second most powerful force in Italian national politics.

Having been a Communist ideologue during his university days—Siena also, McGarr believed—Battagliatti had had to flee Mussolini’s Italy. Rumor had it Battagliatti had participated in some of the most dreadful acts of Russia’s Comintern, and, when he returned to Italy as the American troops were advancing up the Tyrrhenian Peninsula, he proved to be the most capable of the guerrilla generals who stalled the German exit to the north.

Battagliatti always appeared in public dressed in a double-breasted gray suit. He had an amiable chuckle and a sharp wit, but his charm was that of an intellectual. One was left with the impression that his mind was icily rational. “Do we have criminals in our midst?” he asked McGarr.

The chief inspector thought he’d test the man’s vaunted intelligence. “The criminal lurks in everybody’s personality, signor. He is never really absent from our deliberations.”

Battagliatti smiled and sipped from a snifter. “I trust you speak for yourself, Mr. McGarr. In spite of the innumerable occasions on which I have searched my own persona, I have never revealed a criminal element.” All the while he spoke, he was staring at Enna Cummings and not once did he look at McGarr. His eyes were sparkling and, although his smile was probably a permanent affectation of his personality, Mc
Garr judged that at this moment it conveyed a genuine emotion.

Whenever she looked at him, she too smiled, yet in no way did she seem to be coy.

McGarr said, “Come now—each of us contains numerous possibilities within himself. We all have the seeds of greatness and banality in us. Robber, shaman, murderer, saint—we’re power obsessed at one moment, recluses at the next. Have you never imagined yourself a mobster, Signor Battagliatti, or a
borghése
in Milano, a
fannullóne
on the breakwater in Catania, a troubador journeying to Rome for the Christmas holidays?”

“Never,” said the politician. “At all times, I am, sadly, Battagliatti.” He pronounced his name histrionically, gesturing his hand with a slight movement of the wrist. “A man with the same emotions as those which had surfaced in his pitiable personality when he was still a foolish student, young and in love. Most of those other personae whom you’ve named have never darkened his demeanor. And you didn’t mention unrequited lover.” He glanced once more at Enna Cummings.

“Stop it, Francesco. You’re boring Chief Inspector McGarr. I’m sure that the set of personalities he deals with daily are much more colorful than those he’ll find in this room.”

“Not so,” said McGarr.

Noreen and Cummings now joined the group. The contrasting beauty of the two women—one diminutive
with red hair and fine, white skin; the other tall and dark—created a most pleasant tension.

McGarr continued. “It’s just that we’re less adventuresome than those we choose to call criminals. Society and its values have made too deep an impression upon us. We’ve quelled the grosser elements in our personalities. But we lose something all the same, don’t you think?”

“Ah, yes,” Battagliatti said, “the freedom to loot and pillage. The license to kill and maim. But then again, Mr. McGarr, it’s easy for you to talk, since you
have
the license to kill.”

McGarr smiled. A waiter presented O’Shaughnessy and him snifters of brandy. Taking a glass off the tray, he said, “Within limits, of course—those set by society.”

“But what about the man who has led an exemplary life for, say, fifty-five years? Suddenly, he slays his mother-in-law. Surely, his is not a ‘criminal’ personality.”

“Which is exactly my point. The balance of his personality has gone awry, the harmony has been broken momentarily. A psychologist, a sociologist, a——”

“Policeman?” Battagliatti suggested.

“——anybody with compassion and a little common sense,” said McGarr, “can discover the why and the how of the imbalance. It’s a simple paroxysm that the criminal is going through, that’s all.”

“And not likely to happen again?”

“If those conditions that led to this ‘journey to the end of one aspect of his personality’ no longer obtain, then it might not happen again.”

“Then you don’t believe in capital punishment.”

“Of course not. How could I, if I believe what I’ve just said?” McGarr smiled once more.

“But surely you do.”

McGarr shook his head. “Having to deal with ‘criminal’ personalities on a daily basis has made me envious of their freedom. What I’ve just said was a ‘journey to the end of the thespian element in my personality,’ and no more.”

“Toccato!”
said Battagliatti. “Beware of the policeman with wit. He may understand the deviations of a man’s personality and not despise him, thereby diminishing the value of the criminal’s emotional paroxysm. Crime then becomes a nasty little joke that the criminal has played on himself.”

“But we must never lose sight of the victim,” said McGarr. “What part does he play in the crime?”

“Some would say”—Battagliatti allowed a little, perhaps again his professional, smile to crease his smooth features—“the victim invites the crime, that some imbalance obtains in his personality that begs for an untoward act to be done to him. Some would say so, wouldn’t they, Chief Inspector?” He turned back to McGarr.

“Some would, but not I. And then, of course, we would have to examine the motives of the some who would say that.”

“
Toccato ancora
,” Enna Cummings said. “It’s a good thing you’re not a criminal, Francesco, or Signor McGarr would have you incarcerated in no time at all.

“Have you met…” She then began introducing Noreen and McGarr and O’Shaughnessy to the other persons around them.

Throughout it all, however, McGarr’s thoughts were preoccupied. All of these people seemed to be old Italian friends of Enna Ricasoli Cummings, either being from Siena itself or having attended university with her, and they were all quite successful persons in their own rights.

For instance, besides Battagliatti, McGarr was introduced to Oscar Zingiale. He had formed the IRI (
Istitúto per la Ricostruzione Industriale
) during the depression and had almost single-handedly pulled Italy out of economic straits more dire than those most other Western nations experienced. Under IRI he created the Italian coal and steel industry, RAI, which was the state-owned radio and television network in Italy, Alitalia, and Finmare, the shipbuilding concern based in Genoa.

His companies were archrivals of those that Enrico Rattei had created, but when McGarr asked Zingiale about his competitor, he answered, “In fact, we’re dear friends,
when
we can put business matters aside, which is seldom. I saw him last at the Palio two years ago. That’s where we met, you know.”

“At the Palio?”

“No—in Siena, at university. We roomed together, both as poor as church mice.”

“And look at you now,” said Battagliatti, who had been standing next to McGarr all the tiine. “Two bloated capitalisti.”

Zingiale laughed. “Sometimes I don’t believe we attended the same university. You think too much in categories, Francesco.
One
bloated capitalista,” he pointed to himself. He was a bald, rotund man, with a heavy gold watch chain on his belly. “Rattei is a”—he moved closer to the two men and whispered—“Fascist. That’s an unpopular word nowadays, and one not to be said lightly.”

“But when the Fascists ruled, what were you, Oscar?”

Zingiale shrugged. “A Fascist, what else?”

“Then a capitalist is merely a chameleon.” Battagliatti’s eyes flashed.

Zingiale smiled benignly. “If he’s successful, he’s a
bloated
chameleon.”

“What about Fascists?” McGarr asked Battagliatti. “How do you think of them?”

“As any other intelligent man does, as individuals.”

“
There
,” said Zingiale, “he’s learning, he’s maturing.”

“Take Enrico Rattei, for an instance,” McGarr suggested.

Battagliatti paused, sipped from his snifter, and said, “I admire him very much. I am also one of his friends from university.”

McGarr wouldn’t swear to it, but he thought he saw Zingiale’s features glower a bit at that remark.

Then there was Remigio Agnollo, the Turin carmaker. His family, like the Ricasolis, had always had money. He too joined the group and was introduced to McGarr.

After him, McGarr met Umberto Pavini, the historian, and Maria Garzanti, a rotund, chesty woman who was a leading soprano with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They and some others, whose names McGarr didn’t recognize, gradually added themselves to the circle of people standing near Enna Ricasoli Cummings.

And perhaps it was the orchestra, which had begun to play the stately air from Bach’s Concerto for Strings in D Major, or the ambience of the drawing room, which was furnished with reproductions of Quattrocento Florentine craftsmen, or the heat of his palms, which had freed the delicate yet heady aroma of the Luccan brandy in his snifter, that made McGarr wonder what it had been like to be young and at the university in Siena during the late twenties with this group of gifted and intelligent people, how it must have seemed that an interloper, Cummings, had plucked the rose of their coterie from their midst. McGarr now understood Rattei’s purported threat somewhat better. And he wondered how much Cummings himself figured in his recent appointment as ambassador to Italy. Friends as powerful as his wife’s might certainly be capable of engineering such an appointment.

The cigars were Nicaraguan, the wrapper leaf
colorado maduro
, the smoke a light blue, the taste sharp—pleasingly bitter, mellowing. McGarr was beginning to enjoy this assignment. “A good drink, a pleasant smoke, and scintillating company,” he observed to O’Shaughnessy.

The Garda superintendent’s light blue eyes were merry as he surveyed the guests from his eminence.

And that was not all he saw, for when the Cummingses, now surrounded by bobbies, and the McGarrs and O’Shaughnessy left the Italian embassy, pausing on the veranda to bid their final adieus to their host and hostess, the tall policeman, looking over the heads of the other departing guests, saw Foster. He was standing in the shadow of a doorway across the street. There was nothing he could do but pull on McGarr’s sleeve and gesture in the direction of the wide black man. The walkway down was crowded with people, the semicircular drive now blocked by waiting limousines.

With Cummings and his wife pausing on the top stair of the embassy, however, Foster might have had a perfect shot at him. The distance was, say, seventy-five yards through an iron fence, the driveway gates of which were open. In the confusion which was sure to follow such an assassination, Foster’s escape would have been assured.

McGarr wondered why Foster let the opportunity slip.

His thoughts ceased, however, when Noreen grasped his hand in the dark of the back seat of the
Bentley. As he had expected, the moment Cummings approached his limousine and the policemen became free to chase after Foster, if they chose, a small car pulled up in front of the building across the street, Foster hopped in, and it pulled away. The rear lights of the vehicle had been disconnected so that the license number was obscured in the darkness. In any case, the car had most probably been stolen.

Their rooms at the Carlton were at once as sumptuous and ugly as only a decorator with a perfect understanding of upper-middle-class British taste could devise. Individually, all the items in the room—a squat dresser made from fine-grained Honduran mahogany polished to a mirror sheen; an imitation rococo mirror that matched a mantelpiece on which several twentieth-century casts of Victorian reproductions of eighteenth-century ceramic figurines in sickly pastels had been placed—were so gauche as to be nearly laughable, but in all the room looked solid, and that, after all, was the effect intended.

McGarr phoned the lobby and learned that the kitchen had not yet closed. To test its fare, he ordered the soup du jour. When that turned out to be a pleasant
potage velouté aux huitres
, they ordered
salade Niçoise, moules à la marinière
, and a bottle of very dry Schloss Johannisberger. If the soup had been lackluster, McGarr would have ordered meat.