Luigi and Me

If I tell you my story I wonder whether you will believe it?

Forgive me. I am a Nobody and I ask nothing from you other than your time and, should you be in any way familiar with the tragic tale I’m about to impart, the suspension of your conviction that you already know the whole truth. It’s a paradox – if indeed paradox is the right word – that a belief based on little more than hearsay is sometimes the hardest to overturn. Indeed it is an irrefutable fact that no one willingly changes their mind even if faced with clear evidence to the contrary. This is especially true when an eminent family such as the House of Hapsburg is involved.

You may or may not be familiar with one Signore Luigi Luccheni – the sorry apology for an individual with whom I will forever have the misfortune to be aligned – for his name will go down in the annals of infamy due to his part in the assassination of the Empress of Austria which occurred not twenty-four hours ago on a balmy September day on a Geneva boulevard. Such will be his repellant fame that even his head, preserved in formaldehyde, will be displayed in a Viennese anatomical museum for nigh-on a hundred years. Can you imagine such notoriety? But even though our association has been brief and he has no real notion of what lies before him, he would be overjoyed with that, I reckon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To the beginning of our story. Not Luigi’s – his tale of misfortune began much earlier in Parma, Italy – possibly born out of the isolation of being abandoned at birth, a wretched itinerant childhood, not to mention the poverty and delirium that stalked him like a black hound from place to miserable place before ending as a Marble Polisher here in Switzerland before this latest and last fiasco. Not that he appears to regard it as a fiasco… however hideous his end will be, but there you go.

However, I’m afraid I don’t have the luxury of time to elucidate; the men out scouring every dark corner and alley in the back-streets behind the Hotel Beau Rivage will alight on me at any moment, I daresay.

It must be said that my life up to now has been useful but uneventful and in no measure notable. That all changed perhaps a month past when the stranger whom I now know – for my sins – as Luigi Luccheni approached a stall-holder selling agricultural odds and ends in a Lausanne market.

It was early in the day but there wasn’t a breath of wind off the lake that summer morning to disturb the sweltering air; it lay like a lid over the box of small hand tools and miscellaneous industrial objects of which I was but one.

A short stocky man of perhaps twenty-five approached the stall and leaned over the bench to squint and rummage amongst rusted sheep shearers once razor-sharp, horseman’s tools, a broken weather-vane and sundry discarded iron and detritus around me. All at once, I felt the strangest sensation.

Perhaps it was his shabby dress and battered hat, some expression deep within those grey hooded eyes; the heavy eyebrows and low forehead, prominent widow’s peak? Or perhaps his jutting jaw, rough moustache, slight lop-sided reach, flapping coat? But what coursed through me was the shiver of recognition – fate if you will – when certain knowledge of some dreadful destiny comes knocking and you can do nothing but open the door and let it in.

The Italian haggled the stall-holder down to a few sous in quick, competent french – and I was slid into the fetid damp of my new owner’s inside pocket. He conveyed me thus to his ramshackle rooms, I know not where and in due course took me out, peered at me from all angles, turning me over in his hands. Workman’s hands, blunt and covered in callouses and scars.

But although I noticed he was of a somewhat nervous disposition, forever leaping up and peering out of the window when he heard some disturbance – a fight or brawl in the alley outside for example – he spent some considerable time to grind my good edge to a narrow point, fit me up and give me some semblance of quality with a wooden handle he made himself. For what purpose I wondered? I was never going to be top-drawer I acknowledged silently. At last he seemed satisfied and put me back in his pocket, handle and all.

Although he said he was a Marble Polisher, he didn’t appear to have any occupation polishing marble or indeed anything else. He practiced some sort of duelling exercise in his room every morning, met friends in cafés behind locked doors. They drank Absinthe and argued and whispered about political reform and the necessity for action not leaflets. After a few drinks, the discussions turned ugly and the voices of his friends belligerent. Somebody, not Luigi, said "we are not criminals, we are veritable philanthropic assassins. We kill for altruism. For change. For the love of men." Luigi would finger my shape nervously through the material of his coat and stumble out into the darkness alone, leaving them shouting and weeping about the misery of their friends in Lombardy.

Every day after his exercises he would seize his coat and go out into Lausanne and every night he would return and throw it across a wooden chair without removing me from the interior pocket. Despite the reek, I now regarded it as my refuge and the feeling of dread began to recede. Apart from that first time he never took me out and by the time we'd travelled across the mountains to Geneva in the back of cart - he could not entertain the expense of the steamer, you see - I had begun to think he’d forgotten I existed.

I missed sunlight, the rush of wind, the smell of farmland under the plough, that's true, but I found I could work out what was going on from Luigi’s body language and the sounds around me.

In Geneva, Luigi took a room in a run-down boarding house in the Paquis quarter, a short walk from the Beau Rivage and within earshot of the Quai de Mont Blanc where the steamers dock. It had no electric light and he didn’t unpack his bag or repair to a café to drink Absinthe with friends anymore.

He wore his coat and hat all the time and sat on the bed in the dark, smoking and singing his anarchist songs to himself. A shutter nearby slammed and we both jumped. An argument in staccato Italian spilled through the slats.

Presently a knock came at the door and he leapt up to answer it. I heard a creak and someone entered. But although I exerted all my willpower to hear their whispered conversation, Luigi’s heart was thundering so loudly, I couldn’t make out a word. That is, until he reached into the harbour of my pocket to retrieve me from its depths.

"No need," said his acquaintance, staying him with a hand.

"But don’t you want to see it?” asked Luccheni. “I made it myself. Surely you need to reassure yourself of its suitability for the task?”"

“Have you ever killed a man?”

“No, never,” replied Luigi. “Not even when I was in the Military in North Africa.”

The acquaintance laughed then. A gentle, refined laugh, tinged with sadness, not at all coarse like Luccheni’s friends in Lausanne.

"All we need is for you to play your part, Signore Luccheni, with conviction and veracity. But hear this. You must never divulge to a soul what has passed between us. Do I have your word?"

"You have it," responded my master and there was a crack in his voice.

"Do so, and you will get your wish to go down in history. Of that you can be assured."

With that, I heard the door close and Luigi sank down on the bed and drew me from his pocket. He looked at me for a long time in the light of the full moon.

*****

Now I know everything there is to know.

I know that Luigi did not return me to his interior pocket. I know that by nine o’clock on the morning of the 10th September 1898, he was stationed on a bench outside the entrance to the Beau Rivage Hotel, with me in his right sleeve, watching the comings and goings of everyone at the hotel.

The morning air was infused with the gentle warmth of leftover summer intermingled with the barest quiver of impending autumn freshness urging the local population out to enjoy the September sunshine. Seagulls called out to each other as they glided on the balmy updraft of a thermal, the shouts of the ferrymen or the horn of an early steamer headed for Montreux or Lausanne lingered above the water long after they had departed. It was the kind of day that might fill one with hope.

I know that the lobby clock chimed one o’clock as two ladies took their leave of the proprietors of the Beau Rivage Hotel and sun twinkled off their parasols as they made their way across the promenade towards the landing stage. The steamer horn sounded long and insistent.

I know that at the sound, the Empress, the first lady tall and willowy, dressed and veiled in black, carrying a white parasol, with a translucent beauty that belied her sixty years pushed the other lady, shorter and younger than her before her.

“Hurry Irma! Tell the Captain to hold the boat!”

The younger woman obeyed at once, picked up her skirts in her haste and broke into a trot.

I know that Luigi and another man arose from the bench at the same time and Irma stepped aside to make way for them as she passed.

I know that Luigi lunged forward, raised his fist and brought it down with great force upon the Empress’ chest. Her fan clattered to the ground and the white parasol was knocked from her hand and she fell backwards striking her head on the pavement.

Luigi ran then. Took off and me still slid up his sleeve. He hurtled around the corner of Rue des Alpes, heading for the constricted back streets where he could vanish down an alleyway. For a short man, he fair flew along the cobbles, his coat-tails flapping and narrowly avoided blundering into a couple walking their small dog by giving out a blood-curdling yell and leaping over the dog. But by the time Luccheni reached the corner our pursuers were gaining on us so he hurled me into an open doorway. And by the next, I believe they tackled him to the ground.

So here I am, tossed like flotsam in the doorway of Number Three. The tip that Luccheni fashioned so carefully broke off but it’s of no matter as there wasn’t any blood on it anyway.

I hope that someone will find me soon. It would be a disaster for Luigi if the murder weapon was mislaid and never located. Even without the blood, he needs it to prove to the Gendarmes that he was working alone. As they wrestled him to the ground I heard him cry that he alone was responsible. He would be wretched if the credit for her death went to another. He so much wishes to be remembered, you see.

To have made his mark. It is everything to him.