Engel was sitting on the bed, still in his white pyjamas, his legs sticking out of them and red slippers dangling from his bare feet. De Vincenzi stood in the middle of the room staring at Carlo Da Como, who’d stayed near the door. Dressed once more in collar and tie, Da Como had had to wait to be questioned. He knew all too well that this awful story was just beginning. He managed to appear calm, perhaps even indifferent, but he was profoundly worried. It was he who’d put the porcelain doll on Engel’s bed—he’d already confessed during a stormy conversation with his friend and he confirmed it now to the inspector. But how could he have known that, as soon as he’d gone down to the dining room, someone would bring a body up to the third floor and hang it on the landing? A tragic trick of fate…
“Have you known Engel a long time?”
“Years and years. We met in London. We lived in the same boarding house.”
“Why don’t you say that the house was yours, Carlo?”
Engel’s voice was deep and hoarse. He was no longer chortling, but at that moment he doubled up with laughter, abandoning himself to mirth as if to shake off the terror that had overcome him at De Vincenzi’s revelation. It was followed by a state of meditative, searching prostration. It was clear that he was making a desperate effort to understand what was happening and why it was happening.
Da Como shrugged. “Inspector, it’s better if I explain it quickly. At one time I was rich. A long time ago. My father left a considerable estate and I was the only son, with three sisters. I frittered it all away. I was crazy about horse-racing in London. The bookmakers pocketed the better part of my money. Then there were the women. So, if you look for information about me, downstairs they’ll talk about my drug-dealing, about a Soho den, about my hotel where there was gambling…” He shrugged again. “All exaggerations. But I might as well tell you myself. I lived as I pleased, it’s true. And I learnt to my cost that any kind of life is difficult and one has to fight, armed and always ready to bear the cost personally. At the beginning, as a young man, I was innocent of this, with my own illusions, and people took advantage of me. When I no longer had anything, I did in turn what I’d seen others do: I killed off all my weaknesses and abandoned my scruples. There you have it.” He paused, waiting for the inspector to speak. But De Vincenzi kept quiet. Cruni could be heard pacing on the landing outside the room.
“None of this, though, has anything to do with that man’s murder, or anything else. Engel came to live in my boarding house. We’re friends. A few months ago when I suggested that I might return to Italy, it was he who immediately said he’d come with me, and he who brought me to this hotel, which I didn’t even know existed. It’s true that these days I’m living here hand to mouth. When I gamble and win, I pay my account here. But now I’m waiting to be hired by the Bank of Pure Metals. Engel introduced me to Signor Besesti.”
“It’s true,” the fat man uttered in his rough, deep voice.
De Vincenzi suddenly turned to him. “So during the war you were involved with Alton and Besesti in their… coastal trading business, right?”
“What do you mean? I have never been in business with Major Alton. I wouldn’t even have met him if he hadn’t come to see me after my brother died.”
“Why did he come to see you?”
“Because he wanted me to give him the porcelain doll.” It came out spontaneously, and he immediately regretted it. He seemed angry. “Damn those dolls and the rest of it. My brother died of a broken heart on their account. He was poisoned by the memory.”
“Wasn’t he, instead, afraid of Lessinger’s revenge?”
De Vincenzi was groping around in the dark, trying to latch on to some piece of the story he’d overlooked, something the others were revealing only in fragments, stray details that didn’t make sense. The crocodiles on the River Vaal, the dolls, Julius Lessinger, the memory of whom caused everyone to tremble… And the very fact of the gathering at The Hotel of the Three Roses, where a dead man’s will had convened everyone directly or indirectly connected to whatever he’d done—probably with the complicity of his two officers during the terrible years of his stay in the Transvaal… The box of diamonds… The soldier, Lessinger…
Engel took De Vincenzi’s blow without reacting. “Old story.”
“Yet it’s necessary to understand it all now, that story.” He turned to face Da Como. “So how did you know about the doll’s existence? Why did you want to play a joke on your friend by putting it on his bed?”
“I told you: we lived together. Do you think I could forget the fact that, amongst his things, Engel had a porcelain doll in a little pink slip? To begin with, I thought it was a memento of a child of his—faraway or dead. But he told me he hadn’t had children. I asked him about the doll, then, and he gave me some vague answer. But one night in London, we’d drunk a lot of whisky—”
“I was the only one drinking!” came the deep, hoarse voice of the man in white pyjamas.
“Are you saying I took advantage of your drunkenness in order to squeeze the secret out of you?” Da Como’s eyes were blazing, and he clenched his fists so hard that his knuckles went white. Engel merely shrugged in response. “Answer me! What do you want the inspector to think?” Anger swelled the tendons in Da Como’s neck, and his large face went scarlet. His reaction seemed excessive, or at least way out of proportion to Engel’s statement, which had appeared completely innocent and lacking malice. “Don’t believe him! We were both drunk and he started talking. He told me a terrible story. His brother, along with Major Alton and Captain Nolan, committed a horrendous crime.”
“William was only twenty, a kid. He was just out of artillery training and they sent him into combat. A boy… The other two were the ones who committed the crime, and against him, poor thing—he died of it two years later.”
It didn’t seem possible that this huge man with bronzed skin was softening. But his voice sounded harsher and deeper than ever and it was with difficulty that he forced the words from a tight throat.
De Vincenzi listened, attentive to the smallest movement of the two men. At last someone had decided to speak. But the two kept quiet, as if they’d realized only now that a third man was there, watching and listening. Engel shot Da Como a look of hatred from those great gimlet eyes underneath his bushy grey eyebrows.
“And the doll?” De Vincenzi asked coldly. Da Como kept quiet. “The doll?” he repeated.
He didn’t want to give them any time for reflection. He was hoping one would talk if he pitted them against each another. There had to be something there. Da Como’s anger towards the huge man in white had not yet cooled. Perhaps that was how he dominated Engel, constantly threatening him with revealing the secret wrung from him during a night of drinking, and he feared losing his hold over him. Maybe it was blackmail, and had been going on for years. Drug-dealing… the Soho den… the hotel where they’d gambled… The man had raised his hands so the inspector wouldn’t ask him anything about London. However, De Vincenzi didn’t have time to contact Scotland Yard. Everything would need to be resolved within the next few hours. If he did not arrest the killer before the hotel reopened for business, he couldn’t hope to catch him. On the other hand, it wasn’t possible for him to hold all these people in broad daylight. In a few hours the investigating magistrate would initiate the routine enquiries, and the wheels of bureaucracy would begin to grind.
“The doll?”
“When all’s said and done, it’s nothing to do with me!” Now it was Da Como who didn’t want the truth to come out.
“Engel, I’m aware of two porcelain dolls like yours now, the one I saw on your bed there, and another one which Mary Alton has in her room.” The man did not move. He knew very well that the widow had arrived and he couldn’t be unaware that she too had a porcelain doll dressed in pink. “If you won’t tell me the whole truth, then the signora will. And don’t forget that there are other people who’ll speak: Flemington and his wife.”
Engel stirred. “Flemington’s arrived?”
He panted rapidly before rising from the edge of the bed. In his straining pyjamas, he looked absurdly ridiculous.
“Let me get some cognac. I’ll tell you the story.”
The floor shook under his heavy steps as he made for the dresser and took a bottle from the top drawer. The glass was waiting on top of it, next to his shaving brush and the rest of his shaving kit. He filled it and drank noisily, greedily. He must have been drinking when De Vincenzi had first knocked at his door, and what he’d heard had been the noise of a drawer hurriedly closed in an attempt to hide the bottle.
Propped up by the dresser, he began speaking, turning to De Vincenzi and completely ignoring the presence of Da Como, who was also standing there in front of him, leaning against the door frame.
“In any case, it’s a short story. My brother told it to me an hour before he died. But I need to explain something to you, because not everyone knows what sort of life he led down there in South Africa. When Harry Alton went there in 1880, Alton was young and free. He enlisted only later, when war broke out against the Boers. He’d gone to Africa to seek his fortune and arrived in Kimberley just when Cecil Rhodes was setting up the De Beers Company, delivering the final blow to thousands of individual diamond-miners and creating a state monopoly on the gems. One could no longer prosper. Alton understood this so well that he immediately left Kimberley and made for Johannesburg. Mining was still allowed there. Claims were assigned by competition and diggers could try their luck.” He spoke in his rough, low voice, struggling, as if teaching a lesson, to choose the right words and feeling gratified by their effect.
“Anyone who believes the prospectors on the banks of the Vaal were a gang of cowboys—like the gold-miners in California, Australia and Alaska—is mistaken. The diggers on the Vaal were the best of the white immigrants from the Cape Colony. They were students, retired officers, civil servants, distinguished clubmen. Real gentlemen, in fact. When he arrived there, Alton was lucky enough to land a claim and he immediately established a firm with his two companions.” He stopped and looked at De Vincenzi maliciously. “You’d like to know their names, right, Inspector? You think the names will help you understand everything. So here they are: Dick Nolan and Donald Lessinger.”
“So what about Julius Lessinger?”
“He’s the son, of course. The son who swore to get rid of everyone, and who was Harry Alton’s real nightmare from the day he learnt of his existence. That, however, did not stop him dying in peace from illness and old age in Sydney, finally playing the rest of us for fools and gathering us here in this hotel for the reading of the will in the presence of the three dolls. Because there are three of them, not just two. That girl downstairs will have the third: Dick Nolan’s niece, Carin Nolan.”
“Listen to me, Engel!” De Vincenzi interrupted heatedly. “You have no idea what danger hangs over some of the other people staying here, but it’s real, and it’s very serious. What you’ve told me confirms it, even though it’s only the beginning of the story. This is why I’m urging you to hurry! It may be that in what you’re about to tell me I’ll find some aspect—a clue—that will help me identify and reveal the killer before another crime is committed. Will you keep your words to an absolute minimum?”
Engel fixed on the inspector’s mouth as he spoke, like a deaf person trying to understand.
“You still think that Julius Lessinger will be found here carrying out the slaughter!” He shook his head and shoulders vigorously and turned to pour himself another glass of cognac. He knocked it back in his loud, gurgling way, wiping his mouth afterwards with the back of his hand.
“Hmph! It’s almost finished. The claim that yielded most was Lessinger’s. But he didn’t want to say anything yet. The company stipulated an equal division of profits. The fact is, however, that Lessinger knew how to get the better of his partners, who were somewhat younger and less experienced than he was, and he managed to corral into his claim all the best stones and most of the money they brought. Alton and Nolan realized somewhat on the late side that their partner had taken the lion’s share. They’d worked for around twenty years and both were as poor as they’d been when they’d come to Kimberley. Lessinger swore that he, too, was poor, but it was with a real sense of relief that he saw his partners enlist under the English flag, and if he couldn’t stop his son Julius leaving for war as well, he himself held back from following them. He stayed with his three daughters, then just babies, on the banks of the River Vaal.
“The war was long and bloody. Alton became a major and was put in charge of a light battalion, with complete freedom of action and movement. He had Nolan with him as captain, and my brother, who joined them from England, as lieutenant.”
“The crime, Engel—get to the crime!”
He drank some more. All that alcohol was making his eyes glow, and when he began to speak again his tongue was thick and slurred.
“The crime! Oh, the crime was simple, like sucking an egg. Alton must have planned it for a long time, in every detail. He led his battalion along the Vaal and stopped it west of Johannesburg, on a clearing encircled by a wood. Lessinger’s house was in the thick of the trees. Alton clearly understood old Lessinger’s power and cunning, because he didn’t consider Nolan’s help or complicity sufficient. He wanted William’s as well. He got William drunk on promise, dazzled him with the splendour of all those African gemstones. He was only twenty years old, that boy, and they threw him into a ferocious war with no quarter. How could he have retained a sense of what was honest and good, when he was so intoxicated with slaughter? He went too!
“All three reached Lessinger’s house at night. They shot the old man and his three daughters with a revolver. They hung up his body from the ceiling of his hut to make it appear a Boer crime, and threw the babies’ bodies to the crocodiles in the river. They found the box with the diamonds… The old man really did have them, and a lot of them, enough to constitute a fortune. Alton buried the box in the wood in the presence of Nolan and my brother. It was impossible to take it with them in the campaign they were leading against the Boers. Whoever survived was to come and get the diamonds. Nolan made the observation that he had a daughter in England, and that his heirs would be entitled… and the three of them swore that if one of them died, and even if only one of them remained alive, the heirs would have their due at his death.”
Engel delivered the last part of his tale with difficulty. He tried to drink some more, but couldn’t. His eyes were closing. He breathed effortfully, almost wheezing, and he slowly slid down the dresser to the floor, his conical head drooping, his eyes closed, his lower lip hanging loose. De Vincenzi looked at Da Como. The man was pale. He tried to smile but only managed a sinister sneer.
“Did you know this story as well?”
“Yes. He was in this same state when he recounted it to me.”
“Help me get him onto the bed.”
It was a difficult undertaking. Engel weighed over two hundred pounds. By the time they’d laid him out as best they could on the iron bed, they were both exhausted. They had to stay still for a moment to catch their breath. Da Como went to get a tumbler from the sink and filled it with cognac. De Vincenzi watched him drink without stopping him. Even he could have done with a drink. Recounted like that in the deep, raucous voice of a man who looked like an orangutan dressed up as a clown, and in a room with whitewashed walls, by the pink light of a dusty lamp, the story had profoundly depressed him.
“What about the dolls? Do you know how they come into it?”
“Yes. It’s the most dreadful part of the story. The three dolls belonged to the little girls, Lessinger’s daughters. They were found on the floor of the room where the slaughter had taken place. Alton gathered them up and gave one to Nolan, the other to William Engel, to serve as proof of identity in case there should be any heirs to inherit the diamonds.”
“Did the diamonds remain in Alton’s hands?”
“It seems so. Nolan died in battle in 1900 and William Engel left Africa before the war ended. He went to London to be with his brother, and he too died shortly afterwards. I met him. He really was a young boy, and taking part in that awful massacre must have unhinged him.”
That explained everything—apart from the murder of Douglas Layng and Giorgio Novarreno. Alton had taken the diamonds and become rich. He’d settled in Australia, and in 1914 he’d supplied German submarines with petrol and coal, and they’d torpedoed the ships of the English and their allies. And he’d been an Englishman… He’d made Besesti his partner that time. But how had that Argentine—himself penniless and just out of bankruptcy in Buenos Aires—got involved with Alton, already rich and not in need of help? By what means had he insinuated himself into that misbegotten company doing despicable work for dishonourable profit?
“And Julius Lessinger?”
“Ah, the son, eh? Engel must know more than he wanted to say. He’s never spoken about him to me. Only once, a few years ago, in London… after Major Alton made a visit to my hotel, he sneered, ‘The old man is terrified because he’s got it into his head that Lessinger knows every detail about the death of his father and sisters and has sworn revenge. He wanted me to give him my doll, because he was afraid that the young man might come to see me and spot it. He’s a sly fox, but I’m no fool. I’ve never used the doll against him. But to ask me to give it back!’”
“Who was Douglas Layng’s father?”
“Alton. Engel assured me of that.”
“His mother?”
“He would never tell me that.”
“And Carin Nolan?”
“I told you—she’s the daughter of Dick Nolan’s son. Her father is dead and her mother lives in London. The girl arrived here at nearly the same time as Layng, but they pretended not to know each other—or maybe they really didn’t.”
De Vincenzi looked at his watch: it was a few minutes before six. Outside, the water kept falling drearily, thick as hail, down the zinc guttering. Cruni had stopped pacing on the landing. And the others? He felt frazzled. It was the hardest hour after a night without sleep spent in continual nervous tension, the hour when the body refuses to stand up straight, the brain seems liquefied, and the cerebellum at the back of the neck burns as if punctured by flaming needles. After that, one picks up. But at that hour, one’s forces are drained and one feels like throwing oneself on the floor just to rest. He had to act, however. The worst was yet to come.
“That’s fine. Go back to your room. I’ll call for you if I need you.”
Da Como glanced at the sleeping Engel, who was still snorting loudly under the influence of alcohol—a monstrous carnival puppet. He turned to go, but stopped when he got to the door.
“Do you believe that young Layng’s body was hung on this landing in order to frighten Engel?”
“I don’t believe anything.”
The other man paused. “Has anyone told you there’s a built-in wardrobe on this corridor, a sort of hiding place?”
“No! Where is it?”
“It’s difficult to make the door out in this light if you don’t know it’s there.”
In fact the door was there, on the part of the corridor that led to Engel’s and Da Como’s rooms. It shut simply, with a spring latch. De Vincenzi opened it and had to use the torch Sani had given him to look inside. A glory hole where the maids and the porter kept rags and brooms. It would have been impossible to keep a body hidden there all afternoon, to say nothing of the difficulty of carrying it up the main staircase, then the smaller one in plain daylight, while downstairs the hotel guests, the maids and Signora Maria and Virgilio came and went. De Vincenzi shone the torch along the walls and on the bottom, and rummaged in the corners: spiders, dust. A mouse darted between his feet and fled down the corridor.
All at once, he saw something shining through the dust. He knelt down and picked up a gold circle with three concentric circles of red and blue enamel. Half of a cufflink.
“Did you find something?”
The inspector closed the door, turned the key in the lock and put it in his pocket.
“Go to your room.”
It was a few minutes before he went downstairs. On the way he passed Cruni, sleeping on the last step, his head and shoulders against the wall.