The Marshal Makes His Report (22 page)

‘Trouble,’ Lorenzini said, and got out of the car.

‘Don’t. He could recognize you!’ The Marshal had too much to worry about without Lorenzini’s getting involved in a street fight. Besides which, if they didn’t recognize him, which was the more likely contingency, he’d probably get himself beaten up or knifed.

The threatening noises were growing louder. There was a plunging in the centre of the group which widened. The fight was on.

‘Shouldn’t I at least get to a telephone and call a car?’

‘Somebody inside the club will have done that by now. They must be used to dealing with this sort of thing. Don’t worry.’

It was some time, however, before a squad car did draw up with its light and siren going. By then, Leo and his mate had the situation in hand. Leo had a half-nelson on the most vicious of the gang who had been flashing a knife about earlier and who was obviously the leader. He was smallish and older than the others and was kicking like a mule in Leo’s grip. Leo’s mate was struggling with a bigger, younger man and getting the better of him by the look of things. The rest of the gang were evidently only there to make up the numbers and contribute threatening noises.

‘The two of them seem to be managing all right,’ commented Lorenzini as the squad car drew in.

But the two uniformed men who jumped out of it got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Without stopping to ask questions, one of them, seeing the huge figure of Leo fastened on to a smaller, loudly protesting man, drew out his staff and brought it down with a thud on Leo’s shaven head.

‘You fool!’ they heard Leo shout as his hand went up to clutch his streaming head. Then he slumped to the floor. By that time the attacking gang had fled. The half-conscious Leo was booked for assault and the incident was over.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Lorenzini.

‘We wish,’ said the Marshal, ‘that there’d be somebody there to take his prints at this time of night but there won’t be.’

‘You never know. They might lock him up for the night.’

‘I do know,’ the Marshal said, ‘and they won’t. Follow them.’

So they followed the car to Headquarters and waited an hour or so until Leo was released and taken, still clutching his head, to the emergency department of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. There they waited two hours and then they followed him on his journey home in a taxi to the Palazzo Ulderighi. Another night was over.

‘Of course, I don’t expect you to tell me what’s going on,’ lied Teresa, shattering his short, tormented sleep the next morning. ‘I just think I’m entitled to
some
explanation when you stay out all night, that’s all.’

If there was any logic behind that remark, the Marshal, in his much reduced condition, was unable to grasp it. He offered her no explanation. If the worst should happen and his career was blocked, she’d never know he’d asked for it.

The breath of the flute was as sweet and sad as the summer dusk. It had accompanied the Marshal as he puffed up the narrow spiral staircase behind the dwarf, who needed both his hands to pull his short body upwards with the help of a thick rope looped through iron rings in the wall. The Marshal had entered alone by the service door and seen Neri seated near the window but turned a little away from it. He leant forward over the flute, his back stretched, swaying slightly with the current of the music. When it stopped, he laid the flute gently on his knee and leaned back. A sigh that was almost a sob escaped him.

The Marshal, not wanting to embarrass him, crept back a few paces and tapped on the door, shutting it behind him then with a cough. The figure in the chair didn’t move or look back.

‘You’ll tire yourself,’ Neri said sadly. ‘I don’t need anything. You mustn’t bring up my supper. Stay here with me and make fun of the idiot child. You have good reason, I can tell you. All these years I’ve been so afraid of dying and now . . . now, I only feel sad, so sad, for things I’m leaving that I hardly know . . .

‘The breath of flutes at eventide,
Mere seaweed on the shore . . .

‘Such a weight of sadness. Grillo, stay and make me laugh.’

Then he turned his heavy head. His face was flushed with drugs, his eyes too bright.

‘Ah, it’s you . . . Forgive me. Tonight I—you’re so busy and I should help you . . . tell you things, but tonight I—’

‘No, no.’ The Marshal laid his big hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘No, no . . .’

A sea of expressionless white faces bobbed in and out of the shadows, the gyrating black bodies all but invisible against black walls and against each other. The figures moved as though controlled by an earsplitting drumbeat and their movement was momentarily illuminated and intensified by a flash of silver light that left only a fleeting sense of staring eyes and frozen attitudes as the room blackened again.

Lorenzini was shouting something but the Marshal’s attempts at lip-reading were a failure. In any case, there was hardly any need to say it. How could they possibly locate Leo in this crowd? Just their luck that the place he chose to go on his night off—supposedly he was meant to be resting up for tomorrow’s final—was the same disco he worked in, a black and airless cellar that was probably meant to accommodate half the number of bodies now crushing each other. If they didn’t find Leo quickly the Marshal knew he would have to fight his way out because his eyes were streaming with the smoke and he could barely breathe.

‘What?’ What was Lorenzini trying to . . . now he was gesticulating and pointing to the far corner behind the Marshal. Had he seen Leo? What an impossible business! The Marshal’s idea of meeting up with someone in a crowd was to stand stock still, making a landmark of himself, until they found him. It would hardly do this time, not only because the darkness of his uniform, instead of making him conspicuous, in this place was practically camouflage, but also because Leo, if he did chance to spot his visitors, might well run away. There was only one door, which was something, but the Marshal was intent on keeping his back to it while trying to work out what the devil Lorenzini . . .

At last he caught on. On a raised dais in one corner a disc jockey dressed in black and wearing large earphones was working at the turntables and a bank of dimly lighted controls. If he was the regular disc jockey he was bound to know Leo and from up there had a better chance of spotting him. The Marshal had signalled to Lorenzini that he should go ahead. The young brigadier was thin and agile, much more suited to wriggling his way through the mass than the Marshal, who felt more suited to his role as blocker of the exit. Lorenzini was swallowed up and reappeared a few moments later on the steps up to the dais. The tall young man with the big earphones, his face lit from below with the pinkish light coming from the control panels, remained heedless of any attempts on his concentration until Lorenzini managed to reach up and tap his arm. Then he looked down, raised a hand to indicate that Lorenzini should wait a moment and bent to do something beneath the control panel.

Ah, thought the Marshal with heartfelt gratitude, he’s going to turn the volume down.

No such happy occurrence ensued. The young man straightened up and placed another record on the turntable to his left. Wasn’t one enough? Then he held it in position with one finger of his right hand, and with his left raised his earphones. The noise continued unabated but Lorenzini seemed to be making himself understood. The young man in black leaned down from his pulpit to listen and then stood up and looked about him. Further discussion took place and then Lorenzini stepped down and disappeared from view. The disc jockey resumed his earphones and bowed his head in solemn concentration. It was some time before the sweating, suffocating Marshal saw Lorenzini again, but when he did push into view Leo’s head was visible behind him, his stitches sprouting from a patch of iodine.

‘Thank God,’ murmured the Marshal as he puffed up the last step and came out into the square, his streaming eyes soothed by the sight of the moonlit white marble of the church opposite, his lungs gulping at the night air. Why anybody would pay to be closed into that hell hole was beyond him.

‘What’s going on?’ Leo was blustering, uncertain.

‘Just wanted a word with you,’ the Marshal said mildly, ‘and there was no chance of having it down there with all that noise. Our car’s here.’

A squad car tonight, not the Marshal’s little Fiat. Lorenzini got into the driver’s seat.

‘You sit in the back with me.’ The Marshal opened the door for him with a gesture so kindly and casual that he might have been showing his wife into a restaurant. The bull-necked, shaven Leo was bristling with tension but he got in as bidden and sat where he was in silence as the Marshal went round and got in beside him.

‘Aah . . .’ sighed the Marshal, settling into the corner, ‘warm, even at this hour of night. Drive round a bit, Lorenzini. Get a bit of a breeze in.’ And he rolled down the window.

‘Where are we going?’ Leo couldn’t help breaking his self-imposed silence as Lorenzini drove out of the centre and turned, rather too fast for comfort, on to one of the broad tree-lined avenues skirting the edge of the city.

‘Nowhere, nowhere at all . . . That’s better. Bit of air.’

Through the car window the night breeze came heavy with petrol fumes mingled with the scent of flowering trees. The Marshal was, nevertheless, acutely aware of Leo’s mingled smells of strong aftershave and the sweat of fear.

‘I expect you know,’ he began, ‘that we have informers here and there in the city—well, everybody knows that, don’t they?’

‘I’m not thinking of turning informer.’ Leo sounded almost relieved. He had expected worse than this. The Marshal knew it and bided his time.

‘No, no . . . I wasn’t suggesting . . .’

They neared the end of the brightly lit avenue and followed the stream of traffic veering left on to the river bank, then right over the bridge.

Perhaps because their crossing the river appeared purposeful, Leo protested again, ‘Where are we going? You’ve no right—’

‘To what?’

Leo had no answer. The Marshal let him wait until they had driven down river and were going back over the last bridge near the park before embarking on his speech.

‘Informers . . . these informers I was mentioning, have been saying some strange things about you. Very strange. They’re saying there’s more to the Palazzo Ulderighi business than meets the eye.’

He paused. Leo made no comment, but the Marshal knew as he looked out the open window at the needles of light shattering the oily blackness of the river that the figure beside him had become rigid with attention.

‘More than meets the eye. Now, I’m not usually one to give advice where none’s been asked for, but you . . . you’ve no record. This Tiny, on the other hand, now he’s a very nasty character who’s spent a lot of time inside. He’s experienced, knows what he’s doing— mind, I’m not saying you’re stupid . . .’

He paused again then to make sure Leo had time to note that he was saying just that.

‘Somebody like Tiny, you see, is in a position to haggle where you’re not. You’ve never been inside and want to keep it that way. Everything’s at stake for you, whereas he’s got nothing to lose. If he thinks the game’s up and he’s going to have to do a few more years, it’s in his interest to tell all and name names in return for our reducing charges. You can work out for yourself, I imagine, that you’ll come out as the chief culprit in his version. He’ll have just held your coat, so to speak.’

They travelled another long avenue round the other side of the city with Leo hunched in sweating silence, the Marshal gazing blandly out of the window and Lorenzini wondering where people who weren’t working nights found to drive to at that hour. The traffic showed no signs of thinning and it wasn’t even Saturday night. The waves of tension he could feel behind his head were such that he didn’t venture to ask where he should go next, so he stayed on the ring roads and before long they were back on the tree-lined avenue and heading again for the river.

‘Anybody in his position would do the same, I suppose,’ the Marshal continued thoughtfully.

Leo’s breathing had become audible. The Marshal pulled himself together. If he didn’t get on with it they’d be driving round till morning. The truth was that he had this habit, infuriating according to Teresa, of ‘going in and out of a coma’ and making half-baked remarks each time he came to. If Teresa found it infuriating, it might well be that Leo found it frightening. He was breathing very heavily. If he got too frightened he might be too paralysed to act.

‘So what I’m trying to say is that when somebody’s got a clean record they deserve a break. Your friend Tiny’s done some nasty things in his time. I don’t believe the story he’s telling and I don’t at all care for the way he’s telling it. Letting it be known, accidentally as it were, through informers.’

It was a very fortunate thing, the Marshal thought as he talked, that none of this was true. It was a lot more difficult when you had to do a patched-up job on bits of truth and bits of invention. The joins tended to show. But he must keep on or he’d lapse into silence again.