|
|
|
He put the car in fifth and glanced at her. Her skin had become smoother, taking on an apricot colour. It looked much nicer than those typical of Italian women, whose suntanned faces resembled dark brown leather.
“Say something, Debby.”
“Sometimes I wish I lived rough rather than go on like that,” she snapped.
How could she be so desirable and so moody at once? He glanced at her again, at the high muscle tone of her legs, as well as their tanned colour against the lilac background of her pareu, and reminded himself that they’d bought it together from a Moroccan immigrant on the beach a fortnight ago. The Moroccan had called her signorina. She didn’t look thirty-eight.
“Don’t be angry. You’re so lovely in the summer. I fancy you. I sure as hell do,” he said.
She chuckled. “I’m sorry, Paul.”
He touched her on the knee. Was she still attracted to him even though he was getting a bit heavy at the waist? Of course, he could try to lose weight, but there were things he couldn’t change...
The traffic was getting faster. He pointed at a car overtaking them and suddenly pulling into the southbound lane in front of him, to avoid an oncoming van on the middle lane. He changed down. “Shit!”
“We should have taken the Colombo,” she said.
He nodded. Via Cristoforo Colombo had three lanes each way, but on Sundays there was always a lot of traffic to Ostia. He’d thought it wouldn’t be that bad here on the Via del Mare.
An estate car, a Renault Savanna, began overtaking him on the middle lane as he approached a bend.
“Bastard!” she said.
It was an easy, long curve. Even so, he put the car in third and applied the brakes, but as soon as he accelerated out of the bend, he saw the estate car swerving into the oncoming traffic on the northbound lane to Rome and careering through its crash barrier.
“Oh my God!” she cried.
He downshifted to second and slammed on the brakes first once, then again. The New Beetle stopped sharply as, with his heart pounding in his chest, he watched an oncoming car stopping astraddle the white line separating the northbound and middle lanes. Several loud thuds told him the ensuing pile-up involved several cars. Instinctively, he turned around. The car behind him had halted with only a few inches to spare.
“Holy shit!” he yelled.
“Oh God, oh my God!” she murmured.
“Holy shit!” He got out and dashed over to inspect the wreckage. A few soon joined him. Sandwiched between a Fiat Ulysse and a Fiat Stilo station wagon was an old Fiesta whose driver, a middle-aged woman, seemed to have been badly shaken. Apparently nobody else had sustained any injuries other than minor ones.
A woman, about forty years old, leaned over the driver of the Fiesta. “She’s in shock. I’m afraid there’s a serious problem with her spine,” she said. “I’m a doctor.”
The spectators shouted above one another. Cars had already formed long queues in all three lanes. Horns started blaring. Spitefully. It was as if a crowd of drunken yobs were yelling in unison, Move your arses, you motherfuckers. He reckoned the chorus came from the cars at the backs of the queues, whose drivers couldn’t see the scene of the accident.
He peered across the crash barrier on the northbound lane. In a hollow about thirty yards away was the Renault Savanna with the back door wide open and a big man looking into the driver’s seat. Paul crossed the barrier, sprinted towards the Savanna, but stumbled and fell flat to the ground. He got up, his beige chinos and casual shirt mucky.
As he neared the Savanna, he saw Debby being consoled by a small man trying to give assistance. The big man was by this time next to them in front of the car bonnet. A glimpse inside the car told Paul that its driver had died. As he inspected further, he saw huddled in the boot the dead body of another man. He recoiled. The stink was horrific—the man must have been dead for several days.
Paul wanted to hurry to Debby, but also to see what had happened. As quickly as he could, he took a deeper look at the two bodies. The man in the boot had been battered about the head and the face; his body was wrapped in a large white sheet. The driver of the Savanna, Paul noticed, bore a close resemblance to himself. The same swarthy complexion, the same pepper-and-salt hair, the same short but not receding chin, sharp nose, broad forehead and high cheekbones. The man’s eyes were closed, so Paul couldn’t say anything about them, but got the impression that even his age matched his own—late forties or early fifties, the age of heart attacks.
The resemblance, and the sight of the other man battered to death, made him retch violently. He was worried for Debby, however, and somehow managed to control his muscles and run to her. She freed herself from the little man’s hug and gripped Paul’s arm, pulling him farther away from the car.
“That man looks like your double,” she sobbed, “and he’s a murderer—”
The big man’s voice drowned her sobs. “Let me introduce myself—Dr Manni. If I may, I’d advise you to take this lady away.”
“The driver looks unscathed,” said Paul.
“He died of a heart attack.”
* * *
Paul and Debby, followed by the little man, crossed the crash barrier as two officers, a young woman and a middle-aged man, got out of a police car and walked towards the people who were gathered round the pile-up. The little man hurried to them. Paul took Debby to the Beetle and helped her in to the passenger’s seat.
“I must apologize to him,” she said, pointing out the little man. “I almost puked over him.”
She explained that he was a Bosnian, Stefan Popovic. He’d tried to comfort her, but frightened her even more by telling her about the battering of his own brothers in Zvornik. Paul reckoned he was doing the same now with the police officers, as it was obvious, by looking at his gestures, that he was describing several disfigured dead bodies.
As the policewoman headed for the Savanna, Paul saw the lady doctor hand a card to the policeman. Suddenly, it clicked. He’d seen her in the newspapers. Claudia Fossati, her name was. She was a psychiatrist with an institution for drug addicts where his half-sister had been an inmate until the day before yesterday. Without saying anything about that to Debby, he strolled towards the Fiesta.
“The ambulance won’t be long,” the policeman was boasting. “I’m going to radio the traffic people for help...We also want some photos,” he added, mimicking the action of somebody taking a shot, and hurried to the police car.
It was a few minutes past ten but it was already hot and sticky. The driver of the Ulysse, a young lady sporting a designer pink sundress, a large gold chain, a loose gold bangle, and a gold anklet that made her heavy ankle seem even heavier, mopped the sweat off her neck and forehead with a silk headscarf.
“You must have seen how it happened, surely?” she asked Paul.
“Not clearly.”
“What about that lady?” she said, thrusting her chin out in the direction of the Beetle.
“She didn’t get a clear picture of the crash either. Too scared. I’m sorry.”
“I cannot move my knee, and my legs ache all over.” She gestured at the driver of the Stilo, a man dressed in a beige linen double-breasted suit and wearing a polka-dotted tie with the knot undone. “He says it’s not his fault.”
The man jerked his head gruffly backwards. “No, I didn’t say that. I only said it’s not entirely my fault—”
“It’s not mine,” she cut in, flaring her nostrils.
He stretched his arm, pointing his finger at the Savanna. “The primary cause of the accident is that runaway car. It’s true that I then bumped against the Fiesta, but it was when the Fiesta had already bumped against your car.”
“You are a liar! What you say counts for nothing. A big zero!” she shouted, forming a ring with the tips of her thumb and first finger.
“Watch your language!” he answered back, without raising his voice but pulling his nose sideways and showing his wrist covered with small bruises. “Look, here are my wounds. I’m not a liar. I’m an adviser to the undersecretary of state at the Treasury.”
The young woman gave a nervous laugh. “I knew you’d end up saying who you are! For all I care you could be the undersecretary himself.”
“Calm down!” urged Popovic. “A woman has sustained serious injuries and—”
“You mind your own business!”
“She’s right,” added another spectator in shorts, an old Lacoste sportshirt, and moccasins, without socks. “It’s not you or anybody else who’s got to say what she may or may not say.”
“I only mean it’s a matter concerning all of us as members of the public,” smiled Popovic. “We have two dead men and an injured woman.”
“An ambulance...” yelled a stocky man in his fifties in sky blue pants and a sky blue shirt, his hair dyed an unnatural yellowish-brown. “In any other country an ambulance would have got here in less than five minutes.”
“There’s no need to have a quarrel here on the highway,” went on Popovic. “Everybody can make a statement to the police, and the parties to the accident can take legal action against one another.”
The man in shorts clapped his hand. “Very good!”
“Why are you so rude?”
“What d’you want?” The man raised his forearm and rocked the back of his hand with the five fingers united.
“Fuck you,” muttered Popovic.
The man performed a chopping movement on the palm of his left hand with his right one several times. “Taglia!” he shouted in Roman slang. “Get off! Smart people like you get off as fast as they can.”
Paul sensed a familiar presence on his back. He turned about—it was Debby.
“Stop it!” she cried. “Is this the sense of common humanity that unites you?”
Her words were met by a murmur of hostility. Popovic came to her side and linked arms with her. She whispered something. Paul worked out it was a remark about the vulgarity or aggressiveness of the Romans.
The man in shorts roared, “Say it again. Speak up!”
Paul moved towards him. “Just belt up, will you!”
Luckily, the two police officers were approaching them from opposite directions. The crowd fell silent. Then, after a minute or so, the policewoman announced, “We’re now calling for the criminal squad. Will you please wait here until their arrival. They will take down your statements...”
* * *
The time was coming up to one o’clock when the police gave them all the green light, and although Debby was tired and shocked, her grey-green eyes still red-rimmed, she suggested they should go to Ostia all the same. Why? Paul wondered. Certainly not for the show they were invited to, still less for the lunch their host was offering. She couldn’t stand crowded lunches, and the show was a telematic art affair—telematic art had never been much in her line. That was why she’d kicked up such a fuss when he accepted the invitation.
“I think we should go home,” said Paul. “I’m serious.” He reached out and stroked her hair.
“Let’s go to the bloody show,” she insisted. “It may help to drive our mind off those two dead men.”
He tried to figure out what the show was going to be like. The management of the bathing establishment should have placed the mac inside the restaurant. The painters would produce their drawings on the spot, import them into the computer, and send them to the Australians in Adelaide as e-mail attachments. The Australians would then reply by e-mailing their own drawings. Needless to say, the chatting would be in English—and Paul and Debby were supposed to do the interpreting.
“No, you’d be better off out of this hot stuff,” he said.
“You should have said no when they rang us up. You can’t decide to change your mind now.”
“What’s going to happen if we go and you don’t feel well?”
“What d’you want, a written guarantee that however I feel I’ll play the happy wife?”
“Oh, no, don’t start in on me.”
“Paul, I’m fed up with you.”
“OK, if that’s what you want,” he said, and set off.
It didn’t take long to reach Ostia. Once he was driving along the lungomare, he thought her stubbornness suited him. He would have a good reason for not turning up; even so, it would have been embarrassing to fail his friends at the last moment. Not to say that he didn’t like to tell them that he and Debby were so emotional they couldn’t make it. Of course, he couldn’t show up in his dirty chinos and shirt, but could always slip on the shorts and T-shirt he kept in their bathing hut.
The white bathing establishment stood against the Mediterranean azure sky. The car park attendant offered to park the Beetle. He thanked him, handing him one euro, and strode towards the entrance to the establishment. After a few steps, he realized Debby wasn’t following him. He turned about and beckoned to her. As she joined him, she gave a sardonic half smile.
* * *
Paul stole a glance around the table and saw Debby picking at her risotto. True, the number of people sitting at the table seemed to have turned a lunch at the seaside into a state banquet, she didn’t like state banquets, the seafood risotto was too hot and too creamy, and it was July. It was also true that the dead fish and shellfish looked macabre on a day she’d seen what they had seen. Even so, he’d rather she said no, thank you, I’m not having any food today, than pick at it. His Italian upper class mother had taught him that it was poor form. To be sure, his host, his patrician first cousin Urbano Mascalchi, agreed with her.
All of a sudden, it struck Paul he hadn’t exchanged a word with the woman on his left, a telematic painter. In spite of the oppressive heat, she wore a sort of brown monk’s habit with a cowl.
“Quite interesting,” he lied, indicating the drawings hanging on the wall that the painters had sketched for the show.
“We hope they’ll help us bring peace to the world.”
“Do you?” Pity, he reflected, that peace didn’t even exist on the Via del Mare, or wherever his double had been murdered.
“You see,” she said, “by showing one another our works of art throughout the world we promote friendship and understanding among the people of the Globe.”
“How reassuring.”
“Friends don’t go to war with one another.”
“You don’t paint horses, do you?” he asked, remembering that, after all, a former cavalry officer, who painted only horses, had promoted the show.
“Oh, no. I do the compositions I make.” She pointed at a painting on the wall.
He couldn’t distinguish what it was about clearly, except for the girl’s name, Tara, written in block capitals. “What does it represent?” he queried.
“Mars in Chains...Mars, the god of war. My message is, we should put him in chains so that there won’t be any more wars. I also make statues of clay. So I made a small statue of Mars, tied it up with barbed wire, and painted it.”
“You’ve made the god of war a martyr?”
Tara laughed. He noticed her full lips. Her teeth were regular.
He looked up to the other drawings, consoling himself with the thought that since everything had gone wrong today, at least he and Debby had arrived here when their friends or pseudo-friends were finished with the chatting. The drawings would mean nothing anyway, but now, once scanned into the mac and then printed in the shadeless colours produced by the printer, they’d also become grotesquely offensive to the eye. It would have been no easy task for him, or for Debby, to translate into English what the painters had to say about their art in Italian.
By now he’d eaten his risotto. A waiter served him grilled sea bass. Good, it was time for him to turn to the woman on his right, Urbano’s second wife.
“Giulia, you must be very happy today.”
“I’m so sorry, Paul, you and Debby found yourself in such a mess.”
“When I’m with you I forget about everything else, and today I’m also happy we’ll never enter a war against Australia in the future.” Luckily, his old-fashioned English father, whom his mother found so boring, had taught him not to show his emotions.
She grinned, showing her buck-teeth. “Cheeky, cheeky!”
The restaurant was the restaurant of the Gambrinus, a mundane bathing establishment, but still the bathing establishment of the Roman aristocracy. Why had these impoverished or almost impoverished Roman aristocrats run the show? They disliked modern art in all its forms, they also disliked the Web...What did they have to do with telematic art? Why did they pretend to be keen on it when they hadn’t even accepted the word processor, the thing without which his own life would meet his idea of hell on earth?
“Why, don’t you believe in the main purpose of telematic art?” Paul asked.
Giulia grinned again. “Oh yes! Urbano in particular was frightened to death we might go to war with the Australians. His father had fought with them in northern Africa. They were terrific fighters, he says.”
He lowered his voice. “Weren’t we prepared to avoid the war with the terrible Australians at all costs? The drawings are a fair price.”
“Oh stop it,” she replied, lowering her voice too,” otherwise I’m going to give you the scurviest of them all, expecting to see it on the wall of your study next time I’ll pop in.”
“You’re too sexy to waste your time like that,” he whispered in her ear. She wore a vermilion bathing robe over her bikini, and he knew that like Debby, she had beautiful breasts.
“You mean with Giannetto and co?” she whispered back.
He nodded. Giannetto Trittico, the former cavalry officer, sat on Giulia’s right. It occurred to Paul that she and Urbano had run the show only because Giannetto would foot the bill. He was as marginal in Italian pseudo-intellectual life as they were in the affluent society of the new Italy, and foolish enough to love telematic art and at the same time rich enough to give lavish parties in the Roman countryside.
She was all smiles. “You little horror.”
Looking about, Paul clapped eyes on a group of journalists and waved at them. Not all of them waved back. They sure had something against him. OK, he was the only bilingual English reporter capable of writing in Italian for an Italian weekly, and on top of that, the Meridiano was a radical magazine popular among readers in the counterculture of the anti-globalization and pro-peace movements.
He took another look round the room, imagining what he still had to bear. The atmosphere was akin to that of any Roman trattoria. People sat at their tables a long time after they’d finished eating and that was too much for him. As well as the hot and stale air, he didn’t like the sight of crumbs and dirty glasses over the tablecloth and he knew that Debby didn’t like it either. She must have made a tremendous effort not to be sick in front of everybody...
* * *
The restaurant clock told him it was five to four and they were still sitting at the table. Nobody except Debby seemed to mind it. They were all chatting, incessantly, fighting for attention, trying to outbid one another. Urbano resembled an auctioneer; Giannetto, the highest bidder who never gave up.
Paul turned to Giulia, saying sotto voce, “D’you still love Urbano?”
She chuckled. “Why d’you ask such a naughty question at this moment?”
“Maybe because this moment I’m afraid Debby doesn’t love me,” he replied, reflecting to himself that she certainly wouldn’t if he was holding forth like dear Urbano. “Tell me,” he added, “have you ever cheated on him?”
Her chuckle became a laugh.
He went on, “Don’t tell me you’ve never fancied any other man since you got married.”
“I might fancy you if you were a bit more self-confident.” She paused, then continued in a serious tone, “Believe me, Paul, Debby loves you.”
Certainly not today, after they’d found two dead men in a car, one of whom looked as though he’s been brutally murdered, and he’d been insensitive enough to take her here. Or was she upset because the dead driver resembled himself? He caught a glimpse of Debby gazing into the distance, her arms crossed with her fists clenched. She was intolerant of noise, impatient of formalities. She hated spending her time in idle gossip or chit-chat. In a way, she was a loner, and yes, he’d been selfish and uncaring.
Tara’s raucous voice interrupted his rumination. “You seem lost in thoughts of failure. Would you like me to look at your hand and tell you what will happen to you?”
“What?”
“A hand is to us what a leaf is to a tree...I’m also a palmist.”
Paul couldn’t say why, but he showed her the palm of his left hand without uttering a word.
“You don’t have any luck. You don’t even have the fortune line,” she said after a minute. “You are intelligent—and passionate. Your passionate character prevents you from making the right decisions, though. You’re like a powerful car on the road at night without headlights.”
“You’re telling me what I’m like, not what will happen to me.”
“Because your future, your whole life will depend on whether you’re going to see your passion for your woman in the proper light. I see you driving fast on the road pretty soon. I can tell what you’ll then need is called enlightenment.”
Paul withdrew his hand, intending to check whether Debby was staring at him, but he was afraid of her stare and did not look at her. He’d seen her stare before. Had it anything to do with his inability to make the right decisions? It was a month or so since she’d said she wanted to do some serious research. I long for a quieter life, she told him. No doubt she was frustrated by the impossibility of doing any academic work in Italy, since the university mafia was skilled at keeping all outsiders away. She was a first class phonologist, and yet she had to make do with teaching English in a Catholic school. Were her frustrations spoiling their relationship, or was he the cause of her unhappiness? Well, he was anyway. She’d given up her career for him—it was he who had decided to leave England.
He looked at her, at last. She was staring at him. He leaned on Giulia and whispered, “Be good. Do me a favour.”
She eyed him thoughtfully, then turned towards Debby. “Of course,” she smiled. She stood up, saying loudly, “I think you should go to the beach now.”
The group left the inside of the restaurant and walked through the tables that had been placed outside. They were all empty except one. A self-styled marquis, two topless starlets, and Furio Daddi, an actor well known for his Spaghetti Westerns, occupied it. He’d married an English Shakespearean actress and boasted that he’d modelled himself on Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Paul Scofield. But the English actress had ditched him quite soon for his machismo, and since his English was heavily accented, the only characters he’d played in England were an Arab and a gipsy. Paul had met him several times and nodded a greeting, then headed with Debby for their bathing hut.
“I’m sorry, amore,” he said. “It must have been terrible for you. I hope you aren’t cross with me.”
“You, you, you! The world doesn’t revolve around you!”
* * *
He’d been driving in total silence, smoking his pipe and every now and again watching her out of the corner of his eye. A frown of disapproval creased her forehead, and a long line had formed on her cheek. The expression of boredom, sadness, and disgust that she wore seemed to have softened the age difference between them. In spite of her smooth skin, her face didn’t look as young and attractive as it did this morning when they started their journey.
But even if she was old and ugly, he would still be attracted to her. He remembered the first time they’d made love. She’d just received her Master’s in Phonology from University College London and he was working with the World Service in London. They had a bite to eat at a pub in Charing Cross and then went to see a play. They spent the night together in his small flat off Ladbroke Grove. The following morning he asked her if she’d like to go to her place to pack up her things and move in. She did. A week later, they decided to get married.
What had happened to them? Perhaps nothing, aside from the shock caused by the appalling discovery of this morning. Or was her problem that Rome no longer meant anything to her. After all, he was stressed, too—and in fact, he’d recently been unable to keep a hard-on. She’d been kind and considerate. It doesn’t matter, darling, she told him the other day, kissing him on the mouth.
Now that they’d reached Rome, he was partially free of the Sunday traffic. It had been quite heavy on the Colombo, but he was glad he’d avoided the Via del Mare. Another twenty minutes or so, and they would climb up the stairs of their attic in Trastevere.
He switched on the radio for the News at Seven programme. The bulletin led with the Via del Mare case. The Golf and the two dead bodies were still there, with the criminal squad waiting for the state attorney’s permission to remove them. Then the announcer added that although they did not yet have any confirmation, rumour had it that a lady psychiatrist had identified the two dead bodies as those of an inmate and a health assistant of San Bernardo, a home for drug addicts. Apparently, the announcer went on, the managing director of San Bernardo, Ernesto Lodiacono, had reported the inmate missing three days ago. On the other hand, according to a source that couldn’t be named, the health assistant had been seen inside the home premises as late as eight o’clock in the morning.
Paul switched the radio off. The story had stunned him. He didn’t know what to make of it. San Bernardo was the place where Lelia, his half-sister, had been housed until Friday, Ernesto Lodiacono passed for a guru of the caring community, and the psychiatrist was likely to be Dr Fossati. Claudia Fossati had seen neither the dead body of the driver nor that of the man in the boot during the time he and Debby had remained at the scene of the accident. Had she seen them later? And what about Lelia? She should have met them at the home, surely. She should know what was going on there, shouldn’t she?
“Have you heard?” he asked Debby.
“Of course I have.”
He told her he’d recognized Dr Fossati. “What d’you think?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you should talk to Lelia. It’s possible that something will come up later tonight, however.”
Paul suppressed a sigh. Lelia should now be back at her place in Calcata. It was in the province of Viterbo, thirty miles away from Rome. He’d never been there. They didn’t see each other very often—he’d only visited her at San Bernardo a couples of times and, on both occasions, he took Debby along. She and Lelia didn’t get on with each other particularly well. Lelia would turn to him for help as though he was her man, and that pissed Debby off. That was why she’d rather he didn’t see Lelia alone.
“Yes,” he said aloud, “I’ll try to reach Lelia. Tomorrow morning I’m going to Calcata. D’you want to come with me?”
“Oh no,” she replied, unexpectedly. “Do what you’ve got to do, Paul. Then in the evening, we must talk. I feel I’m no longer the same.”
“Oh Jesus! Why don’t we talk this evening?”
“No, Paul. Be patient. Wait until I know my own mind.”
“All right...” He wanted to stop and hug her but did not. “Whatever you say, amore. I love you, Debby. I love you so much...”
“I’m fond of you, too.”
 |  |  |
|
|
|