It is also getting dark, as big Carlo’s car alternately edges and spurts along the traffic, Carlo meanwhile denouncing the students and the police for causing the chaos. When they come at last to a clear stretch Carlo says, ‘My wife I think is no good. I heard her on the telephone and she didn’t think I was in the house. I heard.’
‘You must understand,’ Lise says, ‘that anything at all that is overheard when the speaker doesn’t know you’re listening takes on a serious note. It always sounds far worse than their actual intentions are.
‘This was bad,’ mutters Carlo. ‘It’s a man. A second cousin of hers. I made a big trouble for her that night, I can tell you. But she denied it. How could she deny it? I heard it.’
‘If you imagine,’ Lise says, ‘that you are justifying any anticipations you may have with regards to me, you’re mistaken. You can drop me off here, if you like. Otherwise, you can come and buy me a drink at the Hilton Hotel, and then it’s good night. A soft drink. I don’t take alcohol. I’ve got a date that I’m late for already.’
‘We go out of town a little way,’ says Carlo. ‘I know a place. I brought the Fiat, did you see? The front seats fold back. Make you comfortable.’
‘Stop at once,’ Lise says. ‘Or I put my head out of the window and yell for help. I don’t want sex with you. I’m not interested in sex. I’ve got other interests and as a matter of fact I’ve got something on my mind that’s got to be done. I’m telling you to stop.’ She grabs the wheel and tries to guide it into the curb.
‘All right, all right,’ he says, regaining control of the car which has swerved a little with Lise’s interference. ‘All right. I’m taking you to the Hilton.’
‘It doesn’t look like the Hilton road to me,’ Lise says. The traffic lights ahead are red but as there is very little traffic about on this dark, wide residential boulevard, he chances it and skims across. Lise puts her head out of the window and yells for help.
He pulls up at last in a side lane where, back from the road, there are the lights of two small villas; beyond that the road is a mass of stony crevices. He embraces her and kisses her mightily while she kicks him and tries to push him off, gurgling her protests. When he stops for breath he says, ‘Now we put back the seats and do it properly.’ But already she has jumped out of the car and has started running towards the gate of one of the houses, wiping her mouth and screaming, ‘Police! Call the police!’ Big Carlo overtakes her at the gate. ‘Quiet!’ he says. ‘Be quiet, and get into the car. Please. I’ll take you back, I promise. Sorry, lady, I haven’t done any harm at all to you, have I? Only a kiss, what’s a kiss.’
She runs and makes a grab for the door of the driver’s seat, and as he calls after her, ‘The other door!’ she gets in, starts up, and backs speedily out of the lane. She leans over and locks the other door just in time to prevent him from opening it. ‘You’re not my type in any case,’ she screams. Then she starts off, too quickly for him to be able to open the back door he is now grabbing at. Still he is running to catch up, and she yells back at him, ‘If you report this to the police I’ll tell them the truth and make a scandal in your family.’ And then she is away, well clear of him.
She spins along in expert style, stopping duly at the traffic lights. She starts to sing softly as she waits:
Inky-pinky-winky-wong
How do you like your potatoes done?
A little gravy in the pan
For the King of the Cannibal Islands.
Her zipper-bag is on the floor of the car. While waiting for the lights to change she lifts it on to the seat, unzips it and looks with a kind of satisfaction at the wrapped-up objects of different shape, as it might be they represent a good day’s work. She comes to a crossroad where some traffic accumulates. Here, a policeman is on duty and as she passes at his bidding she pulls up and asks him the way to the Hilton.
He is a young policeman. He bends to give her the required direction.
‘Do you carry a revolver?’ Lise says. He looks puzzled and fails to answer before Lise adds, ‘Because, if you did, you could shoot me.
The policeman is still finding words when she drives off, and in the mirror she can see him looking at the retreating car, probably noting the number. Which in fact he is doing, so that, on the afternoon of the following day, when he has been shown her body, he says, ‘Yes, that’s her. I recognize the face. She said, “If you had a revolver you could shoot me.”’ Which is to lead to many complications in Carlo’s private life when the car is traced back to him, he being released by the police only after six hours of interrogation. A photograph of Carlo and also a picture of his young apprentice who holds a lively press conference of his own, moreover will appear in every newspaper in the country.
But now, at the Hilton Hotel her car is held up just as it enters the gates in the driveway. There is a line of cars ahead, and beyond them a group of policemen. Two police cars are visible in the parking area on the other side of the entrance. The rest of the driveway is occupied by a line of four very large limousines each with a uniformed driver standing by.
The police collect on either side of the hotel doorway, their faces picked out by the bright lights, while there emerge down the steps from the hotel two women who seem to be identical twins, wearing black dresses and high-styled black hair, followed by an important-looking Arabian figure, sheikh-like in his head-dress and robes, with a lined face and glittering eyes, who descends the steps with a floating motion as if his feet are clearing the ground by an inch or two; he is flanked by two smaller bespectacled, brown-faced men in businesslike suits. The two black-dressed women stand back with a respectful housekeeperly bearing while the robed figure approaches the first limousine; and the two men draw back too, as he enters the recesses of the car. Two black-robed women with the lower parts of their faces veiled and their heads shrouded in drapery then make their descent, and behind them another pair appear, menservants with arms raised, bearing aloft numerous plastic-enveloped garments on coat-hangers. Still in pairs, further components of the retinue appear, each two moving in such unison that they seem to share a single soul or else two well-rehearsed parts in the chorus of an opera by Verdi. Two men wearing western clothes but for their red fezes are duly admitted to one of the waiting limousines and, as Lise gets out of her car to join the watchers, two ramshackle young Arabs with rumpled grey trousers and whitish shirts end the procession, bearing two large baskets, each one packed with oranges and a jumbo-sized vacuum-flask which stands slightly askew among the fruit, like champagne in an ice-bucket.
A group of people who are standing near Lise on the driveway, having themselves got out of their held-up taxis and cars, are discussing the event: ‘He was here on vacation. I saw it on the television. There’s been a coup in his country and he’s going back.’ — ‘Why should he go back?’ — ‘No, he won’t go back, believe me. Never.’ — ‘What country is it? I hope it doesn’t affect us. The last time there was a coup my shares regressed so I nearly had a breakdown. Even the mutual funds …’
The police have gone back to their cars, and escorted by them the caravan goes its stately way.
Lise jumps back into Carlo’s car and conducts it as quickly as possible to the car park. She leaves it there, taking the keys. Then she leaps into the hotel, eyed indignantly by the doorman who presumably resents her haste, her clothes, the blurred stain on her coat, the rumpled aspect that she has acquired in the course of the evening and whose built-in computer system rates her low on the spending scale.
Lise makes straight for the ladies’ toilets and while there, besides putting her appearance to rights as best she can, she takes a comfortable chair in the soft-lit rest-room and considers, one by one, the contents of her zipper-bag which she lays on a small table beside her. She feels the outside of the box containing the food-blender and replaces it in her bag. She also leaves unopened a soft package containing the neckties, but, having rummaged in her hand-bag for something which apparently is not there, she brings forth her lipstick and with it she writes on the outside of the soft package, ‘Papa’. There is an unsealed paper bag which she peers into; it is the orange scarf.