The Monster of Florence (5 page)

“I’m surprised he’d want to take this on,” he said. “I mean … better men than him have had to give up on it when the trail was hot, as you might say, but now … and there was never a scrap of evidence as far as I’ve heard. He didn’t strike me as a man who would care for such a public failure.”

“No, he wouldn’t like that.”

Their coffee was brought and the Marshal stirred sugar into his thoughtfully before saying, “In that case I suppose the Chief Public Prosecutor’s dumped the thing on him and he’s got no choice. That won’t improve his temper.”

“The Chief Public Prosecutor and Simonetti,” replied the Captain, apparently addressing his pen, “are old friends. They hunt together, I believe. Simonetti has ambitions. The Chief has a thorn in his side and that thorn is the Monster. This coming year will be the Chief’s last year in office. Then he retires. He’s made a name for himself; you know that he’s had a lot of success in kidnapping cases which, as they often involved foreigners, made him something of a reputation abroad as well as here. He also had a lot of success against terrorism. It’s been an energetic and, if you like, aggressive battle against crime and he’s enjoyed every minute of it, no doubt.”

“But you don’t like him.”

“Let’s say he appears too often on television for my personal taste. Well, it’s not my place to criticize the man and I’m sure he could hardly care less what I think. Even so, he’s made enemies along the way, chiefly because his steamroller tactics leave a lot of walking wounded amongst his colleagues, as many as among the criminal fraternity, I would imagine. At any rate, when the Prosecutor General opened this Judicial Year his speech included some lengthy and unpleasant comments on the failure to apprehend the Florentine serial killer known as the Monster. All the Chief’s years of success go for nothing if he retires as the man who failed to solve
the case that’s sold more newspapers than any other crime in his lifetime.”

“I see. Well, that’s understandable, of course …”

“He set up a specialized squad for this case some time ago, but its activities weren’t much publicized in case nothing resulted.”

“And now something has?”

“Apparently. He wants a rather bigger team. Six men. Three from the civil police and three carabinieri.”

He was reciting again. He clearly wasn’t going to explain why the Marshal had been chosen.

“Can I at least ask … even if you don’t want to—who made the choice, of the three carabinieri, that is?”

“It was made here. We made it.”

“Thank you. I’d no right to ask, but thank you.”

“There’s no reason why you should thank me. The business will be a nuisance to you, I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t ask you to be so much absent from your station did you not have Lorenzini, who I know is extremely competent.”

“Yes. Yes, Lorenzini …”

“And however this business goes, I want you to know that I think a lot of you. You’ve done some good work in the past and I appreciate it. I’m sounding apologetic, but it’s certain that you won’t enjoy being under the authority of the civil police and Simonetti’s preference means that’s how it will work even though you are three and three.”

Well, that perhaps explained the Captain’s embarrassment and his anger also.

“I’ll do my best not to let you down.”

“Do your best to cope and don’t worry about letting me down. You won’t be required to work any miracles, you can set your mind to rest about that.”

“I’m glad to hear it, given how little I know about such things. I wasn’t even here when it began.”

“We all know very little, Marshal. The last time anything remotely resembling this happened in Italy was in nineteen twenty-seven and the police put up a poor show then.”

“So you’re not very hopeful that anything will come of this, despite the new developments.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know, and that’s the truth.”

Again he got to his feet, clearly wanting the interview to be over. The Marshal got up and followed him to the door.

“They expect you at eight tomorrow morning.”

There was no doubt that the brief touch on the Marshal’s shoulder as he said it was friendly, but there was no doubt either that his face as he watched the Marshal leave was dark with anger.

“Don’t tell the boys.”

“For heaven’s sake, Salva, as if I’d dream of talking about something like that to the boys.” Even so, Teresa, too, glanced anxiously at the door through which they’d charged the minute it stopped raining. The white Sunday tablecloth was still on and she had just cleared their plates and brought in coffee. “Such a nasty affair …”

She didn’t go on but the Marshal understood what she was feeling. She’d still been down in Sicily when most of the murders happened but the newspapers all over the country had made the most of such a ghoulish case of murder and sexual mutilation. What she was thinking, and he couldn’t blame her, was that he’d brought it into the house. Wasn’t that what he was feeling himself in not wanting the boys to know?

“Of course, the papers will be full of it,” she went on, “and it’ll be on television all the time. They’re bound to be asking questions.”

“It doesn’t matter as long as they don’t know I’m involved. You needn’t imagine my name’ll ever be in the papers. Why me? That’s what I still want to know. Why me? It makes no sense but there must be a reason. They didn’t pick names out of a hat. Maestrangelo said they’d made the choice themselves but he looked angry.”

“And you can’t imagine why?”

He stared at her. “You mean you can?”

“I mean maybe he’d like it to be himself. So, if for some reason he was passed over …”

“No, no …”

“He’s only human, you know.”

The Marshal sipped his coffee in silence, thinking. He was a great admirer of Captain Maestrangelo, seeing him as everything he himself was not: intelligent, well educated, a good speaker. He’d never thought a lot about the man’s human qualities because they weren’t what you noticed. Teresa would, of course; that was like her. She’d even said when they first met that Maestrangelo was a handsome man, and attractive to women, or that he would be if he smiled. That had certainly never crossed the Marshal’s mind—but then, Maestrangelo never smiled. He was ambitious, that was true … but even so …

“No, no …” he said again. “He has his ambitions, he’ll end up a general, I’m sure of that. But however reliable he might be as an investigator, it’s not where his ambitions lie. And then, a case like this, I can’t see how it can come to anything with the best will in the world. All those years ago and there never was any evidence. No, no, he’s not the man for anything risky or unusual.”

“Well, if you say so, but leaving that aside, I don’t see why they shouldn’t choose you.”

“He said, ‘We made the choice.’ He emphasized the ‘we.’ As though he were taking the responsibility but without liking it. It’s the Colonel’s responsibility, anything of that sort, but he hasn’t been here much more than a month.”

“So the Captain must have recommended you—you know, you really shouldn’t run yourself down the way you do. The Captain thinks a lot of you, you’ve solved some important cases.”

“I’ve never been on an important case. The only case I ever solved was when that poor creature Cipolla shot that Englishman. And he only did it by accident and after that he was just hanging around waiting for me to arrest him.”

“I’ll grant you that—have a drop more coffee; I don’t want any more.”

“It’ll keep me awake.” He accepted it, even so.

“No, I’ll grant you that but what about that jeweller who died years ago? You can’t deny you found out who was responsible for that. I remember the whole story.”

“I didn’t catch her. She was arrested somewhere up near the Swiss border. She confessed. I never so much as signed my name to a report on that. And the same goes for that case in the potteries. I did sort that out, it’s true, but the case was in the hands of the local force—it was out of my area.”

“Well, what about that foreigner in the fur coat? That was your case.”

“Yes, and I didn’t solve it. The chap died in America and we never so much as got a glimpse of him—and what’s more the Prosecutor on that job was the one who’s in charge of this one so that rules out any danger of him thinking I’m some sort of Sherlock Holmes.”

“I still think you’re running yourself down and that the Captain thinks very highly of you. He told me so when we first met, I remember it well.”

The time she’d said he was good-looking.

“He was just being polite.”

“No, he wasn’t. I can tell the difference—and what about that poor crazy old woman near the butcher’s. Now, I was here then—that’s when I started to go to that butcher—you can’t deny you found that dreadful man.”

“There was no arrest. I was too late. That’s me all over, too slow.”

“He committed suicide! For goodness sake, Salva, you still found him!”

“Well … I suppose that’s true enough, though if it hadn’t been for that neighbour telling me … anyway, all right. I found him. So that’s two. Him and Cipolla. Add that to a lot of stolen handbags, never recovered, and dozens of tourists with lost cameras and passports and it still doesn’t make me Sherlock Holmes.”

But Teresa insisted and in the end she almost convinced him. Then she lectured him. People—apart from the Captain, who knew him well—would think more of him if he thought more of himself and if he spoke up now and again and showed a bit of interest instead of just standing there staring into space. The Marshal was at once more comfortable. This was a line of reasoning more acceptable because more familiar. He’d been hearing it for years, from his mother and his
teachers when he was small, and from his wife for the whole time they’d been married. As always, at the end of it he agreed with everything she’d said and resolved to make an effort to look alert and to speak up more, starting at eight tomorrow morning.

After all was said and done, this was an important case and, whatever the reason behind the choice might be, there was no getting away from the fact that he’d been chosen. He owed it to his Captain to keep his wits about him and he was going to do just that. Instead of sitting down with the paper after lunch he went straight to his office and plodded through all his outstanding paperwork. At five he called his young brigadier, Lorenzini, who was married and lived out of barracks, and together they prepared the daily orders for Monday.

By bedtime that night he felt that he had his world under control and his last thought as he dozed off was that, after all, it might prove a very interesting experience and he ought to consider himself both flattered and privileged.

At one-thirty in the morning his eyes opened and he was wide awake on the instant. He’d forgotten to telephone young Marco as he’d promised to do. Damn! He did hate to let someone down when he’d promised. Not only that, he’d forgotten that he’d reminded himself this morning, as he left that bar, to consult the Captain about the problem of the painting, but the new case had—and in that bar he’d bought a cake, an expensive cake, and left it there. So much for keeping his wits about him. A fine start. He’d have to do a lot better than that tomorrow morning. Whether it was his apprehension about tomorrow morning or his annoyance with himself for his forgetfulness, or just all those extra coffees he’d drunk, something kept him wakeful until the small hours. The next morning at eight o’clock he was rather more fuzzy headed and silent than usual.

It was nowhere near as bad as he’d expected. In the first place, he wasn’t faced with a group of complete strangers. He knew both of the other carabinieri, that was the first thing he noted with relief. One of them, Ferrini, was a man of his own age with whom he’d
once worked on a case, and though they were very different they got on well. The other, Bacci, he knew almost as well as his own children, having had him under his feet at Pitti whilst he waited for a place at the Officer School. Bacci must be about due for a promotion to captain by now, but his face was as boyish and ingenuous as ever and surely he was a bit young to be on a case like this? And that young policeman sitting opposite him didn’t seem much more than a boy, either. That probably meant that the Marshal was getting old. Then, you had to remember that youngsters these days had special skills, computers and so on. The thought that they might be there because the job involved anything dynamic and dangerous crossed his mind briefly and vanished, and he returned comfortably to the idea of “computers and so on,” a phrase which covered and dismissed a whole area of investigative activity regarded by him with exaggerated respect and complete detachment.

Running his gaze over the other two policemen opposite he noticed, right facing himself, a face he knew but couldn’t put a name to. The man was about his own age, and when he caught the Marshal’s eye he gave a faint nod of recognition before returning his gaze to the Prosecutor, Simonetti, who had launched into one of his speeches of the sort meant to sound friendly and improvised but which was carefully conceived and rehearsed. What
was
that chap’s name? Di Maira, that was it. They’d come across each other years ago. The other he recognized as a tough and experienced detective. No need to wonder why he was there. Couldn’t remember his name, though.

The room was overheated and quite a few of the men had lit cigarettes. The Marshal fished for his big white handkerchief and dabbed it unobtrusively at his sensitive eyes, which were suffering from both the increasing smoke and lack of sleep. Even so, he didn’t feel as uncomfortable as he’d expected and he relaxed a little as he watched Simonetti hold forth. One thing was sure, he wasn’t there against his will. His face, as he expounded, was pink with enthusiasm and it was clear that there were no doubts assailing his mind as to the future success of their efforts. Much as the Marshal disliked this sleek and
arrogant man, he also envied him. Envied his talent for believing himself in the right—because the Marshal had no doubt at all that he did believe it. It wasn’t a pose and that was why he was able to convince others. How does a man get that way? How does he account to himself for his mistakes, his wickedness, worst of all, his gaffes? Well, perhaps you had to be born that way and that was all there was to it. Not much fun for the people around you, of course. The way the man waved his arms about as if he were directing traffic—that must be a habit he’d developed in court, getting the full effect with the wide arms of his black silk gown which, the Marshal remembered, he always seemed to wear off the shoulder with a very fancy suit showing beneath. His plastron always used to be out of place as well—not crooked but carefully placed to look careless. Dislike for the man welled stronger in the Marshal’s breast as he remembered Mario Querci, innocent witness to murder, who fell victim to this man’s predatory instincts, was swooped on and borne away, then dropped when a meatier prey was offered. For Querci it had been too late because by then he’d been in prison, lost his job and his wife and child. Having no other resources, shocked and frightened beyond recovery, he killed himself. And Simonetti, assuming he’d even registered an event of so little importance so long after the fact, would never for a moment have doubted his right to do what he did. God help anyone who fell in his way in a case as important as this one. There’d be blood and fur everywhere once he started. Why was he thinking of him in that way? Simonetti wasn’t thin, didn’t have a beaky nose or anything … he was well set up and squarish … was it the Captain saying he and the Chief Public Prosecutor hunted together?