Roman Nights (7 page)

‘Then,’ said Johnson, ‘let’s go.’

The first person we saw at the Fall Fair was Innes Wye, clutching a bottle of ketchup, which figures. Sometimes one forgets that Innes is American and conscientious, but not for long.

The railings of the Palazzo Barberini are upheld by marble weightlifters with beards and grimaces of incipient hernia. There were American cars parked under the palm trees beyond and American children with explosive grins and busty cult-figures on their sweatshirts were charging up the façade, chased by an assortment of incoherent doorkeepers.

Inside, as I have said, there was Innes. If the place was a gallery, it was not immediately discernible. At the top of the staircase, a suite of large rooms hung with blazing crystal chandeliers was full of brilliantly barbered Americans. The girls were thin, trouser-suited and purposeful, with Pat Nixon hairdos. The men tended to be silver-haired, statuesque and faintly cultured, and to be standing about with a harem of richly dressed and well-preserved silver-haired ladies. There was a bar, patronized by a milling throng of desperate non-Americans, a side room selling soft drinks and ices, and a large, hot salon full of small empty tables at which sat a number of elderly patrons, looking as if their feet hurt them but smile, brother, smile. The rest of the tables, almost equally empty, had held the Christmas Gifts, the Home-Baked Goodies, the secondhand clothes and used books of the bazaar. There had been a run on everything but tea cosies and babies’ socks. Off that was a smaller room full of silent mothers with raging children, and a litter of toys. In a corner an earnest middle-aged man with glasses like ploughshares was telling a fairy story, with gestures, to a half circle of mesmerized toddlers. His voice, a seductive Irish-American, welled back among the baby socks and mingled with the voice of the auctioneer from the salon, pushing a De Luxe 4-Egg Chick Incubator with Thermostatic Control, plus a 32-page booklet with pictures on how the egg becomes a chick. ‘Don’t they
know
?’
inquired Johnson austerely.

I said to Innes, ‘Never mind. You’ll come out all right in the yen revaluation. Let me carry the ketchup.’ He had a raffle ticket pinned to his jacket.

We accompanied him to his hoard. He had a paper carrier of Trappist jams and a box which said
Electric Callous Eraser. Have Better Looking Feet,
$4
. Di appeared with Timothy, of all people, in tow.

Old Home Week. Of course, it had been her
Daily American.
Snakeskin and lime green fur flipped past the pant suits and drawing up with the dark glasses trained full on Johnson, Di said, ‘And what groovy goodies have
you
got?’ to me.

I said, ‘I paid full market prices. Hullo, Timothy.’

‘You forget,’ said Diana, ‘the law of diminishing returns. Timothy wants to buy something.’

‘Well, there you are,’ I said against the din of the auctioneer’s voice. ‘Throw pillows, patio fruitcake or babies’ bootees.’ Below the glasses, there was a dissatisfied look about Di’s frosted pink eye make-up. I said to her,
‘Timothy,
dear?’

‘I met him outside,’ said Diana. ‘He has a thing going for Innes. He
had
a thing going for Innes. What are you doing with Johnson?’

‘Nothing, yet,’ I said. ‘But I’ll lease him to you, if you can cut out Timothy.’

‘Thanks a million,’ Di said pointedly. Timothy, holding Johnson by the arm, was just disappearing into the room for the little ones. A moment later the reader of fairy tales, looking slightly harassed, emerged and went over, in a distracted way, to help at the book stall. Di, towards whom men were gravitating from every quarter of the suite, started to giggle. Innes, still holding his bottle of ketchup, lost his head and hissed at her. ‘Will you please take Mr Frazer’s secretary out of there and go away? This is a charitable occasion.’ A woman with silver hair, cleaving her way through the throng, said, ‘It’s Diana Minicucci, isn’t it? How nice of you to come along. Now you’re here, I wonder if we can persuade you to pick out the raffle tickets . . . ?’

Unperturbed, Diana walked off, surrounded by units from Pan American, the American Academy, the American Episcopal Church, the American Express, the Ford Foundation and Coca-Cola. Innes fell back and disappeared. I was sorry for him but you have to remember that Di is not only the basic subject of Jacko’s more enterprising photographs; she is also the daughter of Prince Minicucci and Bernadette Mayflower. I went off to find Johnson.

He was in the kiddies’ room, sitting cross-legged listening to Timothy telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood to about twenty-five children who were sitting watching his nice pink Lithuanian face and listening to every word, even the bits he was putting in for Johnson’s benefit. I sat down beside Johnson and whispered, ‘It’s five o’clock.’

‘Spoilsport,’ he said, and got up. Timothy, telescoping the wolf’s eyes, ears and mouth and unzipping Grandma in three well-chosen sentences, got up too. The twenty-five children started to cry. A well-coiffed mother with three offspring and a prenatal outfit covering possibly several more said, ‘You should send back Mr Paladrini.’

‘Of course,’ said Timothy kindly, and slid out after Johnson into the deodorized heat of the salon. Di came towards us, laden with a packet of bread sticks, some crochet work and a 1903 Baedeker, from which she was reading aloud, when she could get a word in edgewise from the crowd hanging over her shoulder.

‘. . . Chapter Five.
Intercourse with Italians
.’ (Happy applause.) ‘Guides . . . Gratuities . . . Waiters.
If too importunate in their recommendations or suggestions, they may be checked by the word Basta
.’ (Ironic cheers.)

I said, ‘Di? Who won the raffle?’

‘Guess who?’ said Di and, lifting the dark glasses down again on her nose, looked at me through them. ‘Innes Wye.’

I said softly, ‘Di?’ Poor Innes, ticketed like the Mad Hatter for all to see, had been easy meat. ‘Di,’ I said. ‘What did he win?’

But even before I finished speaking, a certain muted confusion was making itself felt from the raffle stand. Among the heads turning, I noticed, was that of Timothy’s predecessor, the teller of fairy tales, presumably about to return to his post. An odd idea stirred somewhere at the back of my mind. ‘First prize,’ Di said lightly. ‘Jungle After Shave, the Essence for Men Born to Conquer. I’m rather afraid I gave him the Organizer’s crocodile handbag, too.’

Growing cries from the raffle stand told all too plainly the perfect success of the project. Further cries defined the extent of the tragedy. There had been two hundred-dollar bills and a Cartier cigarette case in the crocodile handbag. The crowd seethed and then began making off, in a surge, down the length of the room to the staircase.

I said to Johnson, ‘Mr Paladrini. The storyteller in glasses.’

‘Yes?’ said Johnson. Pursued by Timothy we were being swept forward by the crowd; the last I saw of Di she was settling down at a table and being brought a drink by a boy from the Embassy.

I said, ‘If you took off his glasses, he would be the spitting image of the man at the zoo with the balloon cart.’

I had, for once, Johnson’s fullest attention. ‘The storyteller?’ he said. ‘Then let’s have a chat with him. Can you spot him, Ruth?’

A man in a shortie raincoat who had been walking just behind us suddenly slipped sideways and began unobtrusively to forge ahead in the crush. It was Mr Paladrini. ‘Oh, damn,’ I said. ‘He heard us.’

‘And he doesn’t want to know us,’ said Johnson, accelerating. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ He began, with the greatest politeness, to thrust through the crowd in the wake of the vanishing storyteller and, as best I could, I followed him.

I dare say, if you lost a crocodile handbag with two hundred dollars and a Cartier cigarette case in it, and saw it vanishing across a room and downstairs in the possession of a small unknown man with a shopping bag, you would lose your razor-cut head and go ape over it. I don’t know who started the cries of ‘Stop thief!’ but I strongly suspected Mr Paladrini. At any rate, they were taken up with touching enthusiasm by all the unlucky raffle contestants and most of the Organizer’s friends who up till then had been trotting rather self-consciously through the marble halls, and suddenly Johnson and I found the pursuit had turned into a gallop. It began to look, indeed, as if with a little encouragement it would turn into a lynching squad. And ahead of us, a bobbing spectacled face in the throng, was the escaping person of Mr Paladrini.

I shoved. Kipper ties and fine jersey knits flinched from me; I stood on a handmade shoe and wriggled through the resulting small gap. Johnson, I saw, with considerable expertise was making even more progress than I was. I heeled around three children and met up with him again in the middle of what appeared to be a logjam. The pregnant mother was next to him and busy talking. ‘Mr Paladrini? Isn’t he sweet? “I’m used to entertaining children,” he said, and just walked right in. I sure hope the Organizers give him a vote of thanks at the next committee meeting.’

We had started to move forward again. Over three shoulders Johnson called, ‘Who brought him?’

‘He just came,’ she yelled back, and we were off again.

I suppose Innes, walking sedately down the stairs on his way back to Mouse Hall and Poppy, had no reason to connect the bustle upstairs with his winnings. When people started to run, he probably thought that the fair had concluded, and the Voice of America was about to arrive in a body and fill all the seats on his trolley bus. So he started to run downstairs also. When the court case came up afterwards, people said that he turned at the first shout of ‘Stop thief!’ and then, faced with a solid wall of shrieking people sweeping down the wide staircase after him, he whirled around and most wisely beat it.

He tripped and fell six stairs from the bottom, and the leading hounds tripped and took off right over him, followed by their near neighbours. Rather stylishly, in a glistening wave of manicured hands and blue glasses and other crocodile handbags, the entire body politic of Little America overturned and slid like a pack of cards straight down the staircase. At the bottom in a pool of scarlet lay Innes Wye, covered in Trappist jam, money and ketchup. And Jungle After Shave, the Essence for Men Born to Conquer.

Glissading down the side of the staircase was Mr Paladrini, his spectacles no longer visible. I took a flying leap over Innes and, with Johnson pounding ahead of me, followed them both out into the courtyard.

Outside, it was the rush hour. I think I have mentioned before that Rome had a worrying problem with traffic. The street was full of taxis, but all of them were bumper to bumper and motionless; ahead, dimly, Mr Paladrini was pounding up the vestigial pavement. He paused, looked around, and then began running downhill to the Via Nazionale and the buses. A large green double-decker bound for the Piazza Venezia swung out from the kerb, and he plunged through the doors as they hit him. We could see him haul out a fistful of money.

In Rome, there is a pathological shortage of small coins. For change, the little shops tend to use candy. Johnson said, ‘Come on!’ and set off down the Nazionale, running.

I could see the point. At the rate the traffic was travelling, we had as good a chance of getting to the next stop on time as the bus had. The pavement, it must be admitted, was crowded and not with polite Americans, but deploying his palette-holding arm, Johnson turned out to be more than an adept at barging. A stream of Italian oaths followed us on the whole of our free downhill slalom, which entailed ignoring the alts and treating the avantis like a springboard. We got to the next stop just as the bus was drawing in, with a brooding face looking down from its galleria. The doors opened. One person got off, and only one person was allowed on. And it wasn’t one of us.

‘Ah, well,’ said Johnson. And again, holding my wrist, began running. We battled our way through the parked cars at Trajan’s Forum and got to the bus stop just as Mr Paladrini descended there. He saw us, turned, and got back in, against the physical and vocal resistance of all his fellows. The door shut and the bus trundled across the Piazza to the Via del Plebiscito, where he got off again.

We were badly behind him that time. To cross the Piazza in the rush hour in full sight of the policeman standing there and chirping at you, whistle in mouth, is the quickest way to the British cemetery I know. We made it in time to see our quarry disappear into the maw of a black archway opposite the Palazzo di Venezia. We raced after him.

Outside, the row of brass plates appeared to indicate the usual colony of lawyers, dentists and insurance companies, with possibly a minor resting place of the Banco di Spirito Santo. Inside was a dark vaulted tunnel of pure seventeenth-century magnificence with a pebbled floor and arcaded walls through which we groped in the meagre daylight which penetrated from the street. The only other light came from a small concierge’s room at the end, next to the locked double doors which ended the tunnel, and from a hint of daylight to the left, from a small courtyard overlooked by tall buildings. Fragments of ancient marble: masks, broken draperies and fractured Latin inscriptions were built into the vine-covered walls. Among tubs of flowering plants rested a small cherub fountain, pouring thinly under the inscription non potabile. The tunnel itself was full of small cars.

We ran about, looking for Mr Paladrini. ‘I bet you don’t know Napoleon’s mother died here,’ Johnson said.

‘A million times I’ve needed you, Mum,

A million times I’ve cried

If love could have saved you, Mum,

You never would have died.’

‘Hell,’ he said abruptly. ‘He’s gone through the shoe shop.’

We had missed it first time around. But on the right, near the entrance, an archway led down some steps and into a lit arcade which proved to be just that: the shoe shop at the foot of the Corso. We plunged through it and into the street. Dodging up it was Mr Paladrini, in the middle of all Rome going home to its wife and bambinos in suede jackets and knitted jackets and shortie overcoats and very long overcoats and enough polo necks to outfit the entire British Raj, and better filled, at that. We belted after.