The Marshal and the Murderer (13 page)

The Marshal remained motionless, letting Niccolini take the floor.

'Well, you'll probably think we're as bad as your cleaning woman because we're here looking for advice and information as well. But, to keep it brief, there's been a young Swiss girl found strangled on the sherd ruck outside Moretti's place.'

'That much I heard but I don't know what she was doing there. Did she work for young Moretti?'

'She was working for Berti, learning Majolica, but now and again, when his men were off, she went round to Moretti's place to do a bit of throwing, just to keep her hand in. She wasn't working for him.'

'So you think it's one of Moretti's men?'

'Not necessarily. They weren't working that day and theoretically anyone could have gone in there and, finding her alone . . . The trouble is we're working in the dark and what we need is some background information.'

'On what?'

'Well, I suppose on Moretti, for a start . . .' Niccolini looked a bit embarrassed. 'They say he's a friend of yours.'

The doctor smiled, to himself rather than at Niccolini. 'You could put it that way.'

'It's not that he's a suspect particularly, you understand, less so than anyone since he has a solid alibi, but he's hiding something, even so. Something serious enough to cause a fight with one of his men.'

'Who?'

'Sestini.'

'You mean a quarrel or a real fist fight?'

'I mean a fight. They were going for each other like dogs. And then there are these stories going around about Robiglio, and I'm not happy about his behaviour towards us either. Then when Marshal Guarnaccia here had a word with Moretti's sister'

'Tina? How is the poor child?' The description seemed apt enough despite Tina's age.

'Half crazy, according to Guarnaccia, and it sounds as though that husband of hers doesn't treat her any too well.'

'Poor creature. So like her mother. And it was she who put you on to Robiglio?'

'Not exactly. I'd heard stories already. In any case, Tina's story was too garbled to mean much, but it did sound as though the Moretti family was connected with Robiglio's dark past and since you were here then . . .'

'I was here.' He took the pipe from his mouth and considered it in silence for a moment. Then he stood up and went over to the open window. With his back to them he said, 'Those were terrible years. I don't say we should forget them, but even so, I don't believe in keeping old hatreds alive. We have to look forward, not back. Are you sure this has something to do with the girl who was murdered?'

'No. We're not sure of anything.'

'What could she have to do with something that happened before she was born?'

'I don't know. I'm being honest with you, I don't know. But I do know that Robiglio's trying to get himself elected. They say he'll try for mayor.'

'I'veheard that.'

'And you approve?'

'No. But it's a long time since I mixed myself up in politics. As mayor he might be no worse than another.'

'Perhaps not. But one thing's certain, he won't want his wartime activities advertised just now.'

'No, and I'm the last man to advertise them for a number of reasons, not the least of them being that he was hardly more than a boy then.'

'I understand. But we're not conducting a witch hunt, we're investigating a murder. Whatever you tell us can remain between us unless it turns out that Robiglio's our killer, in which case the elections will hardly be his most immediate problem, and I very much doubt if it will come to that.'

The doctor remained at the window, staring out at the well. At last he turned and said, I'm not saying you're wrong in thinking that the Morettis are involved with Robiglio, but surely, to cause a young girl to be murdered - is it that you think she found out something?'

'She might have.'

'But what would a foreigner have made of information like that?'

'I couldn't say since we don't know the story.'

"Then take it from me that if this girl became such a danger it could hardly have been because of what happened during the war. It would have had to be something more recent, something more immediately threatening.'

'That's what Guarnaccia here says, but as far as I know, Moretti has nothing to do with Robiglio these days. He doesn't even do business with him.'

'He has done business with him. He once bought a piece of land from him.'

The Marshal who had listened in silence until now spoke quietly.

'Perhaps you could show him the letters.'

'What letters?' The doctor came forward and Niccolini took the package from his pocket and handed it to him. He fished out a pair of reading glasses which he held on the end of his nose like a lorgnette and walked back to the window.

'My eyesight isn't what it should be . . .'

He read through all the letters without comment except for an occasional sigh or grunt of disgust. Then he slapped them back together and handed them over.

'You're right. If things are stirred up to this extent it's better you should know everything.' He settled in his chair and slipped the glasses back into his top pocket with one hand. The Marshal, watching him, noted a slight tremor there. The thin, translucent skin was spotted with brown and the fingers moved with a slow hesitancy as though fumbling in the dark. Only there did the doctor's age show; for the rest, he might have been under seventy. The hands folded slowly over each other and then opened to indicate the window.

'You've seen the well out there? It's dry, has been for years and years, but it came in useful for hiding people during the war. Jews, partisans, and once the parish priest from a village nearby because the SS were looking for him . . . You two are not from these parts I can tell.'

'No,' answered Niccolini, 'I'm a Roman myself and Guarnaccia's from Syracuse.'

'And of course you're very young and don't remember. I don't know whether you realize that half the partisans who died in the fight against nazi-fascism were Tuscans. I'm not making out that our boys were any more dedicated or heroic than others. I suppose they might have been but I'd hesitate to say so. It was just the way things went. The trouble was, you see, that the armistice of '43 was drawn up in such a hurry. So many misunderstandings were never ironed out as they might have been with a bit of thought and patience. Of course, it was inevitable that the Allies didn't trust us. They were frightened of being double-crossed and the result was that they drew up an armistice that eliminated Italy from the list of protagonists of the war, leaving us to deal with the Germans as best we could and going about their business in their own way. It was understandable but it was tragic, as much for them as for us. I said then and I still say that if only there had been some coordination, if only the Allies had made their landing between Rome and La Spezia as they could and should have done, the war would have been over in a matter of weeks instead of dragging on for another year and a half with so many Allied soldiers dead and so many Italian towns destroyed. There need have been no Gothic Line, no bombing in the centre of Florence, none of the so-called German reprisals that wiped out the populations of entire villages for no real military reason. It was a mistake, and it's been my experience that mistakes result in worse disasters even than deliberate evil intentions do. Even Kesselring himself was frightened when the armistice was signed. In one of Colonel Dollman's letters - I have it here in one of my books but I'll just give you the gist of it - he said that according to Field Marshal Kesselring, if Badoglio had taken command right away and started a large-scale Allied landing near Rome the German defeat would have been inevitable. Well, that's not the way things went. There was no coordination, no unified command and the psychological situation was terrible. After all, to a soldier an armistice means the war's over, willpower and fighting capacity were bound to sag unless a properly established command and rapid battle orders did something to keep them going. As it was, a lot of units found themselves fighting in a vacuum on their own initiative. There were three thousand dead in the first two days. There's no doubt in my mind that the partisans saved the day — not so much because of their attacks on the enemy but because they boosted the morale of the people, gave them something to hope for and restored the will to fight back. In other words, they did unofficially what should have been done officially, and thirty-five thousand of them died doing it.

'Now, be patient with me, Niccolini - Marshal Guarnaccia here is too polite to show it, sitting here without moving a muscle - but I can see you're getting restless, thinking you've come across a real war bore. You'll realize in a moment that that's not the case. If you want to understand these letters you have to understand the way people were feeling and thinking then. Most of the letters were directed against Robiglio and the rest against Moretti and you think the writers are divided into two opposing camps perhaps, but you're wrong. The targets may be different but the motive behind the attacks is the same. That's what you have to understand. It all goes back to what happened one night in this town. A night that changed everything in both Robiglio's family and Moretti's. You've seen the statue in the square, of course?'

Niccolini stopped sorting and resorting the letters in his hand and looked up.

'The partisan?'

'That's Moretti, the father.'

'It is? But the name . . .'

'Pietro Moro, his
nom de guerre -
though his real name's there, too, if you'll look more closely. He called himself Pietro, but since there were two of them in the brigade who'd chosen the same name, the other boy who was a northerner and very fair-haired became Pietro Biondo and Moretti, who was dark, Pietro Moro.'

'So Moretti's father was a war hero. Well, I didn't know that.'

'For one reason and another it's not talked about, though it's not forgotten. As to the term "war hero", it covers many realities. There were heroes enough of what I call the genuine kind, those who voluntarily sacrificed themselves for others, and Pietro was one of them, or became one of them in the end. But some were just victims of circumstance and others plain fakes - it was amazing how many men declared themselves to have been partisans once the fighting was over, inventing a new past for themselves after having fought in Mussolini's GNR. They just dumped their uniforms after the defeat and found themselves a red neckerchief to come home in. Well, enough of them. Among the genuine partisans there were all sorts, the idealists, the disaffected, the odd character on the run from the law who found it a convenient way to disappear from circulation, and of course the boys who would otherwise have risked being called up to serve Mussolini's new Republic in Said or packed off to Germany to die in work camps. Moretti, Pietro as you know him, was one of the last group but he had good reasons for being glad to leave his family at that point too. He and young Ernesto Robiglio were both twenty years old that year, but their circumstances were as different as their characters. Robiglio's father was an ardent fascist, and mayor - podesta as it was then - of the town. Young Ernesto was living at home and studying law at the University of Florence. Their factory stood where it stands now, though the present buildings are new since the old place was badly damaged by Allied bombings.

'Moretti - Pietro Moro - was working for his father and uncle in the family business, the same place you know, but in those days they only made field drains and roof tiles. At any rate, young Pietro started work there at age twelve and things went along smoothly enough for a few years until he got involved with his uncle's daughter, Maria, a pretty little thing, small and plump with a mass of curly hair and eyes as large and innocent as a baby's. But she wasn't all there and that's a fact. You could see it in those eyes, pretty and soft but more animal than human . . . You've seen Tina, so you'll understand what I mean. Tina as a child was a replica of her mother, but you've seen how she ended up, and her mother, poor soul, came to an even worse end because of what happened that night.

'By the time she was fifteen Maria was already running after men twice her age and more. Then she took up with Pietro. She was sixteen and he was just seventeen. What made matters worse was their being cousins. I tried to talk him out of it because of that. Too much intermarrying goes on in this town and it's not healthy. I had him in here at the request of his parents and tried to talk some sense into him, basing my arguments on the fact that they were blood relations. I didn't know how much he knew about Maria's behaviour and I was afraid he'd run out on me if I tried to tell him. There's no doubt that he was in love with the girl. In any case, before I could get very far he interrupted me to tell me that I was wasting my breath. The reason he'd let himself be talked into coming to see me was so that he could tell me what Maria had been afraid to come and tell me herself. She was pregnant. Well, you can imagine how things would have gone between the two fathers if they hadn't married. The business was already in severe difficulties because of the war -this was in '41 - and a big family quarrel would have meant the end. So Pietro got his own way and married his little Maria. He certainly seemed to have no doubts about the child's being his and I think it probably was. I hadn't seen her hanging around the town since she'd been with Pietro. So they married and moved in with his parents who were living in a corner of the factory. Conditions were cramped and his mother, who had been against the marriage and had been forced to accept it by the men to protect the business, couldn't get on with her daughter-in-law at any price. Things started badly and soon got worse. As their family doctor, I knew a great deal about what was going on but there was little I could do to help, though the mother frequently turned to me for advice - they were communists and so would have nothing to do with the priest - he once went round there claiming that the young people's future was cursed because they hadn't married in church. He was out on his ear within minutes. I tried talking to Maria but it was hopeless. How can you talk about the responsibilities of motherhood to a child? I doubt if her mental'age was much above twelve. She was wayward and lazy and did nothing to help her mother-in-law in the house, but what was worse was that within a month of moving in there she began hanging around the men in the factory. Nothing happened, of course. Apart from the presence of the men in the family, including her husband, she was already showing her pregnancy. But it caused violent quarrels, especially between Pietro and his mother, and with all their efforts they couldn't keep Maria under control. Pietro was deeply unhappy and it goes without saying that his mother lost no opportunity of saying "I told you so", as is the way with mothers. When the time came I delivered the baby.'