Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Stanley Ellin The Crime of Ezechiele Coen

A yearly event for readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine — Stanley Ellin’s newest story — and this year there are interesting differences...

“The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” is unmistakably Ellinesque — in mystery and suspense; but it is also (a departure for Mr. Ellin) a “pure” detective story — a modern procedural tale of detection set among the ancient ruins of Rome.

And there are other differences: “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” is a novelet — also a departure for Mr. Ellin; and the approach, background, characters, mood, even the special tenderness of this story, are new and shining facets of Stanley Ellin’s impressive talent.

Mystery Writers of America judged Stanley Ellin’s “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” to be one of the three best mystery short stories published during 1963. Since two of the three stories were not tales of detection, it follows that MWA considered “The Crime of Ezechiele Coen” the best detective short story of the year.

Before the disenchantment set in, Noah Freeman lived in a whirl of impressions. The chaotic traffic. The muddy Tiber. The Via Veneto out of Italian movies about la dolce vita. The Fountain of Trevi out of Hollywood. Castel Sant’ Angelo out of Tosca, Rome.

“Rome?” Pop had said. “But why Rome? Such a foreign place. And so far away.”

True. But to old Pop Freeman, even Rockland County, an hour from New York, was far away, and his two weeks of vacation there every summer an adventure. And, in fact, it was unlikely that Pop had been too much surprised at his son’s decision to go journeying afar. After all, this was the son who was going to be a doctor — at the very least a teacher — and who had become, of all things, a policeman.

“A policeman in the family,” Pop would muse aloud now and then. “A detective with a gun in the family like on TV. My own son. What would Mama say if she ever knew, may she rest in peace?”

But, Noah had to admit, the old man had been right about one thing, Rome was far, far away, not only from New York, but also from the blood-quickening image of it instilled in young Noah Freeman when he was a schoolboy soaking himself in gaudy literature about Spartacus and Caesar and Nero. And the Pensione Alfiara, hidden away in an alley off Via Arenula, was hardly a place to quicken anyone’s blood. It took an ill wind to blow an occasional American tourist there. In Noah’s case, the ill wind was the cab driver who had picked him up at Fiumicino airport and who happened to be Signora Alfiara’s brother-in-law.

It was made to order for disenchantment, the Pensione Alfiara. Granting that it offered bargain rates, its cuisine was monotonous, its service indifferent, its plumbing capricious, and its clientele, at least in early March, seemed to consist entirely of elderly, sad-eyed Italian villagers come to Rome to attend the deathbed of a dear friend. Aside from Signora Alfiara herself and the girl at the portiere’s desk, no one on the scene spoke English, so communication between Noah and his fellow boarders was restricted to nods and shrugs, well meant, but useless in relieving loneliness.

Its one marked asset was the girl at the portiere’s desk. She was tall and exquisite, one of the few really beautiful women Noah had yet encountered in Rome, because among other disillusionments was the discovery that Roman women are not the women one sees in Italian movies. And she lived behind her desk from early morning to late at night as if in a sad, self-contained world of her own, skillful at her accounts, polite, but remote and disinterested.

She intrigued him for more than the obvious reasons. The English she spoke was almost unaccented. If anything, it was of the clipped British variety, which led him to wonder whether she might not be a Briton somehow washed up on this Roman shore. And at her throat on a fine gold chain was a Mogen David, a Star of David, announcing plainly enough that she was Jewish. The sight of that small, familiar ornament had startled him at first, then had emboldened him to make a friendly overture.

“As a fellow Jew,” he had said smilingly, “I was wondering if you—” And she had cut in with chilling politeness, “Yes, you’ll find the synagogue on Lungotevere dei Cenci, a few blocks south. One of the landmarks of this part of Rome. Most interesting, of course” — which was enough to send him off defeated.

After that, he regretfully put aside hopes of making her acquaintance and dutifully went his tourist way alone, the guide book to Rome in his hand, the Italian phrase book in his pocket, trying to work up a sense of excitement at what he saw, and failing dismally at it. Partly, the weather was to blame — the damp, gray March weather which promised no break in the clouds overhead. And partly, he knew, it was loneliness — the kind of feeling that made him painfully envious of the few groups of tourists he saw here and there, shepherded by an officious guide, but, at least, chattering happily to each other.

But most of all — and this was something he had to force himself to acknowledge — he was not a tourist, but a fugitive. And what he was trying to flee was Detective Noah Freeman, who, unfortunately, was always with him and always would be. To be one of those plump, self-satisfied, retired businessmen gaping at the dome of St. Peters, that was one thing; to be Noah Freeman was quite another.

It was possible that Signora Alfiara, who had a pair of bright, knowing eyes buried in her pudding face, comprehended his state of mind and decided with maternal spirit to do something about it. Or it was possible that having learned his occupation she was honestly curious about him. Whatever the reason, Noah was deeply grateful the morning she sat down at the table where he was having the usual breakfast of hard roll, acid coffee, and watery marmalade, and explained that she had seen at the cinema stories about American detectives, but that he was the first she had ever met. Very interesting. And was life in America as the cinema showed it? So much shooting and beating and danger? Had he ever been shot at? Wounded, perhaps? What a way of life! It made her blood run cold to think of it.

The Signora was unprepossessing enough in her bloated shapelessness, her shabby dress and worn bedroom slippers; but, at least, she was someone to talk to, and they were a long time at breakfast settling the question of life in America. Before they left the table Noah asked about the girl at the portiere’s desk. Was she Italian? She didn’t sound like it when she spoke English.

“Rosanna?” said the Signora. “Oh, yes, yes, Italian. But when she was a little one — you know, when the Germans were here — she was sent to people in England. She was there many years. Oh, Italian, but una Ebrea, a Jew, poor sad little thing.”

The note of pity rankled. “So am I,” Noah said.

“Yes, she has told me,” the Signora remarked, and he saw that her pity was not at all for the girl’s being una Ebrea. More than that, he was warmed by the knowledge that the beautiful and unapproachable Rosanna had taken note of him after all.

“What makes her sad?” he asked. “The war’s been over a long time.”

“For some, yes. But her people will not let her forget what her father did when the Germans were here. There was the Resistance here, the partisans you know, and her father sold them to the Germans. So they believe. Now they hate her and her brother because they are the children of a Judas.”

“What do you mean, so they believe? Are they wrong about her father?”

“She says they are. To her, you understand, the father was like a saint. A man of honor and very brave. That might be. But when the Germans were here, even brave men were not so brave sometimes. Yet, who am I to say this about him? He was the doctor who saved my life and the life of my first son when I gave birth to him. That is why when the girl needed work I paid back a little of my debt by helping her this way. A good bargain, too. She’s honest, she works hard, she speaks other languages, so I lose nothing by a little kindness.”

“And what about her brother? Is he still around?”

“You see him every day. Giorgio. You know Giorgio?”

“The cleaning man?”

“He cleans, he carries, he gets drunk whenever he can, that’s Giorgio. Useless, really, but what can I do? For the girl’s sake I make as much of him as I can. You see the trouble with kindness? I wish to repay a debt, so now the windows are forever dirty. When you need that one he is always drunk somewhere. And always with a bad temper. His father had a bad temper, too, but at least he had great skill. As for the girl, she is an angel. But sad. That loneliness, you know, it can kill you.” The Signora leaned forward inquiringly, her bosom overflowing the table. “Maybe if you would talk to her—”

“I tried to,” said Noah. “She didn’t seem very much interested.”

“Because you are a stranger. But I have seen her watch you when you pass by. If you were a friend, perhaps. If the three of us dined together tonight—”

Signora Alfiara was someone who had her own way when she wanted to. The three of them dined together that night, but in an atmosphere of constraint, the conversation moving only under the impetus of questions the Signora aimed at Noah, Rosanna sitting silent and withdrawn as he answered.

When, while they were at their fruit and cheese, the Signora took abrupt and smiling leave of them with transparent motive, Noah said with some resentment to the girl, “I’m sorry about all this. I hope you know I wasn’t the one to suggest this little party. It was the lady’s idea.”

“I do know that.”

“Then why take out your mood on me?”

Rosanna’s lips parted in surprise. “Mood? But I had no intention — believe me, it has nothing to do with you.”

“What does it have to do with? Your father?” And seeing from her reaction that he had hit the mark, he said, “Yes, I heard about that.”

“Heard what?”

“A little. Now you can tell me the rest. Or do you enjoy having it stuck in your throat where you can’t swallow it and can’t bring it up, one way or the other?”

“You must have a strange idea of enjoyment And if you want the story, go to the synagogue, go to the ghetto or Via Catalana. You’ll hear it there quick enough. Everyone knows it.”

“I might do that First I’d like to hear your side of it.”

“As a policeman? You’re too late, Mr. Freeman. The case against Ezechiele Coen was decided long ago without policemen or judges.”

“What case?”

“He was said to have betrayed leaders of the Resistance. That was a lie, but partisans killed him for it. They shot him and left him lying with a sign on him saying Betrayer. Yes, Mr. Freeman, Ezechiele Coen who preached honor to his children as the one meaningful thing in life died in dishonor. He lay there in the dirt of the Teatro Marcello a long time that day, because his own people — our people — would not give him burial. When they remember him now, they spit on the ground. I know,” the girl said in a brittle voice, “because when I walk past them, they remember him.”

“Then why do you stay here?”

“Because he is here. Because here is where his blackened memory — his spirit — remains, waiting for the truth to be known.”

“Twenty years after the event?”

“Twenty or a hundred or a thousand. Does time change the truth, Mr. Freeman? Isn’t it as important for the dead to get justice as the living?”

“Maybe it is. But how do you know that justice wasn’t done in this case? What evidence is there to disprove the verdict? You were a child when all this happened, weren’t you?”

“And not even in Rome. I was in England then, living with a doctor who knew my father since their school days. Yes, England is far away and I was a child then, but I knew my father.” If faith could really move mountains, Noah thought. “And what about your brother. Does he feel the way you do?”

“Giorgio tries to feel as little as he can about it. When he was a boy everyone said that some day he would be as fine a man and a doctor as his father. Now he’s a drunkard. A bottle of wine makes it easy not to feel pain.”

“Would he mind if I talked to him about this?”

“Why should you want to? What could Ezechiele Coen mean to you anyhow? Is Rome so boring that you must play detective here to pass the time? I don’t understand you, Mr. Freeman.”

“No, you don’t,” Noah said harshly. “But you might if you listen to what I’m going to tell you. Do you know where I got the time and money to come on a trip like this, a plain, ordinary, underpaid cop like me? Well, last year there was quite a scandal about some policemen in New York who were charged with taking graft from a gambler. I was one of them under charges. I had no part of that mess, but I was suspended from my job and when they got around to it, I was put on trial. The verdict was not guilty, I got all my back pay in one lump, and I was told to return to duty. Things must have looked fine for me, wouldn’t you think?”

“Because you did get justice,” Rosanna said.

“From the court. Only from the court. Afterward, I found that no one else really believed I was innocent. No one. Even my own father sometimes wonders about it. And if I went back on the Force, the grafters there would count me as one of them, and the honest men wouldn’t trust me. That’s why I’m here. Because I don’t know whether to go back or not, and I need time to think, I need to get away from them all. So I did get justice, and now you tell me what good it did.”

The girl shook her head somberly. “Then my father isn’t the only one, is he? But you see, Mr. Freeman, you can defend your own good name. Tell me, how is he to defend his?”

That was the question which remained in his mind afterward, angry and challenging. He tried to put it aside, to fix on his own immediate problem, but there it was. It led him the next morning away from proper destinations, the ruins and remains italicized in his guide book, and on a walk southward along the Tiber.

Despite gray skies overhead and the dismally brown, turbid river sullenly locked between the stone embankments below, Noah felt a quickening pleasure in the scene. In a few days he had had his fill of sightseeing. Brick and marble and Latin inscriptions were not really the stuff of life, and pictures and statuary only dim representations of it. It was people he was hungry to meet, and now that he had an objective in meeting them he felt more alive than he had since his first day in Rome. More alive, in fact, than in all those past months in New York, working alongside his father in the old man’s tailor shop. Not that this small effort to investigate the case of Ezechiele Coen would amount to anything, he knew. A matter of dredging up old and bitter memories, that was about what it came to. But the important thing was that he was Noah Freeman again, alive and functioning.

Along Lungotevere dei Cenci construction work was going on. The shells of new buildings towered over slums battered by centuries of hard wear. Midstream in the Tiber was a long, narrow island with several institutional buildings on it. Then, facing it from the embankment, the synagogue came into view, a huge, Romanesque, marble pile.

There was a railing before the synagogue. A young man leaned at his ease against the railing. Despite the chill in the air he was in shirt sleeves, his tanned, muscular arms folded on his chest, his penetrating eyes watching Noah’s approach with the light of interest in them As Noah passed, the man came to attention.

“Shalom.”

“Shalom?” Noah said, and the young man’s face brightened. In his hand magically appeared a deck of picture post cards.

“Post cards, hey? See, all different of Rome. Also, the synagogue, showing the inside and the outside. You an Americano Ebreo, no? A landsman?”

“Yes,” said Noah, wondering if only Americano Ebreos came this way. “But you can put away the pictures. I don’t want any.”

“Maybe a guide book? The best. Or you want a guide? The ghetto, Isola Tiberina, Teatro Marcello? Anywhere you want to go, I can show you. Two thousand lire. Ask anybody. For two thousand lire nobody is a better guide than Carlo Piperno. That’s me.”

“Noah Freeman, that’s me. And the only place I want to go to is the rabbi’s. Can I find him in the synagogue?”

“No, but I will take you to his house. Afterwards we see the ghetto, Tiberina—”

The rabbi proved to be a man of good will, of understanding; but, he explained in precise English, perhaps he could afford to be objective about the case of Ezechiele Coen because he himself was not a Roman. He had come to this congregation from Milan, an outsider. Yet, even as an outsider he could appreciate the depth of his congregation’s hatred for their betrayer. A sad situation, but could they be blamed for that? Could it not be the sternest warning to all such betrayers if evil times ever came again?

“He’s been dead a long time,” said Noah.

“So are those whose lives he sold. Worse than that.” The rabbi gestured at the shuttered window beyond which lay the Tiber. “He sold the lives of friends who were not of our faith. Those who had lived in Trastevere across the river, working people, priests, who gave some of us hiding places when we needed them Did the daughter of Ezechiele Coen tell you how, when she was a child, they helped remove her from the city at night in a cart of wine barrels, risking their lives to do it? Does she think it is easy to forget how her father rewarded them for that?”

“But why her?” Noah protested. “Why should your congregation make her an outcast? She and her brother aren’t the guilty ones. Do you really believe that the sins of the fathers must be visited on the children?”

The rabbi shook his head. “There are sins, Signor Freeman, which make a horror that takes generations to wipe away. I welcome the girl and her brother to the synagogue, but I cannot wipe away the horror in the people they would meet there. If I wished to, I could not work such a miracle.

“Only a little while ago there was a great and flourishing congregation, here, signore, a congregation almost as ancient as Rome itself. Do you know what is left of it now? A handful. A handful who cannot forget The Jews of Rome do not forget easily. To this day they curse the name of Titus who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem as they remember kindly the name of Julius Caesar who was their friend, and for whose body they mourned seven days in the Forum. And the day they forgive Titus will be the same day they forgive Ezechiele Coen and his children and their children to come. Do you know what I mean, Signor Freeman?”

“Yes,” said Noah. “I know what you mean.”

He went out into the bleak, cobblestoned street, oppressed by a sense of antiquity weighing him down, of two thousand years of unrelenting history heavy on his shoulders, and not even the racketing of motor traffic along the river embankment, the spectacle of the living present, could dispel it. Carlo Piperno, the post-card vender, was waiting there.

“You have seen the rabbi? Good. Now I show you Isola Tiberina.”

“Forget Isola Tiberina. There’s something else I want you to show me.”

“For two thousand lire, anything.”

“All right.” Noah extracted the banknotes from his wallet. “Does the name Ezechiele Coen mean anything to you?”

Carlo Piperno had the hard, capable look of a man impervious to surprise. Nevertheless, he was visibly surprised. Then he recovered himself. “That one? Mi dispiace, signore. Sorry, but he is dead, that one.” He pointed to the ground at his feet “You want him, you have to look there for him.”

“I don’t want him. I want someone who knew him well. Someone who can tell me what he did and what happened to him.”

“Everybody knows. I can tell you.”

“No, it must be someone who wasn’t a child when it happened. Capisce?”

“Capisco. But why?”

“If I answer that, it will cost you these two thousand lire. Shall I answer?”

“No, no.” Carlo reached out and dexterously took possession of the money. He shrugged. “But first the rabbi, now Ezechiele Coen who is in hell long ago. Well, I am a guide, no? So now I am your guide.”

He led the way through a labyrinth of narrow streets to an area not far from the synagogue, a paved area with the remains of a stone wall girdling it. Beyond the wall were tenements worn by time to the color of the clay that had gone into their brick. Yet their tenants seemed to have pride of possession. In almost every window were boxes of flowers and greenery. On steps and in stony courtyards, housewives with brushes and buckets scrubbed the stone and brick. In surrounding alleys were small stores, buzzing with activity.

With shock Noah suddenly realized that here was the ghetto, that he was standing before a vestige of the past which thus far in his life had been only an ugly word to him. It was the presence of the wall that provided the shock, he knew. It had no gate, there was no one to prevent you from departing through it, but if it were up to him he would have had it tom down on the spot.

A strange place, Rome. Wherever you turned were the reminders of the cruel past. Memorials to man, the persecuted. This wall, the catacombs, the churches built to martyrs, the Colosseum. There was no escaping their insistent presence.

Carlo’s destination turned out to be a butcher shop — the shop of Vito Levi, according to the sign over it. The butcher, a burly, gray-haired man, stood behind his chest-high marble counter hacking at a piece of meat, exchanging loud repartee with a shriveled old woman, a shawl over her head, a string bag in her hand, waiting for her order. While Carlo was addressing him he continued to chop away with the cleaver, then suddenly placed it on the counter, and came around to meet Noah in the street, wiping his hands on his apron as he came. The old woman followed, peering at Noah with beady-eyed interest, and in another minute others from the street were gathering around, getting the news from her. Ezechiele Coen may have been dead twenty years, Noah thought, but his name was still very much alive in these quarters.

He was not sorry that the matter was going to be discussed in public this way. As a young patrolman on the beat he had learned not to be too quick to break up a crowd around an accident or crime; there might be someone in the crowd who had something to say worth hearing. Now he gathered from the heat of discussion around him that everyone here had something to say about Ezechiele Coen.

With Carlo serving as interpreter, he put his questions first to Levi the butcher, and then to anyone else who volunteered information. Slowly, piece by piece, the picture of Ezechiele Coen and his crime took shape. It was Levi who supplied most of the information — the time, the place, the event.

The butcher had known Ezechiele Coen well. Like all others he had trusted him, because no man had a greater reputation for honesty than the doctor. He was a great doctor, a man of science; yet he was a man of God, too, devout, each morning binding on his phylacteries and saying his prayers, each sabbath attending the synagogue. Not that there was any gentleness in him. He was a proud man, an arrogant man, a man who would insult you to your face for the least offense. After all, it was one thing to be honest, but it was something else again to behave as if you were the only honest man in the world. The only one on earth who would never compromise with truth. That was Ezechiele Coen. You might trust him, but you could not like him. He was too good for that.

Then the trust was betrayed. Over the years one had learned to live with Il Duce, but when the Germans came to Rome, the Resistance of a generation ago reawoke. Sabotage, spying, a hidden press turning out leaflets which told the truth about Il Duce and his ally. Many said it was useless, but Vito Levi, the butcher, and a few others continued their secret efforts, knowing they had nothing to lose. Jews were being deported now, were being shipped to the Nazi slaughter pens in carloads. What else to do then but join some of their Gentile neighbors in the Resistance?

“Ask him,” said Noah to Carlo, “if Ezechiele Coen was one of the Resistance,” and when Carlo translated this, the butcher shook his head.

Only once was the doctor called on to help. Three leaders of the Resistance had managed to get into Rome from the mountains — to help organize the movement here, to give it leadership. They were hidden in a cellar in Trastevere, across the river, one of them badly wounded. The doctor’s son, only a boy then, no more than fifteen years of age, was a courier for the partisans. He had brought his father to attend the wounded man, and then, soon after, the three men together were captured in their hiding place by the Germans. They had been betrayed by the honest, the noble, the righteous Ezechiele Coen.

“Ask him how he knows this?” Noah demanded of Carlo. “Was there a confession?”

There was no need for one, as it happened. There was no need for any more evidence than the money case of Major von Grubbner.

Noah silently cursed the tedious process of translation. Carlo Piperno was the kind of interpreter who richly enjoys and intends to get the maximum effect from his role. It took him a long time to make clear who and what Major von Grubbner was.

The major was one of the men assigned to the Panzer division quartered along the Tiber. But unlike the German officers around him, Major von Grubbner was cunning as a fox, smooth in his manner, ingratiating in his approach. Others came with a gun in their hands. He came with an attaché case, a black leather case with a handsome gold ornament on it, a doubleheaded eagle which was a reminder of the great name of his family. And in the case was money. Bundles of money. Packages of lire, fresh and crisp, a fortune by any estimate.

Give the devil his due. This von Grubbner was a brave man as well as a cunning one. He walked alone, contemptuous of those who needed guards to attend them, the money case in his hand, a smile on his lips, and he invited confidences.

“After all,” he would say, “we are businessmen, you and I. We are practical people who dislike trouble. Remove the troublemakers and all is peaceful, no? Well, here I am to do business. Look at this money. Beautiful, isn’t it? And all you have to do is name your own price, expose the troublemakers, and we are all happy. Name your own price, that’s all you have to do.”

And he would open the case under your nose, showing you the money, fondling it, offering it to you. It was more than money. It was life itself. It could buy the few scraps of food remaining to be bought, it could buy you a refuge for your wife and children, it could buy you safety for another day. Life itself. Everyone wants life, and there it was in that little black leather case with the doubleheaded eagle in gold marking it.

Only one man was tempted. The day after the three partisans were taken, Ezechiele Coen was seen fleeing with that case through the alleys, running like a rabbit before the hounds of vengeance he knew would soon be on him. Only Ezechiele Coen the devout, the honorable, the arrogant, fell, and died soon for his treachery.

Vito Levi’s words needed translation, but not the emotion behind them. And the crowd around Noah, now staring at him in silence, did not need its feelings explained. Yet, the story seemed incomplete to him, to Detective Noah Freeman, who had learned at his job not to live by generalities. The evidence, that was what had meaning.

“Ask them,” he said to Carlo, “who saw Ezechiele Coen with that case in his possession,” and when Carlo translated this, Levi drove a thumb hard into his own chest. Then he looked around the crowd and pointed, and a man on its outskirts raised his hand, a woman nearby raised hers, someone else raised a hand.

Three witnesses, four, five. Enough, Noah thought, to hang any man. With difficulty, prompting Carlo question by question, he drew their story from them. They lived in houses along Via del Portico. It was hot that night, a suffocating heat that made sleep impossible. One and all, they were at their windows. One and all, they saw the doctor running down the street toward the Teatro Marcello, the leather case under his arm. His medical bag? No, no. Not with the golden eagle on it. It was the doctor with his blood money. This they swore on the lives of their children.

During siesta time that afternoon, Noah, with the connivance of Signora Alfiara, drew Rosanna out of doors for a walk to a café in the Piazza Navona. Over glasses of Campari he told her the results of his investigation.

“Witnesses,” she said scathingly. “Have you found that witnesses always tell the truth?”

“These people do. But sometimes there can be a difference between what you imagine is the truth and the truth itself.”

“And how do you discover that difference?”

“By asking more questions. For example, did your father live in the ghetto?”

“During the war, yes.”

“And according to my street map the Teatro Marcello is outside it. Why would he be running there with the money instead of keeping it safe at home? Even more curious, why would he carry the money in that case, instead of transferring it to something that couldn’t be identified? And why would he be given that case, a personal possession, along with the money? You can see how many unanswered questions come up, if you look at all this without prejudice.”

“Then you think—”

“I don’t think anything yet. First, I want to try to get answers to those questions. I want to establish a rational pattern for what seems to be a whole irrational set of events. And there is one person who can help me do this.”

“Who?”

“Major von Grubbner himself.”

“But how would you ever find him? It was so long ago. He may be dead.”

“Or he may not be. If he is not, there are ways of finding him.”

“But it would mean so much trouble. So much time and effort.”

The way she was looking at him then, Noah thought, was more than sufficient payment for the time and effort. And the way she flushed when he returned her look told him that she knew his thought.

“I’m used to this kind of effort,” he said. “Anyhow, it may be the last chance I’ll have to practice my profession.”

“Then you’re not going back to your work with the police? But you’re a very good detective. You are, aren’t you?”

“Oh, very good. And,” he said, “honest, too, despite the popular opinion.”

“Don’t say it like that,” she flashed out angrily. “You are honest. I know you are.”

“Do you? Well, that makes two of us at least. Anyhow, the vital thing is for me to locate von Grubbner if he’s still somewhere to be found. After that, we’ll see. By the way, do you know the date when all this happened? When your father was seen with that case?”

“Yes. It was the fifth of July in 1943. I couldn’t very well forget that date, Mr. Freeman.”

“Noah.”

“Of course,” said Rosanna. “Noah.”

After returning her to her desk at the pensione, Noah went directly to police headquarters. There he found his credentials an open sesame. In the end he was closeted with Commissioner Ponziani, a handsome urbane man, who listened to the story of Ezechiele Coen with fascination. At its conclusion he raised quizzical eyebrows at Noah.

“And your interest in this affair?”

“Purely unofficial. I don’t even know if I have the right to bother you with it at all.” Noah shrugged. “But when I thought of all the red tape to cut if I went to the military or consular authorities—”

The Commissioner made a gesture which dismissed as beneath contempt the clumsy workings of the military and consular authorities. “No, no, you did right to come here. We are partners in our profession, are we not, signore? We are of a brotherhood, you and I. So now if you give me all possible information about this Major von Grubbner, I will communicate with the German police. We shall soon learn if there is anything they can tell us about him.”

Soon meant days of waiting, and, Noah saw, they were bad days for Rosanna. Each one that passed left her more tense, more dependent on him for reassurance. How could anyone ever find this German, one man in millions, a man who might have his own reasons for not wanting to be found? And if by some miracle they could confront him, what would he have to say? Was it possible that he would say her father had been guilty?

“It is,” said Noah. He reached out and took her hand comfortingly. “You have to be prepared for that.”

“I will not be! No, I will not be,” she said fiercely. Then her assurance crumpled. “He would be lying, wouldn’t he? You know he would.” The passage left Noah shaken. Rosanna’s intensity, the way she had clutched his hand like a lost child — these left him wondering if he had not dangerously overreached himself in trying to exorcise the ghost of Ezechiele Coen. If he failed, it would leave things worse than ever. Worse for himself, too, because now he realized with delight and misery that he was falling hopelessly in love with the girl. And so much seemed to depend on clearing her father’s reputation. Could it be, as Rosanna felt, that Ezechiele Coen’s spirit really waited here on the banks of the Tiber to be set at rest? And what if there were no way of doing that?

When Signora Alfiara called him to the phone to take a message from the police, Noah picked up the phone almost prayerfully.

“Pronto,” he said, and Commissioner Ponziani said without preliminary, “Ah, Signor Freeman. This affair of Major von Grubbner becomes stranger and stranger. Will you meet with me in my office so that we may discuss it?”

At the office the Commissioner came directly to the point.

“The date of the unhappy event we are concerned with,” he said, “was the fifth of July in 1943. Is that correct?”

“It is,” said Noah.

“And here,” said the Commissioner, tapping a finger on the sheet of paper before him, “is the report of the German authorities on a Major Alois von Grubbner, attached to the Panzer division stationed in Rome at that time. According to the report he deserted the army, absconding with a large amount of military funds, on the sixth of July in 1943. No trace of him has been discovered since.”

The Commissioner leaned back in his chair and smiled at Noah. “Interesting, no? Very interesting. What do you make of it?”

“He didn’t desert,” said Noah. “He didn’t abscond. That was the money seen in Ezechiele Coen’s possession.”

“So I believe, too. I strongly suspect that this officer was murdered — assassinated may be a more judicious word, considering the circumstances — and the money taken from him.”

“But his body,” Noah said. “Wouldn’t the authorities have allowed for possible murder and made a search for it?”

“A search was made. But Major von Grubbner, it seems, had a somewhat” — the Commissioner twirled a finger in the air, seeking the right word — “a somewhat shady record in his civilian life. A little embezzling here, a little forgery there — enough to make his superiors quickly suspect his integrity when he disappeared. I imagine their search was a brief one. But I say that if they had been able to peer beneath the Tiber—”

“Is that where you think he ended up?”

“There, or beneath some cellar, or in a hole dug in a dark corner. Yes, I know what you are thinking, Signor Freeman. A man like this Doctor Ezechiele Coen hardly seems capable of assassination, robbery, the disposal of a body. Still, that is not much of an argument to present to people violently antagonistic to his memory. It is, at best, a supposition. Fevered emotions are not to be cooled by suppositions. I very much fear that your investigation has come to an abrupt and unhappy ending.”

Noah shook his head. “That attaché case and the money in it,” he said. “It was never found. I was told that when Ezechiele Coen was found shot by partisans and left lying in the Teatro Marcello, the case was nowhere to be seen. What happened to it?”

The Commissioner shrugged. “Removed by those who did the shooting, of course.”

“If it was there to be removed. But no one ever reported seeing it then or afterward. No one ever made a remark — even after the war when it would be safe to — that money intended to be used against the Resistance was used by it. But don’t you think that this is the sort of thing that would he a standing joke — a folk story — among these people?”

“Perhaps. Again it is no more than a supposition.”

“And since it’s all I have to go on, I’ll continue from there.”

“You are a stubborn man, Signor Freeman.” The Commissioner shook his head with grudging admiration. “Well, if you need further assistance, come to me directly. Very stubborn. I wish some of my associates had your persistence.”

When Rosanna had been told what occurred in the Commissioner’s office she was prepared that instant to make the story public.

“It is proof, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Whatever did happen, we know my father had no part in it. Isn’t that true?”

“You and I know. But remember one thing: your father was seen with that attach^ case. Until that can be explained, nothing else will stand as proof of his innocence.”

“He may have found the case. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Hardly possible,” Noah said. “And why would he be carrying it toward the Teatro Marcello? What is this Teatro Marcello anyhow?”

“Haven’t you seen it yet? It’s one of the ruins like the Colosseum, but smaller.”

“Can you take me there now?”

“Not now. I can’t leave the desk until Signore Alfiara returns. But it’s not far from here. A little distance past the synagogue on the Via del Portico. Look for number 39. You’ll find it easily.”

Outside the pensione Noah saw Giorgio Coen unloading a delivery of food from a truck. He was, at a guess, ten years older than his sister, a big, shambling man with good features that had gone slack with dissipation, and a perpetual stubble of beard on his jowls. Despite the flabby look of him, he hoisted a side of meat to his shoulder and bore it into the building with ease. In passing, he looked at Noah with a hang-dog, beaten expression, and Noah could feel for him. Rosanna had been cruelly wounded by the hatred vented against her father, but Giorgio had been destroyed by it. However this affair turned out, there was small hope of salvaging anything from those remains.

Noah walked past the synagogue, found the Via del Portico readily enough, and then before the building marked 39 he stood looking around in bewilderment. There was no vestige of any ruin resembling the Colosseum here — no ruin at all, in fact Number 39 itself was only an old apartment house, the kind of apartment house so familiar to run-down sections of Manhattan back home.

He studied the names under the doorbells outside as if expecting to find the answer to the mystery there, then peered into its tiled hallway. A buxom girl, a baby over her shoulder, came along the hallway, and Noah smiled at her.

“Teatro Marcello?” he said doubtfully. “Dove?”

She smiled back and said something incomprehensible to him, and when he shook his head she made a circling gesture with her hand.

“Oh, in back,” Noah said. “Thank you. Grazie.”

It was in back. And it was, Noah decided, one of the more incredible spectacles of this whole incredible city. The Teatro Marcello fitted Rosanna’s description: it was the grim gray ruin of a lesser Colosseum. But into it had been built the apartment house, so that only the semicircle of ruins visible from the rear remained in their original form.

The tiers of stone blocks, of columns, of arches towering overhead were Roman remains, and the apartment house was a façade for them, concealing them from anyone standing before the house. Even the top tier of this ancient structure had been put to use, Noah saw. It had been bricked and windowed, and behind some of the windows shone electric lights. People lived there. They walked through the tiled hallway leading from the street, climbed flights of stairs, and entered kitchens and bedrooms whose walls had been built by Imperial slaves two thousand years ago. Incredible, but there it was before him.

An immense barren field encircled the building, a wasteland of pebbly earth and weeds. Boys were playing football there, deftly booting the ball back and forth. On the trunks of marble columns half sunk into the ground, women sat and tended baby carriages. Nearby, a withered crone spread out scraps of meat on a piece of newspaper, and cats — the tough-looking, pampered cats of Rome — circled the paper hungrily, waiting for the signal to begin lunch.

Noah tried to visualize the scene twenty years before when Ezechiele Coen had fled here in the darkness bearing an attaché case marked with a doubleheaded eagle. He must have had business here, for here was where he lingered until an avenging partisan had searched him out and killed him. But what business? Business with whom? No one in the apartment house; there seemed to be no entrance to it from this side.

At its ground level, the Teatro Marcello was a series of archways, the original entrances to the arena within. Noah walked slowly along them. Each archway was barred by a massive iron gate beyond which was a small cavern solidly bricked, impenetrable at any point. Behind each gate could be seen fragments of columns, broken statuary of heads and arms and robed bodies, a litter of filthy paper blown in by the winds of time. Only in one of those musty caverns could be seen signs of life going on. Piled on a slab of marble were schoolbooks, coats, and sweaters, evidently the property of the boys playing football, placed here for safety’s sake.

For safety’s sake. With a sense of mounting excitement, Noah studied the gate closely. It extended from the floor almost to the top of the archway. Its iron bars were too close together to allow even a boy to slip between them, its lock massive and solidly caked with rust, the chain holding it as heavy as a small anchor chain. Impossible to get under, over, or through it — yet the boys had. Magic. Could someone else have used that magic on a July night twenty years ago?

When Noah called to them, the boys took their time about stopping their game, and then came over to the gate warily. By dint of elaborate gestures, Noah managed to make his questions clear, but it took a package of cigarettes and a handful of coins to get the required demonstration.

One of the boys, grinning locked his hands around a bar of the gate and with an effort raised it clear of its socket in the horizontal rod supporting it near the ground. Now it was held only by the cross rod overhead. The boy drew it aside at an angle and slipped through the space left. He returned, dropped the bar back into place, and held out a hand for another cigarette.

With the help of the Italian phrase book, Noah questioned the group around him. How long had these locked gates been here? The boys scratched their heads and looked at each other. A long time. Before they could remember. Before their fathers could remember. A very long time.

And how long had that one bar been loose, so that you could go in and out if you knew the secret? The same. All the ragazzi around here knew about it as their fathers had before them.

Could any other of these gates be entered this way? No, this was the only one. The good one.

When he had dismissed them by showing empty hands — no more cigarettes, no more coins — Noah sat down on one of the sunken marble columns near the women and their baby carriages, and waited. It took a while for the boys to finish their game and depart, taking their gear with them, but finally they were gone. Then Noah entered the gate, using his newfound secret, and started a slow, methodical investigation of what lay in the shadowy reaches beyond it.

He gave no thought to the condition of his hands or clothes, but carefully pushed aside the litter of paper, probed under and between the chunks of marble, all the broken statuary around him. At the far end of the cavern he found that once he had swept the litter aside there was a clear space underfoot. Starting at the wall, he inched forward on his knees, sweeping his fingers lightly back and forth over the ground. Then his fingertips hit a slight depression in the flinty earth, an almost imperceptible concavity. Despite the chill in the air, he was sweating now, and had to pull out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

He traced the depression, his fingertips moving along it, following it to its length, turning where it turned, marking a rectangle the length and width of a man’s body. Once before, in the course of his official duties, Detective Noah Freeman had marked a rectangle like this in the weed-grown yard of a Bronx shanty, and had found beneath it what he had expected to find. He knew he would not be disappointed in what would be dug up from this hole beneath the Teatro Marcello. He was tempted to get a tool and do the digging himself, but that, of course, must be the job of the police. And before they would be notified, the pieces of the puzzle, all at hand now, must be placed together before a proper witness...

When Noah returned to the Pensione Alfiara, he brought with him as witness the rabbi, bewildered by the unexplained urgency of this mission, out of breath at the quick pace Noah had set through the streets. Rosanna was at her desk. She looked with alarm at Noah’s grimy hands, at the streaks of dirt and sweat on his face. For the rabbi she had no greeting. This was the enemy, an unbeliever in the cause of Ezechiele Coen. She had eyes only for Noah.

“What happened?” she said. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No. Listen, Rosanna, have you told Giorgio anything about von Grubbner? About my meeting with the police commissioner?”

“No.”

“Good. Where is he now?”

“Giorgio? In the kitchen, I think. But why? What—?”

“If you come along, you’ll see why. But you’re not to say anything. Not a word, do you understand. Let me do all the talking.”

Giorgio was in the kitchen listlessly moving a mop back and forth over the floor. He stopped when he saw his visitors, and regarded them with bleary bewilderment. Now is the time, Noah thought. It must be done quickly and surely now, or it will never be done at all.

“Giorgio,” he said, “I have news for you. Good news. Your father did not betray anyone.”

Resentment flickered in the bleary eyes. “I have always known that, signore. But why is it your concern?”

“He never betrayed anyone, Giorgio. But you did.”

Rosanna gasped. Giorgio shook his head pityingly. “Listen to him! Basta, signore. Basta. I have work to do.”

“You did your work a long time ago,” Noah said relentlessly. “And when your father took away the money paid to you for it, you followed him and killed him to get it back.”

He was pleased to see that Giorgio did not reel under this wholly false accusation. Instead, he seemed to draw strength from it. This is the way, Noah thought, that the unsuspecting animal is lured closer and closer to the trap. What hurt was that Rosanna, looking back and forth from inquisitor to accused, seemed ready to collapse. The rabbi watched with the same numb horror.

Giorgio turned to them. “Do you hear this?” he demanded, and there was a distinct mockery in his voice. “Now I am a murderer. Now I killed my own father.”

“Before a witness,” Noah said softly.

“Oh, of course, before a witness. And who was that witness, signore?”

“Someone who has just told the police everything. They’ll bring him here very soon, so that he can point you out to them. A Major von Grubbner.”

“And that is the worst lie of all!” said Giorgio triumphantly. “He’s dead, that one! Dead and buried, do you hear? So all your talk—!”

There are animals which, when trapped, will fight to the death for their freedom, will gnaw away one of their own legs to release themselves. There are others which go to pieces the instant the jaws of the trap have snapped on them, become quivering lumps of flesh waiting only for the end. Giorgio, Noah saw, was one of the latter breed. His voice choked off, his jaw went slack, his face ashen. The mop, released from his nerveless grip, fell with a clatter. Rosanna took a step toward him, but Noah caught her wrist, holding her back.

“How do you know he’s dead, Giorgio?” he demanded. “Yes, he’s dead and buried — but how did you know that? No one else knew. How do you happen to be the only one?”

The man swayed, fell back against the wall.

“You killed von Grubbner and took that money,” Noah said. “When your father tried to get rid of it, the partisans held him guilty of informing and shot him while you stood by, refusing to tell them the truth. In a way, you did help kill him, didn’t you? That’s what you’ve been carrying around in you since the day he died, isn’t it?”

“Giorgio!” Rosanna cried out. “But why didn’t you tell them? Why? Why?”

“Because,” said Noah, “then they would have known the real informer. That money was a price paid to you for information, wasn’t it, Giorgio?”

The word emerged like a groan. “Yes.”

“You?” Rosanna said wonderingly, her eyes fixed on her brother. “It was you?”

“But what could I do? What could I do? He came to me, the German. He said he knew I was of the Resistance. He said if I did not tell him where the men were hidden I would be put to death. If I told, I would be saved. I would be rewarded.”

The broken hulk lurched toward Rosanna, arms held wide in appeal, but Noah barred the way. “Why did you kill von Grubbner?”

“Because he cheated me. After the men were taken, I went to him for the money, and he laughed at me. He said I must tell him about others, too. I must tell everything, and then he would pay. So I killed him. When he turned away, I picked up a stone and struck him on the head and then again and again until he was dead. And I buried him behind the gate there because only the ragazzi knew how to get through it, and no one would find him there.”

“But you took that case full of money with you.”

“Yes, but only to give to my father. And I told him everything. Everything. I swear it. I wanted him to beat me. I wanted him to kill me if that would make it all right. But he would not. All he knew was that the money must be returned. He had too much honor! That was what he died for. He was mad with honor! Who else on this earth would try to return money to a dead man?”

Giorgio’s legs gave way. He fell to his knees and remained there, striking the floor blow after blow with his fist “Who else?” he moaned “Who else?”

The rabbi looked helplessly at Noah. “He was a boy then,” he said in a voice of anguish. “Only a boy. Can we hold children guilty of the crimes we inflict on them?” And then he said with bewilderment, “But what of the blood money? What did Ezechiele Coen do with it? What became of it?”

“I think we’ll soon find out,” said Noah.

They were all there at the gates of the Teatro Marcello when Commissioner Ponziani arrived with his men. All of them and more. The rabbi and Carlo Piperno, the post-card vender, and Vito Levi, the butcher, and a host of others whose names were inscribed on the rolls of the synagogue. And tenants of the Teatro Marcello, curious as to what was going on below them, and schoolboys and passersby with time to spare.

The Commissioner knew his job, Noah saw. Not only had he brought a couple of strong young carabinieri to perform the exhumation, but other men as well to hold back the excited crowd.

Only Giorgio was not there. Giorgio was in a bed of the hospital on Isola Tiberina, his face turned to the wall. He was willing himself to die, the doctor had said, but he would not die. He would live, and, with help, make use of the years ahead. It was possible that employment in the hospital itself, work which helped the unfortunate, might restore to him a sense of his own worth. The doctor would see to that when the time came.

Noah watched as the police shattered the lock on the gates and drew them apart, their hinges groaning rustily. He put an arm around Rosanna’s waist and drew her to him as the crowd pressed close behind them. This was all her doing, he thought. Her faith had moved mountains, and with someone like this at his side, someone whose faith in him would never waver, it would not be hard to return home and face down the cynics there. It didn’t take a majority vote of confidence to sustain you; it needed only one person’s granite faith.

The police strung up lights in the vaulted area behind the gate. They studied the ground, then carefully plied shovels as the Commissioner hovered around them.

“Faccia attenzione,” he said. “Adagio. Adagio.”

The mound of dirt against the wall grew larger. The men put aside their shovels. Kneeling, they carefully scooped earth from the hole, handful by handful. Then the form of a body showed, fleshless bones, a grinning shattered skull. A body clad in the moldering tatters of a military uniform.

And, as Noah saw under the glare of droplights, this was not the first time these remains had been uncovered. On the chest of the skeletal form rested a small leather case fallen to rot, marked by the blackened image of a doubleheaded eagle. The case had come apart at all its seams, the money in it seemed to have melted together in lumps, more like clay than money, yet it was clearly recognizable for what it was. Twenty years ago Ezechiele Coen had scraped aside the earth over the freshly buried Major Alois von Grubbner and returned his money to him. There it was and there he was, together as they had been since that time.

Noah became aware of the rabbi’s voice behind him. Then another voice and another, all merging into a litany recited in deep-toned chorus. A litany, Noah thought, older than the oldest ruins of Rome. It was the kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, raised to heaven for Ezechiele Coen, now at rest.