Michael Dibdin: A Rich Full Death

When I awoke the next morning the weather had changed completely. The sky weighed down like a cauldron lid upon the city, which on such a day can appear the most dreary, inhospitable, depressing place on earth. All its picturesque charms wither and shrivel away to nothing, illusions foisted on us by our desire to escape the realities of our own bleak age. Seen with such a cold eye, what are all these palaces and towers and walls and gates but the grim relics of a history that was anything but gay, if the truth be known. It is on such days that the exile asks himself for the hundredth time just what on earth he is doing here, ekeing out a tenuous unreal existence in the shadow of these massive monuments to Power and Wealth and Privilege and Will: these grim memorials to the mighty Dead, who so terribly outnumber-outeverything! — us.

The streets, glimpsed from my window, presented a prospect which was uninviting in the extreme. The rain had turned hard and punchy, coming down in squally showers beaten into every corner by a nasty wind which roamed the streets like a mob in search of victims. It found few enough, for sensible folk stayed at home, and listened to it howling in the chimney. But I could not, alas, and so, bundled up in every protection against the elements I could lay my hands on, I set off across town towards the Ponte Vecchio.

Having noted that Mr Browning is extremely particular about punctuality, I had taken care to pay him the politeness of kings myself, and was therefore both surprised and mildly annoyed when Aere was no sign of him by the time the nearby churches had finished ringing nine o’clock. I was still puzzling over his non-appearance when my attention was drawn by a crowd of men in the standard Florentine garb of slouch hats, short cloaks and cigars, clustered around a doorway to my right.

As Mr Jarves has said, Florence is a city where you may see ten men watching an eleventh buy two oranges from a street-trader with a degree of lively interest which an American crowd might bestow upon one of Mr Barnum’s raree-shows. But the natives’ aversion to foul weather is even more marked than their curiosity, and for a crowd to collect on such a day as that the spectacle, I felt, must possess some greater intrinsic interest than orange-trading. After another five minutes’ fruitless wait, I therefore walked over to investigate.

When I reached the fringes of the crowd I heard my name called, looked up-for the voice had come from above-and found Robert Browning waving at me from a window of the house before which the onlookers had gathered. The next moment he disappeared, but I shouldered my way through the crowd, which parted reluctantly to let me through, and when I reached the doorway Browning was there to lead me past the police constable on guard into the dry empty echoing spaces of the vestibule.

His eyes glittered with a hard intense brilliance.

‘It is all over!’ he hissed excitedly. ‘Come!’

We mounted the shallow slab-like steps to the first floor, three at a time. I asked what had happened, but my companion would say only that he wished me to see for myself.

Another policeman guarded the door to DeVere’s apartments, and once again Browning’s word was enough to gain us entrance, and I could not help remarking on this astonishing volte-face in the authorities’ attitude to my companion. A few days before he had been the object of a police interrogation, his house was watched and he himself followed by a police agent — for all the world like a man under suspicion. Yet here he was, a foreigner with no official standing, ordering the local constables about like one of their own officers! How on earth had he effected this miraculous transformation?

‘Commissioner Talenti has pestered me no more since I called his bluff by challenging that ruffian in Doney’s-he wouldn’t dare!’ Browning explained. ‘As for my status here, it is the result of a little bluffing of my own. I was on my way to keep our appointment when I noticed the crowd outside the house. The police had just been called, but by feigning to be a friend of DeVere’s I was able to gain entrance on the pretext of representing his interests until an official from the embassy arrives.

He is expected at any moment. But there is just time, I hope, for you to see what there is to be seen.’

We had entered the main room, a noble salon overlooking the river. Now when I say ‘the river’, you are not to imagine some stately body of calmly-proceeding water such as the Thames, the Seine, or for that matter our own Charles. The Arno is quite another type of beast: a moody Latin, either thrashing about in spate and threatening to inundate the city (as it did to such disastrous effect in ‘44); or more usually a drab and uninspiring waste of murky water, thick with all the filth of the city and the rank ooze of the tanneries and cloth finishers upstream, split into a maze of tiny channels winding through the banks of silt, torn-up trees and rubble washed down from the mountains. A damned ditch, Dante called it-and such it remains to this day.

The glass doors on to the balcony stood open, and Browning led me outside. The first thing I noticed was that the railing was broken in half, the right-hand section leaning out over the river at a crazy angle. I approached the edge of the terrace with care, and looked down. On a mud-flat below the house a small group of men were standing in a circle around a formless heap covered with a blanket. I saw several policemen, as well as some of the poor fellows called sandmen, who scrape a living sieving for that commodity in the same way the Californians do for gold. As for the sinister object in their midst, Browning informed me that it was the lifeless body of Cecil DeVere.

Although the subsequent examination of the body indicated that death had occurred at some time during the night, the corpse had lain undiscovered until shortly after eight o’clock, when one of those same sandmen had come upon it in the course of his work, and raised the alarm. Knowing what I now know, I have no compunction in pointing out the irony: the vain DeVere had once held forth to me at some length upon Beau Brummel’s definition of elegance, which was also his: dressing in such a way as not to excite attention. By this criterion his toilet had remained impeccable to the last, for his body had lain there for several hours not twenty yards from the busiest bridge in Florence, without being noticed by anyone.

But my immediate considerations were quite different, for you must remember how vital DeVere had been to our hopes of solving the murder of Isabel Eakin. Now those hopes appeared to have been extinguished for ever. I asked Browning if it was yet known how DeVere had come to fall to his death. He pointed to the broken railing.

‘That rail has apparently been defective for some time, and DeVere had repeatedly spoken of having it repaired. The authorities’ view would seem to be that he has now paid the price of his procrastination.’

Browning’s voice was bland-too much so.

‘And is that view also yours?’ I queried.

For all answer, he turned away and led me back inside.

The living-room bore all the marks of its late occupier’s good taste and long purse. Tapestries, pictures, statuary, old books and musical instruments, primitive crucifixes, classical antiquities and suchlike abounded on every side. In the centre of the room, beneath the inevitable chandelier, stood a highly-polished inlaid walnut table, at which I had sat with other guests a score of times, sipping the excellent aleatico dessert wine which DeVere obtained from a local marquis for whom he had done some favour-the story of which invariably circulated with the decanter, for DeVere was one of those who never seem to know when they have told a tale before.