North from Rome (27 page)

“Yes,” Lammiter said gloomily. “If we only remember all the lessons and not just the ones that suit our theories.”

“Here, take this upstairs with you.” Joe pulled off his crumpled blue jacket, stuffed his tie into his pocket, and handed them over. He rolled up his sleeves, unbuttoned his shirt at the neck. “The room at the left is yours. Don’t leave it. I’ll be back soon. Got to see some friends.”

“I’m glad to hear they do exist,” Lammiter said, still worried.

“Sure,” Joe said cheerfully, “sure we have friends. Get some sleep and you’ll feel better.” He chased away some chickens which had come exploring from the yard into the kitchen, and then shut the wide door behind him.

* * *

Upstairs, Lammiter entered a small dark room. He dropped his suitcase, and Joe’s jacket on top of it. Quickly, he went over to the solitary window and half-opened its shutters, letting the early morning sun stream in; so this room faced east towards the wall of the town, while the kitchen downstairs had opened to the west. People around here, whatever their politics, were unanimously against windows, or perhaps solid walls gave shelter from cold winter winds and the blaze of summer. He pushed the shutters farther apart, cautiously, and looked out.

From this height, he had a good view of the road as it presented itself before the entrance to the town. From here, too, he could see a wider sweep, of the wall, and the rippling tiled roofs, and even—where the hill rose inside the walls—the top-floor windows of the houses, with shutters now opened and balloons of bedding already billowing on the sills to air. To his right, there were trees, perhaps a large park, standing just within the walls where they curved round out of sight. But he couldn’t see any sign of Joe.

Down at the gate, two women in light cotton dresses balanced loads of washing on their heads while they exchanged a word and a laugh with a man holding a horse by a rope halter. An old woman in black, long-skirted, came plodding up the road. But there was no sign of Joe.

His eyes searched the olive grove that stretched beneath him. It ran, to his right, along the, wall for some distance and then gave way to a field and trees, trees that matched those over the wall where the park lay. Was there some other entrance over
there to the town? Or was the park a large private garden? Was that where the princess lived?

He looked back again at the main gate. The women were leaving, taking a rough trail to the left that must lead to other farms outside the walls. The horse was being led into the town, clattering over the solid paving stones. The old woman was hurrying out of sight. From one tower, a bell sounded, gentle and melancholy. And there were other sounds, too: the rattle of iron wheels over rough stone; occasional voices—distant and merging; someone calling out; someone laughing; and from the grass under the olive trees, the first chitter of insects, tuning up for their noonday concert. And then, far over to the right in the field with the trees, he saw a man herding two goats.

In spite of himself, Lammiter laughed. It was Joe. Where did he get the goats? Lammiter wondered. Perhaps he had found them tethered among the olive trees, and had taken them along to give local colour to his walk across the open field. He was herding them towards the wood which lay outside the park. So that was the direction where the princess’s house lay?

Satisfied, Lammiter turned away from the window. There wasn’t much in the room—a narrow bed with a mattress that looked as old as the town itself, a low carved chest, a brown-spotted piece of looking-glass, and some wooden pegs on the wall. Two flies had come in from the open window, large black country flies circling slowly around the naked electric bulb hung from the ceiling.

All right, he thought, I’ll play it Joe’s way. I’ll stay here and count those damned flies.

But first, he investigated the other room upstairs. It was innocent enough. It was used now as a storeroom. And then he
stood at the top of the stairs, listening. Again he fought down the impulse to follow Joe. He went back into his room and closed the door. He took off his jacket, loosened his tie, sat down on the mattress, and lit a cigarette. Sleep? He couldn’t. He had too many thoughts pounding through his brain. Play it Joe’s way, he told himself: sweat this one out. But if ever he had to learn how much he loved Eleanor, this was a hard way to do it. He ground out the cigarette under his heel. If I meet Pirotta, I’ll kill him, he thought suddenly.

He stretched out on the bed and counted the flies—five now—and watched the pale sunlight deepen, and listened to the cicadas beneath his window. Sewing machines, he thought drowsily, sewing machines stitching away, stitching, stitching...

He heard a distant voice saying, “Bill.” A hand on his shoulder. He came quickly out of sleep, sitting upright so suddenly, making such a wild grab for the hand on his shoulder, that Rosana cried out. He stared at her unbelievingly.

“Yes, it’s Rosana,” she said. “I did try to wake you gently.”

“Eleanor?”

“No, she isn’t here. She’s at the Casa Grande. She’s all right, Bill. So far, she’s all right. She’s in a locked room upstairs—one of the princess’s own rooms.” She looked at his face. “She’s all right. She’s by herself.”

He suddenly noticed he still grasped her wrist. He let it go. “Sorry.” He glanced at his watch. He had been asleep for almost an hour, a deep dreamless wonderful hour. “How did you get here?”

“Giuseppe sent for me.”

“Joe?”

“He came in by the gate at the woods, where the gamekeeper’s house stands. Jacopone—that’s the gamekeeper—came up to the big house and passed the word to Anna-Maria to get me downstairs.” She touched her very loose cotton dress of pink and green checks. “How do you like it? Anna-Maria lent it to me. She’s Alberto’s wife.”

“How many servants are at the big house?”

“Just Alberto and Anna-Maria meanwhile. The princess always brings the others with her from Rome.”

“And just Jacopone at the gamekeeper’s cottage?”

She nodded. “Two old men and one old woman,” she said as if she had guessed his thoughts. “Not much help, except in good will.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes. The princess telephoned and gave Alberto her orders. She woke the operator at three o’clock in the morning. It was quite a sensation. But so were the cars.”

She moved to the window, looked out, and then drew the shutters closer together.

“Where’s Joe? Tethering goats back into place?”

She sat down on the wooden chest. “He was going to follow me, I thought.”

“Ready for rearguard action?” Or Joe might have other friends to visit. “Well—I’m glad you’re out of that place, Rosana,” he said awkwardly. “What has been happening up there?”

“I’ll tell you when Giuseppe arrives. He will have to hear most of it, too. I only saw him for a minute at Jacopone’s cottage.” She looked down at her hands. And she began to cry, very quietly, just sitting there on the chest in her shapeless dress, her head bent, the tears slowly running down her pale
cheeks. She didn’t want him to notice, so he sat still and looked now at the floor.

She said, “So they killed Tony Brewster.” And she took a long shuddering breath. But she had stopped crying. “And Joe told me that Sabatini—” She paused. “Could it be possible? Could he have betrayed us?”

“It’s possible.” He remembered Joe’s words last night. “If he didn’t, then he is in hiding—if he’s still alive. First, your brother. Then Brewster. Who’s next?”

“Not any more of us, if I can help it,” she said with a sudden burst of cold anger.

Lammiter said nothing to that. He had his doubts.

“Don’t look so worried, Bill,” she said gently. “No one saw me come here. You see, I lived at the Casa Grande for almost two months after I came back from America. The princess was the only one of my mother’s old friends who stood beside me when my brother died so—so badly. The princess knows what disgrace is—her only brother blew his brains out when he saw what his politics had done to Italy—oh well, anyway—she sent me away from Rome until the scandal died down, and I stayed up here. I know every inch of the house and the garden and the woods outside the walls; my only friends were Alberto and Anna-Maria and Jacopone. So this morning—it was easy. You see?”

She rose and went over to the window again. She turned back. She moved around restless, not sitting down.

“It was here,” she said, “in this room, that I first met Bevilacqua.”

“Joe brought you here to meet him?”

“Oh no! It was I who persuaded Giuseppe to join Brewster’s group. He was to be my watchdog. And he has been very good. Only—I’m difficult to watch, I think.”

Indeed you are, Lammiter thought.

“It was Jacopone who brought me here,” she went on. “You see, Bevilacqua had heard that the men with whom my brother had been connected were going to ask me to join them. Oh—not an important job, of course. I was just to be a sort of secretary.” She was embarrassed.

These friends of her brother’s had created a job for her, Lammiter thought. “Very considerate of them.”

She missed the irony in his words. Earnestly she explained, “No—just very clever. I had no money, I needed a job, and then— if I ever did learn more about my brother’s death, I wouldn’t be free to speak out. I had become one of them. You see?”

“And Bevilacqua asked you to accept the job, if it were offered to you.”

She nodded.

“That was a hard assignment,” he said quietly.

She nodded again. She hesitated, and then she declined to finish her story. “The job was offered to me. And I took it. And I found that I was Luigi Pirotta’s secretary.”

She paused again. But Lammiter, watching her in silence and sympathy, seemed to give her courage. “That was a shock,” she admitted. “I knew he was my brother’s friend, but I hadn’t known he was in the same horrible business. But then I persuaded myself that he had been drawn into that mess just like my brother Mario. Because—” she swung round lightly to face him, her dark eyes almost pleading with him to understand her “—if I ever admitted that Luigi Pirotta knew what he was doing, had chosen such a way to live, then I would have to condemn Mario, too. You see?”

Lammiter saw.

“I kept hoping that Luigi, like my brother, was only a— a—”

“A front man, dupe,” he finished for her.

She said, “Tony was absolutely right: I trusted too easily. Because I—well, perhaps I was a snob. Our families—” She looked away. She said proudly, “Luigi and Mario never were educated to behave like that.”

“Didn’t Pirotta’s father—the man who blew his brains out—didn’t he go off the tracks?” He had spoken bluntly, purposefully. And it had its effect. She dropped her half-sad, half-excusing little piece of snobbery, and became the girl Brewster had liked.

“Yes,” she flashed back at him. “But that was open politics. He chose Mussolini’s side. He was wrong. But he did nothing. He didn’t deceive people, pretending one thing, doing another.”

“Not like his son, dear Luigi.”

She looked at him. “No,” she admitted, “not like his son.” She moved back to the window. “What is delaying Giuseppe?”

“You always call him Giuseppe.”

“Do I? Perhaps I prefer Giuseppe to Joe.”

“How did you come to choose him as your—your watchdog?”

“He drove for my brother. I couldn’t afford a chauffeur, so I recommended him to the princess, who needed one. Then, later, when Bevilacqua introduced me in Rome to Tony Brewster—well, Giuseppe seemed just the kind of man Tony needed. And he was devoted to my brother. Giuseppe is a Sicilian, you know. He wanted to find my brother’s murderer as much as I did. So I—recruited him.” She tried to smile, as if she were happy about one wise accomplishment in her life. “That’s the technical word, I believe.”

Poor Rosana, Lammiter thought, caught in such a web of disaster that not even those who are loyal to you have been able to tell you the whole truth. He looked at her beautiful face, strained, white, pathetic. She had changed in the last twenty-four hours: she had lost her self-confidence; something had crushed hope out of her heart. He felt a sudden cold shiver touch the nape of his neck. “Rosana,” he said softly, “when all this is over—”

“Over?” she broke in. “But when? And how?”

“When it’s all over,” he said, with an optimism he did not feel, “then—” He stopped, listening to the footsteps entering the room below, and rose.

“It’s Giuseppe,” Rosana said.

Joe came upstairs whistling. Was it an act? Lammiter wondered: Joe liked to encourage people. Here were two who needed all Joe could give.

“Had a nice walk?” he asked Joe as he entered the room. Joe was more like a peasant than ever. He had borrowed a battered felt hat, and stuck a field poppy’s frail stalk through its grease-stained ribbon.

“Had a nice talk?” Joe said with a grin. He took off his hat and turned to Rosana. “The signorina got here without trouble?”

“Of course,” she told him severely. “We were beginning to worry about you, Giuseppe.”

Lammiter looked at them in surprise. Then he remembered that Rosana believed that
she
was in authority. “Look,” he said, “let’s keep everything simple. Joe—Rosana—Bill. We’re in this together.” He gave them both a smile. There was a brief gleam of answering amusement in Joe’s eyes. “Joe was on the
scene last night more than either of us,” he told Rosana. “So he has a better idea of how things stand. I think we’ll elect him boss around here. We’ll play it his way.”

Rosana seemed a little startled, and then a little doubtful as she studied Joe’s furrowed brow and ingenuous grin.

“He can out-think both of us put together,” Lammiter answered her thoughts. “He’s a Sicilian, isn’t he?”

Rosana smiled suddenly. “He’s a Saracen, you mean. He will have us storming the castle with knives out. Thumb on the hilt, and strike up. Wasn’t that your father’s last piece of advice to you, Giusep—Joe?” But she settled herself on the wooden bench, and her smile was no longer teasing. “All right. What do we do?” She looked at Joe.

“First of all, we’ll learn a few facts. Who drove you here in Pirotta’s car?”

Rosana’s eyes opened still more at the brisk voice. But she obeyed it. “A mechanic—one of the men at the garage— Poggioli’s—where Pirotta has repairs done. He knows nothing. He was just hired to do a job. He is following instructions, though. He wouldn’t let me out of the car, except at one café just beyond Terni; and then he came with me to the lavatory, and waited outside, and took me back to the car, so I couldn’t telephone anyone.”