The Flying Boat Mystery Read online

  THE FLYING BOAT MYSTERY

  Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:

  The Lord of Misrule (2010)

  The Fourth Door (2011)

  The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)

  The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)

  The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)

  The Tiger’s Head (2013)

  The Crimson Fog (2013)

  The Night of the Wolf (2013) (collection)

  The Invisible Circle (2014)

  The Picture from the Past (2014)

  The Phantom Passage (2015)

  Death Invites You (2016)

  The Vampire Tree (2016)

  The Madman’s Room (2017)

  The Man Who Loved Clouds (2018)

  The Gold Watch (2019)

  Other impossible crime novels from Locked Room International:

  The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Torok) 2012

  The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014

  The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014

  The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015

  The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015

  Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015

  The Moai Island Puzzle (Alice Arisugawa) 2016

  The Howling Beast (Noel Vindry) 2016

  Death in the Dark (Stacey Bishop) 2017

  The Ginza Ghost (Keikichi Osaka) 2017

  Death in the House of Rain (Szu-Yen Lin) 2017

  The Double Alibi (Noel Vindry) 2018

  The 8 Mansion Murders (Takemaru Abiko) 2018

  Locked Room Murders (Robert Adey) 2018 (bibliography)

  The Seventh Guest (Gaston Boca) 2018

  Visit our website at www.mylri.com or

  www.lockedroominternational.com

  THE FLYING BOAT MYSTERY

  FRANCO VAILATI

  Translated by Igor Longo

  The Flying Boat Mystery

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in Italian in 1935 by

  I Libri Gialli as Il mistero dell'idrovolante

  Copyright © Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano, 1935.

  THE FLYING BOAT MYSTERY

  English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2019.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright. In the event of any inadvertent transgression of copyright, the editor would like to hear from the author’s representatives. Please contact me at pugmire1@ yahoo.com.

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Vailati, Franco

  [Il mistero dell'idrovolante English]

  The Flying Boat Mystery / Franco Vailati

  Translated from the Italian by Igor Longo

  To Igor, who patiently provided this translation. J.M.P

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Passengers on the Do-Wal 134:

  GIORGIO VALLESI Journalist

  FRANCESCO AGLIATI Banker

  MARCELLA ARTENI

  GIUSEPPI SABELLI Merchant

  GIOVANNI MARCHETTI Merchant

  PAGELLI-BERTIERI Merchant

  LARINI Teller

  VANNA SANDRELLI

  MARIA MARTELLI

  AUGUSTO MARTELLI

  Crew:

  COMANDANTE GIRINI Flight Commander

  SECONDO PILOTA VANDELLI Second Pilot

  Police:

  VICE QUESTORE LUIGI RENZI Assistant Commissioner

  COMMENDATORE BERTINI Commissioner

  COMMISSARIO BOLDRIN Chief Inspector

  VICE COMMISSARIO GALBIATI Superintendent

  1-OSTIA-NAPLES

  The landscape around the Ostia airport was mournfully tedious and flat. The mouth of the Tiber river was a bilge-yellow strip in the sandy coastline. The water slumbered under the sky’s disinterested grey eye. Even the sea had a neutral tint, as if it were ashamed of showing off a glossy, festive blue in the general greyness of the surroundings. A casual whisper of air barely disturbed the wide wings of the flying boats resting within the protective arms of the airport’s small water basins.

  They were all dominated by their powerful big brother, the Dornier-Wal 134, the new-fangled flying boat connecting Rome to Palermo, which had entered into service after a massive advertising campaign to laud its comfort and technical perfection, which had allowed the titanic plane to rival the best foreign models. About twenty people surrounded it: mechanics, airport clerks, passengers arriving from Rome on the airline bus. No one would endure the arduous five-kilometre trip along the Rome-Ostia highway to the isolated airport out of idle curiosity.

  The departure was scheduled for quarter-past-eleven, and the plane was ready to go. The porters were filling the luggage compartment in the tail, and almost all the passenger seats were already occupied. Only one place was still empty. A green booking card satisfied the curiosity of the other passengers, announcing proudly that it was reserved for banker Francesco Agliati from Ostia to Naples.

  Suddenly a car honked from the access road. A green cab raced across the asphalt and its brakes screeched as it came to a sudden stop outside the large glass walls of the Airport Terminal. Its passenger emerged and ran anxiously towards the check-in desk:

  ‘At what time does the plane for Palermo leave?’

  ‘At quarter-past-eleven, sir.’

  ‘May I have a ticket for....’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. The plane is full.’

  The man tried to wipe the sweat from his balding forehead. His grizzled moustache twitched:

  ‘Full? But that's impossible....’

  ‘The plane is full,’ repeated the clerk patiently.

  ‘But I must absolutely be in Palermo before nightfall.’

  The unfortunate passenger gripped his briefcase anxiously.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, there is not a single place on the plane.’ The clerk shrugged ironically. ‘If you want to check it for yourself...’ He indicated with an almost imperceptible movement of his head the grey bulk of the plane visible through the glass window.

  After a brief moment of incertitude, the passenger capitulated and made a miserable exit from the Terminal Building. He started to wander around one of the little basins, but was stopped by a voice:

  ‘Not here, sir! If you want to board, the plane stairway is on the right.’ The round face of a mechanic in blue overalls appeared from behind the plane’s tail.

  The passenger circled around the plane, hoping to have found a secret helper:

  ‘Please, they told me that there is no place on the plane...’

  ‘Yes, we’re full. Do you have a ticket?’

  ‘I couldn’t buy one , but if you would be so kind...’

  The mechanic made the gesture of taking off his cap as he waited in silence for further explanation, whilst his fingers twitched nervously, as if he was still adjusting some delicate instrument.

  ‘I must absolutely be in Palermo before dusk. I’m ready to travel with the luggage, sitting on my briefcase... Of course, my friend, I will....’

  ‘Well, I could perhaps travel in the tail compartment myself, and you could occupy my seat in the cockpit, sir, but....’

  The hopeful passenger was ready to brush off his remaining doubts.

  Several banknotes passed swiftly from one hand to another. Overwhelmed by the strong-willed and very persuasive anxiety of
the generous passenger, the mechanic still feigned some token resistance and nodded towards the terminal offices:

  ‘I must still talk to the pilots before....’

  The mechanics were giving the propellers their first spin. After some jumps, the rhythm of the cylinders became regular and the motor sprang into life. Just as in a slapstick movie, at the very moment the ramp was being detached, a sleek limousine screeched to a halt and a fat little man got out, his hat crammed down over his grizzled head. After frantically asking that the ramp be put back into place, he ran up and into the cabin, waving his blue ticket under the nose of the attendant. Once inside, he distributed pardons to left and right in a more dignified manner, before eventually occupying the last remaining seat.

  Reporter Giorgio Vallesi thought that he seemed more like a fat boy arriving out of breath at the dinner table, red-faced and ashamed for his lateness, than a big financier. Of course, Vallesi had at least a professional excuse for his own interest in the arrival of the powerful banker Francesco Agliati, given his previous attentive perusal of everybody else’s green booking card.

  But journalism was not really the passion of young Vallesi’s life. Having studied politics and completely failing in his triumphal access to a diplomatic career, he had been constrained to accept a less ambitious role in the Commercial Bank. The barbed wires of numbers and strict working hours had been unable to constrain their grudging prisoner for more than six months, he having only too recently abandoned the happy life of the madcap, lazy college student, passing every day with friends at the Sapienza University students’ club, or in a café or fashionable perfumer salon. His foremost hobby during that joyful period of his life was wasting time at street stands haggling endlessly and peevishly over the price of ties he had not the slightest intention of buying, for the sole purpose of enraging the duped merchants.

  The newspaper was certainly an improvement. The work was sufficiently irregular to satisfy even his own difficult tastes, and his easy-going ways had always helped him in the most critical moments. Now, he was going to Palermo for an historical public celebration of a centennial anniversary of some sort. He had been allowed to travel by plane to write a colourful article for the paper, although the editor-in -chief had warned him that the public was beginning to be quite bored by colourful items about plane trips, in which reporters could very easily transform even a Roma-Frascati route into twenty-thousand words of picturesque impressions, and did so almost weekly.

  The plane was effectuating the take-off manoeuvre. The mechanics had pushed the Dornier out of the basin, pointing it toward the barely perceivable sea current. The propellers were now in full action and the body of the plane bounced more and more swiftly on the water. After a minute of such breath-taking motion, Vallesi could suddenly see the bilge-yellow Tiber River below him. He was stunned for a moment at this sudden detachment from the safety of the Earth, which reminded him of a moment in his childhood when he tried to follow in astonished awe the slow and mysterious movement of the hands on his father’s watch.

  After two very wide spiral turns, the plane slowly began its regular flight. Below, the crowded Ostia beach swiftly became merely a smooth inclined plane down which the garish stains of the sunbathers seemed to slip in a precarious, toppling balance towards the grey sea, below the rock-solid borderline of the beach cabins.

  Rome was only an undistinguished fleck ,the almost invisible goal of the small, spidery cars travelling swiftly with small, jerking movements on the grey highway. On the horizon, the cotton clouds were softening the usually sharp silhouette of the Latian hills. Isolated and neatly-shaped Monte Calvo was showing off its peculiar topside tonsure of trees, giving at a distance the false impression of the crenellated tower of a castle.

  The reporter watched his fellow passengers with curiosity; apparently they had all brilliantly sustained their first contact with the sky, with only an occasional disgruntled comment about the sudden air-pockets. Even Agliati the banker... But why was the fascinating woman in red seated in front of him staring so intently at the powerful financier? Clearly Agliati had noticed her, and, highly embarrassed, was trying to bury himself in the mass of papers, dossiers and documents he kept in his bulky and official-looking briefcase.

  The reporter looked with more attentive curiosity at the woman in red. Some years before, she would certainly have been a beautiful woman. Now her elegant figure was a bit too solid, and her cheeks were beginning to be puffy. Whilst her eyes showed a casual indifference, her body was a bundle of nerves and fears. Her head moved constantly from left to right, almost as if she feared the assault of a silent, tiptoeing adversary. Vallesi was a fashion expert, and he noticed a detail which might have escaped many a careless observer. On her elegantly clad knees, wrapped in a dark red silken tissue, she had placed a lizard-green bag which clashed horrendously. A lady dressed by Ventura would never have committed such a mortal sin of bad taste. Giorgio’s great friend, the great hope of the Italian police, Rome Assistant Commissioner Luigi Renzi, would have immediately deduced that the woman in red had been in too much of a rush to catch the plane to notice her own attire—and in a woman this was a classic clue of excitement, distress and possibly fear.

  Giorgio felt very pleased with his own shrewd deductions. As a prize, he conceded himself the umpteenth look at the young woman in the seat to his right, by the name of Marcella Arteni. And, quite frankly, had we ourselves been on the plane, we would undoubtedly have followed his example.

  Signorina Arteni was tall and slender, with shapely legs and a great harmony of figure, her lovely face enhanced by the golden tiara of her blonde hair. The simple blue-sky dress she was wearing was offset by a touch of eccentricity: a round and slightly lopsided straw hat. The soft, tender rouge of her lips was a real masterpiece, a perfect match for her rosy cheeks. Her lips made Giorgio remember with an ironic nostalgia the day he had boasted that he would never have to pay the celibacy tax (a tax imposed by Fascism with the objective of encouraging marriage and Italian repopulation, after the major exodus of the late nineteenth century).

  Suddenly, the woman in red whispered something so softly that Vallesi was obliged to ask her to repeat the question:

  ‘We’re expected to arrive in Palermo before four o’clock, aren’t we?’

  ‘At half-past three, madam.’

  The woman nodded as if the news had confirmed a secret thought, then began to stare again at the banker with her hazel eyes. But Agliati hadn’t noticed her. Behind his glasses he was staring at something, without paying the least attention to the official business documents his grey-gloved hands were clutching.

  Was it possible that he was sneaking an anxious glance at the three men towards the rear of the cabin? To a Roman’s eye they had the unmistakable look of three Latian country tradesmen coming to town: large, swarthy faces; bristled moustaches; sturdy, squat figures; garish violet and dark brown suits stretched tightly. Two of them were old friends, whilst the third one was a more recent acquaintance. One of them, Giuseppe Sabelli by name, was leaving his seat. The enquiring eyes of his fellow passengers instinctively followed his progression along the narrow aisle between the seats. Vallesi could swear that the curiosity was far more sharp and intense in the banker’s eyes than in the other passengers’ eyes. Sabelli vanished behind the railway-wagon-like glass door which gave access to a small vestibule with the plane’s exit door on the left, the small wooden door of the toilet on the right, and the glass cockpit door straight ahead.

  When the country tradesman returned, he again attracted the instinctive curiosity of his fellow passengers, but the banker barely lifted his head. Possibly he wasn’t really interested in the moustached triplet of Latian country merchants. And he was certainly not looking at the humble middle-class, middle-aged couple so cautiously enclosed in their protective shell. More likely he was staring at the man displaying the classic aloofness of the political class, who hardly addressed a single word to the two young minions placed protectively
in his regal vicinity, from which vantage point they could cast ecstatic glances at the ravishing Marcella Arteni and forget about their own stomachs’ grumbling protests against the plane’s sudden jolts.

  The silence in the cabin was only broken by the rustle of the small map given by the airline to its passengers, with the aid of which Signorina Arteni was following the plane’s route with interest.

  Giorgio hoped that she wouldn’t leave the plane in Naples. In any case, he decided to swiftly make her acquaintance. After a brief mis-step on the slick wooden aisle between the seats, he directed himself towards the glass door in the front. When he returned to the cabin, he announced in loud, booming voice:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I announce to you that we have a clandestine passenger on board!’

  Twenty-two eyes looked with quizzical astonishment at the jovial reporter, but he noticed only the pair belonging to Marcella Arteni. His sudden trick seemed to have had a promising success, so he continued:

  ‘He arrived at the last moment, and although the plane was full, he was somehow able to obtain the mechanic’s place in the cockpit. Being quite a large man, I hope that his weight doesn’t prove dangerous for the flight.’

  Giorgio’s joke was a sort of trial balloon, and a very silly one ,of course, but in certain cases silliness can be highly rewarding... He hadn’t the slightest interest in the other passengers’ reactions, but when Marcella Arteni looked at him with a sort of pitying amusement, in a compassionate effort to comfort him for his own blunder, it was not a promising start to a relationship.

  Agliati, on the other hand, was clearly not at ease, and he decided suddenly to retire his large, bulky figure into the small toilet. As the passengers turned their attention again to poor Giorgio Vallesi, one of the country tradesmen called out: