North from Rome (7 page)

He wondered about the princess, who must have postponed her escape to the hills this summer, for the weather was now hot and sticky and promised worse. Why? She hadn’t run out of houses, obviously. The old Roman families (who never called
themselves Italians) didn’t usually spend the tourist months in the city. Nor did they make a habit of frequenting restaurants or cafés very much, and then usually in the late afternoon, when they’d quiz the foreigners’ parade and store up some witticisms for dinner.

“Mr. Lammiter, to what do you attribute your percipient knowledge of the Roman way of life?”

“Talk with the waiters, son. Nice long conversations with waiters and barmen, the trusted friends of the lonely traveller.”

“Waiters, Mr. Lammiter?”

“Sure. They are just waiting to tell you. Start them talking, son, and you can’t stop ’em... They’ll give you more to brood over than a carload of guidebooks. They’re all strangers here, too. Did you know that people in the Abruzzi believe in werewolves? Let me tell you about the old waiter from the Abruzzi who once slept beside a werewolf.”

Werewolf... And I never did puzzle that story out, he thought. The man had believed what he had seen with his own eyes. In the waiters’ dormitory, the young boy who had just come from the Abruzzi used to start up with a howl when the summer moon was full, while the other waiters buried their heads in the sheets to smother their breathing, and he would leap from his bed and out through the door, to return with the dawn, calm, quiet, unseeing, unhearing, already half-asleep on his feet. “A werewolf,” the older waiter had repeated. “Such things happen in my country.” It’s possible, Lammiter reflected, that the boy was simply so homesick for the mountains and forests of the Abruzzi that he’d lie awake on a hot summer night crying to himself. Italians were a regional people, their loyalty to the childhood places deep and passionate. And then there would come a moment when the
memories became unbearable, the strangled sob broke loose into a howl of despair, and he’d rush from the room where the older men (their memories now blurred by city life) were lying awake, listening to him, watching.

Now, what made me start thinking about werewolves? Surely not the princess. Nor Bertrand Whitelaw, even if he was a tortured man. What troubled him, anyway? He had the best of all his possible worlds: he was published regularly; he had acclaim—and money, too, that nice expendable stuff; he enjoyed all the prestige of a free-born Englishman and suffered none of the tribulations of the British climate. Presumably he was one of those types who didn’t need a wife, for he kept himself free from all female entanglements. So what had he to worry about? And then, Lammiter wondered, was Whitelaw’s meeting with Pirotta this morning something that had happened quite naturally: Pirotta had been here to keep an eye on Rosana as he waited for Eleanor, and Whitelaw had come strolling along and joined him? Or had it been contrived? If so, who had contrived it? Not Pirotta, Lammiter decided: Pirotta had many things on his mind, but a quiet talk with the Englishman hadn’t been one of them. In fact, Pirotta had evaded any chance of a tete-a-tete with considerable skill. Pirotta, Lammiter thought now, was the kind of man who usually got what he wanted.

Then who, if he were innocent of all Rosana’s innuendoes, why had he sat at that table with Lammiter? The American imagined himself in Pirotta’s place: a difficult moment with the princess heaving her variety of monkey wrench into the works. But I, Lammiter thought now, I’d have risen, taken Eleanor’s arm, made a firm excuse (and no one was going to refuse any lovers’ excuses) and left everyone to gossip to their tongues’
content. Instead, Pirotta had sat on, had listened and watched. He had been extremely polite. Almost friendly. Disarming, was the better word. Why?

Lammiter’s lips tightened and he quickened his pace. He knew one thing. He would like to spend half an hour with Bunny Camden. Bunny, now one of the naval attachés at the Embassy—liaison work with visiting NATO specialists, Bunny had explained vaguely when they had met, by accident, outside the Embassy gates three days ago—had the kind of mind that had been trained to add up the facts and subtract the fiction from a puzzling situation. And Bunny Camden was a friend, a word that Lammiter didn’t bestow lightly. Even if they only met at the oddest intervals and in the strangest ways—and that, to Lammiter, was part of the amusing aspect of their friendship which kept it alive through all the gaps between their meetings—Camden was someone dependable.

He remembered Bunny’s face when they had met outside the Embassy. His own had been just as delightful and amazed— for the last time he had seen Bunny had been in Korea, six years ago. Bunny was one of those Intelligence officers who had decided to stay in the service (in Bunny’s case, it was the Marine Corps), and now—a little to his surprise and not altogether to his fancy—he had been promoted to a quasi-diplomatic but completely straightforward job in the Mediterranean area. “Strictly legitimate, now,” Bunny had said, talking hard to cover Lammiter’s embarrassment at the meeting, for once the delight and amazement were over, Lammiter was too conscious of the fact that he had been caught hovering around the Embassy gates, hoping to intercept Eleanor on her way out to lunch. Not that either Bunny or the friend with him

(quite definitely a friend, a classics professor called Ferris from Pennsylvania, who was working at the American Academy in Rome for the summer) could have had any idea why they had found Lammiter waiting at the entrance to the Embassy’s driveway; but those who loitered were always sensitive about being discovered. Especially when the discoverer was someone like Bunny Camden. “Hi, there!” he had said, catching Lammiter by the arm. “And dammit if it isn’t. Thought I knew that old bullet head and standout ears. What are you plotting now? If it’s arsenic poisoning we’ve already had it.” And so Bunny could introduce and squash the current sensation about the Ambassadress and her bedroom ceiling, before he branched on to NATO, a prospective trip to Naples, and then suggested a party when he returned. “We must all get together,” he said, including Professor Ferris in his smile, and Lammiter had agreed. Then they parted, and Lammiter hadn’t thought much about Bunny Camden’s old job or qualifications until Rosana had questioned him this morning. Now that he thought about it, Bunny Camden was just the type that Rosana needed.

Lammiter had reached the restaurant’s entrance. He happened to glance back as he was about to enter its doorway. The heat was stifling now. The street was empty: the siesta hour had begun. Except for one man, who had halted near a tree on the opposite side of the street and was busily lighting a cigarette. Lammiter entered, paused, glanced back again over his shoulder. Yes, the man was looking in this direction. Lammiter went into the cool dark room. I saw that man at Doney’s, he suddenly thought; just as I was leaving, I noticed him—a man of medium height and construction, thick-haired, dark, bareheaded like most younger Italians, wearing a blue
cotton suit and a white shirt such as a thousand bank clerks and office workers wore. Except that this one did not carry the usual thin black brief case, which seemed to be a necessary part of a white-collar worker’s dress, the badge of his education.

The restaurant was almost empty. He chose a small table under the large ceiling fan. He agreed with the waiter that he was late, tactfully rejected a variety of pasta and hot bean soup, chose chicken
cacciatore
, to be followed by Bel Paese and fresh fruit. “Nothing to begin with, signore, nothing?” The waiter was desolated: like all Italians he enjoyed seeing people eat. But he brought a nicely chilled bottle of Soave Verona, and as he uncorked it, they talked about the vineyard from which it came: Romeo and Juliet territory, east of Verona. The waiter, Lammiter guessed, came from that part of the country, too. (If he had been a Tuscan, Lammiter would have now been drinking Chianti.)

It was a pleasant little exchange, darkened by the shadow of another possible customer, silhouetted briefly against the sunlight outside as he pulled at the door’s beaded screen to peer indoors for a moment. The screen fell together again with a shimmer of sweet sound, as the man turned away. The restaurant owner, a stout motherly woman whose quick business sense missed nothing, called sharply to the waiter to take the new customer’s order. “Outside, outside!” she indicated impatiently, so the man in the blue suit must have chosen one of the little tables on the sidewalk. He obviously preferred a table under the hot awning to the emptiness of a room. The waiter halted his graphic description of the two small pointed hills, lying like a maiden’s breasts among the vineyards, where the Capulets and the Montagues had built their country castles.

Lammiter sipped the cool white wine, slowly. I wish I had never noticed that man outside, or the brief case he didn’t carry, or the cigarette he lit across the street but had thrown away before he looked into this room. I wish I had been left to enjoy my chicken
cacciatore
without the unpleasant thought that I’m being followed.

He took up
Oggi
and pretended to concentrate on his Italian lesson for today. He smoothed out the small wad of paper which Rosana had given him and held it closely against the magazine’s printed page. All it contained was a telephone number, followed by a brief phrase:
Before half-past four?
The question mark was a politeness: he wasn’t being told, he was being asked. He could almost hear Rosana’s voice adding, “Please listen to me, please...”

He slipped the piece of paper quietly back into his pocket. He kept his eyes fixed on
Oggi
’s front page, but his mind was trying to decide on the most discreet way of telephoning. He wished he had had more training in this kind of work. Back in the army, he had taken a course on ju-jitsu and eye-gouging, like everyone else in his branch of the service. He had also learned to treat elementary ciphers with respect, and deal with maps. But that was all. His friends would never believe that, and they’d be amazed at the predicament in which he now found himself. For although he had always told them the truth—his actual experience in intelligence work had been boringly limited to routine security measures, nothing remarkable—everyone thought he was being modest about his work in G2. The more he insisted that he was on the lowest rung of the ladder, if he could be said even to have one foot half-way towards it, the more they nodded and fell into a discreet but respectful silence.

It was funny, though, to have this misinterpretation of his army service catch up with him in Rome, of all places. He could probably thank Eleanor for that: when Pirotta had questioned her about him, she had instinctively made him out to be a pretty important type. That’s the way women were: anyone they had known well must be exceptional, brilliant. It depressed him now to think how Eleanor might have talked about him. He had rarely felt more depressed. It could have been partly hunger, though, for he began to feel more cheerful when a steaming dish of chicken and vegetables was uncovered before him.

By the time he had reached the stage of peeling a peach, he had decided to telephone Bunny Camden and arrange a quick meeting. There was a telephone at Madam’s little desk, but that was too near the doorway and any attentive ears. Besides, it might not be wise to call Bunny at the Embassy; better to get in touch with him indirectly, better to play all this in an over-cautious way, better to look ignorant, ineffective, and undangerous. The men who frightened Rosana, her so-called “friends”, were just a little too quick in their suspicions. Better, much better, if he gave them no cause to speculate about him, to worry over his actions. And so, no direct telephone call to Bunny Camden. What was the name of the classics professor— the one who had been visiting Bunny at the Embassy three days ago? Ferris. Carl Ferris, now at the American Academy. That was a possibility, in fact the only one he could think of. A visit to the American Academy on the Janiculum Hill was an innocent way to spend the next hour. Quickly, he drank the small cup of bitter coffee, paid his bill, made the correct
goodbye with its necessary compliments, and braced himself to see the blue suit sweltering outside. But the man had gone. Perhaps Lammiter had eaten too slowly, or the sidewalk table had been too hot, or the man had simply resigned his job in disgust. Anyway, Lammiter enjoyed his walk to the corner of the Via Vittorio Veneto, where he’d find the bus that would take him across the Tiber to the Janiculum. It was only on the bus itself, almost empty at this time of day, that he realised that the man in the blue suit had probably only given way to another. He looked carefully at the three passengers who had got on board along with him. Then he began to smile. “This has gone far enough,” he told himself, thankful that he still had enough perspective left to see the ridiculous. “Half of Rome is
not
following you. Stop worrying, stop imagining. Just go to the Academy, find out from the porter where Carl Ferris is staying, and then move on to the next item on your little list.”

Ferris received him with some wonder on his thin tanned face. But he was both cordial and pleased to see Lammiter, even at this odd calling-hour. “Come in,” he said. He was hastily dressed in shirt and trousers. “Sorry, we were just finishing a siesta.” He looked a little embarrassed. He raised his voice to keep his wife safely wherever she was. “Okay, honey. Just a friend. We’ll be in the living-room.”

“I shan’t keep you, long,” Lammiter said, following Ferris from the little hallway into a high-ceilinged room. “And I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t realise what time it was.” His watch told him it was half-past three.

“We’ve been here long enough to adopt the Roman habits,” Ferris explained with a grin.

“All of them?”

They both laughed. Lammiter was looking round the room with interest. It was furnished in the usual Italian way, but Ferris had added a lot of his own things: books, as you’d expect, plenty of books, on archaeology, Etruscan art, history; large photographs of columned temples, a sculptured torso, a typewriter, and a desk piled with note-books and manuscript.