North From Rome Read online

  “And she also doesn’t give one good God-damn for anyone on two legs,” Bill Lammiter said. He looked at the Englishman. This might be a ripe moment to press his question. “What is Pirotta’s connection with this drug ring?”

  “He organised it. He’s in control.”

  Lammiter felt the blood drain from his face. The truth was worse than he had imagined. Eleanor, he thought, my God, what is going to happen to Eleanor?

  Brewster was watching him. “No more questions?” he asked mockingly.

  Lammiter brought a chair to the table for Rosana. He pulled up one for himself. He said, “The quickest way to answer all my questions is to tell me the full story.”

  Rosana sat down, looked at him gravely with her large dark eyes, and then at Brewster. She smiled.

  Lammiter said, smiling back, sharing her unspoken joke, “You don’t see Brewster telling any complete story to anyone?”

  Brewster said, “There never is any complete story. There are always a dozen developments, each with its own importance to different people, always a dozen possibilities for the end, and none of them conclusive. Unless someone dies. Then that is final—as far as he is concerned.”

  Rosana shivered as if she had felt a cold draught on her bare arms. The laughter had left her face. She brushed her short dark hair away from her forehead with a nervous gesture.

  “Rosana doesn’t like me to talk of death,” Brewster said. “Don’t worry, Rosana.” He tapped his bandaged leg, gently but markedly. “This won’t kill me. It is just one of the hazards of our game.” He looked now at Lammiter. “If I tell you any part of the story, you’ll have to face hazards, too. You just can’t walk in here, find answers to your questions, and then walk out again, saying, ‘How interesting... Some day I must write a play about Rosana, the girl who was helping Brewster to find out about the Pirotta narcotics ring, the girl Pirotta trusted enough to make his secretary.’ No, Lammiter, if I tell you anything, you are one of us.”

  Lammiter’s grave eyes looked at Brewster steadily. He nodded, controlling his impatience. He’d have to let Brewster take his time; no doubt Brewster was still deciding whether he could be trusted.

  “I just wanted to warn you of the hazards,” Brewster said. “This leg of mine, for instance, is a good example. Three nights ago, I was coming back here—about eleven o’clock—walking along one of the old streets. I heard a car behind me. At first I thought nothing about it. And then, as it almost reached me, I had a sudden odd feeling. I made a leap for a doorway and fell, twisting this leg badly. But I was lucky. The car mounted the narrow pavement and just scraped past me. It ripped my sleeve. If there hadn’t been three young men walking in the street, I think the car would have reversed and tried to run me down again.”

  “It was aimed at you?”

  “Straight for my spine.”

  Rosana said, “It’s bad luck to talk this way. Death is quick to hear it. The wise man does not attract his attention.” She tried to laugh. “That’s what Giuseppe tells me.”

  “Yes, it was an attempt to dispose of me,” Brewster said placidly. “Just as there was an attempt to kidnap Rosana last night: kidnap her, question her, and then kill.”

  Rosana stood up.

  Brewster told her sharply, “I’m only reminding you how stupid I was three nights ago. And how stupid you were last night. Next time you have a message from Pirotta, to keep an appointment after midnight, you will remember to develop a high fever or a blinding headache or even an aunt’s funeral.”

  “Pirotta didn’t plan last night. I know he didn’t. He arrived late, yes, but he didn’t plan it that way. Tony, believe me: he was upset, too upset and worried, when I told him what had happened.”

  “And you believed him? You still can believe him?” He turned to Lammiter. “She’s too much of an innocent for all this business. Are you?”

  Lammiter said, just as abruptly, “I wouldn’t know.” He waited for another unexpected, probing question, but Brewster went on talking about Rosana as if she had left the room. “She’s too intent on her own discoveries, she never thinks the enemy has his own discoveries; he’s finding out about her just as she has found out about him. She must learn to be careful, cautious, distrustful.” He looked at Lammiter shrewdly. “I still don’t know if I think you are distrustful enough to keep her safe in Perugia.”

  Perugia? Lammiter looked sharply at Brewster. He frowned. He didn’t want to go to Perugia. Pirotta wasn’t in Perugia.

  “A pair of bloody romantics, if ever I saw one,” Brewster said bitterly, surveying them both as if they could neither see nor hear him. “But with this damned leg—what am I to do?”

  Rosana said, “You’d better start trusting Mr. Lammiter. You will have to send him with me to Perugia. Because, Tony, there is no one else to send.”

  “What about your friend Joe, from Sicily?” Lammiter asked the girl. “You like him. He’s a nimble-looking type. Why don’t you take him to Perugia?”

  “The less you mention Perugia, the better,” Brewster advised.

  “Or Salvatore,” Lammiter said, turning to the Englishman. “Why don’t you send him with Rosana? He’s your friend, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Brewster’s eyes narrowed as they studied Lammiter.

  “You said you trusted him.”

  “I do.” The voice was icy.

  Never question Brewster’s judgment, Lammiter reminded himself.

  Rosana said quickly, “Both Giuseppe and Salvatore only know about the narcotics ring, nothing beyond that.”

  “That’s all they need to know,” Brewster said. “If I had been able to walk about, Rosana wouldn’t have been told any more, either. And you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Why choose me?” That was the question that had puzzled Lammiter ever since he came into this room.

  A slight smile hovered round Brewster’s eyes. “Because you have such helpful friends.”

  Lammiter looked both amused and puzzled. “I’m flattered.”

  Brewster’s voice became bitingly precise, “Such as Edward Tillinghast Camden.”

  “Bunny? You know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Surely you can do better than that for understatement,” Lammiter said with a grin, remembering the kind of tangles into which Bunny could get. Anyone who had worked with Bunny was not only light-footed but sure-witted. “Why not tell Bunny about Perug—” he halted. “Sorry. Anyway, why not tell Bunny?”

  “We’ve been unable to reach him in these last three days.”

  “He’s been out of town.” That was a mistake: to admit knowledge of Bunny Camden’s movements was tantamount to saying he was in Bunny’s confidence.

  “Ah—” Brewster smiled now as he looked at Lammiter. His interest rekindled visibly.

  “Look—it’s just an accident that I know he isn’t in Rome,” Lammiter protested earnestly.

  “Of course, of course. And I suppose it was just an accident that you were loitering near the Embassy three days ago and met Captain Camden so innocently?”

  Lammiter said nothing.

  “Rosana saw you. She was trying to get in touch with Camden, much as you did. Only, she wasn’t successful. So she waited to telephone him at his apartment. But he never did go back there. Do you know where we could find him?”

  Lammiter shook his head. “Let’s get this straight. Bunny is no longer working in Intelligence.”

  “But he knows what to do, whom to contact, in an emergency,” Rosana said. She looked nervously at Brewster.

  Lammiter went on determinedly. “And it was an accident meeting Bunny. We were good friends. That’s all. In fact—” he smiled, to ease the shock in Brewster’s eyes—“if Bunny and his Marines hadn’t adopted me on the way out from the Pujon trap, I’d have been either dead or a prisoner. There wasn’t much future for me, either way, until this Marine platoon came stumbling along.” He paused, sensing their complete disappointment. To fill the embarrassing silence, he rushed on. “
You know the Marines: they can’t bear to leave anything behind them. So they picked me up and joshed some life into me, and got me stumbling along with them.” And a damn long stumble it had been, cold on the white-grey snow, over the frozen mud and the ice-glazed rocks, down that winding path to the cold white-grey sea. He could still remember the wind that cut through his shoulders, the cruel numbness in his hands, his feet weighing half a ton and every ounce packed with pain.

  “I see,” Brewster said. He looked at Rosana, shaking his head. She had put both her hands to her mouth. “And last night, Lammiter, you weren’t keeping an eye on the car that tried to kidnap Rosana?”

  Lammiter shook his head.

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh!—And I thought I was so clever, so clever...”

  “So romantic,” Brewster said. He heaved a deep sigh of weariness and reached for the bottle of wine. He had limited himself all through this conversation, so far, to one glass. Now he poured generously, drank, and poured again. “Two bloody romantics.” He was neither bitter nor amused, this time. This time, he was almost philosophic; and completely depressed.

  Lammiter said sharply, “The surest way to make a man useless is to keep telling him he’s useless.”

  Brewster grunted.

  “And I’d like to add that you aren’t much use, right now, yourself.”

  Brewster looked up angrily. Then just as quickly, his mood changed. He even laughed. “The trouble about the English,” he said, “is that even when they are beggars they like to be choosers.” He looked at the American carefully, and then decided. “All right. You’ll do. You’ll have to.”

  “Thank you,” Lammiter said wryly. But he also thought, this man and I could become friends. Good friends. This sudden thought, summoned by instinct, both surprised and pleased him.

  “You want to know more about Pirotta. I want help. We’ll exchange services, quid pro quo. Right?”

  Lammiter nodded. “If I can be of any help to you—” He was still doubtful.

  “I’m the judge of that. One thing is at least in your favour: I think, after your experiences in North Korea, you don’t trust a Communist.”

  “That’s one fact about me you have got straight.”

  Brewster pushed aside his glass of wine. “Thank God,” he said, “that I don’t have to convince you about the miserable realities of political life before you’ll even let yourself listen.” He was easing his leg, hiding the pain of it, altering his hips’ position in his chair. He rubbed his thigh. He gave a sudden smile that was both honest and warm-hearted. “Now,” he began, selecting his words with care...

  9

  Brewster, once he had decided to give out information, talked without pause. Either the wine had increased his eloquence or his subject was one that had haunted him so constantly that he could repeat a list of facts as calmly and impersonally as the multiplication table. Lammiter listened in shocked silence. He was quite aware he was not being told everything, just the necessary outline to establish confidence and enlist his help— but it was enough. And it was startling. Lammiter sat frozen in his chair.

  It was not the fact that a powerful narcotics ring could be selling drugs from Rome, as if it were a reputable business, which was so startling. After all, the world newspapers had been reporting for months on another drug scandal in Rome. (A young girl’s body had been found on a beach at Ostia, resignations had followed in high places, and several explosions had been touched off that were still reverberating around some well-known heads.) But it was the scope of this narcotics business that was news to Lammiter, news both astounding and horrifying.

  The poppies for the drugs were grown in the drab fields of Asia Minor, processed by some obliging Middle Eastern countries, shipped to Italy and France, where there were even factories and well-organised salesmen and (in France) a sizeable market. But the main target was America. The shipments of drugs were constantly being steered through Western Europe towards the United States. There was no doubt about that. And across the Pacific, the direction of drug trafficking was still more blatant. There, in recent years, the agrarian reformers of Red China had increased production of opium, heroin, and morphine to staggering totals—all for the smugglers’ trade out of Hong Kong and Thailand and Japan to San Francisco.

  Lammiter looked both uncomfortable and angry, as men do when they don’t quite want to believe something that they instinctively feel may be too true for comfort. “You make it seem as if Western Europe were all under a constant barrage of narcotics. My God, Brewster—”

  “I’m not exaggerating. I’ve only time to give you the barest details now. Later, if you’re interested, you can trace down many more. They’re all in print.”

  “In print?”

  “Ever heard of Interpol?”

  “The International Police Force? But I thought the war had killed it.”

  “It’s been resurrected. Headquarters are now in Belgium. You must read Interpol’s recent report on the narcotics business. You’ll find all the facts and figures about each country’s contribution to this ugly mess—who grows the stuff, who processes it, who sends it travelling, what ships have carried it, what seamen have smuggled it. They’re all named. My dear Lammiter, the whole thing is a campaign against the West, planned and carefully subsidised by its enemies, aided and abetted by men whose lack of morality is amply compensated by their cupidity. Those who grow opium or process it, or ship it, ask no questions about why it is being bought or where it is being sent. They just keep their eyes fixed on their bank accounts.”

  “They are monsters!” Rosana burst out.

  “Yes, yes,” Brewster said calmly, pulling the conversation back to cold reason. “The United Nations Narcotics Commission has also issued its reports. The facts have all been gathered and noted down. Believe me”—he was becoming a little impatient—“I am neither exaggerating nor lying. America is the chief target.”

  Rosana said, “And what is more, it is your young people who are the centre of the target.”

  “At this point,” Brewster said, “Rosana always bursts into tears with indignation and helplessness. But cheer up, my soft-hearted Rosana: at least one drug-exporting firm is going to be out of business within a week. Thanks to you, Rosana. And to me. I may as well admit I’ve had one success in my life: Luigi, Count Pirotta.” He said the name with relish. He smiled benignly.

  “There are a lot of people to be thanked,” Rosana reminded him. “There was Bevilacqua over at the Questura.” She turned to Lammiter. “Bevilacqua is the detective who has been working on the Pirotta organisation ever since my brother’s death. He’s very good. He’s clever, truly. He did more than anyone—” She bit her lip and smiled. “And then the two nice Americans— narcotics agents from Washington—they are now in Bari and Trieste waiting for two ships to arrive.”

  “They’re always so interested in catching the supplies,” Brewster said irritably. “Opium, heroin, cocaine, marijuana. You puts in your penny and you takes your choice. But I’m interested in people. Such as our handsome count, who is making hay, with a nonny nonny yea.” He cocked his head and looked at Lammiter. “Does my levity shock you? Good. I need something to shock you into taking me seriously.”

  “It’s all very well for you to see Pirotta as a comic character, but it isn’t your country that’s getting the treatment,” Lammiter reminded him grimly.

  “Oh, some of the treatment blew off on us. The American bases in Britain are naturally of interest to Pirotta’s friends. His salesmen found them difficult, so they couldn’t resist trying to make some customers among the young and foolish in the local population. I think we caught them in time.”

  “It is strange,” Rosana said, “how all people who take drugs try to convert others to be like them. They pretend it’s nothing at all, something normal and natural. They need company, I think.”

  “That’s how it spreads. Worse than smallpox,” Brewster agreed. “Anyway, the British are definitely interested in this. Or else I s
houldn’t be here.” He looked suddenly at Lammiter. “I’m a journalist, by the way.”

  “You are?” Lammiter smiled.

  “Yes, indeed. The London Echo is hoping to get an exclusive story when it can all be told.”

  “When is that?”

  “Next week—as soon as the two new shipments arrive and are consigned to Pirotta’s warehouses.”

  Something in Brewster’s voice caught Lammiter’s attention. He said slowly, “I think it isn’t the sale of narcotics that really interests you. I think it is Pirotta himself.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Pirotta is not in the narcotics business for money. He’s in search of power, political power. He’s a Communist.”

  “What?” Lammiter looked at Rosana. She was quite calm, as if she had long accepted the idea and could no longer be surprised by it.

  Brewster went on quickly, “He has set up, during the last eight years, a remarkably efficient organisation, international in scope, with its key men all Communists. It can be turned to political uses when necessary. Meanwhile, it adds to the Communists’ secret funds, helps to corrupt their enemies, and gathers a list of future traitors—drug addicts can always be bribed by heroin, or blackmailed with threats of exposure. They’ll be quislings, every one of them.”

  Lammiter was still thinking about Pirotta. “But he’s the fellow who has everything,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Pirotta? Not in modern terms. What power lies in an inherited title today? What money?—Possessions now mean taxes. So what does an ambitious man do? He knows Europe is changing. He chooses the most ruthless force in the struggle for power. He sees the Communists as the wave of the future. And he is determined to stay on its crest. His family has managed to swim there for years.”

  “For three centuries, to be accurate,” Rosana said. “They’ve switched sides for three centuries, always choosing the winners. Until Mussolini.” She laughed softly. “His father chose wrong, there.”

  “So he thinks he’ll regain the family’s power by supporting the Communists?” Lammiter asked.