Those Who Walk Away (28 page)

And with a cautious glance at Signor Ciardi, who was listening as attentively as if the story were all new to him, Luigi asked, “And the night we encountered each other, you had not been with Col-e-man?”

Ray slowly shook his head, with a slight frown at Luigi, which he hoped conveyed that he did not want to talk about that. “I’d been with friends,” Ray said, and drank from his glass.

“Friends!” Luigi said with a smile, and his short body bent suddenly at the waist, as it did a thousand times a day at his rowing, and he seized his green packet of Nazionale cigarettes on the scrubbed wooden table. His fingers looked huge, extracting a cigarette from the packet. His blunt head and utilitarian features suggested the ruggedness of a tree-stump. But his eyes twinkled warmly at Ray, and Ray remembered that this man had saved his life. Ray had asked Luigi not to tell anyone the lagoon story, and had even paid him not to tell, in a way. He had given Luigi fifteen thousand lire of the money Luigi changed for him. But Ray knew that Luigi would not keep the story much longer, maybe not even all of tonight, after a few more glasses, because what was the purpose now of keeping it?

“Why did you want to hide, dear Rye-burn?” asked Luigi Lotto through a cloud of smoke.

“I needed to be alone. To forget who I was. And I did—almost.”

“You were not afraid of Col-e-man?”

Luigi was convinced, Ray realized, that Coleman had pushed him off a boat into the lagoon. And indeed why shouldn’t Luigi think he had? “I was not afraid of him,” Ray answered.

Signor Ciardi, back in his comfortable sweater again, watched Ray as he spoke.

Luigi looked puzzled, but what might have been a sense of courtesy or a respect for Ray’s privacy kept him from saying anything else. “Life is a confusion, is it not, Paolo?”

Signor Ciardi ignored this, which he must have heard from Luigi many times before. He lifted a finger to Ray. “The police. What did they want?” An automatic resistance to police, and strength like a fortress, showed in his heavy frown.

“They just wanted to know if I came back here,” Ray said.

Luigi was drinking his Valpolicella with relish. “Dica, Rye-burn, you didn’t give Signor Col-e-man too good a…, did you?”

Again the word Ray didn’t know. “Certainly I didn’t kill him,” Ray said, smiling. He looked at Signor Ciardi then and saw, in his lifted eyebrows, in his teeth that bit his under-lip, a hint of doubt at this, though no unfriendliness at all towards Ray. “But of course the police may think so until he is found. Tomorrow I shall go to Chioggia to look for him,” Ray said.

“Chioggia?” Luigi asked.

Ray explained why he was going, because Coleman had gone fishing there once.

“Who is the Signora who is the friend of Col-e-man?” Luigi asked. From his black blouse, he pulled a bent newspaper and looked for the item.

“Inez,” Ray said. “Inez Schneider.”

“You know her?”

“Slightly.” Ray wished they would get off the subject. He sensed that they could never completely understand; with their different temperaments, they would have done things quite differently from the way he had. He sensed also that because he did not talk at great length, they thought he was concealing something. He was, of course. The lagoon story. Ray debated. Luigi was studying him, smiling a little, and Ray looked away from his eyes. If Luigi told it, if Signor Ciardi heard it, it might get at once to the police. The police might very likely pay a visit to Signor Ciardi, and perhaps they had this afternoon. “Signor Ciardi, I hope the police did not disturb you today. With the message for me. Did they ask you any questions?”

“No, no. It was only one policeman. He asked me if I was Signor Ciardi and if you were staying here.” Signor Ciardi shrugged and smiled. “Drink, Signor Garrett! Sit down!”

Ray sat down uneasily on a straight chair beside the table. He was thinking that Inez must have been told the lagoon story by Coleman absolutely as it had happened, if Coleman had told her he had killed him. Of course, Inez wouldn’t ever tell that to the police. Ray suddenly thought that Coleman had probably told Inez this after he had seen him, Ray, in the doorway of Harry’s Bar. It would be like Coleman to boast about a thing like that which wasn’t true. There was a kind of wild Colemanian humour about it. Ray smiled a little.

“That is better! He smiles!” Luigi said, watching him. Dica, Rye-burn—why do you protect Signor Col-e-man?” Luigi looked at him with an intense curiosity, his head tilted. “You say you go to Chioggia tomorrow to find him. You should find him and kill him!” he finished with a laugh.

“Oh, no, no. Too dangerous. Do you think this is Sicily?” said Signor Ciardi, making the conversation even funnier to Ray, because Signor Ciardi took Luigi seriously.

“You’re right, Luigi. Why do I protect him? Luigi, have you told Signor Ciardi about the night you found me in the lagoon?”

“Ah, no, signor! You asked me to keep that a secret!” Luigi clutched his shirt-front with emotion. “Did you want me to tell him?”

“I don’t care new if you tell him,” Ray said. “I just don’t want the police to knew. I thank you for not telling anyone until now, Luigi.”

His word of thanks was lost on Luigi, who was gathering himself for a splendid dramatic effort. He narrated the story in the swiftest Italian, with gestures, in his dialect which Signor Ciardi understood perfectly, though Ray caught only a quarter of it.

Signor Ciardi nodded, laughed, sobered, became anxious, then gave a chuckle and a wondering headshake as Luigi’s story poured forth.

“Then three or four nights later,” Luigi went on, and he told now of the nocturnal visit of Ray to his house on Giudecca. “The miracle of this! To see him suddenly stand before me again—at my house! He stayed with us that night…My daughter’s baby to come…We sent a messenger to you, dear Paolo…”

Luigi managed to talk for another two or three minutes.

Signor Ciardi’s mouth hung appropriately open with wondering attention.

“And now this man,” Luigi wound up, extending an arm in Ray’s direction, “persecuted by the same Col-e-man—Were you alone with him on the lagoon that night?” he asked Ray.

“Yes. In a motor-boat,” Ray said.

“You see? Now this man”—with another fling of arm—“defends this man who twice tried to kill him! Why? Just because he is your father-in-law?” Luigi demanded of Ray.

And Ray thought of the gunshot in Rome, too, but he wasn’t going to bring that up. “No, no. He is angry because his daughter killed herself. He is like a man insane,” Ray said, with a feeling of futility, yet he felt he owed it to Luigi and Signor Ciardi to explain as best he could. “And I myself was full of grief because of the death of my wife. Maybe too much grief to feel hate against Coleman. Yes, perhaps that was it.” He was staring at the scrubbed wood of the table as he spoke, then he looked up. It was easy to say it in Italian, the simple words that did not sound emotional or false, only like the simple truth. But his audience did not completely understand. “Anyway, it’s all understood now, all known—” His Italian suddenly slipped away from him. “I am sorry. I am not speaking clearly.”

“No, no, no,” Signor Ciardi assured him, patting the table gently near Ray’s forearm. “I understand you.”

“I’ll help you look for Signor Col-e-man tomorrow,” Luigi said.

Ray smiled. “Thank you, Luigi, but you have your own work to do.”

Luigi came forward, holding out his square right hand, though not for a handshake. “We’re friends, no? If you have a job, I help you. At what time tomorrow do you want to go?”

Ray saw there would be no putting him off. And maybe it was not so much because Luigi was devoted to him as because the job fascinated him. “At nine? Ten?”

“Nine o’clock. You come to my house. It’s on the way. I know a boat.”

“What boat?” Ray asked.

“It doesn’t matter. I know one. A friend.” Luigi smiled at Paolo. “We Venetians have to help each other, eh, Paolo? You want to come, too?”

“I am too fat. I walk too slowly,” Paolo said.

“You have a picture of Col-e-man? No,” Luigi said to Ray, registering disappointment in advance.

“I can get one. It was in the newspaper two days ago. I can also describe him to you. He is fifty two, a little taller than you, and heavier, almost without hair…”

20

C
oleman, on Friday, 26 November, awakened unrefreshed in his scoop-shaped bed. The bed was even worse than that at Mario’s and Filomena’s, and the mattress seemed to be stuffed with straw which had long ago become hard-packed and now had no resilience whatsoever. His underlip was thrust out from the swelling of the cut inside his mouth, and Coleman hoped he wouldn’t have to have it lanced. He pulled his lip down and looked at it in the mirror. A bright red slit it was, but without any sign of infection.

It was nine-twenty. Coleman supposed the family had been up for hours. He decided to dress and go out for a paper and a cappuccino. He was on his way to the door, when he encountered Signora Di Rienzo coming towards him with a breakfast tray on which he saw besides coffee and milk some cut pieces of bread, but no jam or butter. Of course, he had to stay and eat it, at a round dining-table with a lace square thrown over it. That was an example of the general awkwardness he found at every turn in the Di Rienzo house. His room was cold, and no one offered him any means of heating it, because it was assumed, Coleman supposed, that people were in bedrooms only to sleep, and then they were covered up. The living-room was also frigid, though a portable electric fire—which Coleman was too shy to turn on himself-was standing in it. Last evening when he wanted to use the bathroom (the toilet was there) someone had been in it, bathing. There was a fat maid who looked sixteen, and Coleman thought the Di Rienzos must be getting her free or employing her out of kindness, because she was mentally retarded. When Coleman said anything to her, she only giggled.

There was nothing in the morning papers that day about himself or Ray. He wondered what Ray was doing now, and where he was. The newspapers had not said where he was staying. Coleman wondered if the police would let Ray leave Venice, if he wanted to, or would detain him on suspicion of murder or manslaughter? Once more, Coleman wished that he had a chum who would write to the police about seeing a man rolled into a canal on Tuesday night. Then it occurred to Coleman that Ray could be looking in person for him. And if Inez had mentioned to the police that he’d been to Chioggia once fishing, the police might well come here. Or Ray might.

Coleman, on the street as these thoughts came to him, looked around quickly in the small square in which he stood, and frowned with uneasiness. The fact that there hadn’t been the smallest thing in the paper, such as that the police were still looking for him, made Coleman feel they were going to look in Chioggia, and intended to surprise him. How much had Ray talked, Coleman wondered. Coleman had not before considered that Ray might have told them about being pushed into the lagoon, or about the gun in Rome, but maybe Ray had.

Mestre, Coleman thought, Mestre on the mainland. That was the place to go to. Coleman started to go into a barbershop for a shave, but thought he had better save every lira, and that he could find Signor Di Rienzo’s shaving gear in the bathroom and make use of it. Coleman returned to the house numbered 45, which he had taken note of on leaving it, and pressed the Di Rienzo bell. He decided it would be wise to stay in all day today. Perhaps the Di Rienzos had some books.

Coleman managed his shave, and was lying on his bed reading—he had plucked up courage and asked Signora Di Rienzo if he could have an electric stove in his room, if he paid her a little extra—when at 11.30 a.m., the house began to fill with noisy children, at least ten, Coleman thought, and he opened the door slightly and looked out. Signora Di Rienzo was bringing trays of pastries to the dining-room table, and three children were squealing and chasing one another around her. The doorbell rang, long and loud, and Coleman felt sure more were arriving.

Somewhat angrily, he quit his room and walked towards the bathroom, knowing he would encounter Signora Di Rienzo or the fat maid, answering the door. He met the fat maid and asked:

“What is happening? A party for the children?”

The fat girl covered her pimply chin and mouth with one stupid hand and exploded, bent over, in giggles.

Coleman looked around for Signora Di Rienzo, and saw her emerging from the kitchen, this time carrying a large white cake with turquoise icing. “Buon giorna,” Coleman said pleasantly for the second time that day. “A birthday party?”

“Si!” she acknowledged brightly and emphatically. “The little son of my daughter is three today.” She spoke very clearly for Coleman’s benefit. “We have a party today for twenty-two children. They are not all here yet,” she added, as if she thought Coleman could hardly wait for their arrival.

Coleman nodded. “Very good. Benone,” he said, and resolved to get out of the house as soon as possible. Not that he disliked children, but the din! He refrained from asking the signora how long they were staying. “I shall be going out for lunch,” he said, and Signora Di Rienzo, who had turned from him to go back to the kitchen, acknowledged this with a preoccupied nod.

Coleman went out, sat in a bar-caffé drinking an Espresso and a glass of white wine, and tried to think how he could get his hands on some money. He was wondering also if he dared write a letter himself to the police? He thought he should try. Write it now, post it from Chioggia, then go to Mestre. Coleman got a piece of paper from the barman, cheap paper with tiny blue squares, just the thing. He could buy an envelope at a tobacconist’s. He had his ball-point pen. He sat at his table and printed in Italian:

26 November 19—

Sirs,

The night of Tuesday 23 November near the Ponte di Rialto I saw two men fighting. One man was on the ground. The other rolled him into a canal. I am sorry I was afraid to say anything before.

Respectfully,

Citizen of Venice

It had the right primitivity, Coleman thought, and one or two bits of bad spelling or grammar, he had no doubt.