The Marshal's Own Case Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t as though they even earned enough to eat, since the vicious organization behind them took most of what they earned. They had trouble enough with the police because they were both illegal immigrants and unlicensed traders, but their worst enemies were the Florentine shopkeepers who saw themselves as the real victims of the situation. This time it was the jewellers whose shops lined the bridge who were complaining. Doing more than complaining, it seemed, as the Marshal drew near. It sounded like one of the jewellers had come out of his shop and assaulted a ‘Wannabuy’. The tall white helmets of two municipal policemen were visible in the middle of the violently quarrelling group but they were having no success in dispersing it. An enraged jeweller was shouting: ‘If you don’t do your job we have to do it for you. Do you know the rates we pay to trade on this bridge? And if I find that shit outside my door again with his junk blocking the way for my customers I’ll kick his backside again, do you hear me!’ The assaulted ‘Wannabuy’ was weeping. The others clustered round trying to defend him, their distress more comprehensible than their Italian. The Marshal squeezed past the group and pushed his way through the silently gaping tourists who couldn’t understand what was happening but weren’t going to miss it anyway.
    What sort of unthinkable situation did the ‘Wannabuys’ escape from in their own country that could induce them to tolerate their life here? Had they left families behind who believed they were making their fortune?
    The Marshal crossed the Piazza della Signoria, which was a mass of scaffolding and fenced-in excavations, and made for the church of Santa Croce. There, he had to stop and ask for directions. The street he was looking for turned out to be a very short and narrow one where washing dripped on his head and not a tourist was in sight. Someone was playing the saxophone. There was no Luciano on any of the doorbells but that didn’t mean much. He pressed a bell at random at No. 5. The saxophone music stopped and presently a head appeared at a first-floor window.
    ‘What’s up?’
    ‘I’m looking for someone.’
    ‘Not me, I hope?’
    ‘Luciano.’
    ‘Not me.’ The head vanished and the music resumed.
    The Marshal rang again and the head reappeared.
    ‘Now what’s up?’
    ‘Come down a minute, will you, or let me in?’
    ‘You’ll have to come up. I’m not dressed.’
    The Marshal waited and soon the street door clicked open. The narrow staircase was lit by one weak light-bulb and the walls were peeling with damp. The door to the first-floor flat on the left was ajar and the Marshal pushed it open and went in. The small bare room was bursting with music from the rippling saxophone and the face of the young man blowing it looked on the point of bursting too. He ended on a high note with a flourish and grinned. His face was young and round and sunny, his head surrounded by a halo of brown corkscrew curls.
    ‘Have the chair,’ he said. There was only one. The Marshal looked around him. Apart from the chair there was a truckle-bed and a small battered table. There were clothes strewn on the floor, a coffee cup and an overflowing ashtray on the window-sill. The young man wore torn white pyjamas.
    ‘It’s not much, and I can’t even say it’s my own because I’ve only got it for a month while the person who lives here is away.’
    ‘The person who lives here isn’t a boy called Luciano, by any chance?’
    ‘It’s a girl. Why don’t you sit down?’
    ‘No, no . . .’ He doubted whether the frail wooden chair, pricked with woodworm, would bear his considerable weight. ‘I’m trying to trace a boy called Enrico Luciano—he’s not in any trouble. His mother hasn’t heard from him and just wants to know if he’s alive and well. This was the last address she had.’
    ‘Ah, mothers!’ He laid the saxophone on the bed as gently as if it had been a child and sat