The room above was less dirty. There were family pictures on the walls and a little shrine stood in one corner. I went on up. Another floor with a broken bicycle and a small blacksmith’s forge and a smell of charcoal. Would I never get to the top? I felt pretty well at the end of my tether. I seemed to be stumbling on and on, up never-ending flights of worn stone.
Then suddenly I was out again in the eruption glare. There was a breath of suphurous heat on my face and I had a glimpse of a building, black against the red glow of lava, toppling slowly, toppling and crumbling as it crashed downwards. Then something smashed against the side of my head and I was falling, like the building had done, falling in a shower of sparks to a red, eyeball-searing glow.
I felt something wrenched out of my hand and then I was struggling back to consciousness with a voice I knew saying, ‘I hope I do not hurt you.’ The voice was the voice I’d heard on the operating table and I screamed.
‘Ah! So now you are frightened, eh?’
I opened my eyes to find the face of il dottore wavering over me. The cruel lips were drawn back in a thin smile. I could see the tongue flicking over them and the pointed, tobacco-stained teeth. His eyes gleamed like red coals.
‘Don’t operate again,’ I heard myself say. ‘Please don’t operate any more.’
He was laughing at me now and suddenly I saw that he had no moustache. The face dissolved into Shirer’s face. But the red, sadistic excitement of the eyes remained.
Then my head cleared and I knew where I was. I was in Santo Francisco and Sansevino was bending over me. A torch was switched on and his face vanished in the blinding light of it. He had my automatic in his hand and he was laughing, a horrible, tensed-up, tittering sound. ‘Now, my friend, perhaps you will be good enough to let me have a look at your lovely new leg.’
His hands were tearing at my trousers. I jerked upright at his touch. He hit me in the face with the torch then, knocking me back into the grit of the ash that covered the roof-top. I felt the blood trickling down from a cut above my right eye. It reached my mouth. I licked at it with my tongue. It was salt and full of grit. He had pulled my trousers clear of my thigh now and his hands were working at the straps of my leg. Involuntarily I flinched. He gave a soft snicker. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he said. ‘I do not have to operate this time to remove your leg. See, it is only held by straps — leather straps; the living tissues have gone.’ I could hear his tongue savouring the relish of his words. And all the time I was thinking there was something I had to do. Fear clutched at me at the touch of his hands. I fought it, struggling to clear my brain, to think what had to be done. I couldn’t think with those bloody fingers moving over the flesh of my thigh, touching the cringing skin of my stomach.
Then suddenly he had my leg free. ‘There. You see. It is quite painless, this operation.’
I sat up. He stepped back quickly. The metal of my leg gleamed a dull red. It looked absurdly horrible as he held it in his hands — like looking at my own leg, severed from my body in one lump and bathed in blood. He had switched off the torch now and he was smiling at me. ‘You can do what you wish now, Mr. Farrell. You’re not very mobile.’ It was Shirer’s voice. But almost in the same instant he had reverted to il dottore. ‘I make a nice job of that leg, eh? The stump has healed well.’
I cursed him then, mouthing obscenities in an effort to drown my fear. But he only laughed, his teeth a red, pointed gleam. Then he had ripped the pad out of the artificial limb and turned the contraption upside down. He gave a little cry of satisfaction as a chamois leather bag and a roll of oilskin fell into the ash. He picked the bag up, tearing excitedly at the cord that bound it, his eyes gleaming with greed.
‘So!’ He peered into the mouth of the bag, crooning to himself. ‘Tucek told the truth. Bene! Bene!’
‘What have you done with him?’ I cried.
He looked at me. Then he smiled. It was a wicked, devilish smile. ‘You need not worry about him. I have not hurt him — very much. He is quite safe. So is Maxwell and the lovely Contessa. The stupid American is safe too.’ He laughed. ‘He come all the way from Pittsburgh — where I come from, eh? — to see Vesuvius in eruption. Well, now he has a grandstand view. I hope he likes it,’ he added venomously.
‘What have you done with them?’ I demanded, anger suddenly getting the better of my fear.
‘Nothing, my friend. Nothing at all. I give them a good view of the eruption, that is all. Would you also like to see how a village can disappear under a mountain? You see all these houses?’ His hand indicated the roof tops of Santo Francisco. ‘This village is built in the days when Rome is a great power. And in a few hours it will be gone. And you will go with it, my friend.’ He re-tied the mouth of the leather bag and slipped it into his pocket. Then he stooped and picked up the oilskin package.
He was coming towards me now and suddenly I knew what it was I had to do. I fumbled in the pocket of my jacket, found the rotor arm and showed it to him. ‘This is what you want, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Ah, you think to barter, eh?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t barter with a murderous swine like you. You can try and get out on foot.’ I struggled up on one elbow and flung the little bakelite and metal arm as far as I could. He ran after it. But it fell clear of the roof. He stopped at the edge, staring down into the black pit into which it had fallen. Then he came back, his face livid with rage. He lashed out at me with his foot, kicking at the bare stump of my leg, mouthing curses at me in Italian. I felt grit searing the flesh and the pain of his kicks ran up the left side of my body and struck like hammer blows on the nerves of my brain. Then suddenly he turned, picked up my artificial leg and flung it after the rotor arm. I watched it fall with a red gleam of metal beyond the edge of the roof and a sickening feeling of fear took hold of me. It was silly to be frightened by the loss of an ugly metal attachment. But without it I was helpless and he knew it.
‘Now try to get out of Santo Francisco on your bare stump,’ he snarled.
The black vault of the night flared redder as the mountain blew off again. He glanced up to the glare. I could see the sweat shining in drops on his face. He turned to me, lashed out at my pelvis with all the frustrated violence of a man who is scared of death. I rolled over involuntarily and caught the kick on my thigh. He didn’t kick me again, but bent down, searching through the pockets of my coat and trousers. ‘What have you done with it?’ he screamed at me.
‘Done with what?’ I asked.
He drove his fist into my face. ‘The other rotor arm, you fool.’
‘I haven’t got it,’ I mumbled through my broken lips. ‘Maxwell has it.’ I thought the lie might send him back to them and give them another chance.
He beat at my face with his clenched fist until the mountain flamed again. Then he dived for the door of the roof and disappeared. I heard bolts being shot home and then I was alone in the red glare of the mountain.
I wasn’t frightened — not then. I was too relieved at his departure. Fear came later with the dawn and the lava eating at the buildings across the street and the heat of it withering my body.
After he’d gone I crawled to the shelter of the door and lay there for a while recovering my breath and trying to sort things out. Stones fell clattering against the stonework, throwing dust in my face. Huddled close to the door they missed me and when the shower of lapilli had ended I started on a painful tour of my roof-top prison.
It was about fifty feet by thirty, surrounded by a stone balustrade a foot high. On one side was a drop to a street and on the opposite side, the side where I’d thrown the rotor arm, the house dropped to a garden carpeted in ash. In the middle of it I could see the faint metallic glimmer of my tin leg. The house was one of a row, but it was separated on either side from the neighbouring houses by a narrow alley, a sheer crevice about five feet across. There was no hope of crossing the gap and there was no way into the house from the roof other than by the door. If there’d been a clothesline, even an old piece of wood to act as a crutch I would have felt less helpless. But there was nothing, just the flat expanse of the roof, covered in ash, the foot-high balustrade, and in the middle the stone-built rabbit hutch with the door that led to the floor below. I hadn’t even a knife or any implement with which to set to work on the door.