The Etruscan Net

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘That’s the sort of question you mustn’t ask,’ said Sir Gerald.

  ‘Actually,’ said Moss, ‘I don’t know. As a collector, I simply pay my money – my institution’s money, I should say – to a reputable shipping agency in Rome. They pull whatever strings may be necessary. I ask no questions.’

  ‘But suppose whatever you’d bought didn’t arrive?’

  ‘I should be very upset,’ said Moss gravely.

  ‘I won’t have you grilling my guests,’ said Sir Gerald. He turned to the Sindaco, and said, ‘What’s going to happen at the next election?’

  ‘That is a question which is worrying a lot of people,’ said Trentanuove. ‘I myself am, as you know, a Communist.’ He grinned, and his teeth showed white under his gangster moustache. ‘That is a statement I should have to apologize for, in England. Yes?’

  ‘It’s something you’d have to keep pretty quiet about,’ agreed Sir Gerald.

  ‘In Italy it is possible to be proud of it. People still remember that the Communists were the best fighters. You agree, my old friend?’

  ‘They were very good fighters,’ said Broke. He said it as though his thoughts were a long way off. ‘Not the only ones, though. The most bloodthirsty partisan I ever met was a Quaker.’ It was clear that everyone would have liked to have heard about the bloodthirsty Quaker, but Broke had continued quietly with his meal.

  ‘As I was saying,’ said the Sindaco, ‘I make no secret of my support for the Communist party. I think we shall do well at the National Elections next month. Not well enough to form a Government of our own, but well enough to secure some of the key posts for our men.’

  ‘I’m a bit confused,’ said Elizabeth. ‘What sort of Government have you got? I mean it’s not straightforward like us. Labour or Tory.’

  ‘What we have at the moment is a Government of the left centre. Basically it is Social-Democrat, with Ecclesiastical and Liberal support.’

  ‘How many parties have you got?’

  ‘At the last complete count, thirty-seven. But only seven of them are important. They range from the Communists, on the left, to the Citizens’ Union on the right. According to the way the votes go between those parties, you construct a government of a right, centre, or left complexion.’

  ‘Like mixing face powder,’ said Elizabeth. ‘So much red, so much white, and a little natural tan colour.’

  ‘More like cooking a cake,’ said the Sindaco, grinning again. ‘The operative word being cooking.’

  Miss Plant had finished her pasta, and had had enough of politics. She said, ‘Talking of cooking, have you seen the accounts of the Church Committee–’ and proceeded to slander the English chaplain. (He had incurred her displeasure by moving the lectern from the right-hand to the left-hand side of the aisle and making other popish innovations.)

  As the Consul was aware, once Miss Plant had started on a topic there was no way of stopping her. As with the runaway railway truck, all you could do was to switch the points and hope it ended up in a safe siding.

  He said, ‘I see we’ve got General Anderson back on the Church Committee. He should be a tower of strength. He knows Florence well. He was here during the war.’

  ‘He spent precisely two days in Florence during the war,’ said Miss Plant, ‘and was intoxicated most of the time. You could describe that as being “here”, I suppose.’

  ‘Do I understand, Miss Plant,’ said Moss, ‘that you were in residence during the whole of the German occupation of the country?’

  ‘Naturally. I saw no reason to put myself out to suit a parcel of jack-booted bullies–’

  The Consul relaxed. They were safe for the next ten minutes. He caught an appreciative gleam in his daughter Elizabeth’s eye, and wondered if his tactics had been obvious to anyone else. Apparently not. Tessa was practising her Italian on the puzzled but patient Sindaco. The rest appeared to be listening to Miss Plant.

  The lobsters arrived on the table.

  ‘There was a German officers’ prison camp at Vincigliata during the First World War,’ said Miss Plant. ‘One met quite a number of them. They were, at least, gentlemen. The officers of Hitler’s army, on the other hand, were not. They were vulgar little upstarts and bullies with no pretensions to manners or breeding–’

  ‘Come si chiama la piccola animalia dei boschi–’ said Tessa. The Sindaco looked blank. Tessa imitated a squirrel. The Sindaco beamed. ‘I know him. Coniglio.’

  ‘No, not rabbit. Squirrel.’

  Broke thought, the Germans might not have been gentlemen. But they were damned efficient fighters. He was remembering the half section they had trapped in a farmhouse above Lucullo, in the foothills of the Appennines. Thirty partisans had closed in at dawn. There were seven or eight Germans, a foraging party, under a Corporal. They had placed a sentry at the corner of the building, and the rest of them were asleep in the barn.

  ‘They had a band,’ said Miss Plant. ‘A brass band with trombones, and cornets. And a huge instrument that went oompah-oompah, can you imagine it? And they marched up and down the Lungarno, completely upsetting the traffic, not that there was much traffic in those days.’

  ‘A weasel? A stoat?’

  ‘No. Not a weasel or a stoat. Daddy! What is the Italian for squirrel?’

  They had stalked the sentry, and Guido, who had been a horse-slaughterer’s assistant, and boasted his prowess with the knife, had stabbed him, but had bungled the butchery and the sentry had screamed. Within five seconds the Germans inside the barn were on their feet, and returning their fire. Five seconds! No chance of rushing them. Get under cover, and pick them off as they showed themselves. The sentry had tried to crawl back to the barn, and the partisans had been such rotten shots that it had taken a dozen rounds to finish him off.

  ‘And if you tried to walk on the pavement,’ said Miss Plant, ‘the silly little officers kept pushing you off into the gutter. Or trying to. I had to be very firm.’

  ‘Squirrel? I’m afraid I don’t know. Broke will tell you.’

  Who had suggested incendiary bullets? Could it have been Marco, now so stout and so respectable, with his easy politician’s manner? Someone had suggested it, and in five minutes the straw in the lower barn had been well alight. When, at last, it was a choice between being burned alive or being shot, the Germans had tried to surrender.

  ‘A squirrel? Broke?’

  That had been the worst part. Particularly the smell, in the burning barn –

  ‘A squirrel?’

  – when, at his insistence, they had gone in to pull out any of the Germans who might be wounded but unable to move. And had found the youngster with bullets through both his legs, and his clothes and body alight. Like the lobster on his plate, with its red crust, charred black in places from the hot grill –

  ‘Broke. Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Let me look after him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You get on with your lunches. Don’t let the lobster get cold. It’s delicious. Have mine put back in the oven for me, Daddy.’

  Luckily he had died very quickly. He would have died anyway. There were no doctors up in the mountains.

  They were in Elizabeth’s car, and she was driving it very competently. By the time they reached his house, he was himself again. The old grey past had disappeared and he was securely anchored in the present.

  ‘What a stupid thing to do. It’s weeks since I’ve had a turn like that. The doctors had some name for it. It’s to do with the blood supply to the brain. It’s psychosomatic.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She had brought the car to a halt in front of the house and neither of them seemed anxious to move.

  ‘Medical jargon. It means that it isn’t anything physical that brings it on. It’s just that some coincidence starts me thinking about the past – a train of thought starts up inside my head, and I find it’s running away on its own, and I can’t stop it. The train, I mean.’

  ‘A train accident.’ They both laughed. ‘Whic
h particular coincidence started it this time? Or can’t you remember?’

  ‘It was talking about the Germans – and meeting the Sindaco again – oh, and the lobster.’

  ‘Lobster?’

  ‘I can’t explain that bit. It’s rather horrible.’

  ‘Then please don’t,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t want to be put off lobster for the rest of my life like Miss Plant. It’s one of my favourite foods. Will you be all right now?’

  ‘Absolutely. When this thing’s over, it’s quite over. I’m as fit as a fiddle.’ He demonstrated his fitness by jumping out of the car. ‘And rather hungry.’

  ‘Then come back and finish your lunch.’

  ‘I don’t think I could face that. Tina’ll knock me up something.’

  Tina met him at the door of his flat, with an anxious face. ‘What has happened? Why have you come back so soon? You are not well?’

  ‘I had a little turn,’ said Broke. ‘It was nothing. I’m all right now.’

  Tina burst into tears.

  ‘Come on,’ said Broke. ‘It’s not as bad as that.’ He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘You can’t cook my lunch if you’re crying into the spaghetti.’

  ‘You would like something to eat?’ The thought cheered her up at once. ‘I will cook it for you. It will not take a moment. You can have a piece of melon whilst I cook the pasta.’

  Food, thought Broke, a woman’s sovereign remedy for all ills. If you are tired, eat. If you are worried, eat. If you are dying, you can at least die with a full stomach.

  Elizabeth did not hurry back to the Consulate. By the time she got there the others had finished their lunch, and were taking coffee in the drawing-room.

  ‘Your lobster’s in the oven,’ said Tessa.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Elizabeth with a slight shudder, ‘I don’t think I will. Just a cup of coffee, please.’

  ‘How is Broke?’

  ‘He’s all right, Daddy. He’s been having turns like that, ever since his wife died.’

  ‘Sad,’ the Sindaco said, ‘to lose a wife, at his age. But he is young enough to marry again. He is the sort of man who needs a wife to look after him.’

  Sir Gerald said, ‘What happened to his wife? I heard some story about an accident.’

  ‘What happened,’ said Tom Proctor, ‘was that she was coming home, in her car, early one evening, and a lorry was coming the other way. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt at all that the lorry was being driven scandalously fast. A farmer, whom it had passed half a mile back, said it was “blinding”. I think the truth of the matter was that the driver was in a hurry to get home for his tea and his favourite television programme. He came round the corner, in the middle of the road – not a very wide road – saw the car, much too late to stop, and hit it head-on. Mrs Broke died in hospital twenty-four hours later. The lorry driver was unhurt.’ Tom Proctor added, in a voice which was deliberately devoid of expression, ‘She was pregnant at the time.’

  ‘I hope they put him in prison for a long, long time,’ said the Sindaco.

  ‘In England we don’t put lorry drivers in prison. His Union briefed good Counsel for him. There were no witnesses of the accident itself, only things like skid marks, and the damage to the car, and those can always be interpreted in different ways. He was fined twenty-five pounds for dangerous driving. The Union paid it. That was when Broke decided that England was no longer a country he could live in.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘What a horrible story,’ and choked over her coffee. She was very close to tears.

  ‘It must have been a hard decision,’ said Proctor. ‘Because Broke is English of the English. In fact, he’s a bit of an anachronism. He’s the nineteenth-century European’s idea of an Englishman. Inarticulate, basically sure that all Englishmen are twenty per cent better than all foreigners, tiresomely honest, upright, rigid, and un-simpatico.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘My dear Miss Weighill,’ said the lawyer, ‘you do me an injustice. I didn’t say that Broke was that sort of man. I said that was what he appeared to be. There is an obverse to the coin. After all, his grandfather was Leopold Scott–’

  ‘I knew him,’ said Miss Plant, waking up from her after-luncheon snooze. ‘He painted a picture of my mother’s three Dandie Dinmonts. It hung in our nursery.’

  ‘He was a very successful artist,’ said Proctor drily, ‘and he bequeathed a large sum of money, and a measure of artistic talent, to his daughter, who was Broke’s mother. She encouraged the artistic side of his nature, which is unquestionably there, buried under layers of conventional Englishry. Did you know that he was an accomplished violinist?’

  ‘I confess,’ said Weighill, who had been following this with all the interest of a connoisseur of human nature, ‘that Broke had never struck me as a sensitive person. It’s true that he runs a bookshop and art gallery, but I had always thought of him as more of a businessman than an artist.’

  The Sindaco said, ‘Might that not be because you did not know him before the death of his wife? A thing like that can change a man. Most of us have two sides to our nature. A tragedy like that can bring one side to the top – perhaps permanently, who knows?’

  Elizabeth got up and started to collect the empty coffee cups. Her father opened his small, whale-like eyes a little. This was a job which was normally left to Antonio from the kitchen. As the door closed behind her, he said, ‘There is very little permanency about human nature, you know.’

  ‘You are quoting D’Annunzio,’ said the Sindaco. ‘Did he not observe, “There is nothing permanent in life except death”?’

  ‘One of my uncles,’ said Miss Plant, ‘turned his face to the wall in 1890, and never smiled again.’

  ‘What made him do that?’ asked Tessa.

  ‘I’ve forgotten the details,’ said Miss Plant. ‘It was something to do with cricket.’

  Tenete Lupo studied the report in his hand. It was a business-like, if negative, document.

  Reference to the message of last Monday, received in this office at 21.15 hours relating to the reported arrival of two men at the Central Station. Enquiries have been made at all Hotels and Pensiones and the registration particulars of all indigenous incomers there have been checked.

  (Even Tenete Lupo, attached as he was to official language, felt that ‘indigenous incomers’ was going rather far. He underlined the phrase lightly in pencil to remind him to talk to Carbiniere Scipione about it.)

  No one corresponding in any way to the two men concerned has been traced. It is respectfully pointed out that there were a number of trains leaving Florence later that night for Bologna, Milan, Faenza and Arezzo, in addition to trains returning in the direction of Rome. It is therefore most probable that the two men in question had business to transact in Florence and, having transacted it, proceeded to their destination later that evening.

  Tenete Lupo studied the report carefully. Scipione was a keen and painstaking policeman. Apart from the ‘indigenous incomers’, it was a good report. On second thoughts he crossed out the words ‘most probable’ in the last sentence, and substituted ‘possible’. This seemed to him to commit them less.

  The next thing was to decide what to do with it. There was, on the shelf beside his desk, a large box file labelled ‘Miscellaneous’. This seemed to the Tenete to be the appropriate destination, and he placed the report carefully in the file, and restored the file to the shelf.

  6

  Thursday Evening: The Zecchis at Home

  Just as wild animals who have moved to strange hunting-grounds will quickly tread out their private paths to the water-hole, will fix hours of eating, drinking and sleeping, establish places of watch and places of retreat, weaving a pattern based partly on instinct, and partly on experience, so did the two strangers establish themselves, falling into a routine of fixed times and places.

  They rose late, from the rooms they occupied in the Pensione Drusilla, and made a careful toilet, which
involved lavish use of hair oil, after-shave lotion and eau-de-cologne. When dressed and perfumed they strolled out to the café near the end of the Ponte Vecchio, where they took their pre-lunch drinks, and from there to another café, where they ate a large midday meal. In the afternoon they slept. At dusk they rose again, making a second, and equally careful, toilet, the tall man finding it necessary to shave twice a day. Thereafter they visited a ristorante for drinks and the evening meal, which they took late. Before eating, the stout man would have bought copies of every morning and evening paper on sale, and these he spread over the table, marking the day’s prices on the Rome stock-market, and occasionally commenting on them. The tall man read the racing results.

  Their movements after supper depended on whether they had a rendezvous, for business purposes, with Maria or Dindoni, in the café in the Via Torta, or whether they were free to pursue their own pleasures.

  They had taken a woman each, picking her from the wares on sale at a brothel in the Via Santissima Chiara which they had visited on their second night in Florence. There had been a difference of opinion with the protector of the women over the commission to be offered, and an argument had developed in the hall of the establishment. The stout man, as usual, had done the talking. After a while the tall man seemed to tire of it. He had walked out into the street, where the protector’s new Fiat Mille Due Cento stood by the kerb, had jerked open the bonnet and, with a small blade which had suddenly appeared in his right hand, had severed all six of the plug leads before its outraged owner came charging out to stop him. The tall man had kicked him, putting out his knee cap, and then, squatting beside him as he lay, in agony, on the pavement, had said, slowly, and clearly, as to a child. ‘The inside of a car can be mended at a garage. The inside of a man cannot. Capite? Understand?’ After which there had been no trouble.

  As dawn was beginning to pale the sky, the two men would come padding back separately to the pensione, for which they had been provided with a side door key, and would fall asleep as Florence was waking around them.