A Scream in Soho (14 page)

Chapter XVI

Exit Floriello Mascagni!

Floriello Mascagni, so summarily dismissed from the
Circolo Venezia
, landed out into the streets again in a condition of white-hot rage. Not a little of that violent emotion was caused by the fact of the poor showing he knew himself to have made in front of a man he despised, Luigi Fasoli. He, himself, had invariably treated the wine-shop keeper with unconcealed contempt; the contempt of a gang-boss whose mob would have wrecked the place without turning a hair if the older man had dared to show any open resentment. If he knew his Fasoli, the whisper that Flo. Mascagni had taken a verbal trouncing without as much as lifting a finger, would be well around Soho before he was so much older.

His rage was further aggravated by the thought that, but for this German swine's autocratic orders to meet, and report, to him there at eleven o'clock, he would have been dancing, or otherwise enjoying himself, with Tessa. A moment's reflection upon this point brought him realization that, when all was said and done, it was but a little after eleven o'clock now—quite time enough for them to enjoy an hour or two at one or two of the underworld dance dives where he and his kind were especially catered for, and where closing hours were an extremely elastic business.

Making for the nearest telephone-booth he dialled her lodgings in Doughty Street—Tessa had months ago left the home circle for brighter surroundings: the simple ways of Giacomo Domenico, the wine-cask maker, and his wife, Lucia, were not hers, these days.

His ring was answered by her landlady, who informed him that Tessa had gone out an hour or so ago, and had evidently gone to some restaurant or night club since she had arrayed herself in her latest finery. She had left no word, either as to where she was going, or as to what time she might be expected to return.

A quick stab of jealousy aggravated still further the savage passions already burning in his breast. Knowing her, it was not feasible that she had dressed in that style to spend what was left of the night by herself. Who, then, had she gone to meet?

He prowled the streets for a while, then decided to put in an hour or two at a certain club frequented by gamblers, which also had the convenient tab “Circolo” tacked on to it for obvious reasons—this particular dive was glorified by the title of the
Circolo Romagna
, though the Romans who entered its portals were few and far between. He had plenty of money on him, and there was invariably a hot “school” to be found there.

He had been playing for perhaps half an hour and winning steadily, when he asked the club proprietor to give Tessa's number a ring. The man later on remembered that it was at just on half-past twelve. He got an answer to the effect that Tessa was not home yet; a reply which had the result of rousing the brooding devil which was eating at Mascagni to fever pitch.

Where the hell was she? Who was she out with?

“
Dio mio
, Flo.!” one of the card-players grunted as for the third time Mascagni raked in a heavy pool. “Like-a dese Engleesa say: you lucky da cards, unlucky da love!”

Mascagni half-rose with a snarl, and in an instant would have been at the throat of the jester, but that he suddenly remembered that the fellow was a
Camorrista
man, and the come-back from a quarrel with him might be extremely unpleasant. With a muttered oath, he went on playing.

But, strangely enough, from that moment Mascagni's luck turned. He began to lose even more heavily than he had been winning before.

It was at about one o'clock that the phone rang, and Olinto Delmorti, the proprietor of the club, went to the instrument. It was Tessa Domenico, ringing Flo. Mascagni.

What transpired at the telephone must have been something which pleased the gangster, for, for the first time that night, the brooding scowl left his face and something like a smile took its place. When he came back to the card-table he was whistling.

“Not so unlucky in love, Giacomo,” he observed to the elder man who had spoken. “I got a date in an hour so you'll know that I'm quitting then.”

“
Si!
” the other answered. “But you lose-a da cards, now, Floriello. When I spoke, you win ever't'ing.”

But, by a strange coincidence, Mascagni's luck changed again. In the next three-quarters of an hour all, and more, of the bundle of notes he had passed over had returned to him, and he got up a good winner. With a careless nod and the remark that they would finish it out another time, he left the club and turned up towards Oxford Street.

In a sort of subconscious way he noticed a little figure in a doorway opposite the
Circolo;
someone who, as far as height went, might have been a lad of twelve. As Mascagni moved on up the street, so also did he, but the gangster took no further notice of him.

Suddenly rain began to fall in a light drizzle, and Mascagni turned towards a back alley which he knew would give him a short cut towards that part of Oxford Street for which he was heading. He noticed, almost without realizing, that the small figure which had kept pace with him along the other side of the street had disappeared; then he heard him scuttling along the alley well in front of him. One of those pests of homeless kids who are to be found dossing in every second doorway in Soho, he supposed.

Along the alley he went, keeping under the lee side of the wall. Something, a shadow, suddenly moved in the recessed doorway of a warehouse right opposite him. He supposed it was that kid who had dodged in there out of the rain. Then, suddenly, and without the slightest sound or warning, the beam of a powerful torch shot straight into his face from that doorway opposite, momentarily blinding him. He flung his hand up to cover his eyes—and that was the last action of Floriello Mascagni on earth.

With incredible speed and force a knife flew across the dividing space, piercing his throat and pinning his head to the solid door behind him. Like a flash it was followed by the thrower, who plunged a second weapon right to his heart. With a groan, which was the last sound he ever made, he hung there limply for a second or two, then his weight dragged the first knife from the door and he collapsed in a heap immediately beneath it.

With that same swiftness with which he seemed to do everything, the little figure pulled the knife from his victim's throat and recovered the other. As calmly as though he were eating his dinner, he wiped both weapons upon the dead man's clothes and put them back in their sheaths. Systematically, he went through every pocket of Mascagni's clothes and emptied them, then slid out of the alley as noiselessly as he had entered it!

***

Curiously enough it was that never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed nuisance, Paolo Vanadi, who found the body of the gangster. The mere fact of his being at large proved Fasoli's positive conviction that his belligerent customer had fallen into the hands of the police, as usual, to be entirely wrong.

One would have thought that, with his police record for bellicosity when in drink, the reveller from the North Country would have made a rush to find the nearest constable to prove that he had no complicity in the crime. Another strange fact, strange considering the condition he had been in but a little over two hours before, Signor Vanadi was now as sober as the proverbial judge and, instead of following what would seem to be the natural course for him to have taken, began to behave in an exceedingly strange manner.

First, in the light of a small torch he concealed beneath his coat, he examined the two dreadful wounds, then himself went through every pocket of the dead man's clothes, finding, of course, nothing. Then, in the same methodical way, he gave his attention to the door behind the dead man, found that cleft where the first knife had pinned Mascagni to the woodwork, and stood for a few moments in thought.

Giving his attention now to the doorway opposite and the cobbles between, he examined them carefully and apparently came to some decision concerning them. Following the alley along in the direction in which Mascagni had been moving, he found a tiny footprint marked clearly in blood, which showed him that someone, ostensibly a woman, though the foot, although short, was extraordinarily broad for its length, had not only been upon the scene, but must have been extremely close to the body to have stepped in the pool of blood in which it lay.

Still fainter traces of the same foot-spoor showed him that it had proceeded as far as Greek Street and then turned north. An examination of the other end of the alley showed him more than one trace of the way Mascagni had come. Apparently he had seen sufficient to stamp upon his mind some theory as to how the crime had been committed.

But something was still puzzling the signor; there was some little thing which, to judge by the frowning perplexity of his saturnine face, left an unanswered question in his mind—something which did not fit in. Returning to the body he again, and in the same cautious way, turned his torch upon it, and commenced a second search of Mascagni's clothing; it proved as futile as had the first. Suddenly he lifted one of the murdered man's hands, the right, and examined the finger-tips closely. Something he saw there brought from him a deeply-uttered, well-satisfied “Ah!”—it was a faint blue stain which marked the whorls of the dead man's first finger and thumb.

The puzzled expression had gone from the signor's face, and its place was taken by one of intense eagerness. Leaving the alley he made his way to the nearest telephone box and, in his weird, broken English, informed the police where they would find the murdered body of Floriello Mascagni. After which Signor Paolo Vanadi did something which would have considerably enlightened the denizens of Soho amongst whom he periodically paraded his wild antics.

Moving quietly to Dean Street, and first making very sure that there was no one hanging about in the immediate vicinity, he produced a latchkey and let himself into the lodgings of Detective Inspector McCarthy. Some half-hour later that officer emerged as his well-known self and, keeping well clear of the alley which by now he knew would be a hive of police, made his way by a circuitous route to the
Circolo Romagna
.

A very few minutes' earnest conversation with Olinto Delmorti—who had fear of the law in the very highest degree where Inspector McCarthy was concerned—sufficed to give the inspector the information he needed.

Firstly, that Mascagni had come into the
Circolo
somewhere in the region of a little after half-past eleven o'clock; that he had told Delmorti to put a call through to a certain number—carefully noted down by the inspector—and which was that of Tessa Domenico's lodgings in Doughty Street, off Holborn. That was at twelve-thirty; an hour later. He had learned that the beautiful Tessa had not returned home at that hour.

Secondly, that at one o'clock the phone rang and, answering it, Delmorti found it to be Tessa Domenico, asking for Mascagni. He was informed that the message must evidently have been an assignation made by Tessa for later that night, or, rather, that morning. Mascagni had been exceedingly cheerful about it and had informed his fellow-gamblers that he was finishing in something under the hour, as he had a date. He had left the club at about a quarter to two with quite a large number of notes in his possession.

“And,” McCarthy thought to himself, “was found not six minutes' walk away, murdered, and with empty pockets!”

From the
Circolo
, McCarthy put through a police call to Exchange, and was promptly given the correct address of the number given to Delmorti as Tessa Domenico's. He quickly gleaned the further information that the subscriber was a Mrs. Flannigan and the house a boarding establishment. So much for that.

“Right,” he said in parting, to the club proprietor. “You can keep the fact to yourself that I've been asking a few questions, Delmorti.”

It was as he was leaving the place, followed by the well-nigh grovelling Delmorti, that he observed one man, a dark, swarthy-skinned Italian in the dress-clothes of a waiter, covered by an overcoat, who was seated alone. What quickly fastened the inspector's attention upon him was that his keen eyes detected more than one spot of blood upon the man's collar, and also upon his shirt-front. The latter marks had been made still more prominent by a vigorous attempt to rub them out!

Any person carrying bloodstains so close to the vicinity in which Mascagni was lying murdered was of considerable interest; moreover, the man's face showed signs of having been heartily battered, and not so long since. He had a lump between his neck and jaw which suggested that he might have been kicked by a horse!

“Who's that chap?” he asked, though without appearing to give the man any particular attention.

Carefully turning his back so that the man in question should have no suspicion that he was speaking about him, Delmorti informed McCarthy that the man's name was Andrea Praga, a waiter.

“He is not long com' to Soho,” he informed McCarthy, confidentially. “He is no good—what you call a messee job,
Inspectore
. To-night 'e is sack forwit' from the
Hotel Splendide
, becos' he juggle wit' the change of a customer—
sapeti?
”

“That sort, is he?” McCarthy said. “But that doesn't explain where he got the pasting from.”

“To-night,” Delmorti informed him, in a still lower tone, “he run across a man called Paolo Vanadi—you know him, p'raps? One tough guy, so to spik. He com' here from the North each six months or so, and drinks all the wine in Soho.”

“I fancy I have heard of him,” McCarthy said, without move of a muscle.

“Well, to-night,” the signor went on, “Vanadi he is ver' drunk in de street, and this Praga 'e tries to run da rule over 'im, for his mon'. Plenty mon' this Vanadi always has on him when 'e com' to Soho.”

“He's luckier than I am, Delmorti,” the inspector said. “Well?”