De Vincenzi looked up from the papers in front of him. “Sani!”
“I’m coming,” the deputy inspector responded, and straightaway his chair was heard to move.
The inspector went back to his reading: a handwritten sheet of foolscap in clear, well-formed letters such as you’d see in a primary school handwriting exercise. On the sheet was a long list of names. He started to peruse them and then stopped and picked up a smaller piece of paper, typewritten: an unsigned letter, which he slowly reread.
Sani stood waiting in front of his superior’s desk. The light from the table lamp—the only one in the head of the flying squad’s room—fell from a large green shade in a circle over the papers. The deputy inspector remained in shadow.
“Ah!” De Vincenzi raised his head. “You’re here.” He showed the letter to Sani. “Have you read it? What do you think?”
“I read it. You left it open on your table.”
“You did the right thing.” De Vincenzi smiled.
He was younger than his subordinate, but Sani deferred to him with something more than respect. Sani had had him as his immediate superior at the flying squad for only three months, and already he’d learnt to appreciate every one of his merits. Because Carlo De Vincenzi was undoubtedly a man of quality. Rather reserved, and somewhat dreamy, but that faraway air of being absorbed in something hid an exquisite sensitivity and a deep humanity. Sani understood him, and his respect derived chiefly from his friendly devotion, an unforced attachment to him.
“Well? When the chief constable gave it to me this morning, I said to myself somewhat contemptuously: an anonymous letter. But when I read it, I had a strange impression…” He stopped, then added, “It’s anonymous, and it was written by a woman.”
“How do you know?”
“Every sentence of this letter reveals an unwholesome hysteria which couldn’t possibly be a man’s. Listen.” He read slowly, stopping after every sentence:
There’s a place in Milan where people gamble furiously all night. And that’s not all: everyone who frequents the place or lives there is hiding a secret he cannot confess, one that informs all his actions, and leads to terrible things.
He looked up. “No man would have used a phrase like that. Only a woman could have written it. It’s obviously nothing but a passage from a romantic novel.”
A gathering of addicts and degenerates live at The Hotel of the Three Roses. A horrible drama is brewing, one that will blow up if the police don’t intervene in time. A young girl is about to lose her innocence. Several people’s lives are threatened. I cannot tell you more right now. But the devil is grinning from every corner of that house.
“And that’s how it ends. There’s nothing else, do you see? Just some typing on a half-sheet of paper.”
De Vincenzi shook his head.
“It’s not a joke. It cannot be a joke, precisely because it is ridiculous.”
“It could have been written by some crazy person.”
“Could have been, perhaps; but I’m not convinced. I tell you it’s my intuition, and nothing else. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something happened in that hotel. So much so that I immediately asked the Garibaldi station to let me have a list of the guests actually staying at The Hotel of the Three Roses. Here it is. I received it a short time ago.”
“And what did you find there?”
Sani couldn’t conceal his scepticism. It seemed to him for the first time since he’d started working with De Vincenzi that he was wasting his time. How could anyone take a letter like that seriously?
“Their names, of course. What else would there be? Right now they don’t say a thing to me, even though the branch inspector, guessing what I might want, added all the information he could find on each individual after his or her name. There are about ten women and around twenty men, including the manager of the hotel, his family and the staff.” De Vincenzi now took the sheet of foolscap in his hands and studied it. “In any case, something is strange, and it strikes one right away. Look!” He counted quickly, running his finger down the list. “Five of the guests are from London and have been staying there for a long time. Vilfredo Engel, Carlo Da Como, Nicola Al Righetti—that one’s an American of Italian origin—and Carin Nolan, a fairly young Norwegian, not even twenty.”
“The threatened innocent,” Sani joked.
“Maybe… And another Englishman, also quite young: Douglas Layng. He’s twenty-five.”
“There’s nothing that strange, is there, about five people from abroad running into one another in the same hotel in Milan?”
“Quite. Not if they knew one another beforehand or if the hotel they’d descended on were one of those known to foreigners. But how do you think anyone in London would ever have heard of The Hotel of the Three Roses?”
Sani kept quiet. De Vincenzi’s logic wasn’t convincing him.
Meanwhile, De Vincenzi continued to scan the list of names. “What an odd assortment of people,” he murmured. “And do you know who the last traveller was to arrive in this hotel, just this morning? It’s a woman, and she, too, came from London. Signora Mary Alton Vendramini.”
“An Italian—”
“—with an English name. She’s the widow of Major Alton.” The inspector folded the report from his colleague at the Garibaldi station in four. “I wonder why this lady has actually come to such an unknown third-rate hotel, however centrally located it may be—it’s certainly not the kind you just stumble upon.”
“Someone must have told her about it. Or maybe she knew about it before she went abroad.”
De Vincenzi got up. “It could very well be that my so-called intuition is playing a dirty trick on me by getting me to chase after shadows. In any event, it won’t hurt me to go and look in on that hotel tonight.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven…”
“… and you still have to eat.”
“You’re right! I let Antonietta know I wasn’t coming and she poured all her complaints down the phone. Poor old thing! She loves me like a son, and I am rather like her son, actually, since she fed me with her own milk.”
He went to the corner and took his overcoat off the rack. Just then the telephone rang. He turned round as Sani picked it up.
“Hello! Yes, he’s coming right away. It’s the Garibaldi station asking for you.”
De Vincenzi put on his coat and went to the phone.
“Good evening, Bianchi… Oh!” He listened carefully, his face intent, eyes shining. “Yes, of course. Ask for the chief constable and report it to him. And let him know that you’ve told me. I’ll go up and take a look.”
He put the receiver down and stood still for a few moments, staring at the table. Sani watched him. He’d gathered that it was something extremely serious. De Vincenzi suddenly started as a thought popped into his head. No. It couldn’t be.
“De Vincenzi!”
The inspector shook himself and smiled at his companion. “Something’s happened rather sooner than I expected.”
“What? You’re not going to tell me…”
“Yes,” said De Vincenzi. “There’s a dead man at The Hotel of the Three Roses. And he—he’s one of the five we’ve been talking about.”
“No!” Sani protested. “Dead… how did he die?”
“By hanging.”
“Suicide?”
“It seems so. But I…” De Vincenzi shook his head vigorously and raised his shoulders. “No. I don’t believe anything any more. I don’t want to believe anything.” He walked around the table, grabbed the report with the list of names and the anonymous letter and put them in his pocket. “I’m going up to see the chief constable. They may give me the case. Don’t think I’m asking for it to get ahead… It’s not that.” He paused. He sounded deeply troubled. “But I have a feeling, I have a feeling—do you understand?—that the devil is truly grinning from every corner of that house and it won’t be so easy to prevent more deaths.” He headed for the door.
“Wait for me, Sani. I’ll return and then you’ll come with me.”
The chief put down the receiver and ran a hand through his shiny hair, which was perfectly parted down the middle of his head. He moved his hand down from his hair to the boutonnière of his jacket to touch the flower: a red flower on a heavy grey suit, perfectly cut. Small, pudgy and very precise in his appearance, he might have seemed anyone other than the chief constable of a big city. But his quick, piercing eyes sometimes gave him away. They were constantly moving, even when they seemed to be laughing in his smooth, rosy face. At that moment, those eyes were sparkling. He reached up to press the buzzer, but a knock at the door stopped him.
“Come in! Oh, it’s you. I was ringing in order to alert you, in the hope that you hadn’t gone yet.”
De Vincenzi bowed, closed the door behind him and walked towards his boss’s desk.
“Did you know I’d be calling you?”
“Bianchi told me what’s happened at The Hotel of the Three Roses and I thought you’d like to take a look at the anonymous letter that arrived this morning; you sent it on to me.”
“Yes.” The chief’s eyes were laughing now. “But that’s not the only reason I called you. I mean for you to take charge of this incident, De Vincenzi.” The inspector bowed. “It may be that it’s only a suicide…” De Vincenzi shook his head and the chief regarded him for a few minutes. “Maybe. But even if it is a suicide, we’ll need to get to the bottom of things. There’s gambling in that hotel. The letter may be the product of someone’s imagination, or it could be some unthinking person’s idiotic joke. But the fact that a man ends up dead there on the evening of the day we receive that letter makes one think. You’ve been in Milan only three months. Very few people know you. The Hotel of the Three Roses is frequented by literary types, journalists, industrialists, bankers—notable people, as it happens. And by several women… You have no relationships with any of these people. I prefer it that way. You’ll have free rein. Are you with me?”
De Vincenzi understood perfectly, including the fact that quite a few of those people were probably known to his chief, who preferred to have someone between himself and them.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get in touch with the investigating magistrate regarding urgent procedures, but make sure they let you act on your own for several days. That’s easy enough to understand.”
“Yes.”
“Go on, then. If it wasn’t a suicide…” He ran his hand through his hair, touched his flower. “Well, if it wasn’t a suicide, you’ll let me know tomorrow morning.”
De Vincenzi smiled and left. He hurried down the stairs and crossed the courtyard. As soon as he got to his room, where Sani was waiting, he picked up the telephone and called the Porta Garibaldi station. Sani rose from his own desk and went to stand beside him.
“Inspector Bianchi…”
He was told that Bianchi was at The Hotel of the Three Roses. So he grabbed his hat and said, “Come with me. As we go out, tell Cruni to come along.”
Not one of the three spoke while waiting on the tram platform. Officer Cruni put a half-cigar in his mouth but didn’t dare light it, hoping the inspector would tell him to do so. He had no idea where they were going. Sani looked at De Vincenzi from time to time, but he remained silent and preoccupied.
De Vincenzi himself was profoundly disturbed. He had a vague presentiment that he was about to experience something dreadful.