“You may put it like that,” Alleyn said. “How about a liqueur with our coffee?”
The next two days went by without further incident. Mr. Mailer’s guests followed, Alleyn presumed, their own inclinations. He himself wrote up a detailed report on the case and sent a précis of it to his masters. He had three indeterminate conversations with Valdarno and put a call through to London asking for detailed reports on Lady Braceley and Kenneth Dorne and a check through the army lists on Major Hamilton Sweet. He also asked for the appropriate branch to make enquiries through the Dutch authorities about the Van der Veghels.
On the third day Rome was engulfed in a heat wave. Pavements, walls and the sky itself quivered under its onslaught and the high saints extended their stone arms above the city in a shimmer that resembled movement. Alleyn lunched in the hotel and spent a good deal of time wondering how Fox was prospering in London.
The Latin siesta is a civilized habit. At its best it puts the sweltering heat of the day behind insect-proof barriers, gives people a rest from excitedly haranguing each other and causes a lull in the nervous activity of the streets.
For Alleyn the siesta was not a blessing. Trained to do with less sleep than most persons require and, when necessary, to catch what he could get in cat-naps and short periods of oblivion, he found the three odd hours of disengagement an irritant rather than a tranquilizer. He stripped, slept soundly for an hour, took a shower and, freshly dressed, went out into the street.
Rome was under a haze and the Spanish Steps were deserted. No ambiguous youths displayed on their accepted beat. Flowers blazed under protective canvas or drooped where the sun had found them. All the shops down in the Via Condotti were shut and so was the travel agency where Alleyn had booked his tour.
He walked down the steps: not quite the only person abroad in the heat of the day. Ahead of him at intervals were a belated shop-girl, a workman, an old woman and — having apparently come from the hotel — Giovanni Vecchi! Alleyn took cover behind an awning. Giovanni went on down the steps and into the Via Condotti. Alleyn followed cautiously. Giovanni stopped.
Alleyn’s instant side step into the entrance of a closed shop was a reflex action. He watched Giovanni between two handbags in the corner window. Giovanni glanced quickly up and down the street, and then at his watch. A taxi came down the street, stopped at a house almost opposite the shop and discharged its fare. Giovanni hailed it and came back to meet it.
Alleyn moved further into the doorway and turned his back. He heard Giovanni say “Il Eremo” and name the street.
The door slammed, the taxi rattled off and Alleyn, looking in vain for another, set off at a gruelling pace for Navona.
Arriving there some ten minutes later he made his way down an alley smelling of cooking oil and garlic.
There it was: the little trattoria with kerbside caffè where a year ago Mailer and Grant had dined together. The door into the restaurant was shut and the blinds were drawn. Chairs had been tipped forward over the outside tables. The place at first sight seemed to be quite deserted.
As Alleyn drew cautiously nearer, however, he saw that two men were seated at a table in a shadowed corner under the awning and that one of them was Giovanni. They had their backs towards him but there was no mistaking Giovanni’s companion.
It was Major Sweet.
Alleyn had arrived at a yard belonging to a junk shop of the humbler sort. Bad pictures, false Renaissance chairs, one or two restored pieces ruined by a deluge of cheap varnish. A large dilapidated screen. He moved into the shelter of the screen and surveyed Major Sweet and Giovanni through the hinged gap between two leaves.
Major Sweet, from the rear, looked quite unlike himself: there was something about his back and the forward tilt of his head that suggested extreme alertness. A slight movement and his cheek, the end of his moustache and his right eye came into view. The eye was cocked backwards: the eye of a watchful man. Giovanni leant towards the Major and talked. No Italian can talk without hands and Giovanni’s were active but, as it were, within a restricted field. The Major folded his arms and seemed to wait.
Could he, Alleyn wondered, be arranging with Giovanni for a further installment of last night’s excesses? Somehow the two of them didn’t look quite like that
They looked, he thought, as if they drove some other kind of bargain and he hoped he wasn’t being too fanciful about them.
He saw that by delicate manoeuvring he could cross the yard, edge up to a bin with a polyglot collection of papers under a tall cupboard and thus bring himself much nearer to the caffè. He did so, slid a disreputable but large map out of the bin and held it in front of him in case they suddenly came his way. Lucky, he thought, that he’d changed his shoes and trousers.
They spoke in English. Their voices dropped and rose and he caught only fragments of what they said, as if a volume control were being turned up and down by some irresponsible hand.
“—waste of time talking — you better understand, Vecchi — danger. Ziegfeldt—”
“—are you mad? How many times I tell you — instructions—”
“—search — Police—”
“O.K., Signore. So they search and find nothing — I have made—‘arrangements’—”
“—arrangements. Try that on Alleyn and see what — Different — Take it from me — I can do it. And I will. Unless—”
“—drunk—”
“—nothing to do with it. Not so drunk I didn’t know — It’s a fair offer. Make it right for me or—”
“You dare not.”
“Don’t you believe it. Look here — if I report — Ziegfeldt—”
“Taci!”
“Shut up.”
A savage-sounding but muted exchange followed. Finally Giovanni gave a sharp ejaculation. Chair legs grated on the pavement. A palm was slapped down on the table. Alleyn, greatly stimulated, squatted behind the ruin of a velvet chair and heard them go past. Their footsteps died away and he came out of cover. Somewhere behind a shuttered window a man yawned vocally and prodigiously. Further along the street a door opened. A youth in singlet and trousers lounged out, scratching his armpits. A woman inside the trattoria called with an operatic flourish. “Mar — cel — lo.”
The siesta was over.
It was a long time since Alleyn had “kept observation” on anybody and, like Il Questore Valdarno, he didn’t altogether object to an unexpected return to fieldwork.
It was not an easy job. The streets were still sparsely populated and offered little cover. He watched and waited until his men had walked about two hundred yards, saw them part company and decided to follow the Major, who had turned into a side alley in that part of Old Rome devoted to sale of “antiques.”
Here in the dealers’ occupational litter it was easier going and by the time they had emerged from the region Alleyn was close behind the Major, who was headed, he realized, in the direction of his small hotel where they had deposited him in the early hours of the morning.
“All that for nothing,” thought Alleyn.
The Major entered the hotel. Alleyn followed as far as the glass door, watched him go to the reception desk, collect a key and move away, presumably to a lift.
Alleyn went in, entered a telephone booth opposite the lift and rang up Valdarno as he had arranged to do at this hour. He gave the Questore a succinct account of the afternoon’s work.
“This Major, hah? This Sweet? Not quite as one supposed, hah?” said the Questore.
“So it would seem.”
“What is your interpretation?”
“I got a very fragmentary impression, you know. But it points, don’t you think, to Major Sweet’s connection with Ziegfeldt and in a greater or less degree with the Mailer enterprise?”