Roman Nights (22 page)

A broad white roadway lined with tavernas and trattorias ran all around the harbour, interspersed with palms and lemon and persimmon trees; and behind it all were crowds of volcanic mountains, lushly coated in tropicana.

The yachts were all tied up to bollards in the main street. Leaning overboard with his hand on the tiller, Johnson reversed us deftly up the quay between two floating palaces, and Lenny tied up, after shifting a Birra Löwenbräu van parked in front of our bollard. The ristorante on the other side of the road sent over its menu.

We sat on the afterdeck drinking gin and sunning and studying it. The sun wasn’t quite as strong as the martinis, and the square paving stones of the quayside were still puddled here and there with wet, but a sense of gaiety, if not outright relief, had undoubtedly crept into the proceedings.

I knew, all too well, how Jacko and Innes were feeling. They had made their first sea expedition, without loss of life or of limb. Work lay behind them, and a succession of boozy islands and meals cooked by Lenny queued up enticingly ahead.

They didn’t have to worry about Sophia. It didn’t matter to them that this was Sunday, the twelfth of November, and we were here, on time, in Ischia. ‘All we can do,’ Johnson had said to me that morning, ‘is go there. The island has thirty-five thousand inhabitants and is thirty miles in circumference. If you have a hunch where our buyer and seller are meeting and what they might look like, don’t fail to tell me. Otherwise we have to leave it to fortune. Will the Professor, for example, want to go to the Geophysical Observatory?’

The Professor, as it turned out, didn’t want to go to the Geophysical Observatory but was a pushover for the Aragonese Castle, which is a conglomeration of ancient buildings erected on an offshore rock to the north of the island. She told us all about it while we sat there drinking gin and agreeing. I could see Jacko scowl at his camera and knew he was renouncing, for the sake of his career, all those ripe Ischia friendships he had been hoping to develop. Di had disappeared before we took off for Naples and hadn’t even asked him to write to her.

Innes, of course, was keener on ruins than the Professor was, and we were all fixed up to go there in a twinkling. Johnson didn’t object. Lenny fed us and after lunch we all got into the speedboat leaving him on guard below, washing up the lunch dishes. I had had juice di 2 limoni and pane tostato, gr. 10. All he had to do with my plate was breathe on it.

There is a causeway, if you want to be a sissy, but the trip by sea to the castle is better. We rocketed out over the harbour and between the jaws of the boatyard and lighthouse. A hovercraft got up on its haunches and honked at us, and Johnson raised his hand, and then opened the throttle. We zipped past a succession of grey beaches backed by pale-tinted beach hotels and villas and gardens and I felt as if I were being dry-cleaned and enjoyed it. Jacko, behind me, was standing with his eyes in slits and his hair blown out and flapping behind him. Jacko and Johnson had had a long talk before lunchtime, all about souped-up Fiats. I hadn’t known that Jacko was a world expert on motor engineering, but it had begun to seem like it. He hadn’t mentioned girls once the whole time, even when the Professor was absent.

I looked at Johnson to see if he was studying anyone else in depth, but he was only talking to Lilian, who was sitting beside him, her scalp covered with a low knitted cap and her spotted hand on the rail. Innes was sitting also, frowning into the communal Baedeker and trying to stop the pages from flapping. It struck me that if I knew my onions, I was the one to get Innes talking, but it seemed too much trouble. Then we arrived, and tied up to a ring off the causeway.

It was slippery scrambling ashore. We all did it like ballet school candidates, with the exception of Johnson and Professor Hathaway, who stepped out and walked off like hitchhikers. Professor Hathaway, it was now apparent, had been on boats a few times before.

The rock darkened the sky above us: a high mound plastered with walls and with arches, and topped by a cupola. In it were the fortress and palace and cathedral as strengthened by Alfonso of Aragon. The Professor led the way up the steep slatted stone passage which led into the citadel and up past small houses and gardens, crumbling buttresses and walls covered with creeper and rose trees. On a plateau the cathedral reared its three roofless sides like a kind of dismembered Versailles, white and flaking; the walls furnished with crumbling cherubs and statues, with rococo arches and pillars and architraves. Steps on the left led us down to a crypt with a long vaulted roof, dimly lit and damply chilly, off which one could detect niches containing painted (13th C.) fragments of mystics with vague incised halos.

We pried Innes loose, with some trouble, from the crypt and continued up the steep path where Jacko’s instinct told him, with justice, there would be a terrace with a view, and some birra.

He was right, and by the time we had got there, we needed it. On the terrace there were tables and chairs and a citizen of Munich sitting reading a guidebook in German. Professor Hathaway looked at him as the three men went off to buy their beer and my succo di arancia. ‘Ruth?’ she said. ‘Have you got our own guidebook?’

I hadn’t, but I remembered where I’d last seen it. Innes had laid it down in the crypt while kneeling to inspect a genuine 13th C. painted toenail. I told her, and set off downhill to get it.

O.K. I trusted people. I was new to the business.

Apart from braking at corners, I took the gradient at a trot. There wasn’t a soul on the path to divert me. I lost an ounce and a half skipping through a waste garden and climbing a wall for a shortcut, and I thought of all the further ounces I was going to lose pegging back up again. I galloped into the precincts of the ruined cathedral like an Olympic runner taking the sacred flame to Holborn Viaduct and shot down the steps to the crypt.

A man jumped at me.

I ducked, with my mouth stretched wide open to yell with.

I didn’t. I was grabbed instead by another man who had been standing behind me. He caught my wrist and rammed my head into his diaphragm. Then he held it there while the first man tore the bag from my shoulder and up-ended it.

My dark glasses cracked on the pavement. My compact rolled into the darkness, my keys jangled; my lipstick separated and took off in two stages for different parts of the building. Two handkerchiefs fell, and a purseful of tinny lire, and a billfold full of dirty Italian banknotes and a comb I meant to wash that morning but hadn’t, and a shower of plastic shop credit cards, and a tube of cleansing cream and a small pack of tissues. There were also two used bus tickets and some safety pins. A handbag atomizer, tightly squeezed in a pocket, fell last of all, and splitting, voided four pounds’ worth of Hermès scent over the bloody 13th C. paving.

I lost my cool. I hacked the shins of the fellow gripping me and butted him hard in the stomach. I landed the heel of my sandal on the chin of the man bending over my handbag before he gripped me around the ankle and threw me. The man behind struck me on the cheek with his fist at the same time.

I went down. I struck the paving and rolled over in a patch of watery sunlight. Through the ringing in my head I could see them both on their knees grovelling about after the stuff from my handbag. One of them ground his heel in my compact and then did the same with the aerosol. They shredded the tissues and emptied my billfold so that the lire lay like old potato crisps everywhere. They squeezed the cleansing cream tube to the end, so that it lay like birthday-cake icing all over the wreckage, and then they tore the lining out of my handbag.

I said, ‘What do you want? I haven’t got anything.’ And they both turned and came stalking towards me.

I remember thinking that they were neither of them English. They smelled of Italian food and Italian cigarettes, and they had stocking masks which covered dark Italian hair. The bigger of the two bent over me now and with the flat of his hand hit my face, first on one side and then the other. ‘Where is it?’ he said. And he spoke an Italian’s English.

I said, ‘If it’s the film you want, I’ve burned it.’

Afterwards, I realized I had made a mistake, but I didn’t think of that at the time. I only wanted to stop them manhandling me. And to induce them to say something – anything – which would prove to the police Charles was innocent.

It didn’t work, because they didn’t believe me. The first man held me by the chin and the second one laughed and said, ‘Yes, it is the film we want, little darling. Where is it?’ He was getting ready to sock me again when he looked up, and so did the other man.

What they had heard was the pounding feet of men running towards us. I screeched
‘
Johnson
!’ before they could stop me, and heard the feet change direction and come straight towards us. The first man swore and started towards the doorway, and the crypt seemed to be full of struggling men.

You would think that it would be the skipper of the expedition who had come to the rescue but it wasn’t. It was Innes Wye who burst through that doorway, with Johnson behind on the staircase. I rather hoped, when I saw him, that Innes had brought his revolver but he hadn’t. He just aimed a blow at the first of the men that all but stopped him dead in his tracks and then threw himself down beside me, both his clean, manicured hands seizing mine. ‘Ruth! What’s happened!’

I heard Johnson, ducking expertly behind me, yell, ‘Is she all right?’ Innes, recalled by the cry of the jungle, shouted heartily, ‘Yes!’ and, dropping my hands, did a swallow dive into the melee. The fighting hurtled out of the doorway and receded across the worn paving. There was a running of feet.

I got up. My sandals ground into glass, as they had in Mr Paladrini’s devastated studio. My money, dispersed all over the crypt, stirred lazily in the draught from the doorway. A trail of ants, proceeding out of the stonework, had begun to investigate the scented evacuation of cleansing cream. The place reeked to high heaven of Calèche.

My face hurt and the painted worthies with their well-deserved halos wavered up and down in a way that had nothing to do with the primitive wattage that lit them. Jacko, arriving late and pale as a stick of self-blanching celery, was the only one who actively helped me. He said, ‘Hold on, mate. Astronomers on the job never snuff it.’ And made me sit on his coat and recover, while he fixed all the holes in my clothing with safety pins.

Five minutes later Innes and Johnson came back, grazed and cursing, and coinciding with the arrival of Professor Hathaway, strongly treading, with the proprietor of the café, and a bottle of brandy held by the neck in her fingers.

Johnson, it turned out, had a corkscrew at the end of his penknife. We all sat on the floor of the crypt and drank out of the bottle in turns, while we discussed filing a complaint of assault and also the likelihood of the Ischia polizia ever tracing a hired launch with two bleeding men in it. It had been tied up at the top of the causeway. They had almost stopped them, said Innes and Johnson, but a third man had appeared on the jetty. Innes, I saw, was going to have a black eye and Johnson had two sets of skinned knuckles and a rip in his jersey. As I stared at him, he delved in his pocket and took out and resumed his bifocals.

I wondered if they had been knocked off, or if at some stage in the fight he had paused in order to file them. I wondered why it had been Innes and not Johnson who had first found me gone and come after me. It was because of Johnson I was here at all, sticking my neck out. ‘We must try and catch them,’ said Johnson, and a fine bloody agent Johnson had turned out to be. I glared at him, and he looked back at me blandly. I bet his oil painting of the Pope was a shambles.

We didn’t file a complaint of assault since, as Professor Hathaway pointed out, the men had clearly escaped, and we should merely be asked to devote all our free time to formalities. We left the castle and zipped back to
Dolly,
having silenced the dazed café proprietor with lire.

I thought, on the journey back, that all I wanted was to take my angst to bed with a barbiturate and a hot-water bottle. But, as the sun sank and the lights came on all around the haven and my fighter escort, laying me tenderly down in
Dolly
’s
saloon, proceeded to salve my grazes and their own from
Dolly
’s medicine chest, I began to feel life held something yet.

We had dinner in the trattoria over the road which had sent us its menu, selecting our supper from a vast mesmeric fish tank undulating with frilled fish and lobsters and green misty columns clinging with mussels. We had negronis and crusty bread and butter and antipastos of salami and olives and anchovies and I sat on my diet sheet, which said:

Sunday, 8 p.m.: Riso e rape
(riso gr. 25, olio crudo, 1 cucchiaino
)

I ate lobster, and I wasn’t complaining. I might have missed out on the riso but I was nearly hell of a strong on the rape.

Then the management stood us free cognacs, and the guitarist in a flowered voile shirt and a locket came up and sang ‘Santa Lucia’ and the light rippled on the pool of the harbour and Johnson said, ‘Now let’s plumb the collective unconscious and talk about Ruth’s little troubles.’

Professor Hathaway leaned back and inspected him. Her spotted arms protruded from a sagging jersey dress of impeccable quality, and her face wore a nimbus of Manikins. She said, tapping her ash into a dish, ‘Someone is looking for something. Does Ruth carry about any of her innamorato’s more valuable photographs?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well. . .’ said Johnson. ‘You know, Ruth, Professor Hathaway is quite right. It is the missing couture photographs that someone is looking for.’ And he explained, cheerfully, about the burned photographs.

Everyone listened respectfully. Even I listened respectfully in view of the amount of information he was brazenly withholding. Apparently I destroyed Charles’s film after developing it, on account of some indelicate pictures. Thus destroying, as well, the fashion shots the marauder was after.