Every so often he experienced the sensation of an abrupt descent in an infernal lift. He started out of fits of sleep into a waking nightmare. He told himself he should write to his agent and to his publisher, but the mere thought of doing so tasted as acrid as bile and he sat and listened for the telephone instead.
On the third morning a heat wave came upon Rome. The roof garden was like a furnace. He was alone in his corner with an uneaten brioche, a pot of honey and three wasps. He was given over to a sort of fretful lassitude and finally to a condition that he supposed must be that of Despair itself. “What I need,” he told himself on a wave of nausea, “is a bloody good cry on somebody’s bloody bosom.”
One of the two waiters came out.
“Finito?” he sang, as usual. And then, when Barnaby gave bis punctual assent, seemed to indicate that he should come indoors. At first he thought the waiter was suggesting that it was too hot where he was and then that for some reason the manageress wanted to see him.
And then, as a sudden jolt of hope shook him, he saw a fattish man with a jacket hooked over his shoulders come out of the house door and advance towards him. He was between Barnaby and the sun and appeared fantastic, black and insubstantial, but at once Barnaby recognized him.
His reactions were chaotic. He saw the man as if between the inclined heads of two lovers, and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. And whether the sensation that flooded him was one solely of terrified relief, or of a kind of blessed anti-climax, he could never determine. He merely wondered, when the man advanced into the shade and drew an attaché case from under his jacket, if he himself was going to faint.
“Mr. Barnaby Grant?" asked the man. “I think you will be pleased to see me, will you not?”
They escaped from the Gallico, which seemed to be overrun with housemaids, to a very small caffè in a shaded by-way off the Piazza Navona, a short walk away. His companion had suggested it. “Unless, of course,” he said archly, “you prefer something smarter — like the Colonna, for instance,” and Barnaby had shuddered. He took his attaché case with him, and at his guest’s suggestion unlocked it. There, in two loose-leaf folders, lay his book, enclosed by giant-sized rubber bands. The last letter from his agent still lay on top, just as he had left it.
He had rather wildly offered his guest champagne cocktails, cognac, wine — anything — but when reminded that it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning settled for coffee. “Well then,” he said, “at a more appropriate hour — you will let me — and in the meantime I must — well — of course.”
He slid his hand inside his jacket. His heart still thumped at it like a fist.
“You are thinking of the reward so generously offered,” said his companion. “But — please — no. No. It is out of the question. To have been of service, even on so insignificant a scale, to Barnaby Grant — that really is a golden reward. Believe me.”
Barnaby had not expected this and he at once felt he had committed a gigantic error in taste. He had been misled, he supposed, by general appearances: not only by the shabby alpaca jacket that had replaced the English tweed and like it was hooked over the shoulders, displaying a dingy open shirt with worn cuffs, nor by the black-green hat or the really lamentable shoes, but by something indefinable in the man himself. “I wish,” he thought, “I could take an.instant liking to him. I owe him that, at the least.”
And as his companion talked Barnaby found himself engaged in the occupational habit of the novelist: he dwelt on the bullet head, close-cropped like an American schoolboy’s, and the mouse-coloured sparse fringe. He noted the extreme pallor of the skin, its appearance of softness and fine texture like a woman’s: the unexpected fullness and rich colour of the mouth, and those large pale eyes that had looked so fixedly into his in the Piazza Colonna. The voice and speech? High but muted, it had no discernible accent but carried a suggestion of careful phrasing. Perhaps English was no longer the habitual language. His choice of words was pedantic as if he had memorized his sentences for a public address.
His hands were plump and delicate and the nails bitten to the quick.
His name was Sebastian Mailer.
“You wonder, of course,” he was saying, “why you have been subjected to this no doubt agonizing delay. You would like to know the circumstances?”
“Very much.”
“I can’t hope that you noticed me the other morning in Piazza Colonna.”
“But yes. I remember you very well.”
“Perhaps I started. You see, I recognized you at once from the photographs on your book jackets. I must tell you I am a most avid admirer, Mr. Grant.”
Barnaby murmured.
“I am also, which is more to the point, what might be described as ‘an old Roman hand.’ I have lived here for many years and have acquired some knowledge of Roman society at a number of levels. Including the lowest. You see I am frank.”
“Why not?”
“Why not indeed! My motives, in what I imagine some of our compatriots would call muck-raking, are aesthetic and I think I may say philosophical, but with that I must not trouble you. It will do well enough if I tell you that at the time I recognized you I also recognized a despicable person known to the Roman riff-raff as — I translate — Feather-fingers. He was stationed at a short distance from you and behind your back. His eyes were fastened upon your attaché case.”
“God!”
“Indeed, yes. Now, you will recollect that the incipient thunderstorm broke abruptly and that with the downpour and subsequent confusion a fracas arose between some of the occupants of tables adjacent to your own.”
“Yes.”
“And that you received a violent blow in the back that knocked you across your table.”
“So it did,” Barnaby agreed.
“Of course you thought that you had been struck by one of the contestants, but this was not so. The character I have brought to your notice took advantage of the melee, darted forward, delivered the blow with his shoulder, snatched up your case and bolted. It was an admirably timed manoeuvre and executed with the greatest speed and precision. The contestants continued to shout at each other and I, my dear Mr. Grant, gave chase.”
He sipped his coffee, made a small inclination, an acknowledgement perhaps of Barnaby’s passionate attention.
“It was a long pursuit,” Mailer continued. “But I clung to his trail and — is the phrase ‘ran him to earth’? It is. Thank you. I ran him to earth, then, in what purveyors of sensational fiction would describe as ‘a certain caffè in such-and-such a little street not a thousand miles from—’ etc., etc. Perhaps my phraseology is somewhat dated. In plain terms I caught up with him at his habitual haunt and by means with which I will not trouble you, recovered your attaché case.”
“On the same day,” Barnaby couldn’t help asking, “that I lost it?”
“Ah! As the cornered victim of an interrogation always says: I am glad you asked that question. Mr. Grant, with any less distinguished person I would have come armed with a plausible prevarication. With you, I cannot adopt this measure. I did not return your case before because—”