‘They suggest she’s gone somewhere,’ he said. ‘On some kind of jaunt.’ He paused in order to allow a flicker of amusement to develop in his lean features. ‘They think maybe she ran up her hotel bill and skipped it.’
‘She’s a respectable proprietor of a fashion shop.’
‘The carabinieri say the respectable are always surprising them.’
‘Can you try to find out if she went back to the States? According to the hotel people, that was another theory of the carabinieri.’
Mr Humber shrugged. ‘Since you have told your tale I must try, of course, sir. Would six-thirty be an agreeable hour for you to return?’
He sat outside in the Piazza della Repubblica, eating tortellini and listening to the conversations. A deranged man had gone berserk in a school in Rome, taking children as hostages and killing a janitor; the mayor of Rome had intervened and the madman had given himself up. It was a terrible thing to have happened, the Italians were saying, as bad as the murder of Gabriella.
He paid for his tortellini and went away. He climbed up to the Belvedere, filling in time. Once he thought he saw her, but it was someone else in the same kind of red coat.
‘She’s not back home,’ Mr Humber said with his old-world lack of concern. ‘You’ve started something, sir. Faraday’s flying out.’
In a room in a police station he explained that Mrs Faraday had simply been a fellow-guest at the Albergo San Lorenzo. They had had dinner one evening, and Mrs Faraday had not appeared to be dispirited. She knew other people who had come from America, for the same trade exhibitions. He had seen her with them in a restaurant.
‘These people, sir, return already to the United States. They answer the American police at this time.’
He was five hours in the room at the police station and the next day he was summoned there again and asked the same questions. On his way out on this occasion he noticed a man who he thought might be her husband, a big blond-haired man, too worried even to glance at him. He was certain he had never met him, or even seen him before, as he’d been certain he’d never met Mrs Faraday before she’d come up to him in the hotel.
The police did not again seek to question him. His passport, which they had held for fifty-six Hours, was returned to him. By the end of that week the newspaper references to a missing American woman ceased. He did not see Mr Faraday again.
‘The Italian view,’ said Mr Humber almost a month later, ‘is that she went off on a sexual excursion and found it so much to her liking that she stayed where she was.’
‘I thought the Italian view was that she skipped the hotel. Or that someone had fallen ill.’
‘They revised their thinking somewhat. In the light of various matters.’
‘What matters?’
‘From what you said, Mrs Faraday was a gallivanting lady. Our Italian friends find some significance in that.’ Mr Humber silently drummed the surface of his desk. ‘You don’t agree, sir?’
He shook his head. ‘There was more to Mrs Faraday than that,’ he said.
‘Well, of course there was. The carabinieri are educated men, but they don’t go in for subtleties, you know.’
‘She’s not a vulgar woman. From what I said to the police they may imagine she is. Of course she’s in a vulgar business. They may have jumped too easily to conclusions.’
Mr Humber said he did not understand. ‘Vulgar?’ he repeated.
‘Like me, she deals in surface dross.’
‘You’re into fashion yourself, sir?’
‘No, I’m not. I write tourist guides.’
‘Well, that’s most interesting.’
Mr Humber flicked at the surface of his desk with a forefinger. It was clear that he wished his visitor would go. He turned a sheet of paper over.
‘I remind sightseers that pictures like Pietro Perugino’s Agony in the Garden are worth a second glance. I send them to the Boboli Gardens. That kind of thing.’
Mr Humber’s bland face twitched with simulated interest. Tourists were a nuisance to him. They lost their passports, they locked their ignition keys into their hired cars, they were stolen from and made a fuss. The city lived off them, but resented them as well. These thoughts were for a moment openly reflected in Mr Humber’s pale brown eyes and then were gone. Flicking at his desk again, he said:
‘I’m puzzled about one detail in all this. May I ask you, please?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Were you, you know, ah, seeing Mrs Faraday?’
‘Was I having an affair, you mean? No, I wasn’t.’
‘She was a beautiful woman. By all accounts – by yours, I mean – sir, she’d been most friendly.’
‘Yes, she was friendly.’
She was naïve for an American, and she was careless. She wasn’t fearful of strangers and foolishly she let her riches show. Vulnerability was an enticement.
‘I did not mean to pry, sir,’ Mr Humber apologized. ‘It’s simply that Mr Faraday’s detectives arrived a while ago and the more they can be told the better.’
‘They haven’t approached me.’
‘No doubt they conclude you cannot help them. Mr Faraday himself has returned to the States: a ransom note would be more likely sent to him there.’
‘So Mr Faraday doesn’t believe his wife went off on a sexual excursion?’
‘No one can ignore the facts, sir. There is indiscriminate kidnapping in Italy.’
‘Italians would have known her husband was well-to-do?’
‘I guess it’s surprising what can be ferreted out.’ Mr Humber examined the neat tips of his fingers. He rearranged tranquillity in his face. No matter how the facts he spoke of changed there was not going to be panic in the American Consulate. ‘There has been no demand, sir, but we have to bear in mind that kidnap attempts do often nowadays go wrong. In Italy as elsewhere.’
‘Does Mr Faraday think it has gone wrong?’
‘Faraday is naturally confused. And, of course, troubled.’
‘Of course.’ He nodded to emphasize his agreement. Her husband was the kind who would be troubled and confused, even though unhappiness had developed in the marriage. Clearly she’d given up on the marriage; more than anything, it was desperation that made her forthright. Without it, she might have been a different woman – and in that case, of course, there would not have been this passing relationship between them: her tiresomeness had cultivated that. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ her voice echoed huskily, hungry for friendship. He had told her nothing – nothing of the shattered, destroyed relationships, and the regret and shame; nothing of the pathetic hope in hired rooms, or the anguish turning into bitterness. She had been given beauty, and he a lameness that people laughed at when they knew. Would her tiresomeness have dropped from her at once, like the shedding of a garment she had thought to be attractive, if he’d told her in the restaurant with the modern paintings? Would she, too, have angrily said he’d led her up the garden path?
‘There is our own investigation also,’ Mr Humber said, ‘besides that of Faraday’s detectives. Faraday, I assure you, has spared no expense; the carabinieri file is by no means closed. With such a concentration we’ll find what there is to find, sir.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do your best, Mr Humber.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He rose and Mr Humber rose also, holding out a brown, lean hand. He was glad they had met, Mr Humber said, even in such unhappy circumstances. Diplomacy was like oil in Mr Humber. It eased his movements and his words; his detachment floated in it, perfectly in place.