Roman Nights (30 page)

He hadn’t. He was still taking photographs. After a moment, his elbows went down and he looked around, like a man who is expecting a shower. It was so quiet that you could hear the sparrows rustle below us. It was perfectly quiet. It was perfectly quiet because the wheels had stopped running.

My chair slid slowly to the bottom of its arc and remained there, rocking gently above the tiled and tumbledown roof of a very small cabin. A number of hens pecked about in a dirt yard. A dog, running out of a shed, began to set up a high, monotonous yapping. I twisted around to yell out to Johnson.

Johnson wasn’t there. The chair seat behind me was empty.

He had therefore toppled out. He had (a) over-balanced when the power left the cable. He had (b) been stoned as the chair stopped. He had (c) been shot with a silencer.

God took our Johnson for a star

To love and guide us from afar.

I had lost him.

Then I saw the tree beside which Johnson’s vacant chair had halted. And Johnson climbing down it, with his tennis pullover glinting like eglantine among the graceful green branches. He got to the ground and waved, just as remote cries began to issue from the rest of our immobilized party.

I was waving back when a skylight in the roof just below me creaked and groaningly opened. A ladder rose into the sky with the spectral lassitude of Jacob’s dream, projected in slow motion and backward. The hens fluttered. Johnson appeared, the dog snapping about him, and called, but not too loudly, ‘Do you think you can climb it?’

I could climb his ladder. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I looked ahead, to where Jacko was carrying on an acrimonious conversation with Innes, and behind, where the only view seemed to consist of two vanishing cables holding a lot of dangling seats, emphatically immobile. I lifted the bar over my waist, hitched my bottom over the seat and lowered myself till my feet found the ladder.

Johnson helped me into the house, and then downstairs and out of it, accompanied by the beatific sound of the passing of many great lire. Just as we got to the ground, Jacko turned around in his high seat and bellowed.

I was rather touched to observe that he’d missed me. Johnson cupped his hands and yelled something at him. He promised, I think, to send a mechanic. At any rate, he then took me by the hand and began running with no style but a great deal of speed down the path and back to the platform where we had started. I said, ‘What about freeing the others?’

‘They’re too high to get down,’ said Johnson with absolute accuracy.

We continued to belt down the pathway. ‘What,’ I said, ‘if they can’t get the machinery started?’

‘They won’t get to the villa on time,’ Johnson said. ‘What a pity.’

What a pity.
I stopped dead in my tracks, and the jerk as he skidded me forward nearly shattered my wishbone. I started running again, but methodically. I said, ‘You fixed it.’

‘I fixed it,’ Johnson agreed. He didn’t sound penitent. ‘Who would suspect two taxi-loads of bent tourists?’ he’d said, or something like it. ‘Who,’ Professor Hathaway had said, ‘would attempt to dispose of seven people?’

‘Listen,’ I said. I tried to speak reasonably. ‘What if someone is waiting to go to the villa at fifteen hundred? What if they were about to call off the meeting, and then discover the opposition has reduced itself to you and me? What if they try to knock us off? Hell,’ I said, hauling viciously on his pulling arm so that he was forced at least to turn around and look at me, ‘at least Innes Wye had his Dardick.’

‘Ruth,’ Johnson said very gently. He took me by the arm and walked me past the Hotel Europe with its voyeurs and into a dark and flowery lane all shaded with trees. ‘I haven’t a Dardick,’ Johnson said, ‘but I have a little thought I’d like you to receive and mull over. Whoever will be in the Villa Michele at three p.m., it won’t by any conceivable chance be Charles Digham.’

He was an intellectual snob, a pouf and a traitor. He was also a man of great cunning. I went to heel and walked on with my trap shut.

The Villa San Michele lay on the right past the souvenir stalls. At 1430 hours, we entered it.

Tickets were sold in the vestibule. It was a quiet day, the attendant said, glad to find someone to talk to. One or two gentlemen in the morning. This afternoon, a pair of ladies with cameras and Mr Frazer. Mr Frazer, did we know him, the playwright?

Indeed, said Johnson. He showed no surprise and quelled with a douche of his glasses the open-eyed stare I was trying to throw him. We turned right into the small white-walled rooms and enclosed patios of the villa itself and he hissed each time I spoke until I lost patience and confronted him. We were in the monumental bedroom, as I remember, beside the monolithic uncanopied four-poster and the statues and the heavy carved seat-pieces. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right. I’m here and you’re here and Maurice is here and everyone else is dangling in the air above Monte Solaro. To protect Charles, maybe, but that isn’t everything. Can I induce you to tell me what’s happening?’

‘I have an idea,’ Johnson said. ‘Perhaps Maurice has the same one.’ He touched the chairs, walked around the bed and went and stood under the arch by the window, peering about him.

He made me nervous. Ever since we had entered the villa he had explored it as if he were going to buy it, prodding the statues, passing his hands over the carved fragments plastered into the walls, lifting the cushions. The guide hadn’t come with us, and it was just as well. I’ve seen a few bus parties in my time, but none as ferrety as Johnson Johnson.

‘I have an idea,’ he continued now, peering out of the window, ‘that there is to be no nasty encounter in the Villa San Michele at the hour of fifteen hundred today. I think something else entirely is going to happen. I think a message is about to be picked up.’

The occasion seemed to warrant a little grammar. ‘From whom to whom?’ I asked, whispering flutily. ‘And what?’ I added, as an afterthought.

‘From whom, I can’t prove,’ Johnson said. ‘But it can’t have been left before latish this morning, which makes the attendant’s news all the more interesting. And to whom we may never know, because whoever is going to lift it will make quite sure he is not observed doing it. But what, is a different matter. That is what I hope we are going to discover.’

‘A message,’ I said, helplessly mourning. The rooms connected like a jigsaw puzzle; up and down steps, through little piazzas and terraces. And outside, acre on glamorous acre, stretched the gardens, with the white gleams of statues and fountains.

‘A written message, tucked somewhere known to the searcher. Come on,’ said Johnson. ‘We haven’t all day. Let’s do over the chapel.’

We did over the chapel, which was full of holy paintings and open-pored wooden statues and atmosphere. We walked over mosaic and peered between barley sugar columns of marble and, emerging, climbed the flowery paths to the summerhouse. We nosed our way through the loggia, its white pillars twisted with greenery.

Axel Munthe had built his crash pad on what remained of a big Roman villa, and into it he had squirrelled all of ancient Rome that could be found on the island. Leaning over the wall between the Korda pillars you saw the sea lying burnished beneath you, with the yellow-grey of the cliffs rising from it, and the pale broken arms of the harbour. A white tourist liner moved in, as big as my finger, and the Sorrentino ferry, and the white wakes behind them. The other islands floated sugar-pale on the water and the Italian coast showed, blue and low far behind them. A woman’s voice said, ‘Oh, Mr Frazer. Oh, Mr Frazer, how can we thank you?’

Johnson started to laugh. It was so irritating I could have cuffed him.

I straightened and so, more smoothly, did Johnson. From the distant curve of the loggia stepped the noble figure of the owner of the Frazer Observatory, blandly smiling. Two ladies in tweed suits and felt hats and cameras were backing before him, genteelly drivelling. Maurice stopped, cigar in hand, by a statue. The soft white hair, freshly cut by the artist, strayed across the magnificent forehead. ‘In this haunted bower, what impulses cannot flower; what encounter does not have its meaning, deeper than any we poor mortals may reach for. You have a right profile, dear lady. You may, if you wish, take my left. Various, I fear, as a chameleon. The curse of the mummer.’

He posed, pouting smoke, for a further exposure, and as they bagged their photometers, shook their hands warmly. They walked slowly past us, flushed and moonily smiling and I wondered, as Johnson glanced at them, if either man envied the other.

Maurice had style, panache, courtship, indeed adulation. Johnson had more woolly jerseys, and the recognition due to his profession. If you discerned in him anything remarkable, he forced you to recognize it with the eye of the intellect.

The snobbery which once I had accused him of. Or perhaps merely the requirements of his other, confidential profession. Perhaps he yearned for tight pants and chain belts and contact lenses. Perhaps he indulged in them secretly, with a round bed and a blonde fashion editress in Hampstead. ‘Johnson! And Ruth darling,’ said Maurice, allowing us to approach him. ‘I worry too much, and so does poor, motherly Lilian. There you are, hand in hand and perfectly happy.’ Only Maurice at his most elfish would think of calling Lilian Hathaway motherly. He added, ‘I thought you were all coming at three. Where are the others?’

‘Held up,’ said Johnson vaguely.

‘I know. I saw the chair lift stop. My dear boy,’ said Maurice, ‘haven’t you done anything yet to release them? One would think you were here with an ulterior motive.’

His pink, preserved face with the bright eyes and the actor’s vivid lines surveyed us maliciously. Maurice was making the running. Maurice, who had nearly ruined the assignation outside the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Maurice, who was supposed to be reposing on
Sappho
, and who was here instead, prudently in advance of the multitude and no doubt caught only because two ladies with cameras had happened to be in the Villa San Michele’s interesting gardens.

Johnson was not put out in the least. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see who would be here at three o’clock.’

‘Exactly my intention,’ said Maurice. ‘I thought of squatting behind the splendid statue of . . . is it Hymenaeus? Timothy would know exactly. But this is one of those days when my cigar will only draw in the open.’ He surveyed Johnson. ‘If you wish to squat, dear boy, please do not hesitate.’

‘Thank you, but I’m not allowed. It bags my trousers,’ said Johnson. His trousers were ruched like Harris Tweed window drapes and so, I make no doubt, was his underwear.

‘I told your man Lenny,’ said Maurice. ‘I said, don’t lurk about bagging your trousers. Come in the taxi with me. He did. I just dropped him off in the doorway. I take it we are
all
being followed?’

‘I’m not,’ said Johnson peacefully. He stood, hands in pockets, looking through his glasses at Maurice.

‘Yes, you are. I’m following you, dear boy,’ said Maurice. ‘My intuition told me you were in this, on one side or the other. I trust for Ruth’s sake, it is on the side favoured by Lloyd’s, Baring’s, Interpol and the American Constitution. It also seemed to me, while the Submerged Tenth were prattling, that you were looking for something. Or is it a small Sponsored Litter-walk?’

Johnson began to laugh. He took his hand out of his pocket with a pipe in it. ‘You’ve found it?’ he said.

‘On the contrary,’ said Maurice fruitily. ‘I came to tell you there was no need to investigate further. The meeting has taken place. The communication has passed. The evidence, to be sure, lay about for the taking.’

He placed his cigar in his mouth and, holding open his jacket, removed from an inside pocket an envelope which he handed with simplicity to Johnson. He lifted the cigar from his lips and watched, smiling, while Johnson tapped the envelope open. Into his palm, glittering, tumbled four minute pieces of film, densely figured. Johnson tipped them, without touching them further, back into the envelope.

‘If I asked you where, when and who,’ Johnson said, ‘you would doubtless refuse, for the sake of your health, to tell anyone?’

‘That is right,’ Maurice said. He looked twenty years younger. I hated them both, because they were speaking in riddles.

I said, ‘What, then. What is it? What was on the film, Maurice?’

‘Do you know,’ said Maurice, ‘I was going to ask the same dynamic question. What is on this film, Johnson?’

‘The traffic regulations for the city of Turin for the year nineteen fifty-four. At a guess,’ said Johnson Johnson. ‘If you are still following us, Maurice, we’re going to have a beer in the Europe.’

‘Are we?’ I said. ‘Aren’t we waiting until three o’clock?’

‘It was three o’clock, dear child, half an hour ago. And no one came, except Johnson and you. Look,’ said Maurice with gentle pleasure. ‘There is Lilian.’

The chair lift, it was clear, was now functioning. I wondered what delay Johnson had stipulated, and how much in hard cash it had cost him. I worry about these things for more reasons than one, I can tell you. Then Charles came striding along, and Innes, cagily, and Timothy, with a late geranium held to his cheek. ‘So here you are! You both climbed down, how agile. And tell us, who came at three? I forbid you to say,’ said Timothy petulantly, ‘that nobody came, after everything.’

‘Maurice came,’ Johnson said. ‘But he didn’t meet anyone but two camera maniacs, and he had a lot of good excuses.’

Innes scowled at Maurice, who, supported by the agile buttocks of Hymenaeus, was conversing airily with the Professor. Charles also, I observed, regarded him with the deepest suspicion.

Timothy sighed. ‘
No one
in sneakers with spike mikes and tapes and transmitters?’

‘We blew it. Where’s Jacko?’ said Johnson.

‘In the Hotel Europe,’ said Innes Wye curtly. ‘Close to the bar, I rather imagine.’

‘What a good idea,’ Johnson said. ‘Let’s all join him.’

The sunset from the boat was stupendous: a sort of pink and amethyst light with the sun an orange ball on the sea behind the headland we had all climbed that afternoon. Before an hour had gone by the most beautiful island in the world was only an outline in black, with a necklace of lights strung across it, ending in the golden arcades of the Villa San Michele. I said, ‘What now?’ to Johnson.