48
The demon who escaped my grasp
Being an excerpt removed from the memoirs of Alberto Marchese, magistrate of the Quirinal quarter, 1713–33, at his request.
As you, dear reader, will appreciate by now, the rogue is a most ordinary species. I have, in my time, despatched more than 200 to the prison and thirty or so to the sca fold. Human nature being what it is, I cannot, I confess, feel much regret for their fates, nor satisfaction, either. Life is much determined by a throw of the die. None of these felons possessed some seed of the Devil in their blood. Born to different parents in another time, they would all have made model citizens, I’ll warrant, except perhaps for old Fratelli, who was as mad as a swineherd’s hound and twice as dangerous. But anyone minded to strangle his wife, then serve up cooked portions of the dismembered corpse for the relatives who arrived for her own birthday feast, must be deemed lunatic, and therefore not fully human in the first place. Even Brazzi, that light-fingered blackguard with a taste for lifting the purses of tourists on the Palatine, had his finer side, quoting wistfully from Petrarch as I set down his appointment with the axe (a little thievery is one thing, but the fellow should never have stuck that chap from Milan — I know these northern types can be annoying, but murder is murder, after all).
I can think of only one villain I have encountered over the years for whom I feel the word “evil” is truly appropriate, and it is to my eternal shame that he remains, as far as I am aware, a free man. But this was no ordinary criminal. I cannot give you his real name or history. What I do know is that he is surely one of the most wicked creatures ever to have walked this earth, in that his malevolence was both intentional and directed at the innocent in full knowledge of the pain and injury it would cause. Most malefactors fall into their cycle of criminality through laziness, accident, or, let it be said, necessity. The one I describe here indulged in his devilry — there is no other word — because its performance, and its consequences, amused him. Money, influence, power both sexual and worldly… all these things were but side dishes for the main course of his pleasure, which was to deceive the world with one face and devour it with another.
Every other criminal I have encountered in this odd career, I could in one way or another understand. Poverty, lust, greed — read the Good Book, they’re all there — have driven men to bad since Eve first offered Adam a bite of the apple. Yet this one was beyond me, beyond God in all his wisdom, I’d venture. You will suspect I say this because he was a foreigner, an Englishman at that. You are wrong. This fellow — Arnold Lescalier, as I knew him (though I doubt that bears much resemblance to the name he was christened with, if christened he was) — possessed a streak of evil that ran through his soul with the same unbending accuracy of a flaw despoiling a piece of fine marble. It was appropriate, then, that we first met at the Teatro Goldoni, where a passable pack of players was trying to entertain us with a translation of some ancient piece about Faust by the Englishman Marlowe. It was an amusing melodrama, and would have been all the more so had I known that this articulate, entertaining Englishman to whom I was introduced at the interval could have passed as inspiration for the theme. The doomed doctor on his way to Hades, you think? Ah, no. For all his faults, Faust was human throughout. Mr. Lescalier, I believe, had more in common with Mephistopheles, the Devil’s cool and calculating aide-de-camp, who would smile while slitting your throat, then steal your soul as it departs your bleeding carcass and stop it up in a bottle for his master.
None of this was apparent when we met, naturally. All I saw was a pleasant-looking Englishman, perhaps just past thirty, with fair hair, a querulous, deceptively blank expression, and the kind of foppish clothes the travelling aristocrats prefer when visiting Rome: all silk and finery. Mr. Lescalier appeared the sort of fellow who might wear two kerchiefs in each sleeve and never dare to blow his nose in public. The one hint to the contrary, which I should have noticed, was his manservant, an unspeakably ugly little native whose name I never discovered. I assumed that it was the servant’s coarse worldliness which saved his ingenuous master from being torn apart by the Roman hoodlums. Their story was that Lescalier was the bastard son of a rich English lord who had sent him to Europe for an education. The means to gaining this seemed to be to apply money to all in sight in return for admittance to their circle. Lescalier loved painting, sculpture, music, dance, everything that Rome had to offer. He had, he told me, travelled through Paris, Geneva, Milan, and Florence before arriving in our fair city, and while all had their finer points, none could touch Rome. There was, I later discovered, some truth in this. An Englishman named Debrett (strange how the chap chose these French-sounding titles) had fleeced a score of nobles in Milan before decamping, and I heard reports of similar behaviour in Geneva by a scoundrel called Lafontaine.
Mr. Lescalier cast a spell upon all he met that night. The ladies wished to mother him. The men regarded him much like a younger brother newly arrived in the city, in need of guidance and protection from its cruel realities. Before the evening was out, he had invitations to dinner at six of the best tables in Rome (I declined to join the game for no other reason than embarrassment — my humble home could not hope to match those he now had in his appointment book). Lescalier swept through the cafés and dining rooms of the city like a whirlwind, and it was not until a good seven months after that we discovered what tragedy and wreckage lay in his wake.
It was January of my last year in office, 1733, the year in which I now write. I was woken at three in the morning by a rapping on the door. The weather that night was vile. Soft snow, as cold as the grave, swirled from the night sky, and a bitter wind chilled the bone. There was nothing I wished more than to stay snug in bed. I kissed my darling Anna and told her to go back to sleep while I dealt with the visitor. It is a magistrate’s lot to be at every man’s beck and call, night and day. There is no reason why this burden should be shared with one’s wife.
Downstairs was someone I recognised immediately: the chambermaid of the Duchess of Longhena, a handsome young woman utterly devoted to her mistress. The poor child was quite hysterical, in floods of tears, babbling nonsense, throwing her hands to her cheeks. Longhena, a fat, unlovely, and wealthy widow of somewhat flighty nature, lived three streets away down the hill, on the very border of my jurisdiction. I had never liked the woman, to be honest, and lately she had seemed more gross than usual. She had gone to pieces since her husband’s death and, so the street gossip had it, taken to entertaining young men indiscreetly (the sin being in the indiscretion, of course, not the act itself— this is Rome, after all).
I sent Lanza into the kitchen for some grappa for the girl and made her sit down. When he returned, she drank it in one, then, after a further minute of sundry sobs and moans and trembling, calmed sufficiently to be asked the obvious question.
“It is late, girl,” I said. “What is the meaning of this?”
She turned upon me eyes full of grief. “Oh, sir. It is my lady. She is dead, and horribly too.”
“Dead?”
“Murdered, sir. By one she thought loved her more than any other.”
“Lanza!” He had our coats all ready, and scarves and hats to keep out the cold. Thirty years this man has been by my side, and never once has let me down. “Come, girl. We must see what you are talking about.”
“Sir!” Her eyes were wide and open and glassy with tears. “I cannot. Do not make me go back in that room again. I swear I’ll die.”
“Nonsense,” I roared, impatient to be on with matters. “If there’s a crime here, we must see for ourselves, and I shall hear how you discovered it. How else will we find the villain? Come!”