Safer to wait for a truck.
He waited. A couple of cars drove past on the opposite carriageway. Webb used the passing headlights to check the time and wondered if he had been right to let the first car pass.
Fifteen minutes went by, during which, with increasing desperation, he tried willpower and prayer. But no car came.
A voice? Maybe; but it was on the limit of hearing. Webb put it down to an illusion caused by pounding blood and overwrought senses. And then, distinctly, there was the low sound of a female laugh. He walked along the emergency lane, catching occasional murmurs of conversation as he approached, although not enough to make out the sense.
A car was parked in a police layby about a hundred and fifty yards from where he had been waiting. Human figures were just discernible in its red tail-lights.
“Buona sera!”
A woman of about thirty emerged from the shadows. Her mini-skirt was leather and absurdly short, and her legs were skinny. “Good evening,” Webb said.
“Chi sei?”
“Sono un Inglese.”
“Ma che ci fai qui?”
“Mi sono perso.”
The woman turned to the shadows behind her. “Dice di essere un turista che si è perso. Forse sta cercando un letto per la notte.” Somebody laughed, short and sharp.
“My name is Claudia,” she said to Webb, in heavily accented English. “Can we do some business? Look, I’m clean.” She delved into her blouse and pulled out a little card. Webb held it to the tail-light of the car. There was a photograph of herself and a warning in several languages. The English one said
If the stamp is red don’t take her to bed
If the stamp is blue it’s up to you
There were a lot of stamps. They looked red but presumably that was the tail-light.
“Actually, I was looking for a lift to Rome.”
The woman laughed and said something incomprehensible over her shoulder. “You have to pay for our time, bell’uomo. And there are four of us.”
“There’s no problem with that.” Four ladies of the night, services rendered. Webb almost smiled at the reaction in Accounts.
The car was small, two-door and smelled of stale cigarettes. Webb found himself squeezed into the back between Claudia, who turned out to be red-headed, and a girl with long dangling earrings and smooth skin who announced herself as Giselle.
The front seats went back and another two women slipped in, into the front. Claudia said, “We were just going anyway. Business is cattivo at Christmas.”
The driver turned to Webb. She had short hair in tight curls; she was wearing a black choker and her eyes were heavy with mascara. “This is Martini and my name is Bianca,” she said in educated English. “I’m a criminal lawyer. I make a lot of money.”
“How do you do? I suppose these are your clients.”
“What about you, Englishman?”
“Un professore matto.”
She laughed. “In cerca della pietre filo sofali.”
Webb’s credentials as a mad professor established, the little car eased itself on to the autostrada and then took off briskly; and four whores, a nerve-shattered scientist and the secret of Nemesis headed swiftly towards Rome.
The Werewolf Club
Il Lupo Manaro, the Werewolf Club. A part of Rome which Christmas had not reached, and where white light was the only taboo.
The small car turned out to have a powerful engine, and on the trip back to Rome the speedometer needle hovered at a deeply satisfying one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. There was a lot of repartee in a strong local dialect, most of which went over Webb’s head. Wedged between Claudia and Giselle, he was treated to their bony thighs pressing against his. Claudia’s hand kept straying to his knee.
Within an hour and a half the great plain of Rome was glittering below them and soon they were rattling noisily into quiet suburbs, and down towards Cinecittà. There were still crowds promenading at 1 a.m. in central Rome. Webb tried to keep his bearings from monuments and places he knew.
An alarm bell began to ring in his head.
They cut left at the Colosseum and seemed to be heading south; but then they made a sharp turn north. A sign said Circo Massimo and there were tall floodlit ruins on a hill to the right; and then the criminal lawyer was taking them past the Mouth of Truth, over the Palatine Bridge, across the dark Tiber, and into the maze of narrow crowded streets of the old ghetto.
This was no good: he needed the airport, fast. He said, casually, “You can let me out anywhere, ladies.”
Claudia sniggered, Martini laughed wildly, and Webb’s heart sank, his growing suspicion that he had never escaped hardening up.
The car turned off at a triangular piazza and drove some way into a narrow lane, pulling into the kerbside. The five of them tumbled out. Martini and Bianca were into some noisy exchange, all Italian exuberance, Bianca’s long earrings swinging like pendulums. Claudia was having trouble with her stiletto heels on the cobbles, and Webb’s legs were in agony with returning circulation; they linked arms for mutual balance.
Ditch her and run? Webb reckoned he might get ten yards.
A group of young men and their ladies approached, singing and giggling, and receded into the dark.
A lane leading off a lane, and there was Il Lupo Manaro, strobing the dark corners with green and pink neon. A notice at the entrance told them that
Mephisto
Performs
A Nite of Magic
With the Sounds of
The Meathooks
There were photographs of a rotund middle-aged man, attempting to give an air of mystery to his unmysterious features with beard, top hat, cape and wand. Even at one o’clock in the morning it was antiquated corn.
Webb said, “Thank you for the lift. I ought to go now.”
Claudia was smiling with her mouth. “But you have to pay for our time, remember? Settle up in here.”
“Five minutes?”
“Ten.” Claudia took Webb by the hand and led him in.
Cones of ultraviolet light, thrown down by spot lamps in the ceiling, interspersed the deep gloom. Synthetic fibres passing through the beams glowed a deep purple, and diamonds, if they happened to be real, sparkled and fluoresced. There was, Webb noticed, a lot of fluorescence around. He was startled to see Claudia’s lips and eyelids glowing a brilliant green.
A mature woman with an air of having seen and done it all, once too often, said “Buona sera!” and it was buona sera all the way through a maze of perspex doors into the heart of the club. A luminous purple shirt front and cuffs approached from the shadows like the Invisible Man, and materialized at the last into a figure of oriental features and indeterminate age.
They were ushered to a low table near the centre of the room and lay out on settees, Roman style, Claudia and Giselle flopping down on either side of him. They seemed to be well known in the club, Bianca in particular being on the receiving end of a lot of greetings.
Candles were lit at the table; they burned red and blue and gave off a strange herbal smell, which mingled with the already dense smell of Havana in the air. Expensive minks were scattered casually over the backs of settees, occupied by couples in various degrees of intimacy and angles to the horizontal. Martini and Bianca shared, Martini casually stroking the lawyer’s legs, which were draped over her own. Webb began to wonder about them. A waiter approached and Martini ordered gin fizz all round. The warmth, the narcotic perfume and his exhaustion were like heavy chains.