The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 33

There, that was why I had decided to leave without delay. The temptations were endless, I knew myself too well. If I travelled to Assisi and Giotto, I would then be drawn to Pintoricchio in Spello, Benozzo Gozzoli in Montefalco, Filippo Lippi in Spoleto, the spectacular Marmore falls on the River Nera, Orvieto and the Devils of Signorelli, the list kept growing. Three days more of travelling would take me all the way to Rome, and then it would be too late to turn back. I would be obliged to winter there.

  “If you have made up your mind,” Enrico said, “what can I do to alter it?”

  I smiled without answering, but he had not finished.

  “When two friends part,” he went on, raising his glass, savouring his wine, “likely to see each other never again, they should share some experience, some manifestation of the Sublime, which is known to themselves alone, and to no one else. A bond of friendship, let us call it, which will forever link them in the days and weeks and years to come.”

  I had to smile. He spoke Swiss-German with a strong Roman inflection. It made everything that he said seem knowing and original.

  “And what would you suggest?” I asked.

  “I have a little money, thanks to you,” he said. “I intend to treat you to a spectacle that you and I may carry in our hearts all the way to the grave.”

  “Now you insult me,” I cut in. “If you would do such a thing for me, why should I not do the same for you? I have money. Not a vast amount, I admit, but I don’t suppose you’re speaking of a fortune. How much were you thinking of?”

  “A tip for the doorkeeper,” he said.

  “Doorkeeper?”

  He smiled, but he would not speak any further.

  “What is this spectacle?” I insisted.

  “You must wait and see,” he replied. “In every place on earth there is a mystery waiting to reveal itself to a receptive soul.”

  “Here’s to mystery!” I said, raising my glass.

  Shortly afterwards, I paid the bill and we left the locanda.

  An unseen bell tolled the half-hour as we began to wind our way through the narrow streets and medieval alleys. Via Gatti, Via Luna,Via Cupa, Piazza Drago. The names were all peculiar. The Street of Cats, Moon Street, Melancholy Lane, Dragon Square, as I translated them. It was very dark, the lamps were few, the lanes stank of cats and dogs, and goodness knows what else. There was a sharp icy wind that night, and I was very glad of it – it carried off the noisome smell – until, at last, we stepped once more onto the broad expanse of the Corso, which was now completely deserted.

  “Not long,” Enrico said with a grin. “Not far.”

  “You’ve been here before, I think.”

  “On my way to Switzerland I stayed in Perugia for a month,” he replied. “I learnt to make pendulums from a craftsman who had his shop in Via della Tartaruga. That’s Tortoise Street to you. He took me to see the . . . the place where we are going.”

  Halfway down the Corso, Enrico De Pretis took off his cap, raised his fist, and knocked on a large double door.

  At last, the door swung back, a lantern was held up, a man’s dark face stared out at us. “Si?” he asked, suspiciously.

  “Offer him money,” De Pretis said to me with a wink.

  He turned again to the Italian, raised his forefinger and pointed upwards.

  The man smiled, nodded, took the coins from my fingers, stepped back, and let us enter a cold, stone vestibule. With a careless wave of his hand, he indicated a broad stone staircase.

  “He is our Virgil,” Enrico whispered, “we must follow him.”

  The flights of stairs seemed endless, turning back and forth upon themselves, growing narrower and narrower as we climbed ever upwards. Stone became brick, then brick became wood, the stairs grew steeper, narrower. Underfoot I crushed something soft. By our guardian’s light I saw the glinting eye of a dead pigeon, dull feathers, dark blood. And still we climbed.

  At last, the man stopped before a small door on a landing. He caught his breath, then turned a key and threw the door open, waving at us to go through it. He put his hands together as if he were grasping an axe, then made a violent movement – up and down, up and down.

  “What does he mean?” I asked.

  “He has a job to do,” Enrico said.

  This all sounded very mysterious. And the mystery reverberated in my mind as we stepped out onto a covered terrace. We were standing in the bell-tower of the Palazzo dei Priori, which is the tallest, highest building in the whole of the city. The man who had brought us there was the guardian of the bell-tower, whose duty it was to ring the hours and the half-hours throughout the night.

  “What a view!” Enrico exclaimed, running between the stone balustrades, looking to all four points of the compass. “You can see the whole of Umbria from here. And by the light of the moon. There is the lake that we passed this morning.”

  It was exceptionally cold, and I was not heavily dressed.

  I looked where he pointed, seeing the effects of the moonlight on the countryside that we had admired earlier that day. Lake Trasimeno was a flat expanse like a large sheet of solid ice. The gentle brown hills of the day were now black waves, fold upon fold of them, like an undulating sea concealing monsters. The sky was pitch-black, limitless, the stars a speckled ceiling of unimaginable profundity.

  I felt awed, even frightened, by what I saw.

  “Is it not Sublime? he asked.

  “It is,” I said uncertainly, “the most memorable sight that I have ever . . .”

  At that instant, there was a loud creak of wood.

  The bell-trees began to groan and shift.

  Beneath us the keeper tolled the first of the twelve chimes of midnight.

  The tower seemed to quiver with each clang of the hammer against the massive rolling bells. The tolling drilled its way inside my brain, my sight blurred, my ears ached painfully, as stroke followed stroke followed stroke.

  Sublime?

  Against my will, I turned away and vomited.

  Lentils, quails and rich red wine spilled out into the chasm of the night.

  Before the twelfth note sounded, I had retired indoors again, pressing my hands to my ears, trying to block out that terrible sound. If Enrico had intended to make that night a memorable one, he had succeeded. But while he was alive with excitement, I felt drained by an anxiety which would not set me free.

  “I must go to bed,” I said, trying to excuse my strange reaction to the pounding bells. “I am tired out, I suppose. Perhaps it was the food and drink. In any case, tomorrow morning I must leave quite early.”

  “I will stay a while yet,” he said. “I’d like to see the sun come up.”

  “If you can stand the cold so long,” I warned him. I was shivering violently, involuntarily clenching my teeth. “I think I may have caught a chill.”

  “Until tomorrow morning, then,” he said.

  I clattered down the stairs, and met the bell-ringer in the lower hall.

  I thrust more money into his hand, and said: “Buona notte, signore.”

  By the time the hour of one was struck, I had entered the pensione, claimed my candle from the landlord, climbed the stairs, and was warm inside my narrow bed. I was still awake as the clock struck two, but Enrico did not return. Would he really sit up all night and see the sunrise? I intended to catch the coach for Cesena; it would be leaving at half-past six the following morning. If Enrico De Pretis had returned by then, I would say goodbye. If not, I would remember him as a fine young man who had wished to share an experience with a friend. I had not been the ideal companion for the expedition that he had proposed, I thought ruefully. The harmless, fun-loving Roman clockmaker was a more adventurous Romantic than this faint-hearted Teuton would ever be!

  Five minutes more, and I was fast asleep.

  I missed the morning coach, but not because I had overslept.

  I was wakened by a loud banging at my door.

  “Night watch! Open up!”

  It was not yet dawn. Three men w
ere standing there with cudgels in their hands. Before I could resist them, they had pushed the door inwards very hard, and carried me along with it. No formal introductions were made. I did not dare to ask who they were as I was pressed against the wall, and a cudgel held in two hands was crushed hard against my windpipe.

  “Where were you last night?”

  I spoke a little Italian, so I told them.

  “Who were you with?”

  I answered the question. What had I to hide?

  “Enrico De Pretis? Is that his name?”

  I nodded.

  One of the men was an ex-Papal trooper as I soon learnt, and he spoke German. There were many men like him in Umbria, soldiers who had once been employed by the Pope, men who had stayed when the terms of their service ended. “What time did you see him last? Why did you not wait for him? Was he carrying money in his purse?”

  I answered all these questions honestly, then asked a question of my own.

  “Where is Enrico? What has he done?”

  “He is dead,” the Swiss replied. “That’s what comes of roistering at night, and in a strange town. If he died in sin,” the man said, crossing himself, “he’ll be warming up in Hell now.”

  “Can I see him?”

  I did not need to ask, they were going to take me to identify the body.

  It was a quick run through the empty town. A stone plaque on the wall identified the building which we entered as the Faculty of Medicine. A note had been pinned to the door which the officers pushed open. “Dissection – 10 am.” The large room was built like a theatre-in-the-round without a stage. Rows of pews looked down on a wooden table in what might have been the stalls. And on that table was a naked body. Knives, drills and a selection of surgical saws were laid out beside it on a tray.

  “Is this him?”

  Enrico’s face was as white as snow. His long black hair fell straight back from his brow like a thundering waterfall. A river of blood had drained out from a hole beneath his heart. The wound was a round, black, crusted stain. Clearly, he had bled to death.

  “Where was he found?” I asked.

  “On the steps of the fountain in the Corso.”

  “Did no one see what happened?”

  “No one.”

  Later that day, keeping close in my room, condemned to wait until the following morning for the coach which would take me away from the city, I wrote this note in my diary: Enrico De Pretis, died before dawn on the morning of 24 October, 1792, Perugia, Italy. Murdered. But not by my hand. The authorities are convinced of it. My landlord met me coming in at one o’clock, or thereabouts. The bell-ringer of the Palazzo dei Priori let Enrico out at half past three. I had paid for both of us, the man remembered me.

  I saw his body. Apart from the fatal wound, he was virtually untouched. The knuckles of his right hand were full of cuts, however, as if he had been holding a sword, fending off another man’s attack. But where would Enrico get a sword? He was unarmed when we went out. In conversation he had told me that he would never allow himself to be drawn into a fight. He would rather apologise, right or wrong, and take a beating if he must. He said that he had never held a blade in all of his life.

  Who killed him?

  Why?

  Back home in Ruisling, having spent three months in France, I suppressed my memories of the incident. That is, while my sense of dismay slowly faded away, I was careful not to mention what had happened to my mother or my father. I locked my diary away in a desk-drawer and I hid the key inside the Dutch clock. And when, a short time later, I completed my studies and married my childhood sweetheart, Helena Jordaenssen, I carried the desk, the drawer and key to Lotingen, where I had been appointed as a junior magistrate on the western circuit, making sure that lock and key should never be united. Children came – three, then four, then three again, when Anders died – and all that time, for all those years, the mystery of Enrico De Pretis lay locked inside my desk as safe as any rotting corpse inside a forgotten funeral vault.

  Until today . . .

  The last Friday of the month is the day of the assizes in Lotingen. Three men were brought before me on a charge, and a strange-sounding charge it was when Knutzen, my clerk, read it out in public. “That they had all three, and concurrently, murdered Jacob Gregorius, a wandering Jewish pedlar, 37, and the father of six children, with a duelling-rapier.”

  “How,” I asked the defendants, “can three men kill with a single rapier?”

  I had asked them this question while they were in the gaol, and I knew the answer. But in a public trial for murder, it is important to demonstrate the facts before a sentence can be pronounced and carried out. The principal defendant’s name was Dieter Winnig. He had been a lance-corporal in the King’s Own regiment before they drummed him out. Now, he was a scoundrel, a prodigious drinker, a man who never settled his bills or paid his debts, except by challenging his creditors to a duel. Perhaps he thought by telling me the technicalities of the matter, he might get off with a lighter sentence. Whatever the reason, he was prepared to speak before the court. He was the son of a minor aristocrat, it was evident in his manner of speaking, his style of dress, and his evident disdain for what any person there might think of him.

  “Winnig, speak up!” I snapped.

  He was chubby, turning to fat, his chins doubled up against his collar as he turned to me with a smirk of superior knowledge. “Very well, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis,” he began, his eyes two bright pinpricks, “this is how it was. We were in a tavern making no trouble, when a chap called Johann out over a wench . . .”

  “Called him out?” I challenged. “Please explain yourself.”

  “A duel, sir. That man insulted Johann,” he pointed to the man beside him in the dock. “Said that Johann had been ogling the fellow’s wife. He told him to be waiting in the meadow beyond the West Gate at six o’clock next morning.”

  “Go on,” I said, “and keep it simple.”

  “As simple as an oath,” he swore. “The problem was . . . you see how young he is?”

  “How old are you, Johann Goltz?” I asked the other man.

  “Nineteen, Herr Magistrate.” His voice was thick, drunken, though none of the men had touched a drop in the week that I had kept them in the cells. “I’d never fought a duel before, sir.”

  “Needed practice, didn’t he?”Winnig went on. “Still the worse for drink, he needed warming up. Needed a taste of blood, he did . . .”

  “And then the Jewish pedlar came along.”

  “We didn’t know what race he was . . .”

  “Regardless of his religion,” I opposed, “the man is dead.”

  “Johann killed him!” Winnig cried, suddenly turning on his friends. “Adam had a sword, he forced that man to take it.”

  The dock exploded. Fists were thrown, curses were uttered, each man shouting louder than the next, accusing the other two, excusing his own part in the murder.

  “It changes nothing,” I said. “I intend to sentence all three of you to the gallows. You put the sword in his hand, Adam Schmidt. You ran him through, Johann Goltz. And you egged them on, Dieter Winnig.”

  “And wiped the sword clean,” one of the other two chipped in.

  It had all been for nothing. The other duellist had not appeared for the appointment. He had left town that night, and never been seen again. A father of six had died, and that was that.

  As I donned the black cap and passed sentence, my thoughts were far away.

  In Perugia, Italy. Twenty years before. With Enrico De Pretis, clockmaker.

  I did not know who had killed him, but I had an inkling how he might have died.

  Had some Italian duellist needed warming up?

  Pot Luck

  by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  She always left him, wandering off like a cat without provocation or explanation, returning just as suddenly and without comment after a day or a week or a month. He loved her, but it was hard to keep track of where he stood in her life.
He kept her clothes neatly stacked in a chest of drawers and hoped for the best.

  One day she just didn’t come back. He only found out by accident after six weeks that she had actually moved in with another man in his – their – neighborhood. It was a guy he knew well. They had smoked together and that made them friends of a sort. Not very good friends, evidently, as this guy had had no problem taking his woman away.

  After that Trey lost his appetite, partly because eating usually meant buying ingredients at the shop at the corner opposite her new home in Diego Martin’s mostly working-class suburb of Rich Plain Road. He saw her through the fence sometimes in a tiny pair of white short pants, new ones that she didn’t have when she lived with him, hanging kitchen towels out to dry on the lines strung outside. The pants were skintight and he recognized the imprint of her labia through their dense denim folds. The lower curve of her round ass hung just under the frayed hem. Instead of wanting to eat potatoes and corned beef, he’d taste her memory, salty sweet. He grew thin.

  Tabanca like that has two cures – new love or exorcism. He chose the latter, only because he saw her in the face of every woman he met and feared that any new partner would also prove fickle and desert him for another man.

  Leaving her clothes in the drawers and her compact of cheap brown face powder on the dresser, the only things she had left behind, Trey took off from Diego Martin’s close houses and cramped streets and headed north.

  Trey pored over the small pile of dark green herb in his left palm. Nimbly, he shredded the sticky, soft leaves and brown flowers hidden in the mass, picking out the polished black seeds and putting them aside. When the mix was cleaned to his satisfaction, he reached into the front pocket of his colorful nylon shorts and extracted a balled-up piece of white paper. This he unfolded into a two-inch square and poured the cleaned herb onto it. Behind his ear was a single cigarette. Trey pulled it from its nesting spot and broke off about half an inch. He sprinkled the tobacco onto the herb on the paper, then placed the end of the cigarette on the smoothed-out sheet. Rolling the herb into the shape of the cigarette, he meticulously straightened the emerging cylinder. When it was perfectly flush, he wrapped the paper around it, put it to his lips, and licked the flap shut.