The Marshal Makes His Report Read online

‘You might as well . . .’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well go through, then. She’ll be in there.’ He nodded towards the opposite salon.

  The Marshal pushed his way through to the door. The bigger room was now almost empty. Three men, all impeccably dressed in silk suits and with sleek grey hair, stood talking seriously near the rows of empty gilded chairs. One very young man sat alone on a plain wooden stool almost behind the door, where the Marshal had been unable to see him when he had first glanced in so briefly. At the front of the room stood a grand piano. To the Marshal’s surprise there were no other instruments, only a stereo set on an antique table. In front of this stood a good-looking young man, ‘dear Emilio’, perhaps? He was talking animatedly to a tall, elegant woman in white who had her back to the Marshal. Avoiding the tiny chairs that would surely collapse if his great weight so much as brushed against them, he trod the polished floor almost on tiptoe and, hat in hand, approached them.

  As he came near, the young man stopped in mid-sentence to stare at him. The woman turned.

  ‘Signora Marchesa . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Her eyes took him in from head to foot just as the other woman’s had done but with a good deal more effect. They were very large black eyes but her hair was blonde and her skin white. She wasn’t young, certainly over forty, but she was an extremely beautiful woman indeed and there was an aura surrounding her that deterred the Marshal from going too close. The expression in her bright disdainful eyes so unnerved him that he could hardly have felt more humiliated if he had skidded on the shining floor and smashed a dozen of those frivolous little chairs. He swallowed and looked at the young man as he spoke so as to avoid her eyes.

  ‘I have some bad news, I’m afraid. If I could speak to you alone . . .’

  ‘Bad news . . . ?’ She inclined her head slightly as if making an effort to believe him, then she turned to the young man and smiled. He was dismissed. The Marshal watched him go. Near the door he spoke to the man seated on the stool, who got up hastily and with a backward scowl at the room in general went out with him.

  ‘Rather a fortunate interruption . . .’ the Marchesa murmured with a faint smile. ‘Artists are a race apart, don’t you feel? So that whatever their origins . . . but one must draw the line . . . Dear Emilio. Well, I’m quite sure he won’t make that mistake again—What exactly can I do for you?’

  The sudden change of tone took him aback.

  ‘I . . . It’s bad news, I’m afraid—’

  ‘Ah yes, so you said. Shouldn’t you tell me who you are, exactly?’

  ‘Guarnaccia. Marshal of carabinieri, Palazzo Pitti station.’

  ‘Palazzo Pitti? There’s a carabinieri station there? What an extraordinary thing, but how nice for you. Would you care to sit down?’

  ‘No! I . . . no, thank you.’ Nothing would have induced him to risk planting his weight on one of those tiny chairs. He was beginning to sweat with embarrassment and didn’t really take in a word of what the Marchesa was saying. He could only stare at her with his big eyes. He felt he was looking at someone wearing a mask, trying to fathom her real expression behind it. The mask was one of faint surprise touched with disdain. The eyes looked out through it as hard and bright as ice.

  ‘I was passing here,’ he began after a slight cough, ‘when I was called in by a man . . . a dwarf—’

  ‘Grillo?’

  ‘Grillo, yes—I presume he works for you?’

  ‘Works? Well, yes, he does odd jobs about the place. He’s been with us since he was a child. Part of the family in a way.’

  The Marshal took this to mean that they didn’t pay him and that his position was uninsured and illegal, but he had no intention of going into that. He had enough on his plate already without stirring anything up in that direction. Noticing that he was turning his hat slowly round and round between his large hands, he stopped himself doing it and, holding the brim tightly, said his piece.

  ‘This Grillo took me to a room off the courtyard, a gun room. He told me he’d gone in there himself to clean the guns. Your husband was there. Possibly he’d been cleaning one of the guns himself and there was an accident. He’s dead, Signora Marchesa.’

  ‘Buongianni? Dead . . . ?’ The mask was recomposed into one of distressed astonishment. The eyes didn’t falter for a second. She didn’t even find it necessary to look away from him and he knew as surely as if she’d confessed it that she’d been ready for him, or for whoever else might have brought her this news. The Marshal himself, however, was far from ready for her next move. There was no pretence of grief or anything approaching it. The hard icy glance held his for long enough to establish her hold on the situation and his own irrelevance. Then she turned her head very slightly and raised her voice.

  ‘Gianpiero.’

  One of the silk-suited men at the back of the room detached himself from the other two and approached.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ He took in the Marshal’s uniform and then turned to the Marchesa and took her arm. ‘Has there been an accident of some sort? You look distressed.’

  ‘It’s Buongianni. An accident, yes. This is Marshal . . .’

  ‘Guarnaccia.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon. Dear Gianpiero, thank goodness you’re here, I suppose we must go down and look. Do you think . . . ?’ She glanced down the room to the remaining two grey-haired men.

  ‘They should certainly be with us.’ He addressed the Marshal then in brusque authoritative tones. ‘What sort of accident, and where?’

  The Marshal was nettled. For the moment, at least, he was supposed to be in charge of the situation but he might have been one of the servants.

  ‘It may or may not have been an accident. That’s something we must look into. He’s in the gun room on the ground floor.’

  ‘Dead? Speak up, man, dead or injured? We could be losing precious time.’

  ‘Dead.’ Who the devil did this chap think he was?

  ‘Right. You’ve told them?’ This was addressed to the Marchesa who was coming back followed by the two men. ‘Then we’ll go down.’

  They went down in the lift but not before the Marchesa remembered to complete the introductions. ‘Dear Gianpiero’ turned out to be the chief public prosecutor of Florence. The other two were ‘family lawyers’ who remained nameless. The descent was made in silence. The Marshal, still clutching the brim of his hat, could hear his own heartbeat and his ill-judged words re-echoing in his head. ‘It may or may not have been an accident. That’s something we must look into.’ How could he have been such a damn fool? His only hope was in his not being important enough to matter. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut until he could escape from this house never to return. They’d find some tactful, respectful, high-ranking officer . . . They could hardly get him transferred just for that one remark . . . He wasn’t important, that was the main thing he could count on . . .

  And yet, all the way down in the lift, all the time they were in the room with the body, around which two or three flies were now buzzing, beneath the tension and distress caused by the fear of his own position there was another thought which persisted. ‘Dear Gianpiero’ was a close friend, that was obvious, but even so, as the lady said, how very fortunate that he happened to be here.

  ‘HSA job, is it?’ asked Lorenzini, munching. The usual Homicide, Suicide or Accident report in case of sudden death didn’t seem to him much of a reason to call in for assistance but he was glad enough to find himself eating an excellent pizza.

  ‘This is great.’

  ‘Mm.’ It wasn’t clear whether the Marshal was agreeing about the ‘HSA job’ or the pizza. He didn’t seem to have his usual good appetite, though. Every so often he would cease chewing and stare into space as though his mind were on other things. He had sent for his young brigadier from the station at Pitti partly because he would need his help but more because he found his presence reassuring. At this early hour in the evening very few people in Gino’s, the pizzeria opposit
e the Palazzo Ulderighi, were eating. Most of them seemed to be friends and relations of the owners and were smoking and drinking coffee around the television set on which a local channel was showing a recording of the medieval football tournament.

  ‘After all,’ Lorenzini went on, raising his voice as the crowd round the television set up a roar of protest over yet another bout of violence on the field, ‘if he did kill himself they won’t pay up, will they?’

  ‘No.’ He popped a slice of the crackling pizza into his mouth and when he’d dealt with it said, ‘His wife’s from Naples, that’s why.’

  ‘What? This Marchesa what’s she called . . . Ulderighi?’

  ‘Eh? No, no. The woman who makes this pizza. So her husband was telling me while I was waiting for you. That’s why it’s so good. The stuff they make in Florence as a rule, all that thick rubbery dough with tinned stuff slopped on it and what tastes like motor oil . . .’ He continued munching in silence, frowning a little as the television caught his eye. ‘I hope there wasn’t any trouble. My boys were there. Perhaps I should call home.’

  Lorenzini turned his head to look. Three Green players had fallen in a heap on top of one of the Whites. Their long slashed breeches were covered in sand and not one of them still had a T-shirt on his back. The group round the set stood up shouting and blocked their view. The Marshal got up from his chair.

  ‘I’ll just telephone . . .’ He went off to the back room, fishing for a token in his pocket. He wasn’t gone long. As he sat down again he sighed and said, ‘What a business . . .’

  Again Lorenzini wasn’t sure whether he meant the football or the dead man across the road, but he knew the Marshal well enough to be sure that this grumpy vagueness meant he’d got his teeth into something. He had the look of a bulldog about him and, like a bulldog, he was unlikely to let go. Young as he was, Lorenzini ventured on a word of warning.

  ‘With people like that, of course, it doesn’t do to stick your neck out, especially—’

  ‘Especially with the chief public prosecutor taking a personal interest?’

  ‘That, too. Even so, he’s given you a free hand, hasn’t he? I mean, checking on the tenants and what they might have heard. Establishing the time of death. From what you’ve said he’s not blocking you.’

  ‘No. And why? Why me?’

  Lorenzini was silenced. The Marshal wiped his mouth and took a sip of wine.

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because I’m nobody. Anything I say, anything I find out, can be ignored. And if I don’t like it I can be transferred from Florence—’ he snapped his thick fingers—‘like that!’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s what I meant, but I’m sure if you tread carefully, stay clear of the press and so on—’

  ‘I don’t like being made a fool of,’ the Marshal said quietly. ‘And if I were to tell the truth I don’t like this being made a fool of much either.’ As he said it he placed his large hand on the hat with its gold flame above the peak which lay on the empty chair beside him. After which he finished his meal in silence, gazing in bleak disapproval at the television screen.

  They were half way through their coffee when he suddenly took up where he left off: ‘And bear in mind, when you say he’s not blocking me, that we’re to question the tenants but we’re not to disturb the Signora Marchesa—that wouldn’t do at all—and not her son either, who’s too delicate, they say, so nobody ever sees him.’ He unbuttoned his top pocket and fished a black notebook out from behind his sunglasses.

  ‘This lot,’ he said, flipping the book open beside his coffee cup, ‘are the ones we’re allowed to waste our time on, starting with this Filippo Brunetti—that’s the one they call Grillo, I told you about him.’

  ‘The dwarf?’

  ‘That’s right. I suppose I ought to feel sorry for him but he’s a nasty little beggar, sharp as needles, too, and if anybody knows everything that goes on over there, he does. But . . .’

  ‘You don’t think he’ll talk?’

  ‘He’ll talk all right. I’ve never met anybody who talked so fast. But he knows which side his bread’s buttered on and if he had to leave the Ulderighi place where would he go? Didn’t seem to care much for Corsi, but then . . .’

  ‘But what?’ Lorenzini had a great respect for the Marshal, but he was young and active and couldn’t always conceal his impatience with the older man’s slowness and the half-formed irrelevant observations he left hanging in the air. ‘But what, Marshal?’ he said again, his bright grey eyes glancing through the window at the great house. Left to himself he’d have been over there an hour ago taking accurate, methodical notes, but here they were taking time over the coffee as they’d taken time over their pizza and still the Marshal didn’t answer. Lorenzini turned from the window to look at him and found him once again staring over at the television screen in silence. When he did speak he had drifted from the subject.

  ‘Florentines are a funny lot. After all these years I haven’t got used—no offence meant, you understand.’

  Lorenzini, a died in the wool Florentine, pointed out that we all have our funny ways, but the point didn’t get home.

  ‘If you’d seen him, standing there with a dead man at his feet and cracking jokes.’

  ‘Better a corpse in the house than a Pisan at the door?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s an old Florentine saying from the days of the wars with Pisa.’

  ‘Mph.’ The Marshal thought this over and then said, ‘So I’m the Pisan, is that it?’

  ‘You or anybody else threatening the set-up.’

  ‘Well . . . Maybe you’re right. Perhaps you should talk to him, you might understand each other better—just look at that! He’s trying to strangle the referee! I remember that face, too. Isn’t he the one who got his ear bitten off one time?’

  ‘Might be. It was years ago. I think I was still at school.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it. At least half of that lot should be behind bars, if you ask me. Anyway, you talk to him. Then there’s the porter and his wife. Mori, the name is, and there’s a son, too, and if I’ve got my facts right he’s among that lot.’ Another black look at the screen and then he prodded the notebook with a huge forefinger. ‘This is the old “tata”. Nursed all the Ulderighi children since the year dot. Her name’s Marilena Binazzi. Ninety-one and stone deaf. All these family retainers live in rooms off the courtyard. The other rooms there are rented out as studios. The musician, Emilio Emiliani, who has a flat up on the third floor uses one for practising. One’s a doctor’s surgery . . . here she is, Flavia Martelli, likewise has a flat upstairs. The last one, near the entrance on the right, is rented to an English girl called Catherine Yorke who does some sort of restoration work. She left last week on a trip to England so we won’t see her anyway. Now: there’s another flat on the third floor . . . wait a minute . . . Martelli, Emiliano . . . This one—Fido.’

  ‘Sounds like a dog.’

  ‘Well, he’s a painter. English again, but you’re right, it’s a funny sort of name. Oh, and there’s a ballet school on the first floor but that doesn’t concern us since it’s closed between Saturday and Monday. Well, that’s the lot. Now we go and ask them if they heard anything and they’ll all say no.’

  ‘But, Marshal, surely, these people who are tenants and not family retainers—I mean, a shot like that echoing round a courtyard would wake the dead.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Marshal slipped the notebook back in his pocket. ‘It would. If that’s where it happened. But I don’t think he died there, not like that. He was lying on his back but the blood had settled along one side of his face. There’ll be a post-mortem, of course, there’ll have to be, but I’ll never get to see the results of it.’

  ‘Do you think he shot himself, then?’

  ‘How should I know whether he shot himself? My point is that I’ll never get to know—but I’ll tell you one thing I do know, you don’t wear evening dress to clean a gun. And another thing I know is that there wasn’t enough mess
in there, not by a long chalk. Not a spatter. We’d better pay and get going.’

  Paying and getting going wasn’t so easy. Their waiter was too involved with the noisy crowd around the television to notice their attempts to attract his attention. In the end, Lorenzini got up and went to fetch the proprietor, who then delayed them further by wanting compliments for his wife’s pizza. Lorenzini was happy enough to oblige but all he got out of the Marshal, scowling out of the door from behind his sunglasses, was a mumbled repetition of ‘Not enough. No, no, not by a long chalk . . .’

  As the two uniformed men crossed the street and rang the bell at the Palazzo Ulderighi, Gino, the proprietor stared after them. He reckoned their pizzas were the biggest ones in Florence. And the Marshal had eaten two!

  ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’

  The porter peered out suspiciously at the Marshal. He had only opened the lodge door a crack.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Then if you don’t mind we’ll step inside with you for a minute. Is your wife at home?’

  ‘She’s having a lie-down. It’s been an upset for her. She’s bad with her nerves.’

  He let them in but didn’t offer them a chair or sit down himself. The room was small and stuffy and over-crammed with a mixture of old and new furniture. It evidently served as both kitchen and living-room. The air was thick with the smell of fried onions and meat and a large pan of water was coming to the boil on a gas ring. A washing-machine which looked new stood in one corner with a bit of fringed cloth over its surface and a vase filled with plastic flowers on top. The Marshal’s big eyes took in each detail and his sharp ear caught a faint rustle in the next room. ‘Your wife seems to be awake.’

  The porter hesitated, his glance shifting to the inner door.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to her at some point. Best get it over with and we’ll try not to have to disturb you again.’

  The porter went through to the inner room and shut the door behind him. A murmured argument went on and it was some time before the two of them appeared.

  ‘Good evening, Signora. I’m sorry we’re obliged to disturb you but we won’t keep you long.’