Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (10 page)

The
wine waiter was hovering at our elbows with a decanter. ‘I have taken the
liberty of ordering the wine,’ said Munthe, smiling. ‘Another solecism, I fear.’

Oscar
looked at the decanter in dismay. ‘It is red,’ he whispered.

‘It is
from the Piedmont,’ said Munthe, ‘inexpensive yet extraordinary. Please try.’

The
wine waiter poured a small libation. Oscar sniffed at it suspiciously. ‘I
suppose the danger is half the excitement,’ he murmured. He took a sip and
then a gulp. He drained the glass. ‘It is a blood-red sunset turned to wine,’
he declared. ‘We’ll have a second bottle right away.’

I
laughed.

‘Shall
we drink to the memory of John Keats?’ suggested Dr Munthe. ‘Will you propose
the toast, Mr Wilde?’

‘With
pleasure,’ said my friend, ‘and a breaking heart.’ The waiter charged our
glasses and Oscar raised his towards Dr Munthe. ‘You sleep in the room where he
died, Doctor — that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age. Let us drink to
him now who knew the silver-footed messages of the moon, and the secret of the
morning, who heard in Hyperion’s vale the large utterance of the early gods,
and from the beechen plot the light-winged Dryad, who saw Madeline at the
painted window, and Lamia in the house at Corinth, and Endymion ankle-deep in
lilies of the vale, who drubbed the butcher’s boy for being a bully, and drank
confusion to Isaac Newton for having analysed the rainbow. In my heaven he
walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks, and it may be that some day he
will lift his hymeneal curls from out his amber gleaming wine, and with
ambrosial lips will kiss my forehead, clasp the hand of noble love in mine.’

‘Steady
on, old man,’ I said. ‘It’s only a toast.’

He
smiled and set down his glass. There were tears in his eyes.

‘You
have a way with words, Mr Wilde,’ said Axel Munthe.

‘And
you have a way with people, Doctor,’ said Oscar, wiping his eyes with his
handkerchief and reaching for the menu. ‘And people are what count. As Keats
taught us, “Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer.” When we have ordered,
you must tell us your story. I will speak no more. I have said enough.’

‘On the
contrary, Mr Wilde, I sense you’ve scarcely begun. And I want to talk to Dr
Conan Doyle about his writing.’

‘Food
first,’ cried Oscar. ‘I insist.’

‘And
when you insist, you get your way?’ asked the Swedish doctor.

‘Invariably.’

‘And
yet you are never satisfied? Every gift, however great, is a minor
disappointment — another broken toy on the withered Christmas tree of Nature’s
most favoured child.’

‘You
are very perceptive, Doctor,’ said Oscar, smiling. ‘And I am very hungry.’ He
raised his hand to summon a waiter. ‘I think it’ll be the swordfish, the turtle
soup and the suckling pig for me. Dr Munthe can choose the wines.’

We ate
well and drank liberally. And, as we did so, Oscar was almost true to his word:
he said very little. Dr Munthe inquired about my work, both about my writing
and my special interest in ophthalmology. His own sight was poor and failing.

‘My
spirit likes the sunshine,’ he said. ‘My eyes do not.’ He told us something of
his story — of his childhood in Sweden, of his medical training in Paris
(under the notorious Professor Charcot at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière
[1]
), of his journey south, first
to Naples and then to the island of Capri. ‘Capri is my heaven-on-earth,’ he
said. ‘I say that, even though I lived there with my first wife and our
marriage was not a happy one.

It did
not last. We parted company four years ago.

‘I am
sorry to hear that,’ I said.

‘Do not
be. I should never have married her. From the beginning there was the sense of
an ending. Her name was Ultima.’

Oscar
smiled.
‘Nomen est omen,’
he said. ‘The name is everything.’

‘Indeed,
Mr Wilde. And what is your wife called?’

‘Constance.’

Munthe
smiled. ‘Congratulations. I trust you count your blessings, sir. I count mine —
and being free of my wife is one of them. And knowing the island of Capri is
another. I shall return there one day, when I have made my fortune. Meanwhile,
I am here in Rome, where work is plentiful and I know everyone. I like to know
the best people.’ He raised his glass to both of us once more. ‘Now I can boast
that I know even Mr Oscar Wilde and Dr Arthur Conan Doyle.’

Towards
the end of our meal, as we lingered over our cheese and wine, our conversation
slowed. I filled a silence in looking about the room: the restaurant had
emptied and all but two of the waiters had gone home. I felt for my pipe. As I
stirred, Oscar roused himself and, to light his cigarette, leant forward
towards the guttering candle that stood on the centre of the table. He glanced
up at me as he did so and his oyster eyes sparkled in the candlelight.

‘You
trust Dr Munthe, Arthur,’ he said softly. ‘I can see that. Show him what is in
your pocket.’

‘What
do you mean?’ I asked, momentarily confused.

‘Show
him the “evidence”, Arthur. Show him what has brought us to Rome.’

I
hesitated, but Oscar was insistent. I set down my pipe and, diffidently,
glancing furtively about the room, I produced the handkerchief parcel from my
jacket pocket and, pushing aside plates and cutlery, placed it tentatively on
the table.

Slowly,
I unwrapped it.

‘Good
God,’ exclaimed the Dr Munthe, peering down at the severed hand that now lay
before him. ‘What’s this?’

‘That’s
what we were hoping you might be able to tell us, Doctor,’ said Oscar, quietly.

Dr
Munthe turned to me. ‘Is this yours, Doctor? Is this something from your
dissecting room? Or a hideous trophy from your travels in Africa?’

‘It is
mine,’ I said, ‘in the sense that it was sent to me — or, rather, it was sent
care
of me
to Mr Sherlock Holmes. But why it was sent, and from whom, I have no
idea.’

‘It
came by post? In a parcel?’

‘Yes.’

‘How
bizarre.’ Munthe screwed up his eyes and lowered his face closer to the hand.
‘May I touch it?’

I
looked towards the waiters standing idly at the entrance to the restaurant.
They were deep in conversation. ‘By all means,’ I said.

Dr
Munthe lifted the dead hand and sniffed at it and turned it over and, with his
nose and spectacles no more than an inch or two from it, examined it minutely.
He spent some time considering the fingernails and then the stump.

He
replaced the hand on the table. ‘What do you want to know that you don’t
already? I’d say it’s a man’s right hand severed with a single blow. It’s not
been cut from the wrist with any skill. It’s not the work of a surgeon or a
doctor.’

‘Could
it be the work of the Mafia?’ asked Oscar.

Munthe
chuckled. ‘Yes, I too have read the stories, Mr Wilde. These Mafia men are
partial to dismemberment, we’re told. They might present you with a severed
hand by way of threat or warning, but I doubt that they’d trouble to embalm it
first.’ He looked down at the one that lay before us. ‘This hand is mummified,
as you can see. It has been preserved in formaldehyde and cut off after death.
The severing was brutally done, but the embalming looks to be the work of an
expert. This is not the Mafia’s style — at least, not as I understand it. Was
it sent to you from Sicily?’

‘No,’ I
answered. ‘It was posted from Rome.’

‘And
was there no note with the hand? No message in the parcel?’

‘None
whatsoever,’ said Oscar. ‘But there were other packages, apparently from the
same source — with content almost as surprising.’

From
his pocket Oscar produced his wallet and opened it. He looked to me. ‘Arthur,
show the doctor the finger.’

‘The
finger!’ exclaimed Munthe, shaking his head in amused amazement. ‘This is Grand
Guignol.’

‘You
are right, Doctor,’ said Oscar, carefully laying the lock of hair and the ring
next to the dead hand on the table. ‘It is all very theatrical.’

I took
Oscar’s apricot handkerchief from my pocket and unwrapped the finger.

‘There
you have it,’ said Oscar, sitting back in his chair and drawing slowly on his
cigarette. ‘A hand, a finger, a lock of hair, a tell-tale ring — that’s all the
evidence we have.’

Dr
Munthe surveyed the table. ‘But it’s enough,’ he said.

‘What
do you mean, “it’s enough”?’ I asked.

‘It’s
done its business. It’s brought you to Rome — to do what the police here would
never do: to investigate further.’ Dr Munthe looked at me and smiled. ‘In this
country, no one trusts the police, no one at all. The local police — the
vigili
— are fools, to a man. And they can all be bought.’

‘And
the
carabinieri?’
asked Oscar. ‘They look tremendous in their uniforms.’

Munthe
laughed. ‘And quite magnificent on horseback. They guard the king — and look
after their own. They may be cannier than the
vigili,
but they are just
as corrupt, and considerably more expensive. The police in this country don’t
combat crime: they promote it. I can well understand why anyone who knew of his
existence might turn to Sherlock Holmes in desperation.’

‘And
this “evidence”, said Oscar, waving his cigarette in circles above the table
like a witch conjuring spirits from a cauldron, ‘does it smack of desperation?’

‘I
think it does.’

‘And
these “clues”, what do they tell us?’

‘I
don’t know,’ said Munthe, gazing at the table. ‘The finger is self-evidently
from a different hand — and from a different person.’

‘And
the lock of hair?’ asked Oscar. ‘What do you make of that?’

Munthe
picked up the curl and held it close to his eyes. He rubbed it between his
fingers. He put it to his nose. ‘This isn’t human hair,’ he said. ‘This is
lamb’s wool.’

‘Are
you certain?’ asked Oscar, sitting forward and consigning the butt of his
cigarette to his water glass.

I
laughed. ‘Oscar took it to be a golden kiss-curl from a young man’s forehead.’

‘It is
lamb’s wool,’ repeated Munthe, handing it to me to examine. ‘Feel it.’

‘And
the gold ring?’ enquired Oscar. ‘What do you make of that? Don’t tell me it’s
nothing more than a gewgaw from one of Tom Smith’s Christmas crackers.’

The
Swedish doctor removed the ring from the finger and peered closely at it. He
turned it carefully between his own fingers. Gently he bit on it. He put it
onto the palm of his hand and held it out for us all to see.

‘The
ring is made of gold, to be sure. And inside the ring I see what you must have
seen — the crossed keys of St Peter.’

‘And
what do you make of the ring, Doctor? What does it tell us?’

‘I am
not sure what it tells us,’ said Munthe, ‘but I have seen the ring before, just
a year or two ago, on the bedside table of a dying woman.’

‘Was it
her ring?’

‘No. It
belonged to the priest who had come to administer the last rites to her. At
the time I did wonder whether he might not have murdered her.’

7

The Pyramid of Cestius