nothing, of course. . . ."
But there was no hint of change in the aristocratic blankness of Villari's expression, nor any suggestion that he intended to give anything back in return for all the information he had received. He was not simply ignoring Boselli, but even more simply Boselli had ceased to exist for him while he digested what he had been told.
Boselli turned back towards the shimmering highway ahead.
They were out of the city now, almost magically—he had been too busy answering carefully, playing his answers one by one as frugally as he knew how, to notice how fast they had been travelling. Now they were eating up the kilometres to the sea even more rapidly, rushing to whatever rendezvous lay ahead. For this was not square one again, that at least he knew without Villari having to let slip one helpful word. It had been there from the start, even in the man's assumed nonchalance in the cafe: if there had really been nothing to report it would have been scorn, or sarcasm, or even anger waiting for him there, or certainly something very different from that first guarded hostility. Whereas when he had revealed that he had something to offer, Villari had been eager to take it—eager enough to affect that sickening contemptuous jocularity. . . .
So one thing was sure: they had staked out Audley's apartment on the Aventine and against all reasonable expectation it had quietly paid off. He had been right—it no longer mattered for what ridiculous reason; nobody knew dummy2
about that anyway and looking back on it he felt that in fairness to himself it had been logic and instinct as much as any other consideration which had prompted him to suspect that the English were up to something.
He had been right. He hugged the knowledge to himself triumphantly. And Villari had been wrong: that was almost as satisfying.
And he had been right against the odds and in the very presence of the Generaclass="underline" that was the sort of thing he needed to establish himself, exactly the sort of thing! He had shown his quality in a way which would be noted: not a man of facts and figures, little more than a clerk, but a man of decision and discernment. . . .
" Chase is turning off main highway," the crackling voice on the radio took him unawares again. " Turning right—sign reads . . . Ostia Antica—do you read me?—Ostia Antica."
"Check—Ostia Antica." Villari flicked the switch and frowned at Boselli. "What is there at Ostia Antica?"
"The excavations."
"Excavations?"
"It was the port of ancient Rome, signore," said Boselli patiently. The Clotheshorse was clearly pig-ignorant of everything that did not concern him, but that was only to be expected. "It was the imperial port until the river course changed. I suppose it silted up first. And there would have dummy2
been the malaria from the marshes too—"
"I didn't ask for a history lesson. I know what the place was,"
Villari snapped. "But what are the excavations like?"
Boselli scratched his head. The truth was he had never visited Ostia Antica, although he did not care to admit it just now.
"Just ruins." He shrugged. That was safe enough: the past was always in ruins, and one ruin was much like another.
"Just ruins. You can see them alongside the road to the Lido—
I'm sure you must have seen them sometime."
"I do not go to the Lido." Villari contemptuously relegated the city's beaches to the city's rabble. "Do the tourists go there?"
"To the Lido?" Boselli gazed at him stupidly.
"To the ruins, you fool—are they crawling with foreign tourists?"
"I—I suppose so," Boselli floundered, irritated with himself for having misunderstood the question and also for not having admitted from the start that he knew nothing about the Ostian excavations. But far more irritating was the realisation that Villari had some idea of why the Englishman was making this trip and that he was sitting on his suspicions out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
Crawling with tourists? He stifled his annoyance and concentrated on the vision the phrase conjured up: of the Trevi submerged and the Forum overrun by hordes of dummy2
sunbeaten Americans and English and Germans, their cameras endlessly clicking and their dog-eared Blue Guides clutched in sweaty hands.
So Audley had come to meet someone or to be met under cover of such crowds; an old trick, but one not much to Villari's taste evidently.
"Yes," he smiled at the Clotheshorse maliciously, "I'm sure it will be crawling with foreigners, signore."
VII
BUT OSTIA ANTICA was not crawling with tourists, native or foreign. It was not crawling with anything at all, except heat and solitude.
Boselli stood miserably in the shadow of an umbrella pine just beyond the entrance building, fanning himself uselessly with the official guidebook, waiting for Villari to finish with the policeman who had stayed behind on the end of the radio. Presumably his partner had gone in after the Englishman and his wife, though there was no sign of them down the tree-lined avenue which led to the ruins.
There was, indeed, no sign of anyone: either it was too hot, or perhaps because of the heat the nearby sea had proved an irresistible counterattraction for all those sightseers who would otherwise have made their pilgrimage to the forgotten port of Rome. But whatever the reason, he could not have been more wrong in his forecast.
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In fact he had been so wrong that Villari had not bothered to rub it in; he had merely grunted derisively at the two cars in the parking lot and had ordered Boselli to purchase the guidebook and wait for him inside, and although Boselli would have dearly loved to hear what the policeman in the car had to say, he had been glad to scuttle off with his tail between his legs, away from the danger of further humiliation and the hot asphalt of the car park under his thin-soled city shoes.
He knew that he ought now to be using these precious moments to familiarise himself with the town's layout, but for the life of him he couldn't, for the place overawed and disquieted him in a way he had not expected.
For he had been wrong also about the nature and extent of the remains. Those few hurried glances from his own driver's seat on the family excursions to the Lido had not prepared him for the actuality: there was much more above ground here than could be glimpsed from the roadside, which must have been merely outlying structures far beyond the town's perimeter.
Not just above ground—he flicked quickly through the illustrations in the back of the little book—but high above ground. There was an absolute labyrinth of buildings standing to the first and even to the second storey here. The problem of tracking down anyone, and of doing so in this emptiness without making themselves obvious, would be formidable.
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Clearly, this must have been the shrewd Englishman's idea in coming to such a place. The streets of Rome provided cover for enemies as well as friends; here it would be possible to accept or decline a contact with far greater certainty of having done the wiser thing.
It was not the Englishman's cunning that disturbed him—the man was enough of a professional to be wary and amateur enough to be I unconventional at the same time in his choice of a rendezvous. It was just pure bad luck that he had fixed a place which aroused the deepest feeling of unease in Boselli's soul.
Ordinarily he was not subject to such odd notions. He was a city-dweller born and bred, with a natural contempt and suspicion for the peasant countryside—he knew those gut reactions of old, and allowed for them. But this place was neither city nor country; nor, without the colourful crowds of tourists and the surrounding noise and bustle of a busy city, was it like the antiquities he was used to back in Rome. It was much more like a bombed and plague-emptied town, something which had been alive yesterday and was newly-dead—a corpse unburied, rather than an old skeleton disinterred ... an obscenity. No sooner had he formulated that thought than he was overtaken by embarrassment with it: it was the sort of mental absurdity he would never have dared admit to his colleagues and for which his wife invariably prescribed a laxative. Even the unshockable Father Patrick, his favourite Dominican, had warned him dummy2