The Monster of Florence (19 page)

“The new moon. Yes, I see …” He looked at the Marshal with a different expression, then gave him a pat on the arm. “Good …”

The Marshal was annoyed for the rest of the day, not with
Simonetti so much as with himself. He had fed Simonetti a line that would result in a full-page article in tomorrow’s
Nazione
. He had also, just for a moment, felt rewarded by that pat on the arm. Like the schoolboy with a star on his composition or the good dog who has fetched the newspaper.

He had been right about one thing: the weather had changed. It was raining hard. The search had begun indoors, in a sort of storeroom off the kitchen. The kitchen itself was encumbered with cables taking lights for the film cameras to the dark storeroom. The Marshal, coming out of the sitting room behind Simonetti, stepped over the cables and went outside to where three men were pulling the wheeled rubbish skip into the yard. Once it was there, they stood a while looking at it. There wasn’t a lot they could do with it at this point. They couldn’t open it because of the rain. It would have to be removed to Florence to the police laboratories. Of course they had all, including Simonetti, glimpsed inside, but without much hope. It seemed inevitable that whatever the Suspect had wanted to get rid of had been put there only so it could be removed by his friend or accomplice. The Marshal was put out by this because he wouldn’t have thought him far thinking enough for such a plan. He had seen him as the usual deny-everything type with a well-developed sense of danger on an animal level, but not a cool planner. Not that. It wasn’t often he misjudged his man. And yet, there it was. He’d seen the other man for himself, in as much as you could say you’d seen anything in that solid darkness. They would check through the rubbish anyway in the faint hope that if the gun had lain there, however briefly, there might be a trace of grease on one of the plastic rubbish bags.

He stood there, motionless, the rain beating down on him, observing in silence the men messing around the skip. They were arguing now about the best way to transport it. They had thick, rainproof jackets on and amphibian boots. He ought to go home. Even if he had no hope of sleeping he could at least put more suitable clothing on. He hadn’t had so much as a coffee either but he was too tired to come to any decision, even about breakfast, so he stayed where he was.
Behind him in the kitchen someone had begun hammering. Were they demolishing the place or what? The Suspect, who had the right to be present during the search, had not gone to work. He was raising his voice now in tearful protest at whatever they were damaging.

Just a little way down the lane was another cottage. There were a number of journalists in there. The Marshal had spotted them when they appeared briefly on the roof to take photographs, but it was both wet and dangerous on the loose red tiles and there was very little to see so they had spent most of the morning inside out of sight. No doubt they’d paid a small fortune to the householder for this privilege.

It was stupid to stand there getting wet.

“What are you standing there getting wet for?” Ferrini appeared beside him. He’d arrived this morning and so was suitably dressed.

“I was thinking …” lied the Marshal, whose mind was a blank.

“Come inside and think.”

The Marshal followed him docilely.

“This is a business,” Ferrini muttered. “I mean about last night.”

“Yes.” Seeing Ferrini was pulling off his wet rainproof, the Marshal unbuttoned his soaked greatcoat. “It bothers me, to tell you the truth.”

“Did he give you hell?”

“Not exactly … it’s bothering me because I wouldn’t have thought it of him.”

“Simonetti?”

“No, no … I mean—” He inclined his head towards the door of the storeroom where the Suspect was weeping and his wife was trying to push past him to get in there. Somebody had smashed some bottles of tomato preserve and she was more infuriated by that than by any accusations levelled against her husband.

“Damn and blast it, all that work and trouble—and who’s going to pay for it all? Who’s going to pay?”

“They’re trying to ruin me! What have I ever done that they want to crucify me?”

“I think we’ll withdraw.” Ferrini indicated the next room and they left the kitchen, closing the door on the noise.

“We’ll stay off the film set for a bit, I think. I wanted a quiet word with you. What did you mean, anyway, about our friend in there?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, it was a well-thought-out plan and it worked …”

“Ah. Yes, well. You know, Simonetti likes to make out that our Suspect’s as clever as Houdini. The cold-blooded killer winging through the night and homing in on his victims, sleeping in his coffin all day. Our very own local Dracula. So, he won’t be put out by last night’s tricks, will he?”

“No. No, he’s not. He’s pleased, I think, as far as that goes. Though, if we’ve lost the gun as a result …”

“If he thought he’d lost the gun as a result you’d be out of a job by now.”

“It would be the natural thing to think, though, wouldn’t it?”

“Humph. Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with you. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, either. Not his style. Still, from Simonetti’s point of view, a story like that and a spot of gun grease on one of the bags of rubbish in that skip is a lot better than finding nothing at all. And believe me, if somebody wants to hide something as small as a gun in the countryside there’s no way anybody could ever find it.”

“That’s true.”

“I don’t know why you don’t go and get some sleep.”

“I can’t manage to sleep at all during the day. There were one or two things I wanted to ask you.” But he was so tired that he couldn’t remember for the life of him what they were.

The search continued, slow and laborious, moving from the storeroom to the kitchen. Every inch of the building had to be filmed and any object removed required a written report with a detailed description. They were looking, without much hope, for the gun, but they were also looking for any object belonging to any of the victims. Something from the handbags he’d gone through and emptied. There had never been any clear idea of any particular object missing from the victims, which was one reason why everything had to be filmed. After a certain period of time they would
return to the house and take note of anything that had been removed by the Suspect.

When the Marshal and Ferrini left at lunch time, the lights and cameras had just been switched off. A niche in the kitchen wall containing a statue of the Madonna had been dismantled and the brickwork behind it destroyed with an electric drill. Plaster dust was settling on the white hair of the Suspect, who lay with his head down in his arms at the kitchen table, sobbing. Outside his wife screamed abuse at an intruding journalist, managing to crack him over the head with a sweeping brush as he ran for his life.

“Later!” the Marshal mouthed at the face looking in at the window. It was the man from the house across the way, probably just back from work in the fields, as it was sixish. “You shouldn’t be here.” He waved him away. The man looked disgruntled but he went.

They were still searching the kitchen, looking now at a huge scratched sideboard, the drawers and cupboards of which were crammed with the stuff that always accumulates in the most-used room of a house. Simonetti himself and Di Maira were doing the actual searching. The Marshal’s part was simpler. It was his job to make a written description of anything they might decide to remove and to put everything exactly back in place when they moved on. As yet they hadn’t decided to take anything. They had filmed the area before starting and were now filming the open drawers as they were emptied.

“Excuse me,” the Marshal ventured to interrupt. “This postcard …”

“What about it?” Simonetti, crouched in front of the cupboard, didn’t look up.

“It’s a nuisance, but I think we’ll have to do the first part of the filming here again. It must have fallen on the floor or somebody knocked it off by accident.”

“Leave it there. It probably fell out of this cupboard.”

“No, no … it was propped up here at the back. I happened to notice it this morning.”

“All right, all right. Just leave it there. I’ll see that it gets filmed if it’s of any interest.”

The Marshal replaced the card carefully where he remembered seeing it earlier and the cameraman moved forward to do a close-up of a biscuit tin that Simonetti was trying to open. Di Maira stood back and as he did so the postcard caught his eye. He gave the Marshal a sharp glance and quickly turned away.

Behind them, the Suspect came in carrying a bucket full of new-laid eggs.

“I’m just trying to get on with my work,” he wailed, his meaty face as tear-stained as ever. “I’ve worked all my life, I’ve made myself ill. My heart’s done for, and this is what I get.”

He put down the bucket of eggs and, spotting what Simonetti had just succeeded in opening, his wail increased in volume:

“This is what it’s got me! Strangers going through all my belongings, strangers poking about in my private things, making a joke of the pathetic few lire I’ve scraped together over years and years of back-breaking work. I did my best to do as my father taught me and put that little bit by each week—thank God he’s not alive today to see what it’s all come to. But God’ll pay you back for this! He’s going to see to it that you burn in hell for persecuting an innocent man. A scapegoat! That’s what I am, a scapegoat, because I’m too old and sick and worn out to defend myself.”

“Oh God,” sighed Simonetti, sick of this diatribe, as indeed they all were. “That’s it. Tidy up here. We’ll move on next door …”

“My rabbits! You’re not touching my rabbits! The shock’d kill them like it’s killing me! Not my rabbits …”

He trailed after them, sobbing as they went out the kitchen door and in at the next door on the yard to where fat brown rabbits crouched in overcrowded cages in the smelly darkness.

The Marshal remained behind to put everything back in place. When he’d finished, he shut the cupboards and then tried to shut the drawer at the top, but it stuck. It was far too full and he tried to rearrange the stuff, thinking something must be sticking up. There were stacks of household bills, light bulbs in boxes, spare plugs and
bits of wire, a hammer, tubes of glue, a holy picture, a screw-top jam jar with mixed nails in it, broken pencils and half-used ballpoints with no tops and a big roll of brown plastic sticky tape for parcels. The roll of tape looked the most likely culprit. The Marshal made a deeper space for it and laid it flat. The drawer still wouldn’t shut. Then he remembered a trick. It wasn’t something he’d discovered for himself. A colleague had told him about it after finding a hidden pistol and the sticky tape had reminded him of it now.

“Dead simple, really. They make a parcel of it, put it right at the back of a drawer and tape it to the inside back of the chest so that when you pull the drawer out it stays at the back. What happened was, I pulled the drawer out too far altogether. It fell down behind it, still taped to the back of the chest and the drawer wouldn’t shut. Not bad really. If I hadn’t yanked at the drawer because I’d lost my patience I’d probably never have found the thing.”

The Marshal didn’t lose his patience. He slid the drawer out carefully and put it on the table. Then he bent to look. The parcel was flat and oblong, wrapped in something black, probably a rubbish bag, and stuck to the inside back of the sideboard with the plastic sticky tape.

There was a sudden commotion followed by a piercing scream out in the yard. The Marshal straightened up and went to the door.

“He’ll kill me! He’ll blame me and he’ll kill me! He’s bound to blame me! Oh, Holy Mother of God!”

“Stay where you are, we’ll get them back.”

But the rabbits, a whole cage full of them, had no intention of being got back in without giving everybody a good run for their money. It was the first time in their lives they’d had the possibility of moving more than a few centimetres and they intended to make the most of it, scattering in a dozen directions at once in the pouring rain, ears down and bobtails up.

The Marshal assumed that Simonetti would not be joining in the chase and went next door to tell him what he’d found.

The parcel was filmed in its hiding place, before being removed and opened.

“Money …”

Wads of used notes, each with an elastic band round it.

They filmed it spread out on the black rubbish bag.

“Our friend obviously doesn’t believe in banks,” was Simonetti’s only comment. “Thank you. You may as well stick it back where you found it.” He left with the cameraman.

Outside, the rabbit hunt continued, with the Suspect’s wails and imprecations now added to his wife’s screams.

The Marshal counted the hundred thousand notes in one of the wads. Then he counted the wads and put them back in the bag. A hundred and thirty million lire. He closed the parcel with fresh tape and reached to the back of the drawer cavity to stick it back in place.

That was as much as he earned himself in four years. In the biscuit tin that Simonetti had opened there had been a savings book with another eighty million or so, and a pile of share certificates made out to the bearer. He hadn’t been able to see how much they were worth.

When he finished tidying, he went to the window and stood a moment watching the chaotic scene outside.

“Hmph,” he said to himself aloud. He didn’t add anything else, conscious of the bugs concealed in the room. Still, that didn’t prevent his thinking that, despite all his years of sweating on the land, his own father’s hens and rabbits had never resulted in wads of shares and bank notes.

As he walked out the kitchen door he encountered Noferini. The boy was wet and red in the face and clutching a soaked and trembling rabbit. Apparently he hadn’t been too tired to join in the chase.

“We’ve got them all!”

“Good. Because they must be worth their weight in gold.”

Noferini stared after him.

At the gate someone was waiting, hidden by a vast green cotton umbrella of the sort country people use.