The Dividing Stream (34 page)

‘‘I shall get well,’’ Giorgio said wearily.

Signor Rocchigiani began to tug something from his trouser-pocket and at last produced a banana. ‘‘
Ecco
!’’ he said. ‘‘I bought it as a present for you. Not for
you
, young rascal,’’ he said, still maintaining this new mood of benevolence as he pointed the banana, like a pistol, at Enzo. ‘‘And I bought you this, too.’’ Once again he grubbed in the trouser-pocket and produced a silver identity disc, inscribed with Giorgio’s name and the address in the Borgo, and a silver bracelet on which he began to string it. It was a present which, whether from accident or design, was exactly suited to the tastes of the boy, and Giorgio was delighted. ‘‘ Give it to me,’’ he said, and having fastened it round his wrist, he turned it this way and that, cocking his head at the same time, like a woman examining a ring. For the first time for many days he smiled without an intense, suffering languor.

‘‘Pleased?’’

‘‘Very much.’’

‘‘And look—I bought myself this.’’ Signor Rocchigiani displayed his own hairy wrist on which was fastened a watch. ‘‘ Like it?’’ he asked.

‘‘But good God, Father, where did you get the money?’’

‘‘That’s my secret.’’

‘‘I hope this doesn’t mean that you’ve——’’

‘‘Now look, my boy, have you ever known me do a dishonest thing? Now, have you? I ask you, have you?’’ When Giorgio and Enzo could not restrain their smiles, he exploded: ‘‘ What are you both sniggering at? What’s the joke?’’

‘‘Nothing, Father,’’ Giorgio said, beginning to cough and continuing to do so for so long that it was like a machine gone out of control. ‘‘Nothing at all.’’ Between gasps, he said: ‘‘ But tell us—where did you get the money?’’

‘‘Mind your own business,’’ Signor Rocchigiani answered with an intense self-satisfaction. ‘‘Curiosity killed the cat,’’ he added, in his childish addiction to proverbs.

Ten minutes later the police had arrived.

There was a wisp of a middle-aged man, who had the perpetually suffering expression of a martyr to dyspepsia, and with him a youth whose over-large hands and feet, sullen peasant’s face, and a habit of walking with his head thrust forward, as if in aggression, lent him a kind of brutal charm. Both were in plain clothes, the senior man in a shiny blue suit and black shoes, now grey from having remained so long unpolished; the junior in a cheap grey-and-white striped cotton, a peculiarly bright tie of contrasting lines of green and purple, an artificial silk shirt and slipper-shoes of the grey, punctured suêde then most in fashion among the men of his class. It was these men who had also come to the house after Bella’s death.

The older man spoke, while the youth prowled about the living-room, lethargically opening drawers and boxes and even raising the lid of the teapot. They had both been suspicious of Enzo when called to the dead woman, and though the verdict at the coroner’s court had been death by misadventure, they still persisted in connecting the operation the girl had attempted to perform on herself with the young boy. They now not unnaturally felt that their suspicions had been justified.

‘‘You remember us?’’ the sergeant said; and each word seemed to be impregnated with sourness, as if it were something brought up from his stomach.

‘‘Yes, I remember you.’’

‘‘You had an easy time, last week,’’ the youth drawled, turning a cup over in his hands which were remarkable for the length to which he had grown the nails of the little fingers. ‘‘You were lucky,’’ he said.

‘‘The court never——’’

‘‘We’ve come about the brooch,’’ the older man said.

‘‘What brooch?’’

‘‘The Englishwoman’s brooch.’’ The sour vomit again bubbled effortlessly upwards and emerged from between his lips. ‘‘Where’s your pal?’’

‘‘What pal?’’

‘‘Come off it. Rodolfo Benelli. You know who we mean. He’s not at his home.’’

‘‘How should I know where he is?’’

Outside the door five of the inhabitants were already listening, among them Signor Rocchigiani, who, when he heard this defiant question, exclaimed with disgust. That wasn’t the way to speak to a policeman, he knew from experience.

‘‘We must search you,’’ the little man said. He beckoned the other forward.

‘‘I’ve stolen nothing.’’

‘‘All right. We must search you.’’

‘‘But why the hell—?’’

‘‘We must search you.’’ He perched on a corner of the table and began to fan himself with a paper he had drawn from a pocket.

The young man began to run his clumsy hands over Enzo’s body, standing close to him and looking into his eyes with his own lazy, mocking ones. He had not shaved that day and there were heavy shadows under both jowls. At one point in his examination he touched and then made an obscene reference to a part of the boy’s body, and Enzo suddenly leapt away from him.

‘‘Come here,’’ the policeman said quietly, in his soft, indolent voice, and he raised one hand and pointed to a spot between his feet.

‘‘Not on your life.’’

‘‘Come here!’’

‘‘Not if you give me that sort of stuff.’’

The policeman sprang at the boy and the two scuffled together, blundering round the room until they knocked over a table on which stood a bowl of gold-fish. The sight of the fish, gaping and thrashing their tails on the stone floor, at once quietened Enzo. He stood staring at them, and appeared hardly to notice when the panting detective slipped some handcuffs on his wrists.

‘‘May I put them back?’’ he said.

‘‘No, leave them.’’

‘‘But they’ll die.’’

‘‘Let him do it,’’ the sergeant said from the table.

Clumsily, because of the handcuffs, Enzo picked up one after another of the slithering fish and put them back in the bowl; then he carried it over to the tap and filled it with water. ‘‘Lucky it didn’t break,’’ he said. ‘‘That mat must have saved it.’’ He was quite calm now, and spoke in an ordinary, conversational voice. ‘‘ Well, what do you want me to do?’’ he asked.

‘‘You’re coming to the station.’’

‘‘Do I—do I have to walk through the streets with—with”—he extended his hands—‘‘with these?’’

The sergeant lowered himself from the table as carefully as if he had a time-bomb inside him.

‘‘Now don’t be silly,’’ he said. ‘‘We look after you well. We’ve brought a car for you—just think of that. A car for you, for you alone.’’

‘‘What about searching the house?’’ his junior demanded.

‘‘The other two can do it.’’

‘‘Those two bastards? They wouldn’t notice a thing.’’

‘‘The other two can do it,’’ the sergeant snapped decisively, irritated, as always, by his assistant’s vigour and health.

When they went out, the junior wrenched so violently at his own end of the handcuffs to get Enzo to hurry that the boy slipped and fell on to his knees, bruising them on the stone. As the boy raised himself, he noticed, lodged along the wall, a few scattered pieces of brightly coloured confetti among the grey dust. ‘‘There was a wedding here,’’ he told his two companions; and then he wondered what interest such information could possibly have for them. They went down between the small, silent crowd who now lined the stairs, and out into a glare which made all three of them pause and blink their eyes. Enzo tried to raise a hand, but of course could not do so. He could feel a trickling sensation on the knee, and wondered if it were a fly or blood from his fall.

At the station he was again questioned, by the same sergeant and later by a white-haired man of an extreme, if exhausted, courtesy who, as he spoke, dug holes in his blotter with a tooth-pick. They asked him what had become of Rodolfo, putting the same question over and over again to him in different forms, and each time he answered that he did not know. ‘‘ But surely,’’ the white-haired man urged in his smooth, tired voice, ‘‘ you must know what has become of your accomplice.’’

‘‘He is not my accomplice. I have no accomplice.’’

The white-haired man shrugged his shoulders and dug the tooth-pick deep into the blotter. ‘‘That remains for us to see,’’ he said.

‘‘I know nothing about it.’’

‘‘That, too, remains for us to see.’’

At the door one policeman was glancing vacantly at the ceiling while another rubbed an eye on whose lid was an incipient inflammation; then they both yawned simultaneously and smiled as they looked at each other, their hands over their mouths. The room was suffocatingly hot, and its worn leather chairs smelled as if they had just come from a tannery. There was a large red stain, like a pool of blood, where some ink had been spilled on the beige carpet. Two flypapers dangled above the desk, thickly encrusted, but the air remained loud with an incessant buzzing.

‘‘You spoke to the English family about going to Tunis with your friend, didn’t you? … Well, didn’t you?’’

‘‘Yes.’’ Enzo, who had no handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his forehead on the back of his hand and then wiped the hand on the side of his trousers.

‘‘And you once stole a fountain pen?’’

‘‘No … it was …’’ He hesitated from a desire not to betray Rodolfo, and at last mumbled: ‘‘Anyway we took it back.’’

The tooth-pick again dug deep into the stained blotting-paper and the white-haired man again gave his exhausted, courteous smile as he looked up. ‘‘That’ll do for now,’’ he said, like a dentist to his patient. ‘‘Since you won’t help me more. But I wish you would be reasonable.… All right.’’ The two policeman stiffened from their slouched positions, and marched briskly forward.

Enzo sat on the uncovered wooden slats of the bed in his cell and, hands clasped between his bruised knees, let his feelings of despair and indignation rise over him like a suffocating cloud. In his mind there had been established a connection between the loss of the brooch and his father’s sudden wealth, though there was a mystery here which he could not yet fathom, search it how he would. His father had never met the American family and, as far as Enzo knew, he had never even entered the Palazzo d’Oro. Yet he had stolen the brooch; of that the boy was certain. But how, how? And then through the thick cloud of his present mood an awful suspicion crept. His father had somehow forced his mother to steal it. True, she did not usually take the laundry upstairs to the guests’ rooms—that was done by the chamber-maids and valets. But he now remembered that she had once told him of how, when a woman had been in a hurry for an evening-dress, she had herself carried it up. Would his mother ever do such a thing? It was incredible. No, no, there must be some other explanation; perhaps, after all, his father had had nothing to do with the theft. And yet—she was so weak; she would do everything her husband told her; it had been like that ever since he could remember.…

‘‘Cheer up, son.’’

The
carabiniere
on duty had looked up from his English Grammar, and was smiling at Enzo. He sat, neat and small and handsome, on a rusty iron folding-stool, with his legs crossed before him and his cap on a peg behind. He was a young man, and he had about him an air of scrupulous cleanness. His ears were delicate and pointed; his hair, smooth at the sides where he brushed it in two glossy wings, frothed into curls at the top, in the manner of an Edwardian beauty. His hands, too, were delicate and beautifully kept.

Enzo smiled back gloomily.

The
carabiniere
folded his newspaper and put it into the breast-pocket of the tunic which hung behind him as he asked: ‘‘What’s the matter? What did they get you for?’’ His voice was soft and low, and his beautiful dark eyes, under the arched brows, seemed full of friendliness and sympathy.

‘‘I didn’t do it.’’

He laughed. ‘‘Well, of course you didn’t. They all say that.’’

‘‘I didn’t.’’

‘‘You’re the one who was supposed to have taken the brooch?’’ he said with sudden recognition. ‘‘They were talking about the American woman—seems she’s quite a beauty.’’ He leant forward, and asked in his soft, pillowy voice: ‘‘How did you come to meet her?’’

‘‘Rodolfo—my friend—met her husband first. They asked us back. We met the kids. They were decent to us—until this.’’

‘‘Oh, you met the husband first.’’ The
carabiniere
showed his small white teeth as he smiled, and then put his tongue roguishly between them. ‘‘It was like that, was it?’’

‘‘It wasn’t like that at all,’’ Enzo said with sudden anger.

‘‘All right, all right,’’ the
carabiniere
conceded, laughing. He looked up and down the hunched, despairing figure of the boy, and then exclaimed: ‘‘Your knees! What have you done to them?’’

‘‘It’s nothing.’’

‘‘You’d better wash them.’’

‘‘It’s only a graze.’’

‘‘Wait a moment.’’ He got up from the stool and, having taken a tin mug, filled it at the sink which stood at the far end of the corridor. ‘‘ Have you a handkerchief?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘This one’s quite clean.’’ He pulled a handkerchief from his trouser-pocket and unlocking the iron grille which served as a door, went in to the boy. Enzo made as if to take the water, but the
carabiniere
said: ‘‘ No, no, I’ll do it. You remain where you are.’’ He rolled back his sleeves, knelt on the floor and dipped the clean handkerchief in the water. When he stooped over, Enzo noticed how clean the back of his neck had been shaved, as if he had just been to the barber. The
carabiniere
began to wash the grazes, saying in a voice as soft as the movement of his hands: ‘‘Tell me if I hurt you. It must be done, mustn’t it? You’ve taken off the skin.’’

‘‘You are kind,’’ Enzo murmured.

‘‘We are not all brutes here,’’ the
carabiniere
said, looking up and laughing in his eagerly youthful way. He began to dry the grazes on another part of the handkerchief and asked: ‘‘ Do you know who pinned this on to you?’’

‘‘Who——?’’

‘‘Who took the brooch?’’

Enzo replied abruptly: ‘‘ I think so.’’ His face slowly darkened.

‘‘You know where it is, you mean?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Where?’’

Enzo shrugged his shoulders; and the
carabiniere
, glancing for a moment, with a peculiar intentness, at the boy’s averted face, said lightly: ‘‘There! That looks better.’’

‘‘Thank you.’’

‘‘You’re welcome.’’ He gathered up the tin and the handkerchief, and went out, leaving the cell door open behind him. ‘‘Well, I suppose I’d better lock you into your cage again. That’s orders.’’