“As to that,” said Alleyn, “it’s just a matter of avenues and stones, however unlikely. I’ve been told that Madame Sommita herself feared some sort of danger threatened her and that she suspected Strix of being an agent or even a member of the Rossi family. I don’t have to tell you that Marco is Strix. Mr. Reece will have done that.”
“Yes. But — do you think—?”
“No. He has an unbreakable alibi.”
“Ah.”
“I wondered if she had confided her fears to you?”
“You will know, of course, of the habit of omertà. It has been remorselessly, if erroneously, paraded in works of popular fiction with a mafioso background. I expected that she knew of her father’s alleged involvement with mafioso elements, although great care had been taken to remove her from the milieu. I am surprised to hear that she spoke of the Rossi affair. Not to the good Monty, I am sure?”
“Not specifically. But it appears that even to him she referred repeatedly, though in the vaguest of terms, to sinister intentions behind the Strix activities.”
“But otherwise—”
Signor Lattienzo stopped short and for the first time looked very hard at Alleyn. “Did she tell that unhappy young man? Is that it? I see it is. Why?”
“It seems she used it as a weapon when she realized he was trying to escape her.”
“Ah! That is believable. An appeal to his pity. That I can believe. Emotional blackmail.”
Signor Lattienzo got up and moved restlessly about the room. He looked out at the now sunny prospect, thrust his plump hands into his trouser pockets, took them out and examined them as if they had changed, and finally approached Alleyn and came to a halt.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
“Good.”
“Evidently you are familiar with the Rossi affair.”
“Not to say familiar, no. But I do remember something of the case.”
Alleyn would have thought it impossible that Signor Lattienzo would ever display the smallest degree of embarrassment or loss of savoir-faire, but he appeared to do so now. He screwed in his eyeglass, stared at a distant spot somewhere to the right of Alleyn’s left ear, and spoke rapidly in a high voice.
“I have a brother,” he proclaimed. “Alfredo Lattienzo. He is an avvocato, a leading barrister, and he, in the course of his professional duties, has appeared in a number of cases where the mafioso element was — are — involved. At the time of the Rossi trial, which as you will know became a cause célèbre in the U.S.A., he held a watching brief on behalf of the Pepitene element. It was through him, by the way, that Isabella became my pupil. But that is of no moment. He was never called upon to take a more active part but he did — ah — he did learn — ah— from, as you would say, the horse’s mouth, the origin and subsequent history of the enmity between the two houses.”
He paused. Alleyn thought that it would be appropriate if he said: “You interest me strangely. Pray continue your most absorbing narrative.” However, he said nothing, and Signor Lattienzo continued.
“The origin,” he repeated. “The event that set the whole absurdly wicked feud going. I have always thought there must have been Corsican blood somewhere in that family. The whole story smacks more of the vendetta than the mafioso element. My dear Alleyn, I am about to break a confidence with my brother, and one does not break confidences of this sort.”
“I think I may assure that whatever you may tell me, I won’t reveal the source.”
“It may, after all, not seem as striking to you as it does to me. It is this. The event that gave rise to the feud so many, many years ago, was the murder of a Pepitone girl by her Rossi bridegroom. He had discovered a passionate and explicit letter from a lover. He stabbed her to the heart on their wedding night.”
He stopped. He seemed to balk at some conversational hurdle.
“I see,” said Alleyn.
“That is not all,” said Signor Lattienzo. “That is by no means all. Pinned to the body by the stiletto that killed her was the letter. That is what I came to tell you and now I shall go.”
Chapter eight
The Police
i
“From now on,” Alleyn said to Dr. Carmichael, “it would be nice to maintain a masterly inactivity. I shall complete my file and hand it over, with an anxious smirk, to Inspector Hazelmere in, please God, the course of a couple of hours or less.”
“Don’t you feel you’d like to polish it off yourself? Having gone so far?”
“Yes, Rory,” said Troy. “Don’t you?”
“If Fox and Bailey and Thompson could walk in, yes, I suppose I do. That would be, as Noel Coward put it, ‘an autre paire de souliers.’ But this hamstrung solo, poking about without authority, has been damned frustrating.”
“What do you suppose the chap that’s coming will do first?”
“Inspect the body and the immediate environment. He can’t look at my improvised dabs-and-photographs, because they are still in what Lattienzo calls the womb of the camera. He’ll take more of his own.”
“And then?”
“Possibly set up a search of some if not all of their rooms. I suggested he bring a warrant. And by that same token did your bed-making exercise prove fruitful? Before or after the envelope-and-ashes episode?”
“A blank,” said Dr. Carmichael. “Hanley has a collection of bedside books with Wilde and Gide at the top and backstreet Marseilles at the bottom, but all with the same leitmotiv.”
“And Ben Ruby,” said Troy, “has an enormous scrapbook of newspaper cuttings all beautifully arranged and dated and noted and with all the rave bits in the reviews underlined. For quotation in advance publicity, I suppose. It’s got the Strix photographs and captions and newspaper correspondence, indignant and supportive. Do you know there are only seven European Strix photographs, two American, and four Australian, including the retouched one in the Watchman? Somehow one had imagined, or I had, a hoard of them. Signor Lattienzo’s got a neat little pile of letters in Italian on his desk. Mr. Reece has an enormous colored photograph framed in silver of the diva in full operatic kit — I wouldn’t know which opera, except that it’s not Butterfly. And there are framed photographs of those rather self-conscious slightly smug walking youths in the Athens Museum. He’s also got a marvelous equestrian drawing in sanguine of a nude man on a stallion which I could swear is a da Vinci original. Can he be as rich as all that? I really do swear it’s not a reproduction.”
“I think he probably can,” said Alleyn.
“What a shut-up sort of man he is,” Troy mused. “I mean who would have expected it? Does he really appreciate it or has he just acquired it because it cost so much? Like the diva, one might say.”
“Perhaps not quite like that,” said Alleyn.
“Do you attach a lot of weight to Signor Lattienzo’s observations?” asked the doctor suddenly. “I don’t know what they were, of course.”
“They were confidential. They cast a strongly Italian flavor over the scene. Beyond that,” said Alleyn, “my lips are sealed.”
“Rory,” Troy asked, “are you going to see Maria again? Before the police arrive?”
“I’ve not quite decided. I think perhaps I might. Very briefly.”
“We mustn’t ask why, of course,” said Carmichael.
“Oh yes, you may. By all means. If I do see her, it will be to tell her that I shall inform the police of her request to— attend to her mistress and shall ask them to accede to it. When they’ve finished their examination of the room, of course.”