Some Bitter Taste (6 page)

‘He does? And did you see it?’

‘No, I didn’t, or anything else from the collection other than one or two portraits, this century and not interesting. I was shown the master bedroom and the interviews took place in the kitchen offices. Still, I was in the house where the drawing is and, besides, the villa and its garden are among the most famous in Florence. It features in a book my bank gave me last Christmas. There are five or six colour plates in it of L’Uliveto, and since it’s not open to the public I thought I’d take the opportunity. I hope I wasn’t in your way but it’s a trivial business, anyway.’

‘Hmph.’

‘You think there’s more to it than meets the eye?’ The captain looked hard at him. He always maintained that the quieter the marshal was, the more it was worth paying attention to him. The marshal couldn’t see it. If he was quiet it was because he had nothing to say. To be quizzed only embarrassed him and sent him deeper into his silence. All he said now was ‘No, no …’ The captain was a good man, a serious man, an educated man. It wasn’t right that he should expect as much from an NCO like the marshal as he did. ‘No, no.’

And so, as they came down to the city, their talk turned to other matters—Dori’s statement, Ilir Pictri’s cousin Lek and his ‘building firm’, a lucrative line of business, based in a flat in Via dei Serragli, which the captain was investigating, the condition of the pregnant girl with multiple fractures.

‘The case will come up in September.’

‘You got them all then? But surely the girl is in no condition to testify? I heard she was still in hospital. Lorenzini mentioned it the other day.’

‘Yes, but there was another girl involved. They threatened her, too, but presumably the intention was just to frighten her. They did that all right. She called the free phone number for help. The two girls made the journey here together, apparently, both seventeen.’

It was easy enough to say, as people generally did, so as to ward off any passing discomfort the fate of these Albanian girls might possibly provoke, that they knew exactly what they were being shipped over here for and what dangers they faced. After all, in Albania everybody watched Italian television. They saw the news. The trouble with this comfortable idea was that people, especially inexperienced youngsters, think themselves capable of anything to escape dead-end poverty. They also think that they can make a bit of money and then get out into a better life. They are wrong on both counts. The pimps make the big money and the girls don’t get out. They are on a road with no turnoffs. Also, a seventeen-year-old girl knows neither what she is capable of nor what excesses might be demanded of her. Another girl, in hospital with severe bruising and multiple fractures, had been sick all over her very first client and his very new car. As a punishment she was forced to perform the service requested by the client for her pimp and two of his associates and beaten when she was sick on them, too.

‘Let’s hope, at least, that what happened to the pregnant girl will be the saving of her friend.’

“You’re very sanguine,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll be content if she turns up to testify.’

‘She’s in a safe place?’

‘Oh, yes. In a convent.’

They were in Via Maggio and the marshal remembered. ‘Drop me here, would you? I want to cut through Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti. I’ve a call to make there.’

There are some things we can’t explain to ourselves, though if we knew how to read the signs they are surely there. Standing in the exhaust laden heat with the evening traffic of Via Maggio roaring at his back, the marshal looked up the ginnel to a sliver of the Pitti Palace, its pale stones rosy in the sunset. His stomach tightened and a thought flashed through his mind. ‘I’ll need to call the fire brigade.’ The thought vanished. He didn’t react to it, much less act on it. He had to force himself to start walking up there. Torn between the urge to hurry and his reluctance to move at all, he walked at a perfecdy steady pace, his face expressionless behind dark glasses. He felt as though he were walking in a cloud of cotton wool which prevented him from registering noise or movement. Yet there was noise and movement, he knew that. A child directing a tricycle towards him on the slope, mouth agape with excitement, a mother, hand held high, behind. A boy poised on a moped that wouldn’t start, a blue cloud almost hiding him. Another thought flash: ‘There’s no use blaming myself.’ He didn’t know the numbering but the group that had collected outside an antique shop on the left drew him toward it. Only when one of the women there looked round and then touched the man next to her and pointed at him did the cotton-wool cloud dissolve. The moped roared away, the mother cried out, and the marshal stopped the tricycle as it came straight at him.

‘Oh, thank you, Marshal! Thank you so—you little monkey! Just wait till I get you home!’

When he reached number 4, the woman who had pointed said, ‘We called 112. We were expecting a car.’

‘You did right. They’ll be here.’

‘Marshal Guarnaccia, don’t you remember me? Linda Rossi.’

‘Yes. Yes, I remember.’ He didn’t remember her but he understood. ‘So, you live above Signora Hirsch, is that right?’

‘On the top floor. I hope I did right but I was worried. You see, she—’

‘Come in with me.’

It was a small but well-kept staircase. Dark. The marshal removed his sunglasses so that at least he could make out the yellow glow of a lightbulb in a small lantern if nothing much else. The second-floor door was fluted and had shiny brass fittings. The stink of decomposition was overpowering and the woman beside the marshal retched.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t—’

‘Go up to your flat.’

She scurried upstairs, heaving.

The marshal peered at the door. There wasn’t so much as a scratch on it, as far as he could see; entry would have to be made through a window so as to open up from inside, they would need a ladder crew. The rest was for Forensics to check. A snake of foul-smelling liquid was oozing from beneath it. He called the fire brigade.

Four

S
he lay on her back, head near the door, one foot pointing down the short tiled corridor, the other twisted beneath her torso. Her left arm was stretched outwards, her right hand clutched to her breast. Her chin was tipped up as though she were trying to see who was coming in the door behind her but the face wore a dark and iridescent mask that flickered in quiet concentration. There were tinier movements in the stickiness under the eyelids where already new life fed on her spent one. The flies rose from her, buzzing angrily as the marshal pushed the door with a gloved hand as far as it would go and stepped inside. Before they settled again he saw the bluish mouth twisted in a grimace and the throat wound alive with maggots.

The marshal stepped over her extended arm, avoiding the coagulated blood that had flowed as far as the skirting board and collected there and the thin stream of viscous liquid oozing towards the landing. The patch of blood was very large. A carving knife lay on the floor near the open kitchen door.

In the few moments of peace given him between the fireman’s opening of the door and the arrival of squad cars, the prosecutor, photographer, forensics, the marshal superimposed other images on the one before him: Signora Hirsch coming in as he had done, looking down.
'A knife. Not a bread knife but it was a kitchen knife.’
Signora Hirsch sitting opposite him in his office, the fear that flooded through her body when he’d asked about a smell. Had she smelled it again as she opened her door for the last time? The only smell now was coming from her dead body.

He held a clean folded handkerchief over his mouth, remembering her pleading look as she told him she had been depressed but that she wasn’t mad. He had known mad people in his time. The year when the asylums were officially closed down, people institutionalised for decades were thrown on the mercy of their families or of the world at large. He knew well enough that there were people capable of slitting their own throats, setting up a scenario like this to prove their own stories. They needed help and pity wouldn’t help them. The marshal was under no illusions. He did wish he had visited her earlier in the week but only because it might have offered her a few moments of human comfort, not because it would have made any impression on whatever process was working towards its conclusion in her life.

‘Evening, Marshal. Could you … ?’ He stepped out of view as the photographer started taking his long shots from the doorway. The kitchen wasn’t very big. A bit old-fashioned, very clean. The knives, excepting one, stood in a wooden block near the draining board. The sitting room had an old-fashioned air, too. Of course, she wasn’t young, but still … The reason became clear soon enough. There were two bedrooms and she slept in the smaller one, book and tissues on the bedside table. The master bedroom was unused. A gold satin bedspread covering an otherwise unmade-up bed. Her parents’ house, then. She’d mentioned her mother, her mother’s death. Depression.
'I’m not paranoid.’
Might be worth finding out the circumstances of the mother’s death.

‘You finished? Turn her over then, will you?’ A lot of clattering. ‘Bag the knife.’ ‘No journalists yet! I said no …’

The precious moments of peace were over. The echoes of Signora Hirsch’s voice faded. The atmosphere, suspended since the moment when the murderer shut the door behind him, evaporated. The house became a crime scene and the woman a corpse. Flash—a corpse showing position relative to door. Flash—close-up, corpse only. Flash—throat wound and surrounding bloodstain. Flash—close-up, wound only. Flash—decomposition signs—body orifices, mucous membranes. ‘Rectal temperature …’ The doctor’s voice. ‘Got to be at least forty-eight hours, probably more, but in this heat…’

The prosecutor appeared on the landing. He looked about fifty. He wasn’t tall but there was something stylish about him. The marshal, running an eye over the striped short-sleeved shirt, pale linen trousers, and glossy shoes, put it down to money and to the jacket swinging on his shoulders, the fine leather briefcase, much battered, and the tiny unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth. He had never seen this man before, which made him apprehensive. He watched him as he spoke to the doctor. Then their eyes met.

‘Ah, Marshal—Guarnaccia, isn’t it? How did you happen to be here?’ Oddly enough, the one reassuring thing about him was the little cigar. Reminded him of Prosecutor Fusarri, a strange and anarchic character but a familiar one.

The marshal, with his tendency to think he could only be in the way during any important investigation, gave a brief explanation and made to retreat back to his little office, stolen mopeds, and missing cats.

‘Excellent. No reason why you shouldn’t handle this—and, of course, it’s your patch so no doubt you know her neighbours, valuable witnesses, and so on. Carry on, Marshal.’

The marshal sighed as he started up the stairs to the top-floor flat. He had no objection to carrying on but he had a feeling that there was more to this faith in his competence than a three-second encounter could warrant. The emergency call had gone to Borgo Ognissanti and he saw Captain Maestrangelo’s hand in this somewhere. That remark about knowing the neighbours gave him away. He wasn’t wrong. Neighbours it was, then …

‘I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You deal with so many people. We’ll never forget your help, though.’

‘How long have you been living here?’

‘Just over two years. My husband’s doing very well. You remember, he’s an architect—no, of course, why should you—’

‘I do remember now. He was a still a student back then.’ He remembered the tiny flat where most of the space was taken up by the husband’s drawing table. ‘Do you own this flat?’

‘Yes—or at least we will when we finish paying for it.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He remembered now that there had been some trouble about an eviction, which in turn reminded him of Signora Hirsch’s anonymous postcard. ‘Do you happen to know if Signora Hirsch owned her flat?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid. She was very pleasant and kind but a bit…’

‘Reserved?’

‘That’s it, yes. Reserved. Not the sort to stop and gossip on the stairs. Lisa—my little girl—said she talked a lot to her, but perhaps she was more at ease with a child.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember Signora Hirsch mentioning that you work, and that your little girl sometimes spent a bit of time with her.’

‘Lisa’s twelve but we don’t like her to be alone in the house. Signora Hirsch always treated it as a social visit. She didn’t want to be paid. She said once that since losing her mother she missed having someone to look after. Marshal, tell me the truth. She is dead, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she’s dead.’

‘I knew it. I told Signor Rinaldi but he wouldn’t listen to me—typical of that kind of man if a woman tries to tell them anything—said I was exaggerating, though the smell was strong enough on his landing—he has the shop on the ground floor and lives on the first. As if a respectable, refined person like Signora Hirsch would go away leaving her rubbish bag behind the door—that was his story—but he had a snooty attitude towards her. I think they had a bit of a row. Rubbish bag, indeed! Oh, I know people do but never in this world would she—in any case, she wasn’t going away. She would have told me. I count on her for Friday afternoons, you see, for Lisa. I do freelance editorial work for a publisher so I work at home but I do occasionally have to go in, like this afternoon, so I went and rang her bell and saw—oh …’ She covered her mouth and nose with her hand as though the smell still clung there. ‘She was in some sort of trouble, you know. I told her to go and see you but I don’t know whether she did.’

‘Yes, she did, but I can’t say I understood what was going on. When did you last see her?’

‘Last Sunday.’

‘You’re quite sure about that?’

‘Positive. We’d driven out to the country for lunch at the house of some friends of ours. They’re doing a cottage up. It’s nowhere near ready but they work on it on Sundays. My husband’s helping them a bit so we sometimes join them for Sunday picnic lunch. We didn’t come home until going on for seven and we overtook Signora Hirsch on the stairs.’