Death of a Salesperson (11 page)

Gavin, when he
did
talk about personal matters, came to them at once.

‘I say, Derek, I wonder if I could ask you something?'

‘Yes, of course, old chap. So long as I'm not bound to silence by company policy . . .'

‘Oh, it's not professional. It's—well, I wondered if Anne-Marie and Simon saw a lot of each other while you were married.'

Derek put down his savoury and turned to face Gavin with an expression of great concern on his face.

‘Oh, I say, old chap—really, I blame myself for this. No, really. I never dreamed . . . I can see what has happened. I've been putting silly ideas into your head.'

‘No, it's just—'

‘Yes, I have. I can see it. Well, just don't think any more about it. You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely.'

‘Yes, but did she?'

‘Yes, of course she did. And she'll go on seeing him frequently till the end of her days, unless they have some kind of lo—of family tiff. They're bound up with each other, always have been since they were children. But there's nothing
in
it, nothing of the sort that you've been imagining.'

Gavin stood silent for a moment, then muttered:

‘She certainly does see a lot of him.'

‘Of course she does. But you know what an open-hearted girl she is. When she gives, she gives entirely. I mean, look at her now—'

He waved his hand to the far corner of the room. Anne-Marie was standing with a man, he stiff-backed and fair-haired, she with her face close to his, for she was
short-sighted, looking up intently, laughing at his jokes, giving him the feeling that he was, for that moment, the only man she cared about in the world. Stupid bitch, thought Derek, a spurt of venom seeming to shoot through his veins. You're bringing it on yourself, you silly tart.

‘I mean, look at her. Look at the way she gives her all to anyone she happens to talk to. It's in the blood. Part of her mother's technique, if you ask me. But in her case it doesn't
mean
anything. She's giving him the idea that the sun shines out of his anus, but she probably doesn't know the man from Adam.'

‘Actually, that's Bruno Kohl,' said Gavin stiffly. ‘Friend of the family.'

‘There you
are
, you see. Friend of the family. But if you just
saw
them together, in the abstract, so to speak, you'd think—putting the thing bluntly—there was something between them. And with Simon there is the added thing that he is practically a brother to her. Remember how often she was ill in childhood, those long periods when she was laid up with that dicky heart of hers. She relied on him for companionship. It's not surprising that they got into the habit of depending on one another.'

‘No,' said Gavin, but after a pause.

‘So put the thing clean out of your mind. Good Lord, it's awful to see a happily married chap like you entertaining ideas of that kind. Forget about it entirely.'

But Gavin, fortunately, could not do that. The thing about people with few, simple ideas is that the ideas tend to take them over entirely. And the fact was that, as far as Gavin's Victorian ideas about faithfulness and marital exclusivity were concerned, he had violated them by taking Anne-Marie from Derek in the first place. Or Anne-Marie, in particular, had violated them, with his connivance.

Now Derek and Gavin found that they met fairly frequently at lunch-time. At every meeting Derek noticed with satisfaction fresh care-lines round the eyes, along the
forehead. Even the eyes wandered insecurely around the room, and the mouth seemed slacker. Every time they met, the subject of Anne-Marie hung in the air from the first moment, and every time it in the end came up—was brought up by Gavin. For one or two meetings, Derek kept up the notion that he was quite sure there was nothing in Gavin's suspicions. This was the easier to do because he was in fact sure that, whatever her relations with other men had been, her love for Simon her cousin was child-like and sisterly. Gradually, though, responding to Gavin's insistent suspicion, he shifted to a new tack, so that before long the suspicion was accepted between them as fact.

‘It's a funny family,' Derek would say. ‘I yield to no one in my admiration for Lady Crawley. Still, that doesn't mean I'd want to have been one of her four.'

Before long that became: ‘You can't wonder Anne-Marie is as she is.'

Quite soon Gavin's watchful eye, ever active at parties, dinners and other social occasions, would detect other men who he was convinced were enjoying Anne-Marie's favours. He would ring home during the day and be distraught if he found his wife not at home, or would detect suspicious noises if she was there. Derek, on their meetings, would be reassuring.

‘I'm sure it's more a matter of
manner
, rather than there being anything much going
on.
'

Eventually Gavin would cry: ‘Of course there's something going on. I see how she behaves with these men, don't I?'

‘I didn't say there was nothing going on. After all, she deceived me with you, didn't she? I just mean it's not all that
serious.
You've got to learn to take these things a bit more easily, old man. Be relaxed about the whole thing. Because there's nothing going to change her now.'

The last time Gavin and Derek met, Anne-Marie's promiscuity was by now an established fact for both of them.

‘I can see it bothers you, old man,' said Derek, digging
into his sorbet, ‘but you've got to face it, we're living in the twentieth century. All the old standards have gone by the board long ago. And, after all, you've still got the major shareholding in her.'

‘God!' said Gavin, spitting the word out.

‘I wouldn't mind betting she still loves you. That's how you must see it. It's something in her nature that makes her as she is, but basically she still loves you, in her way. It wasn't like that with us.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean, when we were married and she was playing around—and my God, did she play around!—our marriage was already dead for her. Trouble was, it wasn't dead for me. Though, God knows, I sometimes
wanted
her dead. Funny to think back on it now, but I did. Desperately. Thought of going out and picking the good old foxglove leaves . . .'

‘Foxglove leaves?'

‘Digitalis. Good for the heart in small quantities, fatal for someone like Anne-Marie if she had a hefty dose of it. That was the sort of silly idea I played with, so you can see I've been through it too. But in the end you shake down into the situation. Take the line of “least said, soonest mended.” In the end, whatever she gets up to is so much water off a duck's back. You'll see, that's how it will be with you.'

Derek first knew for sure that that was
not
how it was to be with Gavin when he heard of Anne-Marie's death. Ironically, it was her cousin Simon who telephoned him to tell him.

‘I suppose it was always in the cards, with that heart of hers,' Derek said to him. ‘Awful for
you
—you two were always so close. And I don't mind telling you, it's a shock for me too, in spite of it all.'

That was early on in the morning, about nine, before he took off for the City. Throughout the day there was a trickle of people who had heard, made the connection, and
murmured sympathy. Even in the pub that night someone had heard, and the word went round. Derek downed a couple of shorts, then left. There was a lot of sympathy for him in the Saloon Bar: it had hit him hard, they said. When he got home he wondered whether to ring up then. He thought about it for a bit, then decided it would look better if he had slept on it first.

So in fact it was next morning, after breakfast, when he rang up the police and said:

‘Look, I know I'm probably being silly, but you see my ex-wife has died, and quite by chance I was talking to her husband one lunch-time a few days ago—he's been having trouble with her, as I did—and I made this silly remark about digitalis . . . Yes, digitalis. I'm quite sure there's nothing in it, but it's been nagging at me since I heard she'd died, and I find I can't get it out of my head. What do you think?
Should
you look into it a bit?'

T
he kidnap went badly almost from the first. At five minutes past eleven Arrigo Furlani (manager of the Banco Nazionale Piemontese, and treasurer of the Rome branch of the Christian Democratic party) stepped out of the portals of the Bank's headquarters in Via Sparafucile, Rome. He was gesturing angrily with his one free hand (an Italian with a briefcase is a man half-crippled) and sending a machine-gun rattle of orders and expostulations in the direction of his obsequious underlings in the shadow of the portals.

‘Presto! Presto! Via!'
he concluded, half-turning in their direction as he surged ahead, and barging oblivious through the paths of passers-by. He did not see the dirty blue Fiat parked near his own Mercedes, nor did he heed the presence of the leather-jacketed young men some yards away on the pavement, who were observing his departure from the corners of their dark eyes.

The seizure was the work of a moment. A burst of machine-gun fire killed the chauffeur, and then the young man holding the gun turned it inwards and sprayed the doorway of the Banco Nazionale as a warning. None of the obsequious underlings showed sign of wanting to fight the thing through. Arrigo Furlani found a gag in his mouth and his hands handcuffed behind his back. In the scuffle to get him into the waiting Fiat he dropped his briefcase, and in seconds he was in the front seat and the car was beginning to career off eastwards down Via Sparafucile.

It was then that things began to go wrong. As the seizer of Furlani tore open the back door of the Fiat a shot rang out from the west end of the street. He fell at once. The two other gunmen, who had nearly gained their own car, which they were to drive in the other direction, looked round as
they dived into it, and it was the last thing they did. As the dirty Fiat swerved on two wheels into Viale Mascagni the bullets took over around the headquarters of the Banco Nazionale, leaving a spectacle of leaking petrol tanks, broken glass and spilt blood. To the dead chauffeur were added the bodies of the three members of the Red League, sprawled in melodramatic attitudes of abandonment around the middle of Via Sparafucile. Three for one: it seemed a reasonable proportion. Before long the newspaper boys would be calling it a triumph for the carabinieri.

• • •

Mario Galbani, sweating profusely, drove like a maniac with one hand on the wheel up Viale Mascagni. In front, around and behind were other people driving like maniacs with one hand on the wheel. The back door, left open as his companion fell to the first bullet, had shut itself during the perilous two-wheel turn into Viale Mascagni. There was nothing to mark his car off from the other Rome motorists. No one paid any attention to him, or if they did, and connected him with the gunfire that was still to be heard in the distance, they made sure that their attention would not be too obvious.

‘Just another kidnap,' said a good Roman citizen to his wife, and edged himself into the furthest lane.

Mario's free hand held the gun, which had been poked unnervingly into Arrigo Furlani's side from the moment he was dumped in the passenger seat. Furlani had his eyes open, and was making convulsive movements with his mouth around the gag. Mario kept his foot on the accelerator as they neared the end of Viale Mascagni. Left, then right, then right again. They'd drummed it into him so many times. Why in God's name had he been chosen to drive? He, who'd only been three times in Rome. Why, in the name of Jesus, he had asked? Because you're too stupid to shoot anyone, they had replied. And who the hell is this Jesus you keep talking about?

Left, on two wheels, with shrieking brakes, into the Via Mastromiei, the sweat pouring down his face like Alpine streams in springtime. Left, then right. Right into Viale Corbaccio, keeping with the stream of traffic, but keeping ahead of the crowd. Left, then right, then—left again, wasn't it? As he swerved left and saw with horror a tide of advancing traffic he imagined—surely it must have been imagination?—a muffled voice from the seat beside him:

‘Turn right, you idiot.'

With a soprano screech of brakes Mario swerved the car around and, careering wildly, continued the progress out of Rome.

• • •

It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive before they would get there, and long before that Mario decided he was going mad with tension and frustration. His gun hand went to sleep. Cautiously he transferred the weapon to his right hand, and drove with his left. As they emerged from the city into the Campagna he stole glances at his companion. The glances were returned—operatically, contemptuously. The sun beat down on them. Mario wiped his brow with his free hand, and the Fiat swerved unnervingly towards the ditch. Peremptory cursings came from behind the gag. Mario would have liked to open the window, but he didn't quite dare to let go of the wheel for that long. They careered along at 130, like any Italian family out for a day at the coast.

By midday the sun was unbearable. Mario was dying for a drink. Typical of his friends, Mario thought, that they'd spent last night reading
On the Condition of the Working Classes in England
, and hadn't even thought to buy in a few bottles of Coke. ‘Maniacs,' he muttered. Then, wondering about their fate, he crossed himself. The car swerved madly towards the ditch again.

It was nearly three by the time they arrived at the ruined castle of Orvino-Montevedere. Never much of a castle, it had been abandoned not long after the Risorgimento by its
family (which was not much of a family either, and had later sunk to being pork butchers in a suburb of Naples). Now it was a three-storey ruin, with collapsed roof, holes for windows, and a ridiculous tower which nobody but a fool would ascend. The road to it was hardly more than a path. But at least the members of the Red League (Orvino-Montevedere branch) had thought to remove the worst of the boulders. Mario did not slacken speed until he drove into the dusty circle which served as a courtyard. Then he came to a halt in an anguished scream of brakes.