“Dear Herr Mozart,” he told me, “sights like this only remind us of the fragility of human affairs.”
I said that I agreed fully.
“You know,” he continued, “I began my business career in this part of the country, and Monsieur LeBoeuf and I knew each other as children and young men. Well, who’d have said that I, the ragged boy who fetched wood in the forest, would end up a prosperous lumber merchant, and the wealthy son of the publican would lie dead by a vagrant’s knife?”
“A vagrant’s knife?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Monsieur Provins’s jowly pink face opened in a sad smile.
“Why, I mean the most obvious solution for this unfortunate event, Herr Mozart. You can’t have forgotten the beggar who came by before dinner and stood wailing at the doorstep.”
“You’re right!” I spoke up. “I had forgotten!”
“Well, you heard him weep his song and dance, and saw how LeBoeuf gave him a swift kick and tossed him across the road. The ladies felt full of pity, but our friend LeBoeuf knew better — he knew that one goes nowhere by being generous to the lazy poor. A stern businessman, that’s what LeBoeuf was. Surely the beggar crawled back around the property, waited until the innkeeper went to water his roses, and took his vengeance then.”
It made perfect sense, Anna Maria. How clearly did Monsieur Provins see what had happened! I went back downstairs and joined Mademoiselle LeBoeuf in the sitting room, where Wolfgang was looking at the dead man’s gardening books.
“I believe that the beggar whom your brother turned back last night might be the culprit,” I said. “Monsieur Provins thinks so, and he’s likely right.”
Mademoiselle LeBoeuf started weeping afresh. “I told my brother time and again that he ought to be more generous to the poor, but he was always hard-hearted in that way, both with unknown beggars and with his less fortunate friends. If what you and Monsieur Provins say is true, it’d have been so much better for my poor brother to give a sou to the beggar than to be stabbed for it.”
More out of discomfort at hearing her weep than any desire to discontinue my interrogation, I left the sitting room.
Signor Marini was sitting at one of the tables in the dining room, playing at solitaire. Without lifting his dark curly head, he said, “So, Herr Mozart, have you found your murderer?”
I’d had little reason to speak to this unsavory gambler and was not disposed towards courtesy now. He’d tried to teach card tricks to Wolfgang the night before, and had only laughed when I’d taken the boy away from him. He was smiling even now, setting the greasy cards in orderly rows.
“Don’t be so bigoted, Herr Mozart; have a seat. One can learn much from a card game if it’s played well.”
Against my better sense, I sat down facing him.
He had placed a group of face cards in line, one after the other.
“The Queen of Hearts is Frau Wentzl,” he said with a grin of his flashy white teeth. “She’d have liked to get the innkeeper’s money, but I’m sure he said no. The Queen of Diamonds if Fraulein Putz, who fought with her girlfriend over the attentions of Monsieur LeBoeuf and lost. The Queen of Clubs is Mademoiselle LeBoeuf, who surely wanted to keep her bachelor brother from squandering money with either singer.”
“Signor Marini,” I interrupted. “You are a gossip and a vicious man, not above suspicion.”
“Am I?” The gambler pointed at the next face card. “This is the King of—”
My dear wife, I lost my patience. I struck the cards with the flat of my hand and caused them to fly off the table. All fell except two, which Signor Marini deftly took in hand. “Very well,” he smiled. “You don’t want to hear the rest. But I’ll keep one of these cards covered until you find your solution, and will show you the other to help you along the way.”
It was the Joker.
“Whom does it represent?” I asked with contempt.
Signor Marini bowed from his waist, ceremoniously. “Your son Wolfgang.”
Only the sudden arrival of the country priest accompanied by an acolyte kept me from striking the impudent Marini.
All of us except him and little Wolfgang joined in LeBoeuf’s room to pray for his soul. Fraulein Putz dabbed her eyes with her lacy handkerchief, and Frau Wentzl blew her upturned nose; the servants snorted like sad dogs, and Mademoiselle LeBoeuf wept, leaning on Monsieur Provins’s arm. At one point she became faint, and Provins kindly offered to fetch her some water.
I left the room afterwards, anxious that we should send someone after a possibly murderous beggar, and yet suspicious that Signor Marini might have used our time of prayer to escape if he was in fact the culprit.
It turned out that my suspicion was right. Marini was nowhere to be seen. I was about to go back upstairs and summon the footmen to chase him when Wolfgang skipped out of the sitting room with a book under his arm.
“Papa,” he took me by the hem of my frock. “Papa, you must see this.”
I hushed him, “Not now, Wolfgang,” and tried to free myself.
“But you must look at it.”
“There are more serious things at hand than a book, son. I’ll look at it later.”
“I tell you must look.” Undeterred, our son stood in front of me so that I couldn’t go up the stairs. “I found the rose that Monsieur LeBoeuf was holding when he died.”
To satisfy him, I glanced at the page that Wolfgang held out for me to see. It was a sketchbook which LeBoeuf had undoubtedly kept while gardening for the king in his younger years.
“This is the rose,” young Wolfgang insisted.
It was a watercolor image of the dark pink, heavy-headed flower we’d found in the garden with the body. Below it, in ornate cursive, the name of the plant was written in Latin and French: Rosa Gallica, or Rosier de Provins.
Only now did I notice that Provins was also gone from the inn.
Well, Anna Maria! Five hours later, the merchant had been apprehended and had confessed his crime, and Signor Marini, who had led the gendarmes to him, was once more sitting in the dining room in front of his greasy cards.
Mademoiselle LeBoeuf sighed a deep sigh.
“Who would have thought that Monsieur Provins had kept a grudge for so many years? It’s true he and my brother squabbled about a large piece of land and a mill, but was it reason enough to kill him?”
“I think that your brother’s contempt for Provins when he was poor was rather at the root of the grudge,” I said. “When the beggar was maltreated last night, Provins’s resentment must have flared up again, and he decided to punish LeBoeuf.”
“In Italy we kill for less,” Marini added lightly.
“But how did you connect the rose with the killer?” Fraulein Putz asked, adjusting her red curlets.
“Ah, that was my son’s doing,” I was glad to reply.
Wolfgang was in bed by then, of course, because we have a long trip ahead of us in the morning, and two concerts at the archbishop’s residence. “You see,” I explained to the ladies, “right away Wolfgang understood that the dying man hadn’t just grasped a flower at random. LeBoeuf knew all the roses by name and staggered to the shrub that — by fatal coincidence — bore his killer’s name. He hoped it would serve as a hint, but it was only because of my son’s wit that we solved this crime. In his innocence, Wolfgang sought and found the perfect clue.”
Signor Marini had been looking at me all this while, grinning.