Murder On The Rue Cassette (A Serafina Florio Mystery) (27 page)

Serafina saw the red appear on
his white shirt, a rose suddenly blooming.

She heard herself wail as she
flew to him, helpless, holding him in her lap, his eyes staring, his face
fixed.

One of the policemen rushed to
him with strips of cloth, pressing them into the wound and holding it while the
medics ran in with a gurney. Loffredo looked at her and smiled, pressed her
hand and closed his eyes.

Through tears, Serafina looked
up in time to see Elena stick the barrel into her mouth and fire again.

Chapter
34: Praying to the Virgin

“We came prepared,” the
policeman explained. “Valois warned us of a madwoman.” He introduced himself as
the friend of Valois. They’d been students together years ago in Paris. “He
gave us the address and told us to take all necessary precautions, and so, you
see, we did.” His men wrapped the body of Elena in a muslin sack and it was
taken to the morgue in a wagon dispatched for that purpose.

Medics lifted Loffredo into an
ambulance drawn by two horses.

“They’ll take him to the central
hospital in Aix,” a policeman told them. “It’s an old building on the main
square near the Cathedral Saint Sauveur run by an order of nuns.”

“I’d like to ride with him,”
Serafina said.

He shook his head. “We’ll need
statements from everyone present. A brief description of what you saw and
heard, and perhaps someone give me some background on the woman.”

“You’ll send a copy of your
report to Valois?” Serafina asked.

“Of course.”

When they’d each written an
account of the events in Elena’s studio, they rode in the carriage, making
arrangements for rooms at a hotel recommended to them by the driver, clean,
pleasant, and close to the hospital.

The afternoon was hot, the air,
still.

“It’s all my fault. I should
have known how mad she was,” Serafina said. She rocked back and forth.

When they arrived, she vowed she
would keep him alive, staying by his side without sleeping or eating, except
during the cleansing of his wound.

“His chances, Doctor?” Serafina
asked.

“We’ll know more after the
operation,” the chief surgeon said. He was a kind man with a round face and
half-moon glasses. “Pray, my dear.”

Serafina watched the procedure
from the gallery, praying to the Virgin, impressed by the staff and the
cleanliness and efficiency of the hospital.

After the operation, Loffredo,
looking like a flattened version of himself was wheeled back into the room.
Serafina followed.

The doctor paid a visit. “It
entered his far right side, mercifully avoiding the major organs until it
reached the stomach where we were able to extract it.”

He smiled and held the deadly
thing between his thumb and forefinger. “The bullet is small, but he was
standing relatively close to the shooter and the lead was propelled at a rapid
velocity. It ricocheted off his ribcage, tearing through muscle and came to
lodge in the wall of the stomach. The quick action of the police helped to
prevent too much loss of blood, but he’s had internal bleeding.”

Serafina bit her lip. “His
chances?”

The surgeon shook his head. “The
next seventy-two hours are critical, but he seems in excellent health
otherwise. So far, he’s been lucky. If it had entered his left side, well ...”

“Oh, thank the Virgin.”

“Thank modern medical practice,”
the doctor said, “and thank a poor shot. A woman shot him, I understand. Close
range. Maybe she got the sides mixed up.” He smiled.

“Why isn’t he awake?”

He shrugged. “His body has had a
shock. Each person reacts differently. Right now, he’s in a deep sleep. We
believe he can hear. Talk to him. Sing to him. Last year we had a woman who was
shot by her husband, a similar circumstance, but in reverse. The bullet lodged
in her lung. It collapsed. We removed the bullet, and she was in a coma for
days, but pulled through. Today the man is in prison, not for long unfortunately,
but she is doing fine.” The doctor paused. “Your friend has how many
years—forty?”

Serafina nodded. “More or less.”

Nuns in blue habits and starched
cornettes moved soundlessly and made sure Loffredo was clean and comfortable.

“When will he wake up?” Serafina
asked a tall, plump sister.

The nun shrugged. “We don’t
know, my dear. Pray. I’ve seen far worse survive and walk out a few weeks
later.”

Doctors came in and listened to
Loffredo’s pulse. Most did not stop to talk with Serafina.

For her part, Serafina continued
a long monologue. She told Loffredo how much she loved him, how she always had.
She told him what the weather was like, what she saw out the window down the
hall, how many beds were in the ward, how many patients with bandaged legs,
whatever she could think of. She told him how sorry she was that this had
happened. It was her fault, all her fault, but the care was so good here.
Indeed life was so good, not at all like it was at home. In Oltramari, Serafina
told him, life had become untenable. No response.

Later, she squeezed Loffredo’s
hand, but felt no response.

Two days later, he hadn’t
awakened.

“Keep talking to him,” the plump
sister said. “The worst thing you can do is give up. Patients who wake up tell
us they were soothed by the voices of their loved ones.”

Serafina sang to him, and
laughed at her singing. She read to him from a book Teo lent her about Notre
Dame and gargoyles and love. She squeezed his hand.

No response.

“Read the paper to him,” Rosa
said. “And by the way, Carmela and Giulia are packing up our things from the
hotel. We’ll take a boat from Marseille as soon as Loffredo is well enough to
travel. No need to return to Paris.”

“Oh, but I want to talk with
Busacca and Valois. There is much unfinished business. I think we still must
talk with Gaston and Sophie’s oldest son. We need to find out more about the
dead woman. And what about the stolen photos?”

“Busacca you can see at home.
Valois is on his way. No doubt he’ll have all the answers.”

“Hear that, Loffredo? Valois is
on his way. He must like you.”

No response.

Three nuns came in and told
Serafina to take a walk down the hall while they changed and washed the
patient.

Two days later, the chief
surgeon paid a visit. He seemed concerned. He frightened Serafina.

“Pray, my dear.”

“I’m praying to the Virgin all
the time. I haven’t prayed so much in all my life, eh, Loffredo?” She squeezed
his hand. “Maybe I’ll call you Otto. You hate the name so, it might wake you
up.”

No response.

Rosa bent to him. “Time to get
up for school, Loffredo,” she said and squeezed his hand.

He squeezed Rosa’s hand.

The madam looked like a cat
who’d landed in a bowl of liver. “There. Did you see that? He squeezed my hand.
Just got to use the right words. He’s waking up.”

Serafina’s heart began to pound.
She thought perhaps Rosa was imagining, so she squeezed Loffredo’s hand.

She felt no response from him
and her heart sank.

Then he squeezed her hand.

Serafina laughed and cried at
the same time. “Time to open your eyes.”

In a moment, his eyes blinked
and he smiled at her. “Where am I?”

“In a hospital.”

“I must have slept.”

Three days later, Loffredo was
walking up and down the ward, anxious to leave. He and the doctor had become
friends and exchanged addresses.

“I’m impressed with French
hospitals,” Loffredo told him. “We have a lot to learn from you, and I am
grateful for your care. When I get back to Oltramari, I’ll talk to my surgeon
friends and see if we can’t arrange an official visit.”

Serafina teared up. She missed
home. She missed her family, but she was grateful indeed for the miracle of
Loffredo.

A few days after Loffredo was
released, Serafina’s group sat in the hotel garden enjoying the sunshine and
one another when Rosa, who’d returned from shopping with Tessa, said, “We have
a visitor.”

It was Valois. “I wanted to
thank you in person for your work. I’ll admit there were times I doubted you,
times I thought you’d overstepped your bounds, many times I didn’t agree with
you, but you are a fine detective.”

“Bravo,” Loffredo said.

“You’ve forgotten something,”
Rosa said. “She is maddening, truly maddening at times.”

“Elena’s body was shipped to
Versailles and laid to rest after Busacca identified it,” Valois said, “And now
we can close the case. You agree, of course.”

“Not so fast, I’m afraid,”
Serafina said. “We have more work. I’ll write to you from home. Won’t the
insurance company press charges?”

“Perhaps, but that’s separate
and their concern. We’ve released the Italians who followed you.”

She nodded. “I must take care of
the don in Oltramari, I’m afraid. Do you know the identity of the woman
murdered in the Rue Cassette?”

He shook his head. “A
streetwalker. A woman of thirty years or so. We think she was living in a poor
neighborhood without husband or children. She hadn’t been seen in quite some
time. What she was doing on the Rue Cassette, we don’t know.”

Serafina pursed her lips. “So,
at the very least, we need to find out more about her.”

“Before Haussmann redesigned
Paris, there were terrible slums, but now the displaced have to live somewhere,
don’t they? And so they find little warrens in which to congregate. I’m afraid
there are establishments which attract them, and Café Odile is one, but we haven’t
found her identity as yet, and so we buried her in a common grave.”

Serafina frowned into the
distance, lost in thought.

“And I have something for you
from Busacca,” Valois said. “Two thick envelopes. In one, your tickets for your
passage on the pack boat, Niger, leaving Saturday from Marseille for Palermo.”

“How many tickets?”

“Six. Carmela stays in Paris for
the moment, but there’s one for Loffredo, your husband to be, I think?” He
smiled. “At least that’s what Françoise tells me. She said to say hello and
hopes we’ll meet again soon.”

Serafina looked at Loffredo. He
smiled.

Valois continued. “There is a
second envelope, and Busacca asks that you not read it until you’re home and
surrounded by your family. But from what he tells me, I have a feeling this is
not the last time we’ll be working together.”

For a while Serafina was alone
with her thoughts of Don Tigro and the reckoning that awaited her in Oltramari.
Despite the warmth of the Midi, she felt a chill. “Another thing I don’t yet
know is who took the photographs from your desk. I’d like to see them. I wonder
if I would have known from those images that the dead woman was not Elena.”

“We believe men who had access
to my office and the photographer’s rooms were thieves hired by Elena.” Valois
shrugged. “Beyond that—”

“So there’s another unknown,”
Serafina said.

She tapped the side of her nose
and winked. “Look to Elena’s nephews, Ricci or Beniamino de Masson, Sophie’s
youngest and oldest. The middle son, Tessa tells me, is too busy mismanaging
one of Busacca’s stores. And Ricci owed his aunt gambling debts.” Yet somehow
she thought Ricci an innocent.

There was a momentary lull in
the conversation until they drifted again into a discussion of Elena.

“I still think that if I hadn’t
goaded her, she wouldn’t have shot you,” Serafina said to Loffredo.

“Perhaps, but she was the one
who shot me, not you. I would never blame you. You needed to find out the
truth.”

“And sometimes the truth is
buried deep and must be pried out of us,” Rosa said.

Serafina opened her mouth to
speak but thought better of it.

“Elena wasn’t always like that,”
Loffredo said. “Most of us mellow with age, either because we grow wiser or we
are closer to our God.”

“Or we cannot debauch the way we
used to in our youth,” Rosa said.

“But Elena,” Loffredo continued,
“became a caricature of herself. She became less, not more.”

“So do people change?” Serafina
asked.

Valois shook his head.
“Definitely not. They carry their unique stamp from birth to their grave, and
cannot change.”

“Oh, but I think we do, we grow
and we change,” Serafina said. “Most of us for the better, even though,
perversely, we long for the past. When we mourn for others, we long for a part
of us we’ll never have again.”

“There you go, talking
convoluted nonsense,” Rosa said. “Perhaps it was the disease from which Elena
suffered that spiraled her downward. It drives people into madness, makes them
blind, you know.”

“How did you know about her
disease?” Valois asked. “You couldn’t have read the autopsy.”

“It was obvious to me,” Rosa
said.

Loffredo rubbed his chin. “Dr.
Tarnier told me she had syphilis. It was the reason he agreed to care for her.
Normally women who are with child hire midwives, but because of Elena’s
complications—”

“And because she made a generous
bequest to
La Maternité
,
he took her case,” Rosa said.