Roman Nights (31 page)

Since our return from Anacapri he had been at his most aggravating. To all my whispered questions about the incident in the Villa Michele he had merely responded with pipe smoke and platitudes. Maurice, appealed to on the subject of the torn film, had been equally bland and equally unforthcoming.

Neither of them referred to the passage in public. It seemed to me that Maurice, having meddled in something which didn’t concern him, had backed discreetly into a Jiffy bag of deliberate ignorance, and Johnson was letting him do it.

Or maybe, of course, Johnson knew where the torn film had come from. But if he did, he wasn’t prepared to tell me or anyone else. I assured Charles, Innes, Professor Hathaway and Diana, each of whom took me aside, agog, that there was no reason to suspect Maurice of being a front man for the Mafia, and that truly Johnson and I had seen nothing suspicious. Jacko didn’t ask because now he had Di he was specializing.

I kept the bit about the envelope of film to myself. My instinct, as I remember, was to let the whole thing die a natural death. Charles was free. Our guess about the appointment in the Villa Michele had proved to be groundless. Tonight
Sappho
would sail for Naples, taking Professor Hathaway to her morning encounter with Bob and Eddie. Tomorrow
Dolly
would follow and, united, we should all pile into Johnson’s and Maurice’s cars and drive back to Rome and the observatory. Whatever Johnson was up to, the rest of us would be home for Christmas. I said, ‘What now?’ to Johnson with the dim idea of inviting a summing-up.

‘You mean there ought to be something else?’ inquired Johnson. Di, with her hair spectacularly done, was lying full length by his knees on the cockpit cushions dressed from head to foot in burgundy velvet with pierrot ruffles in white organdy around her neck and both her wrists. Charles said she looked like a hambone but I could see he was itching to photograph her.

I said, ‘I mean, shall we ever find out what really happened?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ said Johnson, considering. ‘It seems unlikely. Two days after you get back, you’re due to leave Italy anyway, aren’t you? If I hear anything, I’ll send you a postcard.’

‘You mean,’ I said suavely, ‘that you’re painting the Pope all through Christmas?’

‘No. You’re right,’ Johnson said. ‘I shall be busy. I’ll send you a card
after
Christmas.’

Then Di proposed bridge and I went below to start packing. I could hear them revoking all the time I was cleaning my teeth.

To hell with Johnson. And Capri. And the Finnish Observatory. I fell asleep, thinking forgivingly of poor Charles’s watch.

It was the last time I remember feeling forgiving. I was a nice, simple girl up to that evening, refreshingly clear of the current mainstream of received opinion. The twentieth-century equivalent, emotionally, of the horse. It is a handicap I no longer suffer from.

We got halfway to Naples, as I remember, when we saw the red flags on the horizon. They were lying out of our way, but it was early morning and we had time to be Good Samaritans and investigate.
Sappho
was already in Naples and Professor Hathaway at this moment would be in the hill post studying Eddie’s logbook.

The rougher ethnic element on
Dolly
were in rather less of a hurry, and in any case Charles, asleep in the saloon, was a formidable obstacle to anyone attempting to prepare breakfast. In the end, I imagine Lenny simply laid the table around him. I know he was still in his pyjama bottoms when Di and I eventually stumbled out of our stateroom. I was glad to know he had pyjama bottoms. I had never seen them before.

We had had breakfast when Lenny whistled up Johnson. All you could see at that time was a stretch of empty blue sea with a streak of black and white in the distance. ‘I can’t quite make it out,’ Johnson said. ‘It may be some wreckage.’

‘Or a net?’ Innes suggested. Fishing nets sometimes broke adrift from their offshore weights and anchors, and the ferry traffic would be at its height very shortly.

‘Or a wreck
and
a net?’ Charles suggested. He gave me the binoculars. Johnson moved to the cockpit and, turning the wheel, pointed
Dolly
straight for the flag sticks. I could see them now very clearly, and a lot of black and white balls knocking about at their feet. They took a long time to become any plainer.

Johnson cut out the engine. He said, ‘It’s farther away than it seems. I rather think this is a job for the speedboat.’

We had been trailing her, the narrow
V
of her wake inside ours. Lenny moved aft to pull her alongside and before he had her tied up. Charles and Jacko and Innes were in her beside him.

Johnson stood and looked down at them all. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘The last treat of the hols. You’ll capsize her.’

But he let them stay and waved Lenny back to the cockpit. ‘You take her. Keep her screw out of the nets, that’s all I ask you.’ A moment later, in a shower of spray the speedboat had abandoned the three of us.

You have crossed the flowing river

To the land of evergreen

Each day I long to see you

But the river runs between.

‘Spoilsports,’ said Diana vaguely. She was painting her feet in the cockpit. They looked rather nice; like paper doilies as supplied to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Johnson went below, having put the wheel on automatic. The speedboat, diminishing, was hitting the wave tops like a jumping bean and I could hear snatches of sea shanty – Charles, at his most exuberant. Innes and Jacko weren’t singing and I felt sorry for them, but it was their own fault for being so far forward. I said, ‘If there’s fish in those nets, it’ll stink to high heaven.’

Di looked up with her brush full of henna. ‘I know what you think,’ she said. ‘You think they’re going to find that net wrapped around a body.’

‘Never crossed my mind for a moment,’ I answered. I drew a trembling line down to my shin with her dipstick.

‘A body,’ said Di with satisfaction, ‘with a scrap of cardboard still in its dead fist. A scrap of cardboard saying
S.M. Capri
twenty/fifteen hundred. Go and watch them through the binoculars and tell me the moment when Jacko sicks up his cornflakes and uova.’ She had got The Marmalade on the radio and I couldn’t hear Charles singing anymore.

I took the binoculars and walked around the side deck to the long polished stretch in front of the coach house. Below the hatch I saw Johnson moving about in his cabin. I got the speedboat into focus just as she slowed down to circle the flag sticks.

There was a fingerprint on one of my lenses. I had lowered the glasses to wipe it when I noticed an empty boat in the sea under
Dolly’s
port beam.

There had been no sound of engines. I was trying, I believe, to work out its possible link with the wreck when I saw it was the launch from
Sappho.
I was still looking at her when a man’s arm snapped around my waist hard and held me, and a man’s hand struck down my arms and dug itself sweatily over my mouth.

I kicked the hatch, as I remember. I bit the dirty hand holding my face together and I got my nails in and I dredged up my three bits of mail-order jiujitsu, but Johnson didn’t sprint up with the anchor chain and it didn’t alter the outcome by a whisker. Someone raised a club and someone brought it down on my cranium, sharply.

I fell face downward on the deck of the
Dolly,
and left the roll call of active participants.

I was knocked out once before, playing hockey, and the first time I woke, I rather expected to see the games mistress looming above me. Instead, I was in a kind of fuzzy darkness which made my nose tickle. I let out a volley of head-splitting sneezes and light entered as the fuzz lifted suddenly. Someone spoke in Italian, there was a prick in my arm, and I went to sleep again. Looking back on it later, I thought of four other things I might have thought of doing which would have altered the course of events quite considerably, but I really wasn’t up to it.

The next time I woke wasn’t very much better, but I did have the sense to keep my eyes shut and listen. I was indoors, on a bed with a coverlet under me, and I could sense electric light on my eyelids. I was still, I was glad to find, fully dressed. I could hear someone breathing, and a chair creaked in front of me. I turned, sighing reposefully, waited, and opened my eyes.

I was facing a wall. It was bare, whitewashed and heavily fingermarked, and on it, in green felt pen someone had written EXP 62, QSS C9D B ABnv C Bnv i’ve got to meet di will you put it in the logbook.

I was in my own bed in the rest room of the Frazer Observatory, just as I had been when Jacko walked in on me the day it all started. The door opened behind me and I turned, still half awake and thinking, I believe, that it was Jacko all over again and this time when I met Charles and he suggested the zoo I was going to say No and change the whole course of history. A man in a black sweater and trousers came in, glanced at me and said to another man, sitting in the rest-room straw chair, ‘That one is awake. What about the other?’

They spoke in Italian but they were not, I thought, the two men who had attacked me in Ischia. They didn’t look as if they would trouble to call anyone ‘little darling’ before they socked it to her. I said, ‘What other?’ and the man in the chair got up and they both walked, shoulder to shoulder, towards me. I wished I hadn’t spoken. Then I saw they were both gazing at the other bunk which lay up above me.

‘He’s awake, too,’ said one of the men, and lifting his arm, brought it down suddenly on the bedding above me. The mattress bounced and Johnson’s voice, rather breathless, said, ‘I want a pot of Indian tea and some toast, lightly done. My friend, I believe, would prefer coffee and biscuits.’

I was starving, too, but I shouldn’t have had the nerve. I could feel my nose beginning to swell, I was so glad I wasn’t alone. I said, ‘Hullo,’ huskily to the bed up above me.

‘Hullo’, said Johnson. ‘What exciting lives astronomers lead. Does your head hurt very much?’

I was about to answer him when one of the Italians said something and the other, bending, took me by the arm and pulled me over the edge of the bed. I said, ‘Johnson!’ and Johnson’s voice, perfectly calm, said, ‘They’re taking us into the kitchen. Do what they say, and leave all the rest to me. They understand English.’

One of them kicked him when he said that; he was just sliding down and I saw it. I didn’t see why either of us had to put up with that. We were two against two and I can kick people too, if I have to. Then Johnson arrived on the floor and I saw his hands were tied together. His jersey was torn and he had bruises all over his face and his glasses were cracked. He looked a mess. He looked at me over his splintered bifocals and said, ‘I’m afraid there are at least three more unsporting gentlemen outside. Whatever do you think they can want?’

There was, then, no point in resistance. Particularly as I knew as well as Johnson just what they wanted. I walked erratically out of the rest room, propelled by one of our captors, and found myself pushed into the kitchen where Jacko and I had had so many companionable breakfasts, eating Innes’s goodies. There were two other rough types in the room lounging about, and a man, sitting in the chair where I had sat, poring over the film advertisements in the
Messaggero
.

He looked the sort of man who had his own manicure arrangements and others would appear out of the ground if he snapped his fingers. There is nothing quite so chic in the world as a handsome, grey-haired Italian in impeccable Savile Row suiting with a fluent command of endearingly accented English. I had been trying to collect one for years before I met Charles and I know people who cultivated Di in the sole hopes of being able to prise one out of her collection, but she hung on to them all like grim death, and I don’t blame her.

This one was like all the others, smooth and hard-eyed and smiling, and he had my bullwhip in his fingers and was idly snapping it at the feet of one of his minions, who stood there, grinning stiffly. It was the sort of thing that keeps people interested in the widescreen cinema and I should have adored every minute if I hadn’t been in the same room, instead of watching it. He turned his head when we came in and said, ‘Ah. Miss Russell and Mr Johnson. Please come in and sit down. I hope we shall not need to keep you for more than a moment.’

‘I hope not. We are rather hungry,’ said Johnson severely. They had put him in one of the observatory chairs and were tying his arms to the back of it. In a moment they did the same to me, and we sat pointing our chests at the doorway. The two men who had brought us in stood in front of it, smirking, and the two others had stationed themselves behind our chairs, exuding garlic.

The room seemed full of men, and judging from the cigarette stubs lying everywhere, they hadn’t just come there. On the table at the grey-haired man’s elbow stood one of our precious bottles of vino and a chipped glass, half empty. All our glasses were chipped, and I was glad of it.

He picked up the tumbler while I was watching him and said, ‘I am sure you are both hungry and thirsty and that you would both prefer to make yourselves tidy before we hold this conversation. I cannot, however, afford to allow either of you out of sight just for the moment. Mr Johnson, I rather think you have something of mine which I am going to ask you for in a moment. But first, Miss Russell, I want the photographs from Lord Digham’s Zeiss Icarex camera.’

We talk the old times over

We laugh and joke the same

But still it hurts a lot inside

When someone speaks your name.

‘She burned them,’ Johnson said.

The bullwhip, moving idly, circled around and then snapped in his direction. I could feel the draught of it, and it was less than an inch from Johnson’s face. ‘When I speak to Miss Russell,’ said the grey-haired man agreeably, ‘it is Miss Russell I wish to answer. The photographs, please.’