North from Rome (28 page)

“Did he talk much?”

“It’s a long journey. He began to talk half-way.”

“About himself?”

“His name is Giovanni. He was worried about not being able to say goodbye to his girl except by a telephone call. She was angry. They were going to a party tomorrow night.”

“He expects to be away from Rome, then?”

“He wouldn’t answer that question. But there were three of Pirotta’s suitcases in the back of the car. It looks as if he is going on a vacation.”

“Did Giovanni talk about his girl?”

“Constantly. It seemed a safe subject, I think. Her name is Margherita. She works at Stefano’s—that’s a shop for making artificial flowers. She is seventeen. Very beautiful. Dark curls and good figure. They are getting married next month. That’s about all, I think.” She frowned, trying to recall anything else.

Joe took out an old envelope from one trouser pocket and a stump of pencil from another. Lammiter, sitting beside him, on the bed, saw what he was jotting down.
Stefano
—
fiori artificiali—Margherita
17,
tipo Lollobrigida
—
Giovanni, mecanico—Autorimessa Poggioli.
“It’s good enough,” Joe said. “It will be simple to track down the girl. She will know where her Giovanni is going.”

Lammiter stirred restlessly.

Joe looked at him. “This is not useless,” he said gently. “All we have to do is to wait for the next few hours. No one is leaving the Casa Grande until two o’clock, when the two men who forced Eleanor into the car are taking the bus. At present, they’re on guard: one in front of Eleanor’s room, the other at the telephone. Pirotta wants to be wakened at noon, and his car is to be ready for him at three. Signorina Halley is to be kept in her room until he returns this evening. Dinner for two.” He looked at Rosana. “And one dinner on a tray in Miss Halley’s room. And the mechanic eating with Alberto and Anna-Maria. Right?”

She nodded. “Anna-Maria asked how much food she must buy. The princess keeps an eye on the bills. And Pirotta said, ‘Oh, enough, enough until tomorrow night. We’ll be leaving
then.’ So it’s my idea,” and she glanced with a little smile at Joe, “that the important meeting at Perugia will be over by tomorrow afternoon. Is it possible?”

Joe said with a grin, “I think Tony Brewster taught you a lot of things.”

“Or perhaps,” she said softly, “I learned a lot of things from Joe without knowing I was being taught.” She stood up. “That’s about all, isn’t it? I had better get back now.”

“Going back?” blurted out Lammiter. “Into that place?” Dinner for two, he remembered bitterly. “Are you still hoping you can influence Pirotta?” he asked angrily.

She shook her head. “That’s one idea that died last night, when I kept my appointment with his car. He was there, waiting with the mechanic. When I saw he wasn’t going, I knew he had tricked us again.” She turned to Joe.
“You
know he had said over the telephone that he wanted to finish some work in the country, and that I was to bring along all the papers I had on the Galante correspondence—that was an honest business deal he was arranging for his firm.”

Joe said soothingly, “That’s what he told you.”

“But when I saw Pirotta wasn’t going, I stepped out of his car. I was scared and angry. Then he said that Eleanor was in danger, that he had to persuade her to leave Rome that night. He said that he needed me to be with her, to look after her, to keep her company. Do you know—I do think he told the truth then. Perhaps,” she added bitterly, “it is the only time he ever told me the truth.”

“So you got back into the car?” Lammiter asked.

“I got back into the car.” She looked up at him. “You helped me when I needed help. So—” she shrugged her shoulders “—I
help you. I’ll get into Eleanor’s room when she wakens. She was still half-drugged when they arrived this morning. But she has to eat. And a tray must be carried into her room.”

“You won’t be allowed near her! Look, Rosana, Pirotta never told you the truth once in his life, except when he said you were beautiful. Last night at his car?—the same old confidence trick. He wanted you out of Rome. Brewster’s been murdered and you’ve run away. See what he’s building up around you? Suspicion, a wall of suspicion as big and thick as that wall out there.” He caught Joe’s eye. “How much evidence have Pirotta’s friends planted, how much fabricated? I bet, right now, that Brewster’s diary is being found.”

“He never kept a diary. He
wouldn’t!”
she said derisively.

“Of course he wouldn’t. But either a diary or a letter will be found saying he was becoming suspicious of you, that he thought you were working against him, that he had challenged you yesterday afternoon, and you had been frightened. Joe—I ask you: am I talking nonsense? Or is all that in the pattern?”

“Pattern?” Joe said and was as stupid as possible. “Well, maybe... You write a play about it, eh? You have a real good plot there.” He said to Rosana. “Glad we’ve got a writer fellow with us to show how plots are made.”

Rosana avoided their eyes. “Yes,” she said haltingly, “that could be true. It’s in their—pattern.” Then her voice became bitter. “But I shall be allowed to see Eleanor if I am willing to make her listen to Pirotta’s story. He needs me for that—I’ve already had the first hints. He will persuade me, and I have to persuade Eleanor, that right is wrong and wrong is right. His story will seem very, very good. Yes—that is also in the pattern.” Suddenly, her face was emotionless, and her voice
reminded Lammiter of the princess. “I’m going back to the Casa Grande. Now. At this moment. Is that agreed?”

Joe agreed.

“Bill,” Rosana said, “you know someone has got to reach Eleanor. She
must
know she is not alone.”

“Yes,” he said. “But—”

“Oh, you Americans! But—but—but! I shall come to no harm.” She began walking over to the door. She looked down at the loose pink-and-green checked cotton dress, and laughed as she pulled it in, for a moment, against her slender waist. “How thin I have grown!”

“Tell Eleanor—” Lammiter began, as he followed her to the door, and then he was silent.

“That you are here? Those will be my first words to her.” Then she was looking at him, most serious with her large dark eyes. “Goodbye, Bill.”

He took her hand awkwardly. “Goodbye, Rosana. Take care of yourself.” He kissed her cheek, on an impulse he could not explain. Or perhaps hand kissing was not in his line.

“I shall, I shall,” she said reassuringly. She touched his arm for a moment.

“I go with you part of the way,” Joe told her, picking up his hat.

“More questions? But I told you
everything!”

“What did the princess say on the telephone?”

“I couldn’t talk to her. The mechanic wouldn’t let me.”

“What did she say to Alberto?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

“He wouldn’t?”

“It upset him too much. But one thing I do know: the princess must be against Pirotta. For Alberto wouldn’t even speak to
him when he arrived in the Lancia. Anna-Maria had to do all the talking.” She gave a last smile to Lammiter; and a cheerful wave of her hand. Then she started downstairs. Joe was about to follow her.

“Just a minute,” Lammiter said, and caught Joe by his arm. “There’s a limit to everything. Do you expect me to stay up here all day?”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“I’d like to stretch my legs, look around, get a feel of the town.”

“I can’t risk you—”

“What risk? None of Pirotta’s hired men know me. I’ll take no chances. I won’t even try to climb the Casa Grande walls.”

Joe relented. “Wait until the morning bus arrives. Follow it in. Look as if you could have come that way.”

“I certainly won’t try to look as if I had just buried my parachute.”

“Okay, okay. Keep to the narrow streets. Pirotta’s car has to travel along the main one.”

“When does the bus get here?” Lammiter looked at his watch. It was now a quarter to eight.

Joe shrugged. “Depends on its business at the other little towns. You’ll hear it, all right.”

Rosana’s voice called from downstairs: “Coming?”

“Coming!” Over his shoulder, to Lammiter, he said quietly, “If it makes you feel better, I’m going to telephone. We keep in touch with the big world, eh?” He gave a cheerful salute and ran downstairs.

“You’re so
slow!”
Rosana scolded him gently in Italian.

“We’ll be very quick now. And careful?”

“Very
careful.” You could hear the smile in her voice. “What a mess you two have left in this kitchen! Someone ought to wash these dishes, put things away—”

“Yes, yes.” He closed the kitchen door firmly.

Upstairs, Bill Lammiter stood at the window and waited until he saw Rosana in her borrowed dress—it looked pink at this distance, and far too noticeable—cross the field towards the wood. Then she vanished from sight. But once more, he couldn’t see Joe. Then he looked at the gate to the town. For a moment, he was startled: a girl in a pink cotton dress was standing talking to two thick-waisted women in black. Other women joined them, all with bundles of laundry on their heads. Then they scattered, shouting good-naturedly in their strong hoarse voices to each other. Some followed a path across the road, to houses that must lie outside the walls. He counted three pink dresses altogether. He relaxed then.

He took off his tie, rolled up his sleeves, opened the top button of his shirt. He studied himself for a moment in the scrap of looking-glass on the wall. That buttoned-down collar was straight from Madison Avenue. He took out his penknife and with its small blade carefully cut through the threads that held the buttons. Strange how laundries could remove buttons so easily, he thought as he sawed away. But he admitted the finished effect was more in local colour once he had crumpled the collar still more.

Then he remembered the jacket which he would have to leave in this room. He went through its pockets and removed the handkerchief with the Evans photograph. Cigarettes and matches, too. And his keys. But passport, traveller’s cheques, his wallet? The cheques could be left here, in his suitcase. The
passport was another matter. He hated to part with it. It could fit into his trouser pocket and probably stay there if he didn’t have to run, but he couldn’t always be clamping one hand to his thigh to make sure the passport was still safe. Then he found he was smiling: in a play, a character would probably make a grand exit without giving a passing thought to all the damned documents he had to stow away about him; everyone bulged when he travelled nowadays. But he wasn’t writing a play. All right, he decided, and opened his suitcase and stowed away his passport, his cheques, a note-book, his heavy wallet, and his jacket. Then he locked the case and carried it into the storeroom along with Joe’s discarded jacket. He laid them behind an open sack of down feathers. Someone hoping for a new mattress? He closed the door and returned to the bedroom, looking carefully around him, picking up the cigarette stub. He was leaving as little noticeable sign of his stay here as Joe had. The farmer wouldn’t get into trouble from any prowlers. As Joe would say, you never could tell in this game.

He pocketed the neatly folded handkerchief and some lire notes he had taken from his wallet. No bulges, at least. He looked at his watch again, and wondered when the bus would come. He was ready to go.

Distantly, there came the bugling of a bus horn, and then the muted drone of a powerful engine pulling up the hill to Montesecco. Bill Lammiter, lying on the bed, fallen into that strange state of waking dream when the body accepts sleep but the mind holds it a short distance away, roused himself and swung his legs on to the floor. The drone was louder. It could be a truck, but it might be the bus. He glanced at his watch once more. With a shock, he saw that it was almost noon.

He went to the window and waited there. At least, he felt rested. And less depressed. Joe hadn’t come back, but that didn’t worry him very much: Joe had left with several purposes and he had told Lammiter only one of them. He wondered now what commands the princess had given old Alberto on the telephone at three o’clock in the morning. He could imagine the operator, roused out of bed, cross but curious, forgetting about cold feet as she listened to the princess. But the princess
would imagine that, too: perhaps her directions to Alberto had been so cryptic that Alberto was still puzzling them out. What had she thought Alberto could do, anyway? Lock Pirotta in his room like a disobedient schoolboy?

Impatiently, he watched a boy cycle out of the gates, an enormous bundle of dried twigs on his back, and then veer well in to the side of the narrow road. A farmer with two yoked oxen, pulling a cart laden with barrels, looked back downhill over his shoulder and hauled the beasts off the road close to the trees, to give safe passing-room. The loud engine throbbed, changed down to an extra low gear to cope with the last hill outside the gates, and then the bus came into sight. Briefly. For behind it there was raised a cloud of dust from the loose surface of the road. The bus eased its way through the gates and gathered a spurt of speed from the rough pavement now under its wheels.

Bill Lammiter started downstairs, a little impressed by the bus. It was not so large as the C.I.T. or Europabus giants, which he had seen so often leaving Rome for destinations as far off as Venice or the Swiss border, but it looked new and shining. The people of the hill towns were better served than he had imagined. Good, he thought: they must be tired of watching well-fed, well-dressed tourists who could afford to spend four weeks without working. And yet, as he opened the kitchen door and stepped into the cool shadows of the yard, he couldn’t remember any signs of grudge or hostility or hidden jealousy from any of the people in the month he had spent among them. “Enjoy yourselves; smile: we only ask for politeness,” they seemed to say to the visitors. “If we had your money, bless it, we’d do the same. And perhaps we shall, someday. Who knows? There’s the lottery, there’s my uncle in America, there’s that job I may get if the typewriter factory opens near my home.” They were a concentration of optimists—how else would they have survived so many centuries of invaders and looters?