‘Won’t you be cold with the window open?’
‘No, no!’ shouted Ferruccio as he concentrated all the strength in his body on shaking his head. ‘Don’t worry about the cold. Open it, open it.’
‘Fine,’ Angela conceded, and walked across the freshly cleaned room to the window.
‘Nothing has happened, has it?’ Ferruccio asked again, and without waiting for a reply, he went on talking: ‘No, no, not a bit, absolutely nothing! He’s just got himself a little worked up, it happens to him every now and again, but a nurse’s nose, now. What do you think? Since they stopped that medicine of his, he hasn’t been calm at all. Not at all.’
The bag of pastries still lay untouched on the chest of drawers.
‘Aren’t you eating your cream puff, Fefe? I brought it specially for you!’ Ferruccio turned to look at it, Angela called herself an absolute cretin and approached the bed to feed him.’
‘Slowly, now, ok? Don’t be in such a rush!’
‘What does Marco say to me if I eat too quickly? Well, Ferruccio, you know that’s not all right, you’ll swell up, and if you go on like that I’ll take it away from you.’
Despite the rule, Fefe devoured the cream puff in three mouthfuls.
Angela checked her watch. Almost midday. She gave herself another five minutes. Ferruccio mustn’t get too tired.
In the taxi she tried to hold back her tears. But she couldn’t stop the thoughts writhing around in her head like snakes. She tried again, a long, deep breath. Hugging Pierre would have done her good, or even just talking to him on the phone. Damn him for wanting to go to Yugoslavia to find his father, to see the world! It would have to be during that famous ‘fortnight without Odoacre’. A fortnight just for the two of them. Now, with Ferruccio’s relapse, Pierre could have been near them. But he would have started cursing his luck, his own powerlessness, his poverty, their hopeless affair. No, come to think about it, Pierre wouldn’t have been much help, except to spend a night giving vent to the sadness she felt inside.
She realised she thought of him as a little boy. He was fascinating, handsome, she still remembered the first time their eyes had met, at the dance hall. He had that barely perceptible smile of a screen idol, his hand in his trouser pocket, his brilliantined kiss-curl that flopped around as they twirled on the floor. The Filuzzi King. All of a sudden she found the whole thing ridiculous. Pointless.
The black hole in her thoughts became a chasm. She felt old, as though she had lived her life twice. She was Ferruccio’s mother by necessity. She was the mother of Pierre, also an orphan, in pursuit of adventures to show that he was a match for any mysterious father. Perhaps in a way she was even older than Odoacre, who had not known hunger and poverty, who had not brought up a mad brother, without a penny, without anything. That was why he had picked her up off the street, giving her a decent future. She immediately regretted thinking anything of the kind. Odoacre had left the conference, he was coming back to be close to her. He really loved her, she was the one who was betraying him. She felt bad, remorse gripped her by the stomach, a shiver ran through her. With her last breath, she begged the driver to stop. She opened the door and threw up on the pavement.
Chapter 49
Between Trieste and Dubrovnik, 28 April
By the time they had reached Jablanac, Cary was certain of it: Major Dyle was an idiot.
Certainly, what he had read about him in the MI6 dossier had not made him warm to him particularly. Only a major idiot could manage a career like that without going under. But other factors had intervened, clothes first and foremost, then the affected upper-class accent, the chicken’s-arse mouth and the over-active Adam’s-apple.
On the other hand the major wasn’t entirely to blame if Cary was in such a twitch during those April days. He had set off in the hope that Archibald Leach and Frances Farmer would leave him in peace for a while.
There were other bores, too, plotting in the shadows.
On the journey from Trieste to the border alone, the AMG car had had a flat tyre, nearly knocked over a cyclist and had only avoided a head-on collision with a truck by a miracle. On the pitted Italian roads, Cary had had discovered, at the age of fifty, that reading in a car made him sick. He had thrown his guts up in a stinking ditch, not even managing to save his shoes from mud and vomit.
It was at that very moment that his nerves had started to go into a tailspin.
He had begun reading the Dyle dossier the day before, in the hospitable calm of a Trieste café, over a steaming cup of black tea. He had persuaded his escort to leave him alone for a few hours, long enough to take a walk, to have a bit of peace. He was in such a dishevelled state that no one would recognise him. They had agreed on discreet and remote surveillance. Remote, but not too much so. The delicate pier-glass reflected a clear image of the two Englishmen whose task was to follow him everywhere, busy downing a beer at three in the afternoon.
In 1947, during a communist uprising in Greece, Major Alexander Dyle had asked Marshal Tito to close the Macedonian border. No communist was to escape the repression. Slaughter, mass executions on Churchill’s orders. The kind of solution that Cary found revolting. You didn’t have to be a communist to see it as carnage. When you’ve won, you’ve won, you don’t have to be merciless. What was the Latin quote? Est modus in rebus, or something of the kind.
He had sipped his blended Assam tea, resolving to deliver that opinion to the major in person when he met him face to face. That happened the following day, on the border between zones A and B of the Free Territory of Trieste. Major Dyle, a British official on Yugoslavian soil, had come to take delivery of Cary, to bring him to Dubrovnik.
He was wearing an old and uncomfortable-looking deerstalker hat in mouse-grey tweed.
He had a ludicrous moustache.
He was pompously smoking a pipe curved like a saxophone.
He didn’t stop talking for ten minutes at a stretch, and, with minimal pauses, for the remaining three hours.
Cary was not well versed in the study of physiognomy. To claim that the facial features revealed anything about a person’s character struck him as an exaggerated hypothesis, supported by large numbers of idiots with idiotic faces and refuted by too many criminals who looked like gentlemen. Anyway, he had a technique for recognising imbeciles. More than a technique, a sixth sense. Infallible. Based on a simply elaborated concept of ‘external appearance’, which was not limited to the face, but encompassed the manner of speaking, the choice of clothing, the gait. Out of a sense of indulgence towards his fellow-man, he hesitated to attribute 100 per cent certainty to his diagnoses.
With Dyle, he restricted himself to a probability of 70 per cent.
The information in the file added another 20 percentage points.
Some 150 kilometres, 180 minutes and thousands of words were more than enough to supply the remaining 10.
The umpteenth confirmation. A moron.
Fortunately, thanks to this talent, Cary immediately sensed what a terrible blunder he had committed in bringing the discussion round to Greek communists, Tito and the style of the victors.
After travelling 160 kilometres, just past Jablanac, Cary pretended to go to sleep, but this childish ploy was not enough to silence the major. He merely redirected the flow of his logorrhoea towards the driver, the innocent victim of bombastic pronouncements on international politics.
The big dipper started getting faster, his nerves were whirling now.
Cary regretted the meditation courses recommended by Betsy; he had never gone beyond the introductory lesson. If he couldn’t actually have slept, he would at least have closed his eyes, breathed deeply, relaxed his limbs. And fixing his mind’s eye on a point above his lip where the breath brushes the skin as it leaves the nostrils, he would have avoided drowning in the muddy torrent of crap issuing from the major’s mouth.