The Marshal Makes His Report (17 page)

‘Good afternoon, Father.’

‘Please . . .’ He was being asked to step into the lift. ‘It’s rather urgent, would you mind . . .’ The priest continued his ‘rather urgent’ whispering as the lift rose.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Marshal said, ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ The priest only came up to his shoulder. The hand that he laid on the Marshal’s uniformed sleeve was plump and white as a baby’s.

‘It’s all for the best, I do feel that or I wouldn’t have dreamt . . . Here we are.’

They emerged on the floor where the concert had taken place.

‘This way.’ Plump as a waddling pigeon, he bustled along the darkly polished passage in front of the Marshal. The double doors to the two great drawing-rooms were closed on either side. They continued to the end and the priest opened a heavy brass-handled door. ‘Just a moment . . .’ He turned on a light. There was nothing beyond the door but a staircase, one flight of smooth stone steps leading up to another door like the first.

The Marshal wanted to ask where the devil he was being taken but he was distracted by the thought of somebody saying to him at some point,
‘You never see him
on the stairs.’
Who . . . He was getting short of breath, but so was the priest. He was slowing down a good bit. Thank goodness for that, anyway. They were steep, these stairs, and slippery and all you could hang on to was a worn and heavy rope looped through iron rings set into the wall. The Marshal’s hands were big and he could only just manage a grip on such a rope. The little priest was using both hands. He paused at the top on the brass handle of the second door but didn’t turn it.

‘I just want to warn you that the minute I’ve shown you in I shall leave you. I feel it’s better that you see him alone.’ All this still in a whisper.

‘What exactly—’ began the Marshal.

‘Shh! Now he’s very distressed, so I do hope that once he’s told you what he wants to tell you you’ll leave. You’ll find me here. You understand that all this is because there is a serious threat to his health. A very serious threat, otherwise . . . Do go in, do go in.’

And the Marshal found himself hustled through the door, which was shut on him. Behind it he heard the priest’s shuffling steps go on upwards. For a moment he stood quite still wanting to be sure that the room was quite empty. It was. He knew by instinct where he was even before crossing the room to look down from the window. The diminished courtyard lay below him. He was in the tower, though not at the top of it. The piano music was still just audible. There was a good view of the entrance. He saw the porter come out and let someone through the gates. A woman. No one he recognized. Not that it was easy to recognize someone from above like that—he’d hardly have known who the porter was if he hadn’t seen him come out of the lodge. But this woman had red hair so it wasn’t anybody belonging to the house. She started up the staircase and disappeared from view.

‘You never see him on the stairs . . .’
He was pretty sure that Flavia Martelli had said that about somebody, but who and why he couldn’t recall. These northerners talked so damn fast you couldn’t keep up with all they were telling you. Well, sooner or later it would come to him. Difficult to work out whose flat was whose from here, but if Dr Martelli was away then that one was most likely hers with all the shutters closed. So next door on her . . . left, if he remembered rightly—yes, that was the painter’s flat. Easy to see right into it. Surely there shouldn’t be that much light in a room on the courtyard where even the midsummer sun didn’t penetrate? Must be some special lighting. Probably he was painting. There he was. Waving some sort of coloured sheet about in the middle of the room. The Marshal heard a bell ring quite clearly. Amazing! It must have been the painter’s bell because he dropped the sheet at once and went off. Of course, sound always travels upwards and in the enclosed space of the courtyard . . . His thoughts were interrupted by what happened next. He saw the red-haired woman come into the centre of the painter’s room. Fido himself followed and encircled her from behind with his arms. Then he stood back. The red-haired woman took off her clothes quickly and lay down in full view of the window.

Once over the initial shock the Marshal began to reason that what the woman was doing was posing. He knew that sort of thing was done—but in full view of the window? With all that artificial lighting he could surely close the shutters. In full view . . . But it wasn’t true, not the way he’d thought. The Marshal was looking round the other windows now and it wasn’t true. The woman was arranged on some sort of low dais where Fido had thrown the coloured sheet. The flats were on the top floor of the building. The only window high enough to look down on the naked woman was this one.

A faint noise behind him made him jump and he turned away from the window as though he felt guilty. Neri Ulderighi stood facing him, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. He didn’t approach the window but the involuntary glance over the Marshal’s shoulder and the blush which darkened his face told everything. Almost everything.

‘You were very kind to come and see me. Father Benigni said . . . Won’t you sit down?’ His voice was quiet, or weak, perhaps, as though he were unused to speaking to people. ‘Will you sit here? Father Benigni always sits here. You see, it’s comfortable. My chair is close and we can talk.’ Neri had turned a faded round leather chair away from a table in the corner so that it faced the Marshal. The Marshal, again, was very conscious of Neri’s size and bulk and the awkwardness of how he held his head. He wasn’t crying now, though the Marshal had an idea that he might have been not long before because his eyes seemed too bright and his face was flushed. He had no idea what to say to him. How could he have? He was a total stranger, an enigma, and what, anyway, did he want? So the Marshal said nothing and Neri fixed him with shiny beseeching eyes.

Don’t take me back to that house . . .

They were Corsi’s eyes, the eyes of the corpse he must but couldn’t abandon, and whatever Neri wanted to tell him he knew from the sickly feeling of apprehension in the pit of his stomach that he would be sorry to know it. If he found words at last it was only to put off the evil moment. He glanced past Neri to where the table behind him was covered with tiny leather boxes. ‘I heard you were a collector.’

It was as easy as distracting a small child. The anguished eyes filled with pleasure.

‘Oh yes, indeed. It takes up almost all my time. Do you know much about antique coins and medals?’

‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh dear. But then, why should you . . . You must have a great deal of work to do and then . . . Father Benigni very wisely told me that it would be wrong to take up too much of your time unnecessarily. Father Benigni is always very thoughtful of the needs and problems of others. He’s always tried to teach me to be like him, but I’m afraid I’m a bad pupil.’

‘You have problems of your own, I imagine. I understand that your health—’

‘Oh yes, yes, certainly, but God never gives us greater suffering than we can bear. I do believe that’s true, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

‘Oh, I’m sure of it. Besides which, you know, everyone else has problems, too. I have bad health but I also have a great many expert doctors looking after me. I often think of all the sick people in the world who have no one, no means . . . you understand?’

The Marshal could only gaze at him, perplexed. This strange overgrown child had no guile in him, no hypocrisy, no arrogance. How, in heaven’s name had the Marchesa Ulderighi produced such an innocent soul? Was he a throwback to some distant ancestor— the visionary in the fresco?

‘I would have liked to show you my collection but Father Benigni . . . it’s lonely, you see, sometimes.’

‘You never go out?’

‘Go out?’ The idea seemed to take him aback. ‘I— my mother takes me to the country in the summer. The heat here is bad for me, they say. But here I very rarely go out. There’s so much noise, the traffic and so on, that for someone with delicate nerves it can be a problem. But people are very kind—for instance, the dealer who sells me most of my coins quite often brings things to show me and I think that’s so thoughtful of him since it’s out of working hours, don’t you?’

The Marshal thought it was very enterprising of him and no doubt very profitable, but he kept his opinion to himself.

‘Is it a family collection you’re adding to or did you begin it?’ The things he would really like to ask Neri! Here he was asking inane questions about a coin collection because he had been summoned to appear before this young man and the shadow of the chief public prosecutor lay over them.

‘It was begun by my great-grandfather. The family did have one or two quite important things before then but they were just there, if you understand me. It wasn’t in any conscious way a collection.’

‘I see.’

‘One or two things were sold . . . unfortunately . . . because . . . well, now they’re in the Bargello Museum. That’s a very fine collection, very fine, so . . . Ah, tea.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Neri’s more accustomed ear had caught a noise which meant nothing to the Marshal until a concealed service door as in the rooms on the courtyard opened to reveal Grillo struggling with a tray.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it? Tea for two. Little party.’ He banged the tray down on a small marble table and shook his fist at Neri. ‘Eat something!’

‘I’ll try . . .’

‘You’ll do better than that or I’ll want to know why. I haven’t climbed three hundred stairs with that lot for nothing, or have I?’

He was slapping cups and plates to right and left, hopping from one foot to the other as he did so. It was impossible to know whether he were truly angry or acting. Neri seemed to take him very seriously and to accept his rudeness as normal.

‘The steps are hard for you, I know.’

‘Ha!’ He did a little grotesque dance. ‘The Marshal doesn’t think so. The Marshal probably thinks I should be in a circus.’

‘I . . .’

‘Now the truth is—’ he pawed Neri’s big shoulder and wagged his other hand towards his face—‘if I had your legs and you had my energy there’d be a normal human being there somewhere.’

‘It’s true.’ Neri seemed delighted. ‘But what about brains, Grillo, who’s got the brains?’

‘You have. But I’ve got my wits and that’s another matter. If you had your wits about you, you wouldn’t be entertaining this fellow.’

The smile faded from Neri’s face. ‘Leave us alone now.’

‘I’ll leave you alone!’ He scuttled back to the hidden door. ‘On your own is what you’ll be but never left in peace!’

He was gone. The Marshal stared with his big eyes at Neri, longing to ask something, anything, that would elicit an explanation of their relationship which was a mystery to him. He didn’t, of course, ask anything, but Neri was quick to understand his look.

‘You mustn’t mind him. I’m afraid he must have given you a difficult time if you’ve had to question him.’

‘He was a bit strange.’

‘But you didn’t feel sorry for him?’

‘Sorry for him? I—maybe I should have in all conscience but I must confess he got on my nerves so much that—’

‘That’s why he does it, you see. I have a great deal of time to think about things, and so . . . Grillo has looked after me all my life. Even when I was so small that I had a nanny he was always there, rather like a guard dog. Nanny, who was English and never did manage to follow a thick Tuscan accent, hated him. He tormented the life out of her and she would end up by chasing him, but he could always outrun her and it delighted me. I think now that he did it partly to amuse me because I was so often sick. I think I can honestly say, Marshal, that I have never laughed in my life except at his instigation. I’m grateful to him for it.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘Can you?’ Neri looked at him hard, as though it mattered a great deal to him that the Marshal should understand. ‘Yes. Yes, you look like a man who understands things. At the funeral . . . But we were talking of Grillo. The fact is, you see, that someone as small as he is, the height, say, of a child of eight, is automatically treated like a child of eight. It’s a natural reaction and there’s no unkindness meant, but how would you feel if you were habitually treated like an eight-year-old?’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘You wouldn’t be wearing that uniform for a start. The job you did would be entirely conditioned by your height. You’d be ignored a lot. People would talk over your head, literally and metaphorically, and if they noticed you at all it would be to feel sorry for you. Now, you may find Grillo’s behaviour strange, as you say, and unpleasant, disconcerting. Even so, I rather imagine that you haven’t treated him like an eight-year-old and that you haven’t tried to talk over his head. You’ve felt angry with him, perhaps, irritated, but you haven’t felt sorry for him.’

‘That’s right. That’s very true, I hadn’t thought.’
You
never see him on the stairs.

That’s who it was, of course. Grillo. The tenants were convinced that he spied on them, that he knew everything that went on on every floor, though no one ever saw him on the stairs. They were almost certainly right. He had his own stairs, and the service doors, to the studios for example, might be locked but they were flimsy and good for listening in. At this thought the Marshal’s heart began beating faster and his face felt hot. How much had been said between himself and William Yorke that time when the dwarf had been lurking? He couldn’t even remember. Whatever he’d said had been enough to precipitate the release of the body, the funeral . . . they had certainly talked about the porter’s son, but had he mentioned his intention to pick up Corsi’s clothing? He couldn’t remember—of course, that would have got back in some way whether the dwarf . . .

‘Is something wrong? You don’t look well? Some tea?’

The Marshal took it and held it without registering what it was. The dwarf was probably out there now! And where had that priest gone? How many of the Ulderighi family knew he was here and why? He didn’t know himself why but he was being watched, invisibly from all over the building.