Roman Nights (26 page)

‘Look here!’ Jacko said angrily. He turned to me. ‘Ruth, go in. There’s no need for you to listen to this.’

It was good advice. I got off my knees, straightening my shift and trying to hang on to my dignity. I said quickly, ‘Look. If the watch means something special, Sophia, I’m sorry. But Charles only lent it to me, because the glass of my own one got broken. I’ll tell him you’re worried about it. You can ask him yourself for the thing, when they spring him. But I can’t hand over someone’s property to you, not just like that. No one would. Leave it, and we’ll sort it out later.’

I was proud of that speech. I had the feeling that the whole sunbathing piazza was proud of it also. It came to Sophia that she had lost the sympathy of her audience. She took one step towards me and at the look in her eye, I retreated. Then I remembered the pool and stepped sideways beside Di’s gungy flask of sun lotion.

Di stretched out a languid arm to protect it just as Sophia rushed forward. Sophia’s shins and Di’s forearm collided and Sophia hurtled on, straight for the water.

Di and Jacko and I watched her disappear, head first, in her smart swimsuit. Then I went in to find Maurice’s suite and join the rest of my party. I don’t know when I’ve felt more justifiably cheerful.

The parting was so sudden

We often wonder why

But the saddest part of all, dear,

You never said goodbye.

We dined that evening with Maurice and Timothy, by which time Di and Jacko had spread the glad tidings and Maurice, who liked little Finnish birds in his entourage as well as great helpings of portrait artists and astronomers, was clearly devising how to maintain his offer of a sail north for Sophia without putting out Di or the rest of us.

He needn’t have worried. Di’s greatest enemy was boredom. She had already let herself be used by Sophia as a means of an introduction to Maurice. There was nothing Di would enjoy more than a couple of days pumping Sophia about her love life.

And so long as Sophia was on
Sappho,
I can’t say I minded all that much now either. I had been worried about Sophia before I met her, but I wasn’t worried now – not in the slightest. If I am sure of my boyfriend, I don’t make dramas over possessing mementos. I had Charles. I didn’t care if she had his bloody wristwatch or not. But until Charles said she could have it, I wasn’t handing it over.

We had a sparkling evening during which Maurice received fifteen people at his table and was photographed twice. We didn’t even glimpse my late colleague, Sophia.

I cornered Johnson on the way downstairs to the rubber dinghy and he confessed that he had known she worked in Capri but hadn’t told me in case I jumped to conclusions. ‘If it pleases you to know it,’ said Johnson, ‘I have had her investigated. Her career is impeccable; her life is an open book. It would be interesting to know however whether Sophia or Charles arranged that meeting in Naples—’

‘Wasn’t it obvious?’ I asked sarcastically.
Dolly
and Lenny had been in Naples while Charles was there. Watching, I made no doubt, his every movement.

Johnson was unperturbed. ‘All that was obvious was that they met by prearrangement. It was a short meeting, in the bar of the hotel where Charles had been visiting a client in connection with a photographic assignment. They separated half an hour later. Much of the time, I am told, they seemed to be arguing.’ We had emerged from the hotel and were walking down the tiled steps past the swimming pool. ‘I notice,’ said Johnson, ‘that the situation doesn’t disturb you. Do you think therefore that Sophia sought that meeting? Is she still in love with him?’

I said, ‘I don’t think she’s in love with anybody. I think she wants him back because her pride is hurt.’ I thought and – since there didn’t seem any point, as Di would have said, about being coy over it – I added, ‘According to Charles, she is very Scandinavian in bed.’

‘And Finnish-type partners are hard to come by? I shouldn’t have thought she had far to look, on Capri. I should tell you,’ said Johnson, ‘that the Rome police have not yet been told about Sophia. We know she works on Capri. We know that Mr Paladrini was arranging for some exchange of what was possibly classified information on the twentieth in San Michele, Capri. We know Sophia has been meeting Charles. But we also know that from the outset Charles’s movements have been made to look suspicious. Sophia is scornful of Charles in jail on a gambling charge. How would she react to Charles in jail for something more serious? Would that salve her pride?’

This was playing the field with a vengeance. I stared at him. Below, Lenny had brought the dinghy to the water’s edge and was steadying it, while I could hear Innes and Jacko and Professor Hathaway stepping out of the lift doors above us. Di was sleeping, or something, in the hotel.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘is Sophia framing Charles somehow? I don’t know. She’s certainly inviting publicity: that little scene by the swimming pool will have flown all over Taormina by this time. The payoff, I suppose, would be Charles turning up at San Michele, all set apparently for the appointment. You’ve saved him from that, anyway.’

For the first time, I was grateful that the Rome police had put Charles in clink and Johnson hadn’t done anything to rescue him. He had wanted ten days, Johnson said, to back his fancy. Six of the ten days had gone, and with Charles still in jail the yacht had been searched and I had been attacked and searched also. We had not, as we had hoped, surprised two of Mr Paladrini’s clients in the act of trading secrets but the more I thought about that, the more it surprised me that, without time and place, Johnson ever thought we should.

Capri, of course, was another matter. San Michele meant the most famous villa on Capri, now a monument and a museum. And 1500 meant 3 p.m. One was still left wondering who, after all the police intervention after Mr Paladrini’s death, would be fool enough to meet there.

Unless they had no alternative. Unless they had been advised well in advance and didn’t even know Mr Paladrini’s death had a bearing on the matter. Unless someone trying to frame Charles had invented the whole rendezvous with the intention of enticing Charles there from Naples, and then blowing the whole thing to the police.

But you would have to be very deeply involved yourself, and very scared, to need to unload the blame like that on an innocent person. And Sophia’s life, Johnson had just said, was blameless. Nothing might now happen on Capri, which would be a pity. For everything that happened, every act of violence, every interference with us or our liberty, was a step towards finding the truth and freeing Charles.

And that was a laugh. For the next act of violence did neither. It happened the next day in Taormina, the old, picturesque town on the mountain behind us.

I explored Taormina with Innes and Professor Hathaway, having swooped up the hillside by cable car. We saw Johnson once through the arch of the clock tower and again hopping down one of the little steep streets with pink houses and wrought-iron balconies and coloured shutters and great earthenware pots of cacti and flowers and creepers streaming everywhere. Every time we came out of another old church we spotted Di going into another boutique, generally with Jacko protesting behind her. She was got up as Ariadne with a long floating caftan thing trailing behind her and dark glasses, which would have blown Theseus and made even Bacchus think twice, I shouldn’t wonder.

Maurice and Timothy were easiest of all to find. They spent the day sitting on the paved edge of the Corso Umberto having coffee and diet pills and being universally admired. It wasn’t that the place was full of raven-haired bandits. In fact, there seemed no middle course between fat Sicilians with black berets and boleros and lissom Sicilians in long sprigged shirts and shrink-wrapped trousers who smiled at Timothy.

Timothy, who was used to his reputation having preceded him, sat very correctly in his chair beside Maurice and played with a long, thin gold-plated ballpoint from Gucci which Maurice had given him for his birthday. The boys’ eyes followed it to such purpose that a kind of Inner Ring Road developed in the region and they had to rise periodically and change stations. At two o’clock, by prior arrangement, we all met to allow Professor Hathaway to feed us, which took, agreeably, most of the afternoon. At the end of it, Maurice announced that we were all going to the ruined Greek theatre.

When Maurice mentions the word theatre, no one contradicts him. We all, dammit, went.

The ruined theatre crowns the ridge at Taormina and commands, I suppose, one of the six most beautiful views in the world. No one told me. I plugged up a road behind Timothy. All the shops were selling Greek masks and Maurice walked past them with grace, faintly smiling. No one recognized him. At the top we paid at a ticket office and filed through a boulder-strewn yard to the monument. Bits of building loomed over us, patched together from thin, oblong red Roman bricks and dove-grey Greek marble. With all his Player King instincts Maurice plunged through a high arching hall lined with fragments of marble which proved to be the fastest way on to the stage.

I was about to follow him when I noticed Johnson. With Professor Hathaway and Innes in close attendance, he had turned away from the arch and was climbing the steep flight of steps to the amphitheatre. I cast a glance after Maurice, who was swimming gently along with Di on one side and Jacko on the other, while Timothy ran with little cries from sculpture to sculpture. Then I too turned, and climbed the wide, shallow steps leading upward.

We had, of course, like dried-out alcoholics, become overconfident. Nothing had happened to us since Ischia. Lipari had been devoid of incident, unless you counted my involuntary swim. Taormina so far had been equally devoid of incident, unless you counted Sophia’s involuntary swim. From the top of an ancient Greek amphitheatre, at least none of us could fall into water.

So no one stopped me when I hopped up the steps after Johnson, although at the top Johnson and his little party were nowhere to be seen, and I came to a dead halt myself from simple astonishment.

I had stepped from the stairs onto the outer rim of the shelving amphitheatre, which plunged down to the ruined orchestra where I could see Maurice and his three companions picking their way, small among the blocks of pale grey and red fallen marble. Behind them towered the crumbling arches and walls of the scaena, the cracked white Corinthian columns shining against the wooded slopes of the mountains, spiked with poplars and dark green with orange groves, dropping through village and town to the scalloped blue rim of the sea. There was no horizon. Sea and sky met in a china blue haze in the sunshine and behind it all, glittering and magical, rose the snow-covered cone of Mount Etna.

A bloody, stupid voice somewhere said, ‘You will now give me that watch.’

I don’t think I was even frightened. I had been wrenched away from a private experience and I was angry. Irritated, exasperated, and this time, unforgiving. I looked about me.

The terrace on which I stood was empty, and so were all the wooden benches below me. Farther down, the original marble seats were still there, the Greek names of their owners carved on the backs. Farther down still, on the municipal stage which filled part of the orchestra, Maurice had raised his stick and appeared to be lecturing. Everything he said floated with terrible clarity to where I was standing and beyond. He had just begun to realize this, and, as I stood there, tossed off a couple of accurate epigrams and a clerihew. The voice said, ‘My watch.’

Sophia, of course. I looked around again. I had seen, a moment after I came in, Professor Hathaway appear far below and vanish into a ruined corner of the Parascaenium, Innes beside her. There was still no sign of Johnson. A low broken wall lay between me and the seats. Between this and the outer wall, also broken, were a number of odd tumbled buildings with weeds and bushes growing beside them. I began to walk very slowly from one horn of the terrace around to the other. I wasn’t afraid of Sophia. Or at least I wasn’t afraid of a private discussion, however nasty, with Sophia. I didn’t want another public battle, if I could help it. The voice of Maurice, quoting Sappho, intoned:

‘This is the dust of Timas, who died before she was married and whom Persephone’s dark chamber accepted instead.

After her death the maidens who were her friends, with sharp iron cutting their lovely hair, laid it upon her tomb.’

I ask you. If ever there was a moment when I didn’t want to hear an obituary, that was it. Good for Timas. If Sophia cut my throat in the next two minutes, Di wouldn’t so much as chuck me an Asiatic bang from Elena’s.

However, I have never yet heard of trained astronomers giving way to crimes passionels over a wristwatch, so I soldiered on. I got halfway along, too, and was just circumventing a low Roman blockhouse, or perhaps ticket office and candy stall, when someone came up and grabbed me.

It was Sophia, with her long yellow hair coming out of its ribbon and her face livid under the suntan. I tried to drag my arm out of her grip but she had such a tight hold of me that I couldn’t do it. I said, ‘You silly twit; I don’t care whether you have it or not, but it isn’t mine to hand over. Ask Charles for it, if you’re so thick with him.’

It made sense to me, but it didn’t seem to reach Sophia. She not only continued to hang on, but struck my free hand out of the way with a blow that made my eyes water and proceeded to scrabble with my watch buckle, her hair hanging all over the place. My wrist sawed up and down as I hauled it away from her and she dragged it back, still unfastening it. I continued to reason with her until I saw that she really had got the leather half out of the buckle and then I did what I should have done in the first place: swung my elbow around sharply.

It caught her just under the chin. As her jaws snapped shut, I kicked her legs backward from under her and she went down, dragging me half on top of her. I could tell she’d never played hockey at school. Down below, Maurice, pleased with the sonority of his vowels, had begun on Pindar, of which he seemed to know a great quantity. He had started to throw in some gestures. I scrambled to my knees, whipped my hand at last from Sophia’s slackened grip and got to my feet quickly.