Piazza Santo Spirito was only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel, over the Arno by way of the Ponte Alla Carraia, down the Via dei Serragli and then left-handed into the Piazza. At the far end of the square was the Church of Santo Spirito. It was a narrow piazza, with the space in the middle tree-lined and holding a few seats for those who just wanted to sit and stare and rest their feet. Number 23 was on the left not far from the church. A twisting stone stairway served the three or four flats into which the house had been converted. Halfway up at a turn there was a Madonna and Child set back in a wall niche decked out with some artificial flowers and lit by a weak electric light bulb. At the next turn up there was a heavy wooden door with a small brass plate carrying the name—Pelegrina. Below it was a brass knocker shaped in the form of Michelangelo’s David. I took him by the legs and rapped his backside smartly against the door three or four times. I waited. Nothing happened. I repeated the treatment. This time I was rewarded with a shuffling sound on the far side of the door.
It opened slowly on hinges that needed oiling. Standing on the threshold of a small, very dark hallway was a large shape, oval, about five feet tall at its vertical axis and three feet at the horizontal. There was a round excrescence at the top of the oval from which came the glint of glass.
I said, ‘Signore Pelegrina?’
‘Si.’
I handed the shape one of my cards. He came forward a little into the light of the stairway to read it. The dim light threw up more details. He wore a monocle stuck in the right eye of a fat, reddish-brown face whose colour could have come from weather exposure, blood pressure, drink or all three. He didn’t have any neck, his shoulders went straight up to his ears. When he readjusted his monocle to examine the card, his mouth gaped open like a goldfish starved of oxygen. He could have been anything between forty and fifty and he had wiry, almost curly dark hair which had scattered a fine dandruff dust on the shoulders of his jacket.
‘Inglese?’ His voice was a little hoarse as though he had lived in a damp atmosphere too long.
I said, ‘Yes. I’d be glad if you could spare me a few minutes.’
He let the monocle drop from his eye, and frowned. There was a strong odour of Turkish tobacco about him and stains down the front of his velvet waistcoat. One of its fancy pearl buttons was missing.
In English he said, ‘It is very early in the morning.’
‘Well, you know the old saying. The early bird.’
He frowned again and momentarily there was a nervous tic in his right cheek. I had the feeling that I had worried him.
‘I am not dressed for visitors.’
He looked clothed enough for me. Maybe he was referring to a pair of sloppy carpet slippers he was wearing.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ I said. ‘You speak very good English.’
‘I should do. My mother was English, and insisted. She was a very insistent woman. That’s why my father left her. Come in.’
He stood aside for me to enter, closed the door on us, and then passed me down the gloom of the little hall. He opened the door at the far end and ushered me into the main room of the flat. From behind me he said, ‘I will be back in a minute.’
I was left alone in the room. There was no gloom here. Three sets of windows looked out over the piazza. It was L-shaped, with a small fireplace set in the smaller part of the L. By the window was a large divan. In one corner stood a grand piano with a purple cloth runner on the top and a silver-framed photograph dead centre on the cloth. There were a couple of well-worn armchairs, a long narrow table and, in another corner, a small roll-top desk, open, with a typewriter on it. I walked past the fireplace and examined the bookshelves beyond it. Two of the shelves were given up to paperbacks. English, Italian and French. The bottom shelf held a collection of English books, mostly, I noticed, about sailing or the sea. Flat on their sides at the end of the shelf were an old Lloyds Register of Shipping, Volume I, 1962-63, and on top of that a Mediterranean Pilot of the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty. Over the fireplace was a big photograph of a coastwise tramp steamer, and above the desk another photograph of a steam yacht. I was moving over to look at it when Leon Pelegrina came back.
He had put on patent leather shoes and a different jacket. He waved me to a chair, picked up a cigarette box and said, ‘You will probably prefer to smoke your own—unless you like Turkish?’
He sat down and we both lit our own cigarettes.
Without going into a lot of side details, I told him that I had been employed by Mrs Stankowski to find her
