Death of a Dutchman (13 page)

The Marshal perched himself on the edge of the low stool so that he could easily glance out into the piazza, scanning the crowded market as he talked.

'Not many people can afford an apprentice, these days,' he remarked. 'I was talking to a printer yesterday who said he couldn't even think of it . . .'

His voice sounded casual but his eyes were rolling from the window to Signor Beppe, round the room and back to the window, and his remark was anything but conversational.

'And neither could I, under normal circumstances. It's thanks to Toni that I can do that and other things . . .'

Maybe he owes him everything,
the blind man had said.

'I bought this business from Toni when he decided to settle permanently in Amsterdam. In fact, I'm still buying it, and at a price so low and over a period so long . . . Well, I worked for old Goossens all my life and I taught Toni most of what he knew because his father was often travelling and I was set to help him, the senior craftsmen being too busy. Toni was never one to forget. His only condition in the sales contract was that I always trained an apprentice.'

'That must eat into your profits, even so. What happens now he's dead?'

'The payments will be made to his wife.'

'And the apprentice?'

'The arrangement remains the same. I don't keep the boy because I have to, Marshal. This business means a lot to me; I've worked here all my life. My own son's in the
Liceo Scientifico
and wants to study engineering, but continuity is what made this city what it is. If the crafts die out now for lack of apprentices ..."

'What else was in the will?'

'Nothing of any interest: a few pieces of jewellery to his mother-in-law and the same to his stepmother who continues to have the right to live in the flat upstairs as his father would have wished. He had no other family—oh, and there's a small legacy for an old lady who lives upstairs.'

'Signora Giusti?'

'That's right.'

'Have you any idea why his stepmother left here so suddenly?'

'None, no . . .'

'You don't seem keen to speculate?'

'She was a good woman, and exceptionally good to Toni. He loved her very much.'

'Yet she left without a word—not even a word to you?'

'That's right. Immediately after the funeral. She didn't even take her belongings; it seems her clothes are still up there.'

It occurred to the Marshal to wonder if she had done the same after her first husband's death: walked away leaving everything behind her to start a new life in a different country. It wasn't impossible that she had married again. But it would be wiser not to say so just now. Instead he said:

'Toni must have been very upset?'

'He was.'

'But he never offered any explanation, mentioned any quarrel?'

'There was no quarrel. Toni wasn't even here when she left, he was in Amsterdam, and he knew of no explanation; he was as baffled as the rest of us. At first he telephoned and sent letter after letter through her solicitors, asking her just to see him and explain. Eventually his wife, Wanda, put her foot down. There was never any answer, anyway, so he more or less gave up . . . although recently . . .'

'Recently?'

'I'm thinking of the last time he was down here, which would be about four months ago. He seemed to think there was some hope of getting in touch with her.'

'He didn't say why?'

'No. Only that he felt she would have to come back now.'

'Without mentioning a reason?'

'No, just that he felt sure he would hear something, that she would have to come back now. I didn't press him because it was a subject that always upset him. He never really got over it.'

'Do you think it might have had anything to do with the baby they were expecting?'

'I suppose it could have been. After all, she was going to be a grandmother, so to speak, for the first time.'

'Nothing else in Toni's life had changed?'

'Not that I know of.'

'And how did he seem on that last visit?'

'Particularly cheerful. Mostly because of the baby—after eight years they'd almost given up hope.'

'Eight years? What was the problem?'

'That I couldn't tell you. I only know he was over the moon when the news was confirmed. He rang us up from Amsterdam.'

'Were you usually in touch with him in Amsterdam? I mean, he let you know when he was coming down? Signora Giusti said he sometimes telephoned her.'

'Yes, and me too, but not this time.'

'So apart from the phone call about the baby, you had no contact at all with him for the last four months?'

'I didn't say that. I said he hadn't let me know he was coming down. He wasn't due to come, not for another two months. Any business he did in Florence he did through this studio. He dealt with other jewellers besides me but we all met here; I arranged it as soon as he phoned. Between times you could say we were in touch because I sent him his mail. Some of it still arrived here, catalogues and bills mostly, and notices from the council, rates and such-like because he owned the property.'

'When did you send the last lot?'

'I think about three weeks ago. I don't send things one by one, I make up a package when there are a few—unless something looks urgent.'

'There could have been a letter from his step-mother in the last lot, then.'

'No, there couldn't. In the first place he'd sent her his address in Amsterdam after he married, through the solicitors, and in the second place, if she had written to him here I'd have noticed the letter.'

'You open them?'

'No, but as I said, I only make a point of sending on an individual letter if it looks important. I would certainly have noticed a personal letter with an English postmark, even telephoned him.'

'Had he ever asked you to do that?'

'Not in so many words but I knew how much it mattered to him.'

'Can you remember what was in the post you sent? Was there any personal mail at all?'

It needn't, after all, have been posted from England. If the woman was here now she could already have been here then.

'Nothing personal at all. I remember wondering whether to wait another week but the boy was going to the post for me anyway so I decided to send what there was: a catalogue, a letter requesting certain stones for a jeweller here—he'd left it here when he called and I said I'd send it on, and a letter from the Town Council. That was all.'

'Someone had ordered stones . . . would they be valuable ones?'

The goldsmith smiled at his ignorance.

'Of course. They were diamonds. But he would hardly have been bringing them down this week without letting me know, if that's what you're thinking. Besides, he wouldn't have had time to buy and cut them.'

'What about the letter from the Council?'

'I've no idea. Those yellow envelopes all look alike. A letter about the rates going up, a circular from the local library, or one of those offers of a free cancer test or X-ray from the department of health . . .' The goldsmith shrugged.

The Marshal had got to his feet and was toying with his hat. It was all there, he was convinced, if only he could grasp it; all the elements of a crime and all the elements of a family quarrel, too; but everybody kept telling him that there was no crime and no quarrel. Whenever he tried to grasp any one of the elements it evaporated like a ghost in daylight.

He sat down again with a thump and took out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

'And yet,
something
broke the family up . . . and why should he bring those dark clothes with him as if he were dressing for his own funeral . . .'

'There are those that say he was."

'And are you one of them?' The Marshal stared up at him.

'No, I'm not,' he answered quietly, 'but it's for you to decide.'

'That's just what it isn't!' The Marshal's big hands were clenched on his knees in frustration, his face red with heat and a sort of aimless rage, like a bull too long tormented in the ring. 'That's just what jt isn't—and I
know
that if I don't find the answer before he's buried I never will! Funerals—it always comes back to funerals.'

'Most family troubles do. That and money.'

'And this family seems to have had plenty of both—not to mention diamonds. If I could only feel I had more time I—'

He turned and recoiled from it before even hearing the blind man's warning bell and the boy's running footsteps.

Two inches away from him a white, malicious face was peering in through the hole in the paper.

CHAPTER 7

The face recoiled, too, in a second, and the Marshal had time to recognize both fear and surprise in its expression before it was gone and he was making for the door, colliding with the apprentice who was running in. Signor Beppe who, from his standing position, had seen nothing, hurried out after the Marshal and spotted the woman making for the corner almost at a run.

'Oh! Marshal!' he called out in surprise. 'But that's the Signora! Signora Goossens!'

But the Marshal, though he heard, didn't pause in his pursuit, and both he and the woman were soon out of sight round the corner.

'Now, Signora,' whispered the Marshal to himself. 'Now . . .' though he couldn't have said now what.

She had slowed down a little, once out of the square, and was walking at a normal pace along Via Mazzetta. She might not have known yet that she was being followed; even so, she was still walking a little too fast for this heat, which made her noticeable as she threaded through the lethargic shoppers and strolling tourists. On reaching the tiny Piazza San Felice, where four roads met in a tangle of blocked traffic, she glanced behind her, and the Marshal felt sure she saw him before hesitating a second and then turning left.

At first he thought she might be going to take another left turn and so arrive back in Piazza Santo Spirito, but instead she crossed over and took the fork that led to Pitti, disappearing for a moment among a crowd of Japanese tourists, the only people who were walking as briskly as she was. When he next spotted her she was in full sunlight, half way up the sloping forecourt in front of the palace.

It seemed, incredibly, that she must be making for the Station which lay beyond the archway on the far left, but after hesitating a moment by the postcard stall, she went in at the great central doors which led to the courtyard, the entrances to all the galleries, and the Boboli Gardens behind. She was immediately lost in the teeming gloom of the arcade. The Marshal, having panted up the slope behind her, had a moment of panic as the crowd sucked him in and his vision blurred. He had been too absorbed till then to notice that his sight had been getting steadily weaker, but now tears were rolling down his cheeks and he was as blind as a newly-emerged mole. Cursing himself, he plunged into his pockets in search of handkerchief and dark glasses. By the time he could see again he had little hope of spotting her, but the crowds worked in his favour rather than hers. She had rushed up the big staircase on the right that led to the Palatine gallery, and must have been turned away at the top of the four great flights because she had no ticket. The ticket office was down in the courtyard to the left of the stairs.

He spotted her trying to fight her way down through a coach party going up behind their leader who was waving a red handkerchief on a stick. The noise under the colonnade below was deafening, and two large women in pastel-coloured trouser suits were dragging at the Marshal's arm, shrilly demanding that he tell them the way to some incomprehensible place. He shook them off and pushed his way towards the centre of the courtyard as Signora Goossens had just done, and saw to his dismay that she was making for the gardens beyond.

'Excuse me, excuse me!'

The walled-in stone path leading up to the level of the gardens was narrow, and the over-heated tourists were moving up at a snail's pace, probably grateful for a few moments of shade. Excusing himself only caused them to stop and stare at him, blocking his way more effectively. A large young man in shorts swung round and hit him in the face with an enormous, metal-framed backpack.

'Excuse me!
Let me through, for the love of ...!'

At last he was out at the top of the slope, under the beating glare of the sun, with the cathedral dome shimmering beyond the trees. He spun round to the right, sending up a spray of gravel, and saw the woman moving quickly through a party of schoolchildren coming in the opposite direction. If she had slowed down and mingled with the crowd it would have been impossible to follow her, but she went on pushing her way through them, almost running.

'So, you're afraid of me,' muttered the Marshal under his breath. He was already rather breathless and he felt the gravel burning the soles of his shoes. In this open, dusty space, the sun's intensity was sickening. The Marshal had little enthusiasm for a chase through the gardens. Having lived here so many years, she probably knew them better than he did, and would undoubtedly stick to this end where the crowds were always thickest. There were at least three exits she could use . . .

'Now where are you going?' She was staying on the lowest level and had taken the road that ran past the back of the palace, then the left fork where a giant, glittering white Pegasus reared up before a slope of clipped grass. He lost her for a moment as she vanished round the bend where a Roman sentinel marked the beginning of the laurel walk. He quickened his pace, baffled. He had assumed she had come in here either just to pose as a tourist or to try and shake him off, but now he was unsure. This part of the gardens was always quiet and she must know that. It could be that her attempt at dodging into the gallery had been a blind but that she had an appointment here.

'Well, if you have, I'll come too, Signora, if you don't mind . . .'

The covered laurel walks formed a maze of shady paths on the side of a steep slope. Stopping at the bottom of the first one and looking up the travelled alley that seemed to vanish into gloomy infinity, he spotted his quarry toiling upwards and started after her. At the first intersection her pale dress vanished among the dark green foliage to the right. When the Marshal got there she was gone. He stopped and took out a handkerchief to dry his forehead and the back of his neck.

Except for the chinking of an amorous blackbird, invisible in the dry grass and tangled shrubbery beyond the confines of the covered walk, the garden was silent and the Marshal listened to his own heavy breathing. He would have liked to sit down on the stone bench he could see jutting out a little further on, but his instinct told him to keep going. He walked forward very slowly, listening hard between the light crunch of his own footsteps. When he came out momentarily into the light at the main intersection, he was so blinded, even behind dark glasses, that the passage before him was a featureless black tunnel, and only very gradually, as he walked through it, did its roof of gnarled branches and the flecks of spent light on the pathway reappear. Then he stopped.

He had heard a rustling noise accompanied by someone else's footsteps on the gravel. It came from somewhere along the path running parallel to the one he was on. The Marshal peered through the tangle of sweet- smelling leaves, past the grassy patch to the next walk, and spotted the movement of light-coloured clothing. There was no way of cutting through, so he hurried as quietly as he could to the end of his path, and climbed up to turn into the next one. The pale figure was still there.

'Good morning, Marshal. What brings you here? Not your day off, is it?'

'No, no ... it isn't.'

The gardener who, in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves, was tying a small laurel sapling to a supporting pole, was the Marshal's next-door neighbour. He stopped work expectantly as the Marshal stood looking uncertainly about him.

'Another bag-snatcher, is it?'

'Not exactly. I wanted a word with a woman ... a tourist ... I thought I spotted her but it must have been you.'

'A fairly elderly woman? Wearing a sort of cream-coloured frock?'

'That's her.'

The gardener pointed with the clippers in his gloved hand. The scent of the bayleaves where he had been cutting and tying was almost overpowering.

'She's gone higher up. If you ask me, she's lost, but she couldn't be bothered to answer when I wished her good-morning, so I left her to it.'

The Marshal toiled heavily up to the next path. There was no one in sight along all its length. Sweat was pouring off him despite the shade of the branches bent overhead, and his shirt and the waistband of his trousers were soaked through. Again he spotted flecks of white among the dark green on some distant path and hurried forward, only to find a Roman matron smiling blindly down at him, one broken hand outstretched.

'Blast the woman!' muttered the Marshal without specifying whether the stone or the flesh and blood one.

He had reached the top of the 'maze' and he had lost her. There was nothing for it but to start down again. She may well have taken some other route but, since he had little or no hope of finding her, he might as well stay in the shade as brave the beating yellow glare on the open pathways. He took the steep walk going straight down the centre, his shoes sometimes skidding a little in the ochre dust of the gravel, and the gravel sometimes getting into his shoes.

At the bottom he paused by the fish pool, gazing across at the island. The still, green water was flecked with orange fish and edged with upside-down lemon trees in huge terracotta pots. The heat and silence were hypnotic, and he was almost going to sit down on a stone seat and close his eyes. It caused him physical pain to wrench his gaze from the green and gold vision and go on walking. It would help, he thought, if he could find some water to drink and get some of the dust out of his mouth. But when he moved towards the sound of trickling water and found, in a shady arbour, a moss-green man in jerkin and breeches emptying his ever-flowing wine jar into a barrel clutched by a grinning boy, the sign below the stone figures said 'Not drinking water'. With a sigh, the Marshal joined the tableau and held out his hands for the man to fill them with cool water which he dabbed on his head. He started back along one of the lower paths of the maze, pausing at the first intersection to listen.

As soon as his own footsteps ceased, he heard hers. They were coming towards him rapidly. She came round the corner from the path to his left and almost ran right into him. He stood there, still and apparently impassive behind his dark glasses, making the most of this first opportunity to have a look at her face. The eyes were cold and expressionless and the lips reduced to a thin dry line strangely crossed by vertical creases as though they had been mummified into an expression of selfish fury. Only a red blotch on her neck and an involuntary toss of her head indicated her nervousness as she swerved round him, startled, and hurried on down the slope, sending up little clouds of yellowish dust.

The Marshal pursued her doggedly, confidently. Having seen her close to, he realized that however inefficient his efforts at following her had been, she didn't know it. She looked as though she had been running all this time, convinced that he was cleverly shadowing her and managing to keep out of sight. He could almost have agreed with the gardener who had thought she was lost. Was it possible that in all her years in Florence she had never spent much time in the Boboli? It seemed so unlikely . . . the only green oasis among all that imprisoning stone... and yet she wasn't sure of her way . . . unless she was looking for somebody.

At the bottom of the slope she hesitated before turning right towards the palace. As they neared the crowded area where the tourists gathered, he got closer to her. It was nearing lunch-time, and people in shorts or flimsy sundresses were climbing up into the stone seats on the shady side of the amphitheatre and spreading out picnic meals, closely stalked by thin, wild-eyed cats. The cathedral bell, its tower visible beyond the trees, began to toll the Angelus and the Marshal began to wonder what was going to happen to his lunch.

As they came out through the courtyard and on to the car park he thought longingly of his cool, dark sitting-room, of taking off his sweaty uniform and dusty grit-filled shoes; of a shower and a meal and a doze in his armchair. But he went on following the woman, who had begun to look anxiously at her watch.

Where are we going now . . . ? the Marshal wondered, as she pushed her way along the narrow pavement of Via Guicciardini towards the Ponte Vecchio. He had already decided that he wouldn't like to be a tourist if they had to slog round like this all day. They crossed the bridge between the tiny jewellers' shops. Could she be going to see one of the jewellers? The Dutchman could easily have brought stuff with him, perhaps illegally imported . . . But the woman went straight across the bridge without so much as a glance at the shops, and now they were on the broader Por Santa Maria and she was looking at her watch again. If she did have an appointment, it hadn't been in Boboli where she had simply been trying to get rid of him.

At the flower market she turned right, into Via Vacchereccia, a short street which opened into the Piazza Signoria where the Palazzo Vecchio stood, the old palace with its crenellated top, heraldic shields and stone tower. Before going into the piazza the woman halted and looked again at her watch. The Marshal looked at his. It was after twelve. Still she was hesitating, trying now to look nonchalantly into the window of a big café on the corner, where handmade chocolates wrapped in thick yellow paper were stacked in little mountains. The Marshal wondered if she would go in, but after a glance at the prices on the tiny squares of chocolate, she went back a few yards and entered an ordinary bar.

The Marshal, watching her from the middle of the road said to himself, 'Good,' and followed her in. Even so, he thought, picking up a paper napkin and helping himself to a sandwich, it's a far cry from the international diamond business. It looks as though the saintly Signora doesn't like to part with her money. He ordered a coffee and a glass of water, and feeling in his top pocket for such money as he might find there, decided that it was just as well for him that she hadn't gone into the other place.

The narrow bar had only three tables in it, and Signora Goossens was sitting at one of them with two sandwiches and a cold drink.

'Have you a telephone?'

'In that little alcove at the back there.'

'Give me a token.'

From the alcove he was just able to see the two sandwiches and one of her shoes. He dialled, watching thin, claw-like fingers reach for one of the sandwiches and remove it from sight.