The Marshal and the Murderer (11 page)

'Run about in the dust . . . ?'

'What else can they do in a room that size? And they call that physical education! If it weren't so far away they could at least have their lunch but with only one hour between that and the last lesson they've no time for more than a sandwich, the buses being what they are. Anyway, I think you should come with me to the meeting.'

'What meeting?'

'Oh, Salva! The meeting I'm telling you about if you'll only come back to earth for a minute. It looks better if you come. You haven't once set foot in the school. People will think they haven't got a father.'

'But everybody round here knows me ..."

'That's not the point. You should show an interest. It's at six-thirty tomorrow night.'

'At six-thirty? I won't be here ... at least I don't think so.'

'You're not going to be out all day again?'

'Mmm.' She gave out a dramatic sigh and counted some more stitches but that seemed to be the end of the matter. They watched the film in silence for a quarter of an hour before she spoke again.

'Who's that? That's not his wife . . .'

'Eh? Whose wife?'

'His
wife. The one we just saw leaving on a plane. The woman we got a glimpse of at the airport was blonde. Wasn't his wife a brunette and taller?'

'I've no idea.'

Another dramatic sigh.

'Your mother was right, God rest her soul. Half the time you're asleep on your feet.'

'Mmm.'

They went to bed straight after the news. Before going into their bedroom his wife went in as usual to cover up the youngest boy who always slept sprawled out with the blankets trailing down to the floor. The older boy slept huddled in a heap with his head almost invisible. The Marshal hovered at the door, the expression in his eyes like that of a jealous mother cat, though he didn't go in. Despite his wife's remark about his not taking enough interest, the two plump dark-haired boys were the centre of his existence. It was true that his wife was the one who did everything including giving them a hiding when they'd been up to mischief, but then she would always add, 'If I tell Papa what you've done, you'll get a
real
hiding!' And they would beg her not to. Naturally, she would tell him on the quiet and he would play up to his menacing image by glaring at them with huge threatening eyes, but the real hiding never happened. He was incapable of laying a finger on them.

When they were settled in bed and his wife had turned out the lamp he suddenly said in the darkness, 'Maybe it's because I eat too much.'

'What is?'

'You said I seem to be asleep on my feet. Maybe I eat too much and that's what makes me dozy.'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'All right.'

'It's because you've got something on your mind. Is it work?'

'Perhaps.'

She didn't insist. He had never got into the habit of talking about work problems with her, in part because he tried not to think about them when the working day was over, which wasn't easy given that they lived in the barracks. But it was also because they had been separated for so long when he had been sent to Florence and she had had to stay with the boys down in Syracuse because there was his sick mother to look after. He had got into the habit of brooding on things by himself. Even so, after a moment he sighed and said, 'You're right. I've got an unpleasant business on my hands . . .'

'Is that why you've been out so much?'

'Yes.'

'Try not to think about it. Get a good night's sleep.'

Easier said than done. When he did drop off his head was still filled with those same images of the rainy pottery town, and nobody could have been more surprised than he was when he woke feeling refreshed and light as if the whole business had been resolved in the simplest possible terms during the night. If he had dreamed he had no recollection of it and he found it very difficult to come back to the reality of having understood nothing at all and of being back at square one where he had been the day before. Even when he had reminded himself of the fact, the light, confident feeling remained.

'Well, you certainly look more cheerful this morning,' his wife remarked as he sat down before his big cup of milky coffee and a brioche. 'Did you sleep well?'

'I must have done . . .' There was no explaining it, and what was more he had the feeling that what was at the bottom of it was that he must have remembered during the night the fact that had eluded him yesterday. Again he was convinced that it was linked to the girl's being locked out in the rain, but if he had indeed remembered during the night he recalled nothing of it now.

Before leaving, he went into his office to fill in the daily sheet which he hadn't managed to get to the evening before because of the exhibition.

'Are you going to be out all day again?' Brigadier Lorenzini, though perfectly capable of managing everything in his absence, looked as if he and the lads were being left orphans.

'I'll get back as early as I can this afternoon.'

But he wasn't to see his office again for a long time, if only he'd known it. He got into his greatcoat and, after a glance out of the window at the bright wintry weather, fished about in the pockets for his sunglasses and put them on. At the bottom of the stairs he greeted the park-keepers in their office on the ground floor, and came out blinking even behind his dark glasses into the bright day. His battered little car was parked in deep shadow alongside the squad car and the van on the gravel just outside the door. As he got in and started the engine he glanced over the laurel bushes at the glittering marble bell-tower and the red-domed cathedral wreathed in a pale bluish mist and remembered that yesterday should have been his day off. It would have been nice to be free today to take a turn around the peaceful tree-lined paths in the Boboli Gardens here, pausing to look at the goldfish swimming around below the fountain in the green lake, or to sit for a while on a warm stone bench in one of the sunny arbours guarded by white statues of Roman soldiers. He would even have enjoyed a walk in the centre with his wife to look at the elegant shops they would never be able to afford to go into.

'Well,' he muttered to himself, 'have to wait till you're on your pension. Let's hope at least that the weather stays like this even out there . . .'

If anything, there seemed to be rather more ground mist about once he was on the open road and following the railway line, and he wound up the window which he had left open until then. It seemed a few degrees cooler, though that might have been his imagination. However, the sky remained empty and bright. When he pulled over and parked outside Berti's place the cottage with the pile of junk and plastic bags beside it looked even more dilapidated and dirty in the sunlight than it had in the grey November rain that had softened and camouflaged it.

There was no other car there and the metal shutter was rolled down covering the door and window of the studio. Before he had even switched off his engine Tina's pale round face appeared behind the small barred window, smiling vacantly, as though she had been expecting him. When he got out and tapped at the door he could hear her shuffling footsteps already approaching and she opened the door to him readily, one eye smiling at him with childish pleasure, the other drifting.

'Good morning,' began the Marshal, 1 won't come in'

But she was shuffling away from him, pretending not to hear, and he had no choice but to take off his dark glasses and follow her, holding his breath against the stench in the narrow corridor.

'You can sit on the chair where you sat before.'

He could imagine her saying the same thing to the Swiss girl, pathetic in her pleasure at receiving somebody. The house was exactly as it had been, everything severely tidy but nothing looking fresh and clean, though that might have been a psychological effect of the smell.

'I wanted to ask you about your brother - your brother is Moretti, is that right?'

'That's right.' Her eyes lit up at the mention of him.

'Why don't you sit down, too?'

She pulled another hard chair away from the table and sat down facing him with her hands in her lap like an obedient child.

'When you go to see him, do you go to his house?'

She shook her head. 'He hasn't got a house.'

'I see.' Did he tell her that to keep her off his back? At any rate this wasn't the moment to disillusion her since he seemed to be the only light in her life. 'You go to the factory, then?'

'That's right. But only when there's nobody else there, so nobody knows. You won't tell
him?'

'No, no . . .'He thought for a moment.'He doesn't come to see you here.'

'For a while he did but I don't think he'll come any more, not now.'

'Why is that?'

'He liked to look at the Signorina but now she won't be coming any more, will she?'

'No, she won't be coming any more.'

'Will they put her in the cemetery?'

'Yes.'

'That's where they put my baby. Will she be put near my baby?'

'No, a long way away, near her own house.'

'That is a long way, she told me. But not across the sea.'

'No, not across the sea. Did your brother come last week to see the Signorina?'

'Yes. He used to say how pretty she was. He used to say that she liked him and sometimes she used to go and see him. She used to smile at him, and at me, too. She used to smile at everybody.'

'That's right,' the Marshal said, 'she did.'

'Even Robiglio, and he's a spy.'

'Robiglio? He came here, too?'

'No.'

'Then how do you know?'

'My brother told me.'

'Well, perhaps she didn't know he was a spy. Do you know what a spy is?'

'Somebody wicked. He was sick afterwards, my grandma told me. She used to say he was as sick as a dog afterwards and that he tried to hide his face from her and that the whole room was full of blood and they drank all the wine in the house.'

'Who did?'

'They
did.'

'You don't know who they were? Do you know why the room was full of blood?'

'No.'

'You weren't here?'

'Yes, I was.'

'But you can't remember what happened?'

'I was asleep.'

The Marshal would have been tempted to dismiss all this as the ramblings of a lost mind, but he had a double reason for not doing so. First of all, he had thought the same thing about her story of the baby which had turned out to be true, and secondly because he remembered that Robiglio had been involved in something nasty during the war. If this was the something concerned, then there must be a more reliable source of information somewhere and there was no point in pursuing it with Tina. Perhaps it was this vague and disturbing story that caused the feeling of anxiety he had felt yesterday to return and obliterate his morning optimism. A feeling that if they didn't get there in time something was going to happen. He got to his feet.

'Are you going away?' Tina loked about her as if hoping to find something to distract and delay him as the picture of her baby had done, but he put on his hat and moved to the door.

She shuffled after him pulling at his coat sleeve.

'Aren't you going to touch me?'

'What?'

'Aren't you going to do something to me?'

'No . . .'

He heard her draw in a sharp breath and her shuffling steps came to a sudden halt. He was already in the corridor and he turned to look down at her, surprised that his answer should have caused such a strong reaction. But he was mistaken. Her habituated ear had caught a sound he hadn't noticed and her face was red with fright.

The front door was opening and silhouetted against the bright light from outside the Marshal saw a small dark figure holding something bulky. When the door closed and they were all enclosed in the evil-smelling gloom he saw that this must be Tina's husband standing as still as a suspicious animal and staring at them in silence, a dark, rat-like little man in a greasy black beret, carrying a big bundle of grass under one arm.

'Good morning.'

The marshal's greeting was left hanging in the air and nobody moved. Then the small man's mouth widened in a threatening leer directed at Tina and showing two widely spaced brown teeth. Without a word, he turned and opened the door of the room where the animals were kept and vanished.

The Marshal went to the front door and opened it, turning to take his leave of Tina, but she, too, had disappeared. He went out, blinking into the daylight and put on his sunglasses.

There was still no sign of Berti and he hovered there a moment outside the studio, watching the traffic stream by and wondering whether to wait.

A muffled, high-pitched sound behind him made him turn and look back at Tina's house, frowning. He saw nothing but the little black cat, or rather its eyes, glittering in the gloom behind the bars. Perhaps he had imagined the noise. He strained his ears but there was nothing but the dull sound of the traffic. This place was getting on his nerves. The anxiety was rising inside him no matter how he tried to reason it away. But the noise came again and this time there was no possibility of his having imagined it. A frightened wail, desolate and barely human. His first thought was that the hare he had seen fattening in the barrel was being slaughtered, but he knew it wasn't true even before he remembered the big bundle of grass. Then he heard a man's voice raised in anger though the words were indistinct. He caught only the odd phrases:

'How often have I told you? Well? Well? Imbecile! Keep your stupid mouth shut!'

Then the terrified wail again.

He took a few steps towards the door and then stopped. If he went in there and intervened - even supposing somebody opened up for him, which was unlikely - he would only make matters worse. He couldn't stay there for ever and once he left . . . What was the use?

He got into the car. He couldn't stand to wait here for Berti. Niccolini would have to see to it.

But as he drove round the big curve the first thing he saw was Berti, coming down the steps of Moretti's factory with his slow spidery walk and a stack of plates in his arms. Parked below the wall in front of the terrace was a truck, and the big man in the woollen hat was lowering a huge red pot down to someone standing in it surrounded by heaps of straw. The Marshal braked, putting on his indicator. The only way to get over there was to turn in in front of Robiglio's gates as Berti had done. He glanced down the drive at the big house with the seven lavatories but no one was looking out today, as far as he could see. He turned and drove across to Moretti's, parking in front of the truck. The blue car was parked behind it and Berti was loading plates into the boot, but the Marshal didn't approach him at once. Having got out of his car on the side near the wall, he was able to see something which had been invisible from the road because the truck had been in the way. Someone had used a can of red spray paint, probably during the night, to write in huge uneven letters along the wall below the terrace the word MURDERER.