Death of a Dutchman Page 10

  'And so,' prompted the Marshal, "then he met Signora Wilkins . . .'

  'Right here in this flat. She'd soon got into the way of popping up to see if I needed anything. I don't think she let a day pass without calling in on me for at least a moment. She had no need to work, of course, but she couldn't bear to be idle. One day she came up and asked me what I thought of the idea of giving English lessons to the local children. She wanted to do it without taking payment but I persuaded her against that; people would have thought it peculiar, and if it comes to that, there are always those who don't pay up, she needn't have worried. It was the company she wanted, that and the idea of doing something useful for somebody. Her first pupil was young Toni. Goossens was delighted. He didn't expect the child to learn Dutch, but it seems that most Dutch people speak English, and Toni would have to take over the business some day and deal with Amsterdam. There were other pupils too, of course, but anyway, Toni was the first, and that's how she and Goossens met.'

  'And then she became your next-door neighbour?'

  'Not right away. I'll tell you something that I wouldn't tell anybody else: they were married more or less in secret, and she kept her flat downstairs for a year after that . . .'

  The Marshal shifted uncomfortably on his hard chair which was a good deal too small for him; his back was beginning to ache. Signora Giusti, however, was showing no sign of flagging, sometimes leaning forward to rattle her tiny hands at him, sometimes tossing herself back into her cushions and chattering reminiscently at the ceiling.

  'It was the child, you see. He was a quiet, sturdy boy but very sensitive. He had his father's heavy build but his mother's big dark eyes and artistic temperament. As pupil and teacher the two got on like a house on fire, but once he saw what was developing between her and his father he clammed up. It was a very tricky time for all three of them, and she sometimes came to me in tears. She'd never had a child of her own but she'd always wanted one and her heart went out to Toni. She had all the patience in the world with him, but there wasn't a scrap of response—not that he ever said a wrong word, you understand, he was always polite, always well-behaved. In the end, he began to behave in the same way to his father. They were in despair, the two of them. I often wondered if he just felt they wouldn't want him around and he was trying to show his independence. He must have thought a lot about his mother during that time, too. Who knows? He might have been fighting against Signora Wilkins because it seemed like a betrayal. There's no knowing what goes on in a child's mind.'

  'How old was he then?'

  'He'd be about fourteen because that summer he finished Middle School and started in the workshop with his father. There was a change in him right away. I suppose he must have felt he had a place in his father's world, after all. He worked like a little slave, I can see him now, filing away hour after hour at his bench, so desperately anxious to do everything just right. If he made the slightest mistake his eyes would fill up and his face redden.

  'Then, one day, he broke a small file. I don't know how. Instead of telling anybody, he hid it. It was a week before anybody noticed—there were three other craftsmen in the studio and they all tended to stick to their own set of tools—and Toni got paler and more worried every day; nobody knew why, of course. In the end, he needed the file for some small job he'd been asked to do. He was terrified. His father was a stolid, even-tempered man and had never struck the boy in his life; nevertheless, he was a craftsman, and very strict about the way the studio was run. Looking after the tools was the first thing Toni had had to learn. Well, he came up here to me and her broke his heart. It seems ridiculous, looking back on it, especially as it turned out the file had been an old, slightly damaged one that they'd given him to practise with—though, of course, he didn't know that. I think he would have run away from home, you know, over a little thing like that, if I hadn't been here.'

  'It happens. I've known children run away for less, and in less strained circumstances.'

  'Well, luckily he had his mammina to run to instead. I was close to him but not involved, if you see what I mean, and then, I'd known his mother and I think that counted for a lot. I can see him now; he sat at that table there and broke his heart, great big sobs without a tear. I've never seen a child cry like that . . . His nerves were shattered and there were great black rings under his eyes . . . crumpled up there with his head on the table . . .'

  It was more real to her, that day in the distant past, than the scene in the bedroom two days ago. But the Marshal, looking at the oilcloth-covered table where the young boy in his apprentice's black smock had wept, was seeing the figure crumpled behind the door, a towel bound uselessly round one hand.

  'They're the only people who mean anything to me. The people round here, like that witch downstairs . . .'

  'What happened about the file?'

  'Well, of course Toni was missed and his father came looking for him here. Funny, he was a big, clumsy sort of man, although he did such fine work. In a crisis like that he stood there with his big, clever hands all limp. You could see that every one of the boy's sobs went right through him, but he wasn't a demonstrative man and he didn't know what to do. In the end I poured out a drop of vinsanto for him to give the child—and he was so distracted he began to drink it himself! I had to push him towards the table. Toni took a sip or two and then started on about the wretched file, trying to apologize; then he flung himself at his father and started to cry real tears.

  'That was the crisis over with. After that his work came on like nobody's business. He had his father's feeling for solid craftsmanship, but there was Italian blood in him, too. "He's an artist," his father would say to me, time and time again, "He's an artist. I can teach him craftsmanship, but he knows things I don't know . . ."

  'Every spare minute Toni had, he would draw, designing every sort of gold work and settings for the jewels he saw his father cutting. There was a ring he. designed that impressed his father so much that he decided they should make it together. It was in gold, and young Toni had never worked in gold—this was still his first year and he had only recently been given a small piece of silver to work on after having had only copper to learn on. Nevertheless, his father let him make part of the setting—but then, he was a very talented boy, there's no doubt about that, and gold is so much easier to work than harder metals, "like carving butter, mammina" he used to say to me, "just like carving butter!"

  'It was a really special ring and it's hard to describe it...'

  She was turning her own hands over each other as if feeling for the shape of it in her memory.

  'It had a double layer of gold, a plain, broad, flat band with a layer of filigree over it, slightly broader. It gave the effect of fine lace over smooth silk, if you can understand me, and the overlapping, lacy edge had the tiniest possible stones in the border—each stone different and rather odd in shape; a miniature lozenge-shaped pearl, a brilliant sapphire, hardly bigger than a full stop, a slightly larger ruby, and three diamonds, all small, set between the two layers of gold so that they were only just visible, peeping through the "lace".'

  'Must have cost something . . .' said the Marshal thoughtfully.

  'I should say it did . . . but perhaps not as much as you'd think; the stones were very small and not of great value, and it's the workmanship that's the biggest expense—that one piece took the two of them months to finish; they used to work on it together when the studio was closed in the evenings. They kept it a secret from everybody until it was finished, and those hours they spent together unbeknown to anyone must have put the boy right. It was just the sort of attention he needed, I suppose. Anyway, they finished it. It was a unique piece, unrepeatable because of the peculiarity of the little stones. Nevertheless, it brought them in thousands of pounds' worth of business—it was on show downstairs in the saleroom behind the studios for a time, and the original drawings for it are still there now, although the business has been taken over by Signor Beppe, as they call him, one of Goossens's
craftsmen who's always worked there.'

  Here was yet another area in which the Marshal felt conscious of his total ignorance. He knew no more about diamonds, cut or uncut, than an occasional glance into the jewellers' windows on the Ponte Vecchio could tell him. Would a ring like that eventually have such value that someone would kill to get it? Or had the Dutchman, when he came down to Florence on Sunday, been carrying diamonds, legally or illegally? This was an international trade about which he knew nothing; and these people, English and Dutch, who seemed to be at home anywhere in Europe, were beyond his understanding. His only contact with foreigners was when they lost their Instamatic cameras. The rest of his time was spent reporting stolen Fiat 500s that never got found because looking for them was like looking for a wisp of hay in a haystack. Or he spent it trudging round hotels routinely checking registers. For the second time, he felt seriously like giving the whole thing up. He felt he was chasing ghosts, and the only result was likely to be that he would make a great fool of himself. And yet, the Lieutenant had taken the trouble to come round here . . .

  'You said,' he suddenly remembered, 'that the trouble with Signora Wilkins's sister happened "twice over", didn't you?'

  'And so it did. When Goossens died, you see, he left everything to his wife, naturally, and so there was more fuel for the sister's jealousy—I always maintained that it was a mistake to have invited her to live out here.'

  'She lived here? What was her financial position then? Had the diabetic husband died?'

  'Oh yes, he died all right, and she was still penniless.'

  'What about insurance?'

  'I don't know, not for sure. But I do know she had nothing. Often, when there'd been a scene and the Signora would come round here in tears, I'd say she should throw her out, it was ridiculous to tolerate her nastiness, I said, after all you've done for her. But she always said she couldn't, that you couldn't put your own sister out on the street, that she had nothing. It wasn't strictly true, of course, because I do know that the allowance she'd paid her during the diabetic husband's illness went on being paid. She didn't want her sister to feel dependent, to have to ask for money when she wanted it. Imagine wasting such delicate feelings on somebody who'd strangle you for two pins! At any rate, I'm pretty sure that her going on with the allowance meant that there'd been no insurance. It was never mentioned openly, but Toni once let slip to me that there'd been talk of suicide, so maybe the insurance people had refused to pay up . . .

  'Anyway out here she came, and the English house was let. "You'll rue the day," I told her, and I think she did, too, though she never said so in as many words. The more kindly and generous she was, the more it infuriated her sister who wanted to be respected and envied, not pitied. There were some shocking scenes, I could hear them from here. Then threats of suicide, then trips to the doctor's—that all had to be paid for—imaginary illnesses and more threats of suicide. But don't you believe it, was what I used- to say. People like her make sure they don't damage themselves, only the people around them get hurt. She'll outlive both of us, I used to say . . . Well, I suppose I might have been wrong there, but even so - . .'

  Even so, right in principle, the Marshal thought, though it seemed now as though Signora Giusti was all set to outlive her every acquaintance.

  'What was it,' he said aloud, 'that you didn't like to tell the officer, yesterday?'

  'I answered his questions, he can't say I didn't.'

  'But some questions he didn't ask, is that it?'

  'A youngster like that ... he wouldn't understand the things that can go wrong in families. I doubt if he's even married.'

  'Even so, he must be part of a family.'

  'I hadn't thought of it like that.'

  'What went wrong?'

  'Well, I always said that nothing went right after old Goossens's death. There's always one person who holds everything together in a family, one person that everyone respects or at least that nobody wants to quarrel with, then when that person dies . . . Usually it's a woman but in this case it was old Goossens; he was quiet and solid, never quarrelsome . . .

  'Toni always blamed the sister, though he admitted he had no concrete reason, but I still maintain that it was one of those things that happen once the central figure of the family dies, up to then all disagreements and the like are kept under control, but after that person dies, sooner or later they break out. If old Goossens had lived . . . well, he didn't, and whatever the reason was behind it—and I've never known—Signora Wilkins, Goossens I should say—and I'll not hear a word said against her, whatever you think . . . The fact is that she left this house on the day of the funeral and she's never been back here since. I don't know where she is to this day and neither does Toni. And it's been ten years, think of it! I wasn't at the funeral, I was already past being able to get about, and she never said a word to me before going out that day, not a word . . . She'd locked herself in alone with her grief for days.'

  She sat back in her cushions and dabbed at her eyes.

  'I was the one who had to let Toni know she'd gone off just like that. He was working in Amsterdam by then, you see; his father had sent him up there five years before to learn cutting, and to take over the Amsterdam end of the business. Toni had just met Wanda, the girl he married, and they were thinking of getting engaged, I remember . . .'

  'Had there been a quarrel? Even if he was in Holland and his stepmother here, there could have been a disagreement, by phone or by letter. There could have been money troubles after the father's death, couldn't there? It's the sort of thing that breaks families up all the time.'

  'No. All that was settled very fairly. They were both well provided for, and Toni swore to me that there hadn't been a quarrel, not one ill word.'

  The Marshal mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief. He was feeling out of his depth again. There were two many ins and outs in this family and he wasn't at all sure that he was asking the right questions. He tried to introduce a note of common sense.

  'Why didn't he just report her missing to the police? She might have had an accident, lost her memory, turned a bit strange . . .'

  'No; she wasn't missing, not in that sense. Toni had a letter from her solicitors in England saying she was breaking off all communications' with him and that anything urgent could be dealt with through them. He telephoned them right away but he couldn't get anything out of them except that she'd settled in some other part of England and had been in touch with them by letter, instructing them to sell the house which up to then she'd only ever rented out. Toni would have gone after her, searched the whole country, but Wanda, his fiancée, wouldn't have it. You can't blame her, of course, because she'd never known her. All she knew was that she was Toni's stepmother and had behaved badly, going off like that and upsetting him. She's a gentle creature, but when it comes to defending her own . . . She felt it was just asking for more upset, going after her, and she put her foot down. Oh, but he took it all badly, did Toni . . .'

  'But surely the girl was right. She was only his stepmother, after all, not his mother, and if she'd stated so clearly that she wanted no more to do with him . . .'

  'You don't understand! You don't understand at all. Remember how, even when she and Goossens were married, she was too delicate to move into their flat because she wasn't sure how Toni would take it?' She waited almost a year, that's how much she thought of that child! Then came the ring. When it was finished Toni and his father presented it to her. It was Toni's own idea. It was like a second wedding, and she moved in that same week. Up to then, nobody but me had known they were married.

  'Well, after that everything went well. She was like a young girl again once she had people to look after. She ran the house and helped with the business . . . and they travelled together, too. She used to say God had given her two whole lives, that she was living her youth all over again. And I'll tell you another thing: she loved Goossens and they were always happy together, but the greatest thing of all, for her, was having
Toni. All her life she'd wanted a child, you see . . .

  'Let me show you something . . .' She reached for her walking chair but sank back again. 'In the table drawer, get the photographs out ... no, not the album, the two that are framed . . . that's right . . . now see for yourself.'

  They were enlarged colour snapshots, taken on holiday. In one, the burly, grey-haired Goossens stood with his arm around his small English wife. The sea was in the background and a deep blue, clear sky; but there must have been a breeze because the woman was holding back her wavy hair which threatened to blow across her face. In the second snap, which had obviously been taken by Goossens, Toni, a strapping youth of about seventeen, built like his father but with a more delicately modelled face and merry dark eyes, was lifting his stepmother bodily and threatening to toss her into the waves which were lapping his feet. He was in swimming trunks but she was wearing a white sundress with red spots on it. Both of them were helpless with laughter, the sort of wholly relaxed nonsensical gaiety peculiar to happy families.

  The Marshal gazed at this photograph longer than was necessary. He would soon be at the beach with his boys, but by the time they got accustomed enough to each other for that sort of laughter it would be time for him to leave them.

  'I put them in the drawer so as not to upset Toni when he came. They used to be on the wall. I suppose I could put them back now, or you could do it for me . . .'

  The Marshal found the hooks where the pictures had left patches on the wall and hung them up carefully.

  'No, that one at the other side . . . that's how I had them before . . . You can just see the ring, if you look closely, but not enough to tell what it was like because her hair's in the way. She never took it off.'

  'I thought you said it was displayed in the saleroom?'