by Ngaio Marsh
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘All are agreed that she is a little mad.’
‘Ah.’
It appeared, the Questore continued, that for an unspecified time, years perhaps, Mailer had eluded Violetta, but getting wind of his being first in Naples and then in Rome she had chased him, finally establishing herself on the postcard beat outside S. Tommaso.
‘I have spoken with this Irish Dominican,’ said the Questore. ‘It is nonsense for him to say that no one could escape their vigilance going or coming from the places below. It is ridiculous. They sell their cards, they sell their rosaries, they add up their cashes, they visit their stores, they sleep, they talk, they say their prayers. A man of Mailer’s talents would have no difficulty.’
‘What about a woman of Violetta’s talents?’
‘Ah-ah. You speak of the shadow on the wall? While I am sure that she could elude the vigilance of these gentlemen, I doubt if she did so. And if she did, my dear colleague, where was she when they made their search? I have no doubt the search was thorough: of that they are perfectly capable and the lighting is most adequate. They know the terrain. They have been excavating there for a century. No, no, I am persuaded that Mailer recognized you and, being aware of your most formidable and brilliant record in this field, took alarm and fled.’
‘Um,’ Alleyn said, ‘I’m not at all sure I struck terror in that undelicious breast. Mailer seemed to me to be, in a subfusc sort of way, cocksure. Not to say gloating!’
‘Scusi? Subfusc?’
‘Dim. It doesn’t matter. Do you mean you think that at some moment when we were groping about in the underworld, recognition came upon him like a thunder-clap and he fled. There and then?’
‘We shall see, we shall see. I spread my net. The airports, the wharves, the stazioni.’
Alleyn hurriedly congratulated him on all this expedition.
‘But nevertheless,’ Valdarno said, ‘we make our examination of these premises. Tomorrow morning. It is, of course, not my practice personally to supervise such matters. Normally if a case is considered important enough one of my subordinates reports to one of my immediate staff.’
‘I assure you, Signor Questore—’
‘But in this case, where so much may be involved, where there are international slantings and above all, where so distinguished a colleague does us the honour—Ecco!’
Alleyn made appropriate noises and wondered how great a bore Valdarno really thought him.
‘So tomorrow,’ the Questore summed up. ‘I leave my desk and I take the fields. With my subordinates. And you accompany us, is it not?’
‘Thank you. I shall be glad to come.’
They whipped through the routine of valedictory compliments and hung up their receivers.
Alleyn bathed and dressed and wrote a letter to his wife.
‘—so you see it’s taken an odd turning. I’m supposed to be nudging up to Mailer with the object of finding out just how vital a cog he is in the heroin game and whether, through him, I can get a line on his bosses. My original ploy was to be the oblique approach, the hint, the veiled offer, the striking-up of an alliance and finally the dumping upon him of a tidy load of incriminating evidence and so catching him red-handed. And now, damn him, he disappears and I’m left with a collection of people some of whom may or may not be his fall guys. Consider, if you’re not fast asleep by this time, my darling—consider the situation.
‘To launch this Il Cicerone business, Mailer must have had access to very considerable funds. You can’t do this sort of thing on HP. The cars, the drivers, the food and, above all, the quite phenomenal arrangement that seems to have been made with the Gioconda Restaurant who as a general rule would look upon package diners, on however exalted a scale, as the Caprice would look upon coachloads from the Potteries. It appears that we dine à la carte at the best tables and drink distilled gold if they’ve got it in their cellars. And Mailer pays all. Well, I know we’ve paid him through the nose but that’s another story.
‘And then—this lot. This lot who’ve stumped up fifty quid each for the pleasure of hearing Barnaby Grant, with evident reluctance, read aloud, very badly, from his own best-seller. Next attraction: a walk round an ancient monument that’s open to the public followed by tea or whatever they had on the Palatine Hill, and dinner at the Gioconda which could set them back anything up to £20 a nob if they went under their own steam, and then on to a further entertainment coyly unspecified in the brochure. Probably a very expensive strip and champagne show with possibly a pot party to follow. Or worse.
‘All right. Take Lady B. She’s rolling in money. One of her husbands was an Italian millionaire and she may have alimony paid out to her in Rome. She could obviously afford this show. She’s rich, raffish, pretty bloody awful and all for la dolce vita. No doubt she’s paying for the egregious Kenneth who looks to me very much as if he’s hooked and may therefore turn out to be a useful lead into Mailer’s activities. I gather from something young Sophy Jason, who is an enchanter, let fall that she just suddenly decided to blue fifty quid out of the Italian funds available to her through business connections.
‘The Van der Veghels are a couple of grotesques, and interest me enormously as I think they would you. Grotesques? No, not the right word. We both go for the Etruscan thing, don’t we? Remember? Remember that male head, bearded and crowned with leaves in the Museo Barraco? Remember the smiling mouth, shaped, now I come to think of it, exactly like a bird in flight with the thin moustache repeating and exaggerating the curve of the lips? And the wide open eyes? What an amusing face, we thought, but it is perhaps atrociously cruel? I assure you, a portrait of the Baron Van der Veghel. But against this remember the tender and fulfilled couple of that sarcophagus in the Villa Giulia: the absolute in satisfied love? Recall the protective hand of the man. The extraordinary marital likeness, the suggestion of heaviness in the shoulders, the sense of completion. Portrait, I promise you, of the Van der Veghels. They may be Dutch by birth but blow me down flat if they’re not Etruscan by descent. Or nature. Or something.
‘The overall effect of the Van der Vs is, however, farcical. There’s always an easy laugh to be won from broken English or, come to that, fractured French. Remember the de Maupassant story about an English girl who became increasingly boring as her command of French improved? The Baroness’s lapses are always, as I’m sure beastly Kenneth would say, good for a giggle.
‘I suppose their presence in the set-up is the least surprising. They’re avid and merciless sightseers and photographers and their fund of enthusiasm is inexhaustible. Whether one can say the same of their fund of cash is anyone’s guess.
‘Major Sweet. Now, why has Major Sweet coughed up fifty quid for this sort of jaunt? On the face of it he’s a caricature, a museum piece: the sort of Indian Army officer who, thirty years ago, was fair game for an easy laugh shouting Qui-hi at a native servant and saying By George, what? I find it unconvincing. He’s bad-tempered, I should imagine pretty hard on the bottle, and amorous. As the young Sophy found to her discomfort in the Mithraic underworld. He’s violently, aggressively and confusingly anti-religious. Religion of any kind. He lumps them all together, turns purple in the face and, deriving his impenetrable argument from the sacraments, pagan or Christian, says the whole lot are based on cannibalism. Why should he pay through the nose to explore two levels of Christianity and a Mithraic basement? Just to have a good jeer?
‘Finally—Barnaby Grant. To my notion, the prime puzzle of the party. Without more ado I would say, quite seriously, that I can think of no earthly reason why he should subject himself to what is clearly the most exquisite torture, unless Mailer put the screws on him in another sense. Blackmail. It might well be one of Mailer’s subsidiary interests and can tie in very comfortably with the drug racket.
‘And as a bonne-bouche we have the antic Violetta. If you could have seen Violetta with her “Cartoline—posta-cardas” and harpy’s face, foaming away under a black headpiece! Il
Questore Valdarno can shrug her off with remarks about short-tempered postcard ladies but never trust me again if that one isn’t possessed of a fury. As for Sophy Jason saying it was Violetta’s shadow she saw on the wall by the stone sarcophagus, I think it’s odds-on she’s right. I saw it, too. It was distorted but there was the tray, the shawl and the hitched up shoulder. Clear as mud or my name’s Van der Veghel.
‘And I think Valdarno’s right when he says Mailer could have nipped out under the noses of Father Denys and his boys. There’s plenty of cover.
‘But without any justification for saying so, I don’t believe he did.
‘On the same premise Violetta could have nipped in and I do believe she did. And out again?
‘That too is another story.
‘It’s now a quarter past eight of a very warm evening. I am leaving my five-star room for the five-star cocktail bar where I rather hope to hob-nob with the Lady B. and her nephew. From there we shall be driven to La Gioconda where we shall perhaps eat quails stuffed with pâté and washed down with molten gold. At Mailer’s expense? Well—allegedly.
‘More of the continuing story of Anyone’s Guess tomorrow. Bless you, my dear love, My—’
CHAPTER 5
Evening Out
They had dined by candlelight at a long table in the garden. Between leafy branches of trees and far below, shone Rome. It might have been its own model, laid out on a black velvet cloth and so cunningly illuminated that its great monuments glowed in their setting like jewels. At night the Colosseum is lit from within and at this distance it was no longer a ruin but seemed so much alive that a mob might have spewed through its multiple doorways, rank with the stench of the circus. It was incredibly beautiful.
Not far from their table was a fountain, moved there at some distant time from its original site down in Old Rome. At its centre lolled Neptune: smooth, luxurious and naked, idly fingering the long ringlets of his beard. He was supported by tritons and all kinds of monsters. They spouted, jetted and dribbled into basins that overflowed into each other making curtains of water-drops. The smell of water, earth and plants mingled with cigar-smoke, coffee, cosmetics and fumes of wine.
‘What is all this like?’ Sophy asked Grant. ‘All this magnificence? I’ve never read Ouida, have you? And anyway this is not at all Victorian.’
‘How about Antonioni?’
‘Well—all right. But not La Dolce Vita. I don’t think I get any whiffs of social corruption, really. Do you?’
He didn’t answer and she looked across the table at Alleyn. ‘Do you?’ she asked him.
Alleyn’s glance fell upon Lady Braceley’s arm, lying as if discarded on the table. Emeralds, rubies and diamonds encircled that flaccid member, veins stood out on the back of the hand, her rings had slipped to one side and her talons—does she have false ones, he wondered, and saw that she did—made little dents in the table-cloth.
‘Do you,’ Sophy persisted, ‘sniff the decadent society?’ and then, evidently aware of Lady Braceley and perhaps of Kenneth, she blushed.
Sophy had the kind of complexion Jacobean poets would have praised, a rose-blush that mounted and ebbed very delicately under her skin. Her eyes shone in the candlelight and there was a nimbus round her hair. She was as fresh as a daisy.
‘At the moment,’ Alleyn said, smiling at her, ‘not at all.’
‘Good!’ said Sophy and turned to Grant. ‘Then I needn’t feel apologetic about enjoying myself.’
‘Are you liking it so much? Yes, I see you are. But why should you apologize?’
‘Oh—I don’t know—a streak of puritan, I suppose. My grandpa Jason was a Quaker.’
‘Does he often put in an appearance?’
‘Not all that often but I thought he lurked just now. “Vanity, vanity,” you know, and the bit about has one any right to buy such a sumptuous evening, the world being as it is.’
‘Meaning you should have spent the cash on doing good?’
‘Yes. Or not spent it at all. Grandpapa Jason was also a banker.’
‘Tell him to buzz off. You’ve done a power of good.’
‘I? How? Impossible.’
‘You’ve turned what promised to be a perfectly hellish evening into—‘ Grant stopped short, waited for a moment and then leant towards her.
‘Yes, well, all right,’ Sophy said in a hurry. ‘You needn’t bother about that. Silly conversation.’
‘—into something almost tolerable,’ Grant said.
On the other side of the table Alleyn thought: No doubt she’s very well able to take care of herself but I wouldn’t have thought her one of the easy-come easy-go sort. On the contrary. I hope Grant isn’t a predatory animal. He’s a god in her world and a romantic-looking, ravaged sort of god, at that. Just the job to fill in the Roman foreground. Twenty years her senior, probably. He’s made her blush again.
Major Sweet, at the head of the table, had ordered himself yet another cognac but nobody followed his example. The champagne bottles were upside down in the coolers and the coffee cups had been removed. Giovanni appeared, spoke to the waiter and retired with him, presumably to pay the bill. The maître-d’hôtel, Marco, swept masterfully down upon them and not for the first time inclined, smiled and murmured over Lady Braceley. She fished in her golden reticule and when he kissed her hand, left something in his own. He repeated this treatment with subtle modulations, on the Baroness, worked in a gay salute to Sophy, included the whole table in a comprehensive bow and swept away with the slightest possible oscillation of his hips.
‘Quite a dish, isn’t he?’ Kenneth said to his aunt.
‘Darling,’ she replied, ‘the things you say! Isn’t he too frightful, Major?’ She called up the table to Major Sweet, who was staring congestedly over the top of his brandy glass at Sophy.
‘What!’ he said. ‘Oh. Ghastly.’
Kenneth laughed shrilly. ‘When do we move?’ he asked at large. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘Now we are gay,’ cried the Baroness. ‘Now we dance and all is hip and nightlife. To the Cosmo, is it not?’
‘Ah-ha, ah-ha, to the Cosmo!’ the Baron echoed.
They beamed round the table.
‘In that case,’ Lady Braceley said, picking up her purse and gloves, ‘I’m for the ritirata.’
The waiter was there in a flash to drop her fur over her shoulders.
‘I too, I too,’ said the Baroness and Sophy followed them out.
The Major finished his brandy. ‘The Cosmo, eh?’ he said. ‘Trip a jolly old measure, what? Well, better make a move, I suppose—
‘No hurry,’ Kenneth said. ‘Auntie’s best official clocking in la ritirata is nineteen minutes and that was when she had a plane to catch.’
The Baron was in deep consultation about tipping with the Major and Grant. Their waiter stood near the door into the restaurant. Alleyn strolled over to him.
‘That was a most excellent dinner,’ he said and overtipped just enough to consolidate his follow-on. ‘I wonder if I may have a word with Signor Marco? I have a personal introduction to him which I would like to present. Here it is.’
It was Valdarno’s card with an appropriate message written on the back. The waiter took a quick look at it and another at Alleyn and said he would see if the great man was in his office.
‘I expect he is,’ Alleyn said cheerfully. ‘Shall we go there?’
The waiter, using his restaurant walk, hurried through the foyer into a smaller vestibule where he begged Alleyn to wait. He tapped discreetly at a door marked Il direttore, murmured something to the elegant young man who opened it and handed in the card. The young man was gone for a very short time and returned with a winning smile and an invitation to enter. The waiter scuttled off.
Marco’s office was small but sumptuous. He advanced upon Alleyn with ceremony and a certain air of guarded cordiality.
‘Good evening, again, Mr—’ he glanced at the card. ‘Mr Alleyn. I hope you have dined pleasantly.’ His English w
as extremely good. Alleyn decided to be incapable of Italian.
‘Delightfully,’ he said. ‘A superb evening. Il Questore Valdarno told me of your genius and how right he was.’
‘I am glad.’
‘I think I remember you some years ago in London, Signore. At the Primavera.’
‘Ah! My “salad days”. Thirty-one different salads, in fact. Perhaps five are worth remembering. Can I do anything for you, Mr Alleyn? Any friend of Il Questore Valdarno—?’
Alleyn made a quick decision.
‘You can, indeed,’ he said. ‘If you will be so kind. I think I should tell you, Signore, that I am a colleague of the Questore’s and that I am not in Rome entirely for pleasure. May I—’
He produced his own official card. Marco held it in his beautifully manicured fingers and for five seconds was perfectly motionless. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Of course. I should have remembered from my London days. There was a cause célèbre. Your most distinguished career. And then—surely—your brother—he was Ambassador in Rome, I think, some time ago?’
Alleyn normally reacted to remarks about his brother George by falling over backwards rather than profit by their relationship. He bowed and pressed on.
‘This is an affair of some delicacy,’ he said and felt as if he spoke out of an Edwardian thriller or, indeed, from No. 221B Baker Street. ‘I assure you I wouldn’t have troubled you if I could have avoided doing so. The fact is Il Questore Valdarno and I find ourselves in something of a quandary. It’s come to our knowledge that a certain unsavoury character whose identity has hitherto been unknown is living in Rome. He has formed associations with people of the highest standing who would be appalled if they knew about him. As I think you yourself would be.’
‘I? Do you suggest—?’
‘He is one of your patrons. We think it proper that you should be warned.’
