Death of a Dutchman (14 page)

'Stazione Pitti.'

'Gino? Is that you?'

'Yes, Marshal. Where are you? Your dinner will—'

'I know, but I shan't be back. Share mine between you.'

They were always hungry. Gino had been known to down three bowls of
pastasciutta
before starting on his main course. 'Are there any messages?'

'Only one. A drug addict was arrested while trying to sell somebody a Fiat 500—it was the boy he was selling it to who was arrested first for pushing heroin, which was what he was going to pay with, but then the car turned out to be stolen, so for once we found a Fiat 500.'

'So what's the message?' The Marshal's surprise came through a mouthful of sandwich.

'The message is, will we look out for the owner because he hasn't reported it missing. Lorenzini says he probably never will because it wouldn't be worth much.'

'Have you checked—'

The second sandwich was still on the plate but the foot had vanished.

'Marshal . . . ?'

He hung up and ran for the door, dropping a thousand-lire note on the counter as he passed. If he'd been a second slower he would have lost her, but he spotted her cream-coloured dress and her too-rapid walk as she entered the Palazzo Vecchio. Then he slowed down to his usual steady pace. If they were going to play at being tourists again that was all right by him. The Palazzo Vecchio had only one public entrance and he would content himself to waiting beside it. Inside, tourists were milling about the dim courtyard, taking flash photographs of Verocchio's bronze cherub clutching his fat fish above the trickling water of the fountain, not minding, if they knew, that it was only a copy. From the left of the courtyard, office workers were streaming out from the part of the palace that was used as a town hall.

The two white-helmeted
vigili
on guard at the main doors looked curiously at the sweaty and dishevelled Marshal, but he wished them good-day without offering any enlightenment so they returned to their conversation, pausing now and then to direct visitors to the monumental apartments.

'It can't go on like this,' grumbled one of them, lifting his helmet to apply a handkerchief. 'It's like a Turkish bath. I haven't slept properly for three nights.'

'It won't go on,' said the other ominously, and a rumble of approaching thunder confirmed his prophecy.

Only then did the Marshal recall the blind flower man's words, 'There'll be a storm before long,' and he looked anxiously up at the sky. It was still innocently clear and blue, but there was more heavy dampness in the air than ever and the uneasy rumbling was now almost continuous. He glanced back into the courtyard just in time to see the woman coming out. When she saw him there she gave a tiny start and then turned and pretended to examine the bronze cherub and the water trickling from the fountain. Should he have followed her in, after all? It had seemed like just another ploy to dodge him, but if she had met someone ... It was unlikely since she had only been in there for a few minutes . . . Even so, it was long enough, wasn't it, for something to change hands?

His eyes scanned the tourists coming out laden with cameras, rucksacks and guidebooks. He should have followed her in; she was much more agitated at his having found her there than she had been when she'd almost bumped right into him in the gardens. He stood there staring in at her, knowing that she felt it even though she kept her back to him. At last she made up her mind to move and came suddenly towards him, her shoulders stiff and straight but her head turned and lowered just slightly, despite her obvious efforts to keep it up. Once past him, she gave that little, nervous toss of the head again, almost as if she were saying, 'Whatever you may think, I have the right to do what I'm doing!' Yet there was something about her attitude, as the Marshal followed her across the piazza, that made him think she was both annoyed and frustrated. Had her meandering efforts to shake him off made her late for some appointment? Too late to do whatever she wanted to do? At the corner of Via de' Calzaioli she stopped. There was a newspaper kiosk there and she bought an English paper and stood a moment looking at it. The Marshal stationed himself in a doorway on the opposite side of the street and stared at such parts of her as were visible behind the open newspaper. He noticed that the heels of her cream shoes were thickish and not very high as the blind man had rightly judged. Were they the ones Signora Giusti had heard on the stairs?
It was a woman. High heels.
Well, they weren't very high, but high enough to distinguish them from a man's shoes. He wondered if she still wore the famous ring; or had that been discarded along with everything else belonging to her past life? From this distance he couldn't tell. How long were they to stay on this corner? She would have to make a move some time . . .

He glanced down the street towards the cathedral square where the bell tower stood. He looked harder. The bell tower was gone. He took off his dark glasses and stared at them before looking again down the street. He hadn't been deceived; there was no bell tower in sight. The lower half of the street had vanished in a thick, grey cloud, and the cloud was moving towards him, hissing with rain. People were fleeing before it, squealing and scattering into doorways, and the street was empty when the first great fork of lightning darted down into the centre of the road with an ear-splitting roar of rage. The cloud hadn't reached the piazza and the bit of sky directly over the Marshal was still blue. He looked around him for shelter, wondering if he could reach the Palazzo Vecchio, but the woman had stepped back under the awning of the kiosk and evidently intended to stay there.

The Marshal, too, stepped back, into a doorway which in itself offered little shelter but which at least had a high step and wooden eaves far above it that jutted out at least a metre from the building.

Even so, the rain, when it reached him, swept right over him and drenched him from head to foot, making him gasp. He pressed himself back into the doorway as far as he could, as the water swirled past beneath his feet. In the sudden darkness the street lights came on and then went off again as the lightning ripped down the side of one of the tall buildings. One or two taxis were still trying to crawl forward along Via de' Calzaioli with their headlights on, but the rest of the traffic had stopped, and cars were temporarily abandoned in the middle of the road.

The woman was hidden from him now by a group of tourists in brightly-coloured transparent macs, who had joined her under the awning, squealing as the grey water ran in fast rivers round their ankles, and covering their plastic-hooded ears with their wet hands at each rending explosion that reverberated between the high buildings.

The Marshal knew the nature of this beast. After tearing at the great, hubristic dome of the cathedral, whose golden globe shone up at the clouds like a challenge, it would flounder about the city, terrorizing the population and striking at everything in its path, then make for the high trees of the Boboli Gardens, moving steadily upwards to spend its fury finally bouncing from one to another of the hills surrounding the city, flashing and grumbling out there for the rest of the day and throughout the night, returning again and again to attack the red and white radio masts that bristled above the hill where the cemetery lay.

The lights came on again and stayed on. The Marshal wondered if the park-keepers had already started to evacuate Boboli, warning people to keep away from the trees, any one of which might be split open like matchwood. He remembered that he had left his bathroom window open . . . maybe he could get to a telephone before the storm reached Pitti . . .

A pair of flimsily-sandalled feet with bright red toenails came splashing through the water, and a breathless girl, her soaked dress clinging to her body, jumped on to the step beside the Marshal. She was carrying a waterlogged tray with three portable coffee cups and a pile of disintegrating sandwiches floating about on it. She had probably been on her way back to one of the dress shops with a snack lunch for her colleagues when she got caught. Water was streaming from her dark hair. After looking up and down the darkened street once or twice, she laughed up at the Marshal and said, 'What's the use?' Then she hopped out into the swirling water again and made off with her head down.

The Marshal's shoes had filled with water that had run down his drenched trousers. He tried to dry his face a little with a handkerchief but only succeeded in wetting the handkerchief. The rain which had been hot at first was now cooling and he began to shiver. Some of the tourists had made a run for it in their iridescent macs, and he could see Signora Goossens again now, her tinted hair lying flat and her face pale with fear, her chilly eyes regarding the storm with personal antipathy. Did she think it was some sort of divine retribution? If she did, she evidently considered it to be unjust . . .

'I have every right . . .' Right to what, though? What was she doing here after all these years? And if she did poison her stepson, what possible reason could she have had?

The lightning had moved on to the next street and was only visible as lurid flashes accompanied by deafening thunder that had already given the Marshal a piercing headache. The streetlights cast a livid gloom that was more dismal than the stormy darkness had been, and the sulphurous smell of the electrical discharge mingled with the earthy smell of the rainwater spouting from the terracotta roofs. The rain showed no sign of abating, and the fountains and drains were already overflowing. Water swilled over troughing in long sheets to hit the road far below with a loud clatter; waterfalls formed wherever there was a fault in a drainpipe, and grinning stone faces spewed malevolently into their flooded bowls.

People were calling to one another over the noise of the rattle and spray of the downpour; only the Marshal and the woman regarded each other silently from opposite sides of the street, and the look in her cold eyes was one of hatred.

'Marshal? Where are you?'

'In a bar.' This time he had her in full view as she stood dabbing at her hart with a handkerchief while waiting for a
caffelatte.
'Listen, Gino lad, go through to my quarters, will you, and shut the bathroom window, if it's not too late to prevent a flood.'

'It's all right, we've already done it, sir. Lorenzini checked the whole building and put the board up in front of the cellar grating—he says it's going to be bad.'

'It is. Hasn't it reached you yet?'

'No, but it's very near; it's going dark . . .' Behind Gino's voice the Marshal could hear the loudspeakers in the Boboli Gardens giving out a warning in four languages. 'The electricity went off for a bit but it's on again now. Lorenzini said he hoped you were on this side of the river . . .'

'I'm not, but I'm not far away. I'll see you later.'

'You're not too far from home, I suppose? From your
station?'

The blind man, like Lorenzini, had suffered in nineteen-sixty-six. In Florence, 'before the flood' had a more recent connotation than the biblical one, and each building carried a small ceramic plaque with a wavy line drawn on it at the height the water had reached on that November 4th. Some of the plaques were at second- and third-floor level.

The Marshal could feel the whole city tense and uneasy as he followed the woman wearily back across the Ponte Vecchio. Lights were on in the jewellers' windows and many of the shop-owners were standing in their doorways discussing the adequacy or inadequacy of the dredging and reinforcing of the river bed that was still going on. One of the big yellow diggers was marooned on an artificial sandbank, and people were hanging over the central parapet of the bridge to watch the racing brown water that was dragging along huge branches torn from trees far out in the country where'the rain must have begun days ago.

The Marshal's only comfort, as he squelched miserably back along Via Guicciardini, was that Signora Goossens was as wet as he was; but since she was somewhat elderly and since he wasn't a vindictive man, it wasn't much comfort at all. Just before they reached Pitti, she turned in at a pensione on the left and he trudged mindlessly in after her. It was a place he had to call at, anyway, if he ever gave up this wild goose chase.

She had taken her key and vanished when he got up to the reception hall on the first floor of the building, and he made no effort to go after her, merely saying, as the nonplussed receptionist put the blue register into his dripping hand:

'I need to use your phone.'

He opened the register before dialling, and copied into his sodden notebook a British passport number and the name Goossens, Theresa. He didn't like her having his wife's Christian name, no matter how good she was supposed to have been. She had checked in the previous day, Tuesday.

'Stazione Pitti.'

'Gino? It's me again. I want you to tell Lorenzini to meet me immediately round the corner at the Pensione Giottino. I'm at the reception desk. If he doesn't find me here, he's not to worry but to go straight back to Pitti. Have you got that?'

'Pensione Giottino . . . yes, I've written it down. There's a message for you, Marshal; d'you want me to read it to you?'

'Go on.'

'A lady telephoned and said ... I wrote it down because it sounded a bit odd . . . she said: "No, none of us, and I've checked the boys as well. Nobody." She said her name was Franca and that you'd know what she meant.'

'Yes. Thanks.'

He put the receiver down.

'That was no lady,' he muttered to himself, but he appreciated Franca's discretion and was amused by her having checked out the boys as well. He couldn't really imagine the Dutchman having picked up a prostitute at all, but the idea of his picking up one of the transvestites down the river . . . Even so, if you checked, you checked everything, otherwise there was no point.

'Is anything wrong, Marshal?' The receptionist, who did double duty as a porter,was observing him apprehensively.

'No,' the Marshal answered.

The one thing he had wanted to avoid was dragging any of the lads into this business, but he couldn't go on in this soaked condition and he couldn't neglect his hotel round either.