Roman Nights (12 page)

‘But darling,’ she said. ‘Absolutely new and too easy. The closest any woman can come to the tingled air-washed look of a country-freshened face. So it says on the pot. You must try it.’

The Via del Babuino is where most of the art dealers dwell and the streets around about it are occupied by the artistic colony and the voluntary bodies who serve it. The Via Babuino closes from lunchtime till half-past three in the afternoon. It was nearly lunchtime now. Between the brass rings of the eight-panelled portals the cinquecentis were filing out from their patios, leaving patches of oil by the statues. Peering through lightless windows you caught glimpses of classical busts, painted bureaus, furniture French and Italian, Dutch paintings on easels, Florentine prints on boxes and bookends. On the left, a familiar red and white street sign said carnaby street, while below, a white arrow on red said via margutta.

‘Think nothing of it,’ said Johnson, and, leading briskly, turned into the street of the balloon man.

The Via Margutta is a quiet street. On the left, behind the parked cars, stretched a row of shops selling dresses and icons and paintings. On the right there was a line of mews buildings, whose faded wood doors were closed with cumbrous latches.

On none of them was the street number Johnson had been given. ‘I’ll ask,’ I said quickly, and went into the first shop that seemed open.

It was a small leather boutique dangling with belts and shoppers and shoulder bags, with racks of suede skirts and rawhide jerkins with fringes. A male Italian with liquid eyes and a long, unwavering nose and a perfect jawline with silky black sideburns was lolling on a wooden chair absorbing instant football from a transistor, while beside him a signora in knee boots was jabbing holes in a belt with a hand-punch. Bags of eyelets and staplers and wooden shoe moulds and lengths of cut leather littered the floorboards. The smell was ecstatic.

I explained I was looking for a street trader who sold Occhiali Giocattoli.

Against football, no woman can expect to compete for attention. The perfect head swivelled around in my direction. The man’s cigarette hung from his lips, and his thumbs were tucked into a belt so low it was practically garters. But his lips did not move, neither did his mind swerve from its primary task. The girl said, ‘For Marco, another visitor.’

Which was sad. I said, ‘Oh. He has someone with him?’

‘Ah, frequently,’ the girl said, and I didn’t need my crash course at the language laboratory to follow the nuances. ‘Four people to drink with last night, and already another this morning.’

‘Drink, then, is his trouble?’ I said. I smiled at the gladiator by the transistor, who fluttered his eyelashes.

‘Why not?’ said the girl, forcing an awl through a wadding of pigskin, her arm muscles rippling. ‘You cannot imagine he chooses to earn his living making Occhiali Giocattoli, now can you? He is an educated man, well brought up by his family.’

‘You know him well, then?’ I inquired.

‘He is a neighbour,’ the boyfriend intervened lazily. ‘No, we do not know him well. He has accepted a coffee when he comes for his cart.’

‘Where does he keep it?’ I asked.

The girl jerked her head at one of the faded doors opposite. ‘In the mews there. His studio is two stairs along, next to the dress shop. On the first floor. You will see the name, Marco Susini . . . To-to!’

To-to turned, with flattering reluctance, from studying all he could see of my kneecaps.

‘
Cavallette
!’ the girl shouted suddenly, and flung up her fist with the awl in it.

The awl was pointing at me. And the sharpened steel flashed in the candlelight.

The boyfriend sprang to his feet and, snatching a broom, plunged toward me.

I flung myself sideways. There was a crash, a flurry of scattering handbags and a grunt from To-to, engaged in tolerating stress poorly among the cape leather slough-offs. Through the plate glass window I could see Johnson and Di standing outside in the rain, their hands in their pockets. I screamed, and snatched up a bullwhip of plaited kangaroo leather. To-to got to his feet scowling faintly.

‘There is a plague of them,’ the girl said obscurely, and lowering the awl, resumed stabbing the pigskin. To-to said, ‘Two stairs along,’ and began, irritably, to pick up the handbags. ‘You wish the bullwhip?’ he added.

It cost twelve bloody pounds and I bought it. I hadn’t the nerve to refuse it. Then I left the shop and showed Johnson the stair to the studio. He set off for it right away, but Di lingered, unrolling my bullwhip.

There were twelve feet of it altogether. We trailed it up the chipped marble staircase after Johnson and stood in total darkness outside the door that said
Marco Susini.
‘Fourteen pounds,’ said Diana. ‘Come on, Ruth. Charles doesn’t need it.’

‘Neither does Jacko,’ I said, outraged. Now that Di wanted it, the bullwhip seemed the most sophisticated possession since suspenders.

‘That’s what you think,’ said Diana. ‘Fifteen pounds. And my pot of Fresh Air Make-up Base.’ Johnson was ringing the bell.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Mr Paladrini is in there. And very possibly Mr Paladrini’s visitor, with a muzzle-loading gun and a guilt complex. The bullwhip is mine and I’m hanging on to it. If you want a kangaroo of your own, go and catch one.’ Johnson rang the bell for the second time.

Di said helpfully, ‘The door’s open, darling.’

And so it was. A thin crack of daylight, widening and lessening in the draught, showed where it had been left on the latch. ‘I want my mother,’ said Johnson, ‘to have an Interflora Sympathy basket. It will be cheaper if you send it from London.’ He pushed open the door very slowly.

The room inside was large and empty of people. The glazed roof and windows, heavily coated with dirt, on which the rain frothed and spattered, told that it had indeed once been a studio. It was now the stockroom of the balloon man as well as his living space. A frayed armchair stood beside a battered stove, on which a pan thick with pasta was sitting abandoned. Packets spilled out of a cupboard onto a small table holding the remains of a meal, and one or two wooden chairs stood about.

The rest of the room, bare of carpeting, was occupied by long trestle tables containing layers of cards loaded with clockwork mice and toy sunglasses and plastic tea sets and Vampire Fingernails and cardboard masks and glutinous reptilia and tiny cowboy guns with
Super Bum-Bum
on them and packets and packets and packets of limp assorted balloons.

We stood in the doorway, taking it all in. Then Diana said, ‘There’s no one here, what a sell. Now
I know
who would like a clockwork mouse,’ and swam forward to the nearest table, bubbling. Johnson and I followed after her. I had the door in my hand when it was wrenched out of my fingers and slammed shut behind me. A hard hand striking my shoulder sent me tripping forward to crash into Johnson. He whirled around and Di, a clockwork mouse in her fingers, looked up, the eyelashes open like daisies.

Standing with his back to the main door and barring it stood Innes Wye, and the gun in his hand was pointing straight at us. ‘I don’t know anyone who would like a clockwork mouse,’ said Di, her voice shaking, and I can’t think when I’ve admired anyone more. Then Innes said, ‘Drop that whip,’ and I realized it was still in my right hand.

I didn’t make any jokes. I dropped it.

I have said, I think, that Innes Wye was a little man with a high voice and equivalent principles which none of the best scientific workshops in the world had apparently succeeded in shaking. There was little more I did know of him, except that he came to the Dome for his calories, and that the rest of his life, it appeared, was devoted to his white mouse and his bloody Incubator, with sundry forays into bestial licence in the Museo Nazionale Romano and the Pinacoteca Vaticana on holiday.

He had, for example, torn up poor Jacko’s painstaking photographs, and made the Fall Fair the Fall Fair of the century. He seemed, in fact, a character of quite regrettable consistency until you noticed the fact that he
had been
at the Fall Fair. That it was his falling downstairs which allowed Mr Paladrini to escape. And that he had the new key to the observatory.

I looked quickly at Johnson. Johnson was standing with his hands hanging at his sides looking at Innes, and demonstrating the melancholy fact that it is not the habit of eminent portrait painters to carry offensive weapons about in their jackets. He said gently, ‘Dr Wye. What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Innes. ‘Oh no, it won’t wash. Put your hands in the air, all of you. And get over there, away from the table. This time. Miss Minicucci, I don’t get pushed around. This time, Mr Johnson, you won’t get your friends to do your dirty work for you. This time you all get what’s coming to you.’

It is another unfortunate fact that in moments of stress all human exchanges are conducted in unerring clichés. The exception proved to be Johnson, who said merely, ‘Why?’ followed after a moment’s thought by ‘What?’

‘You’ll find out,’ said Innes firmly over the revolver. He sidled along the wall towards the door to the inner room, near which, I suddenly saw, was a wall telephone. I wondered if Mr Paladrini – Marco Susini – was inside the other room and if so, why he hadn’t come out to help his colleague. I wondered what possible connection Innes Wye could have with the houses of Antonelli or Schön, and then realized that those who earn their living by dealing in secrets don’t necessarily confine themselves to fashion houses. I wondered what exactly was inside Innes’s mysterious Incubator that none of us had been allowed to gaze upon, and if in fact there was anything at all except, say, a Mickey Mouse eight-day alarm clock.

Sitting there in his shed, engaged in intergroup transactions with half the scientific establishment in Europe, no one could deny Innes was neatly placed: as central as the fish in my balloon. I wondered if he had put the fish in my balloon, and whom he had meant the message for. There were fish on the table, rather inefficiently cut out of cardboard, with the string and the rubber studs all ready for fixing. Beside me Diana, her hands stretched up high with the fingers pointed outward like Plate 193 of the Kama Sutra, said, ‘Don’t phone, Innes. The police know we’ve come here.’

Innes smiled, his hand on the telephone. ‘Bluff,’ he said, and took down the receiver.

‘They do. Innes,’ I said with equal earnestness, not to mention mendacity. ‘Look, don’t make it worse. You can’t possibly overpower three of us and get away without anyone noticing. All we came for was to talk to Mr Paladrini.’

The revolver was pointed straight at my head. Of course, for his work, Innes’s touch had to be steady, but I wasn’t keen on the spillover into small arms. He said, still smiling stiffly, ‘I have no idea who you are talking about. There was no one here when I arrived. The whole affair was a trick and I have no intention of overpowering anybody. I am simply going to call up the police.’

‘You are?’ said Johnson in tones of mild disbelief. His arms dropped and, as Innes’s hand whitened on the trigger, sprang straight again.

‘You think I won’t tell the Trust all about it?’ Innes said. ‘But I will. They’ll hear all you’ve been up to. I’ll tell them about the break-in at the Dome that was so cleverly hushed up. And they’ll want to know what you are all doing here. I don’t need to ask what this is. This is the hideout of the man who sold Ruth Russell and Digham that balloon.’

There was a brief silence in honour of this earful of dazzling facts. Johnson was the first to recover. He said to Innes, ‘We’re here because we managed to track down the balloon man and thought that we’d trapped him. Why are you here?’

Innes stood, the telephone still in one hand because he had not yet solved the problem of how to dial a number while keeping us all at his gun-end. He said, ‘Need you ask?’

‘Darling, he needs,’ said Diana gently. ‘Go on, tell him.’

Innes stared at us all. He said stiffly, ‘I was telephoned by a Fall Fair official. He referred to the misunderstanding which led to my accident and invited me to this address for a drink and an apology from the Organizer.’

‘And when you came, no one was here,’ Johnson said.

‘I knew as soon as I opened the door,’ said Innes indignantly. ‘No one answered the bell, and when I found the door open I walked in. As you see, no one in their senses would take it for a fitting rendezvous for such a purpose. It is a street trader’s lodging and workshop. And the street trader, I have no doubt, is the dubious one you encountered. Naturally, I feared for my life.’

‘Then you heard us come up the stairs,’ I said. ‘But didn’t you guess who we were by our voices?’

‘Of course,’ said Innes. ‘But surely it is obvious that the source of the whole trouble lies with someone connected with the observatory?’

‘That’s what we thought,’ Diana said.

Innes stared at her. The splendid certainty which had informed his every action to date ran out a little. His revolver hand slackened. Johnson said, still gently. ‘That’s why we wondered, you see, what you were doing here. Do you usually carry a gun?’

Innes dropped his gaze and looked at it, and then at all of us. You could see the scientific brain assimilating the facts and then spewing out, with however much distaste, the deductions. He said, ‘You expected to find your balloon seller here?’

‘That’s right,’ said Johnson patiently. ‘We got a photograph of him the other day by a fluke and I checked it with the authorities. This is the address we were given. But he seems to have gone. Do you usually . . .’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Innes irritably. He gazed at Johnson, and then at Di and then at me.

Di said, ‘You can’t be the working man’s Maigret, darling, unless you keep your revolver pointing at the thing you’re shooting.’

Innes looked down at it and said, ‘I got it off a card on the table.’

‘Super Bum-Bum,’ I said, trying not to burst into open hysteria. Innes threw me a look of dislike and dropped the hand with the gun in it. Then he slowly hung the telephone receiver back on the hook. It wasn’t much of a vote of confidence, but it was better than nothing. Johnson said, ‘You really did get a message to come here?’