North From Rome Read online

  “When does the alarm clock go off?”

  “Salvadore said a quarter to eleven, but I set it for half-past ten. I thought I’d give Tony time to awake thoroughly. He must let us in.” She closed the door carefully behind them, and shook it gently to test the automatic lock.

  Lammiter suddenly remembered something else. “Didn’t you lock the other door after Salvatore and I arrived?”

  She nodded, made a gesture for silence, and listened.

  He lowered his voice. “But I saw Salvatore locking it...”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Testing it. He doesn’t trust women.” Then she motioned to him, and they began to descend the narrow staircase. In this house, the back had become the front: on this kitchen staircase, the light was warm and sun-filled; people lived behind these doors, breathed this air, flavoured it generously with the meals they cooked and ate. But at this moment, these flats seemed all deserted. There were no voices, no scolding, no laughter. Two doors even stood open, showing walls needing plaster and paint, too many random pipes, a crush of wooden chairs round littered tables.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Taking the air in the Piazza. It is the evening ritual.” For a moment she hesitated, glanced back up the staircase, frowned. But she went on, without saying something she wanted to say.

  Wasn’t it safe to talk here? Lammiter wondered, as they descended the worn stairs. Safer than the Piazza. He glanced at his watch. It was after seven o’clock. Only an hour since Brewster had begun to take him into his confidence. An hour was a long time in some ways, short in others. In an hour, you could smoke half a dozen cigarettes, or read a newspaper, or write a letter, or just sit and dream. You could travel four miles on foot, sixty in a car, a hundred in a light plane. You could make a friend (or an enemy) who might last you fifty years. And in one hour, you could make decisions that would change the entire course of your life.

  Rosana put her hand on his arm as they reached the last short flight of stairs, so that he halted, too. She looked up towards Brewster’s door. She was still troubled.

  “He will be all right,” Lammiter said encouragingly. “A little sleep, and he will be biting all our heads off with his usual gusto.”

  She smiled. Then quickly she leaned over the worn balustrade, its eighteenth-century carvings of conch shells and triumphant Tritons partly washed away by a sea of passing hands. She decided it was indeed safe enough: the entrance, just below them, was quite empty. She faced him. She looked extremely unhappy. She said, “He is only a journalist.”

  “What?” He stared at her. “You mean Brewster wasn’t sent here officially on any mission?”

  She shook her head.

  “He wasn’t transferred to this job?” Kicked downstairs was the way Brewster had described it.

  Again she shook her head.

  “Was he kicked out entirely? Why? Drunk?”

  “Oh no! Not then!”

  “For making mistakes?” Such as letting Evans slip away from England.

  “Tony says that he made only one mistake.” She halted, listening. Reassured, she hurried on. “After Evans had escaped, Tony kept searching for the man who had warned Evans. The man who had helped to place him when he began his career, and promote him into the right department. For there has to be such a man.”

  “Yes,” Lammiter said slowly, “there has to be such a man.” It was a disquieting thought. “Did Brewster find him?”

  “Tony says he must have been close, very close, to finding him. For suddenly—for no reason he or any of his friends could understand—he was given quite another problem to solve.”

  Lammiter couldn’t see Brewster taking that lying down, not that old Protestant upstairs. “So he made several biting remarks and lost his job altogether?” Then he frowned, wondering if secret service agents ever did get discharged. If they were of no more use, what happened to them? Given less and less important work, until they were so bored they just faded away? In more ruthless countries, they fell out of trains.

  “He didn’t complain, make any protests. I wish he had. I think it was then that he began to—began to drink more than he should.” She looked anxiously at Lammiter: “You see how it is?”

  “I see,” he said gently. He was a little touched by the way she had tried to make him understand about Tony Brewster. He watched her eyes. “You believe all this?”

  “But of course! Tony does not lie.”

  Yet it was only Brewster’s word... “People could say that he brooded too much over his disappointment—exaggerated the situation.”

  “That’s what the Communists did say. It spread around. In the end, even most of his friends stopped believing him. So he threw up everything, took a journalist’s job, and came to Rome. He used to be a journalist long ago—before the war.”

  “Tell me one thing. What did he mean by ‘three-sided chess’? Wasn’t that what he said?”

  “It’s his theory that the Middle East and the West and Russia are all playing a chess game. Russia is standing to one side, supervising the moves. Tony says ‘jogging the pieces’. Making the other take certain moves that are bound to cause counter-moves—and always trouble.”

  “But—no one can make nations move except the nations themselves. Governments listen to their own advisers.”

  “What if one of them is another Evans?” She looked at him solemnly, letting him fill out the rest for himself.

  What if such a man, trusted as Evans had been, could influence opinion? Or delay an important document? Or misinterpret a piece of urgent news? One small move like that might start a whole chain of events.

  “He will not be working alone,” Rosana said. Anxiously she watched him. “He could begin trouble. And he will have help to make it spread.”

  Yes, Lammiter thought, if someone in the foreign ministries of other Western countries were working along with such a man, the trouble might well spread. Lammiter tried to muster a counter-argument. This was the kind of crazy theory he might have expected from Tony Brewster. “But—” he began.

  Rosana seemed to guess something of his doubts. She jumped to Brewster’s defence. “Tony does not say that Russia is winning this chess game. He does not even say that the Communists have men like Evans still in our governments. What he says is—the Communists have trained for this kind of game. They have tried to get their men in position. That, we all know.” She took a deep breath. “It frightens me.”

  He looked down at Rosana’s dark eyes, the gentle curve of cheeks, the finely moulded features. She pushed back the ridiculous fringe of short dark hair which had fallen on to her brow.

  “Yes,” he said, “they have tried. We all know that. But don’t let Tony’s theories worry you. Things are looking pretty peaceful just now. Why—Malenkov was even passing out boxes of chocolate in England, and patting babies’ heads. What did one woman say—‘Ow, isn’t he nice? He’s just like my uncle!’”

  “And four weeks later, when the workers were shot down in Poznan?” Rosana asked angrily, her eyes widening. “What did she say?”

  At the entrance they heard a quick footstep. They looked at each other. Lammiter slipped his arms around Rosana, drawing her closer to him, back against the wall. He whispered, “What else would we be doing here?” She half-smiled. And as the man came upstairs, Lammiter kissed her. He could feel her sudden gasp, ending in a little laugh of embarrassment as he ended the long kiss. The man, returning home from his work earlier than most (the usual hour was eight o’clock), was probably hurrying upstairs to wash and change his shirt before joining his wife and children in the Piazza. He looked at them curiously as he passed. But there was a smile on his dark face, a good-natured understanding of why two strangers should be sheltering from the world inside his doorway.

  Bill Lammiter tightened his grip around Rosana’s soft waist. And this time, when he bent forward to kiss her, she did not gasp. They stood in silence for a long minute, looking at each other as if they were searching for an answer
to their own questions. He let his arms fall to his sides. He said, “We must go.” What was wrong, he wondered? If any girl could help me forget Eleanor, here she is. And yet— Sharply, he told himself he was an idiot and a fool.

  Overhead, the footsteps ceased, and a door banged shut.

  “He accepted us,” Lammiter said.

  “Yes,” she replied. She began walking down the last short flight of stairs. He followed more slowly, watching the way her graceful neck met her shoulders in a clear smooth curve. Why had that kiss been such a damned anticlimax?

  Rosana said quickly, “Will you be able to find your way here at eleven o’clock? Knock three times quickly on Tony’s door. And then a pause. And then a fourth knock. And then speak, when he asks you who is there, just so that he will know who it is.”

  “What if he is still asleep?” He had a ridiculous vision of a small line gathering outside Brewster’s door.

  “The alarm is the kind that keeps ringing until he does answer it.”

  “He’ll be in a filthy temper.” He hesitated. “And suppose he falls asleep again. What do I do? Wait until you and Salvatore and Joe are all there to start pounding?”

  “You must be serious,” she told him, horrified by such an idea.

  “I’d prefer to meet you somewhere. Couldn’t we have dinner together, around nine?”

  She said, “If you don’t want to go up by yourself, then— But why don’t you?”

  “I’m out of my depth here,” he admitted. “Have dinner with me, and you can put me more in the picture, and we’ll climb the stairs together. We’ve worked out a good alibi, anyway, for any stranger who comes along.” He slipped his arm around her waist again. I’m a man who keeps trying, he thought. “Dinner?”

  She shook her head. “Too dangerous. I’ll meet you across the Piazza, at the church steps. I’ll walk on, and you can follow.

  “That’s one thing I can always do—follow a pretty girl.”

  “You must be serious,” she warned him gravely. “Eleven o’clock.” She slipped away from him, and stepped out of the sharp black line of shadow, across the bright threshold, into the golden Piazza.

  It’s odd, he thought, as he watched Rosana disappear from sight, it’s odd how I have kissed the prettiest girl in Rome, and there’s so little to remember. No joy, no excitement... He might as well have stolen a kiss from his prettiest school-teacher. He stopped thinking about Rosana and concentrated on his own exit.

  Around the three fountains, the children swarmed, thick as ants around three sugar bowls. On this, the eastern side of the Piazza, the buildings were drenched with warm light, but the doorways were now in shadow as the sun slipped lower in the western sky. Opposite, the buildings lining that long side of the Piazza Navona were in complete shade from the hot evening Sun. There, not far from the church, was the Tre Scalini, where he had dined before. It looked inviting, cool and empty at this time. But it was too early to eat in Rome. He would look as conspicuous as the few hungry tourists, their stomachs geared to half-past seven, who were making their appearance by horse and cab. Tonight, he decided, it was better not to be seen hanging around this district. And there was a taxi driving into the Piazza by its northern entrance, the old gateway to the Roman circus, where the chariots had raced. He smiled suddenly at the strange quirks of memory, at the odd facts he had assimilated in this last month of wandering round the city, at the peculiar moments they would keep returning to the surface of his consciousness.

  He watched the taxi curving around the Piazza towards the restaurant opposite. He timed it carefully. Now, he told himself just before it reached the restaurant, and plunged away from the dark doorway over the hot glaring sidewalk, across the cobbled street which edged the central island, among children learning to walk, children on bicycles and in baby carriages, children carried, children running, laughing, crying, children holding other children, children. This was obviously a district central enough to let the men return home for a midday dinner and a pleasant siesta.

  The taxi was emptied, paid off, and about to be driven away. Bill Lammiter raised one hand and left the crowd. “Via Vittorio Veneto,” he said, out of habit. But in a sense that had become his own petit quartier.

  As the cab circled round the long island of fountains and children, he glanced out of the window. He had been reasonably certain as he had crossed the Piazza to reach the taxi that he had not been followed. And now, nothing followed him out of the Piazza. Good. And yet strange—for he had been followed this afternoon. When had it stopped? About the time he had met Giuseppe, or Joe, or whatever Rosana’s Sicilian friend called himself. No, even earlier than that. About the time he had telephoned Rosana from the American Express office? It wasn’t a question he liked.

  One thing he did know: interest in him had faded. Or— and this thought was less comfortable—or interest in him was merely pushed aside for a certain space of time in which “they” knew what he had been going to do. One didn’t need to follow a man whose movements were known in advance.

  This thought, as he looked at it from all angles, became definitely ungainly. He could wish he had never conjured up this particular little monster.

  He looked at his watch: it was a quarter to eight now. Eight o’clock—what had he to do before eight? There had been something. Oh yes—photographs! He almost laughed aloud with relief: it was pleasant only to face such a tourist occupation as collecting photographs. By all means, let’s go and collect photographs.

  But he kept wondering about Rosana. Could she actually be in love with Tony Brewster as Salvatore had hinted? That was difficult to believe. Yet women were so damned unpredictable. And men, he told himself, were so damned vain: she let you kiss her, but you didn’t measure up, and that’s the part that really annoys you. Or perhaps, and this was less wounding but more distressing, her ideal woman was the Venus of Cyrene, classically pure, noble as marble, cold as the tomb.

  The photography shop, just off the Via Vittorio Veneto, was about to close. The last customer was leaving, and two of the assistants had already gone. An elderly white-faced man in a white cotton coat looked increasingly depressed as Bill Lammiter entered. But he took Lammiter’s receipt, and while he searched slowly through an immense collection of envelopes for the prints, Lammiter used the shop’s telephone to call Carl Ferris over at the American Academy. It was a brief call, and a careful one. (Lammiter mentioned no names.) There was no news of Bunny Camden except that he was reported to be on his way back from Naples. Professor Ferris sounded a little glum, as though playing guardian angel over a telephone was beginning to pall. “I’ll keep calling,” Lammiter promised. “Sorry. But it’s an emergency.”

  He turned to the envelope of prints, which the man had at last found. The photographs weren’t particularly good. After all the fuss he had made about collecting them, they just were not any good at all. Colour was, of course, the trouble. He would have to use a light meter as carefully as an amateur. But that was the kind of thing that took all the fun out of photography. To have to measure and calculate made picture-taking too serious a business.

  “How much?” he asked the tired face behind the side counter. “And there’s that telephone call to add to the bill.” He counted out the cost in soiled and sticky lire notes that felt no longer like paper but almost like thin velvet. Behind him, a woman’s high heels came clacking through the narrow door. (The tired-faced clerk had, hopefully, already pulled an iron trellis across the entrance, leaving only a small space for this late and slender customer.)

  “Are these ready?” she asked in good Italian. She was standing at the main counter, holding out a numbered receipt. So eager was she to have her snapshots that she hadn’t even looked at the other side of the shop. But Lammiter would know the sound of these heels anywhere, apart from the clear light note of her voice. He didn’t have to turn around to see the supple figure in its simple dress, or to watch the way her fair head would be tilted to one side a little pleadingly, as if she could cajol
e the clerk into finding her photographs. It was Eleanor.

  The, clerk took the receipt she handed him. He searched, slowly; but politely, among the bundle of envelopes. “Not here, signora.” He looked at her sympathetically.

  “Are you sure?” She was upset. “Please look again. They ought to be here. And I must have them.”

  Lammiter started towards the door quietly, quickly. You said goodbye to all that, he told himself: only today, this early afternoon, you said goodbye definitely. Get out of here, Lammiter—

  He was at the door, about to push aside the iron gateway to let him ease his way on to the sidewalk, when he heard her say, “You see, I’m leaving Rome. For America.”

  He nearly said, “What?”

  She was saying, “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I knew you’d find them.”

  He pushed the iron trellis a little more to one side. It scraped harshly, shivered a little, and stuck. He pulled at it impatiently.

  “Signore, signore, uno momento, uno momento!” said the clerk, leaping into life as he rushed round to salvage his precious gate.

  “Bill!”

  He came back into the shop. For once, he had absolutely no idea of what he would—or even should—say. She had been crying. She had been crying a great deal.

  “Oh, Bill!” She put out a hand to touch him as if to make sure he was real. “I tried to reach you by phone this evening. I didn’t know—” Her voice strangled: she was crying again, quite silently. And her sudden tears distressed her still more. She bit her trembling lip and turned her head from him and the curious clerk.

  “How much?” he asked the man, pointing to the envelope Eleanor held in her hand. He paid for that, too. Quite like old times, he thought as he took her arm and steered her through the gateway. “Now where?”

  “My apartment is just round the corner.”

  “Oh?” he said, as if he hadn’t known that. How many nights had he passed by its windows and wondered— Hell, he thought as he tried to jam on some brakes: for a man who had buried his past so determinedly, he was helping it out of the grave too damn quickly.