As he stood there with the bottle in his hands it seemed to him that the water running in the stream below sounded suddenly louder. He was near it now, there was only the final close-growing barrier of bramble and blackthorn, then the leaning, smothered poplars that lay just above the stream. He could see nothing of the water yet, the level had fallen in this drier weather, the course of the stream was still invisible.
He was in a green twilight here. Wild clematis had clambered up through the branches of the poplars to a height of thirty or forty feet and they mingled their darker leaves with the foliage of their host, shutting out the light. The trunks of the trees were ragged with ivy. Ritter saw great clumps of it, thick with dark berries, bending the upper branches with their weight. The new shoots of the parasite, higher up, showed a delicate tracery of leaf and a beautiful spiraling growth of the gently adhesive creepers; but the reality of the ivy, to Ritter’s sense at least, lay in the ground roots, dense and hairy and hideously matted, like a thick pelt around the base of the tree. Cutting through this dealt a mortal blow to the whole: it withered there where it had clambered and triumphed, high up in the sunlight. But the ancient cables of the ivy were embedded, they could not relax their grip, could not be removed without death to the host. Strangle marks that would never be healed, they would stay there on the tree till the tree died …
Late in the afternoon Harold Chapman’s patience was rewarded. Through his binoculars he saw the approach of the lorry, saw it turn off into the strada vicinale, saw it halt, saw the driver accosted by three gesturing figures. He made out the slack-faced Bruno, the rancid-looking woolen hat of the Checchetti father, the powerful bosom of the daughter, whose hair today was a mass of newly permed Medusa curls. He saw the driver get down from his cab.
A lot depended, of course, on the character of this driver. He might choose the path of least resistance, as Mancini had shrewdly thought, preferring not to risk any brush with officialdom. On the other hand, he might be a quick-tempered man or by nature intransigent; he might kick the Checchetti stakes out of the ground and so ruin everything.
Chapman watched with bated breath. The colloquy was not protracted. After perhaps two minutes the driver climbed back into his seat. Chapman saw the lorry reverse away up the slope and turn back toward the village.
Clutching the binoculars and his jacket and the knapsack in which he had brought his picnic provisions, he scrambled down the hillside and made his way around to the back door of his house. He found Cecilia making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. “They have turned him away,” he said. “It has worked out just as Mancini said it would.”
Chapman’s usual mode of showing pleasure or satisfaction was a wide stretching of the lips with the mouth remaining closed; in moments of particular glee, however, he had a grin which changed the look of his face altogether, the upper lip rising well clear of the teeth, which were widely spaced and sharp-looking. The grin was in evidence now as he said, with a rather hissing emphasis, “Now we shall see, now we shall see.”
Cecilia paused for a moment in the act of measuring out the tea into the pot to look at the triumphantly grinning person before her. More strongly than ever before there came to her the feeling that she had somehow opened the wrong door, entered the wrong hallway, as she had once done years before in England in a street of terraced houses, houses closely similar on the outside, strangely different within. The umbrella stand in the hall, the color of the walls, something different in the smell … “See what?” she said.
“For God’s sake, Cecilia. We shall see these bloody people get their comeuppance.” Chapman was rendered more downright than usual by his immediate irritation at his wife’s vague and distrait manner and by the loose-fitting, lilac-colored smock she was wearing, a garment that seemed, in its paleness and shapelessness, to sum up Cecilia’s perpetual inability to exert a grip. “I am going to phone Mancini and give him the news,” he said.
But he had some tea first and before he had finished this there was a further development. A knock came at the door and when Chapman went to answer it he found a man in blue overalls and a state of considerable rage, who immediately began to speak loudly to him and make gestures toward the hillside. Chapman had not the remotest idea what he was saying, but after some moments it came to him that this might be the lorry driver. “Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll get my wife.”
Leaving the man at the door, he went back through the house to the kitchen. “Come and interpret,” he said to Cecilia, resolving yet again to press forward with his Italian as speedily as possible—he could not go on having all his vital experiences mediated in this way.
Cecilia came and listened and after a while said, “It is the man who came with the wood. He has left his lorry up there somewhere.” And she too gestured toward the hillside behind them.
“Up there?” Chapman was bewildered. “Why should he do that?”
“It seems that the Checchetti told him there was another road to us, one that goes up behind and circles around.”
“But that’s not a road, it’s no more than a track; you would need a Jeep to go up there.”
“The Checchetti’s idea of a joke perhaps,” Cecilia said. “In fact the driver has got stuck halfway down. Loaded as he is, he can’t go forward. He wants us to come and look and tell him what to do.”
The Chapmans looked now in silence for some moments at the lorry driver and he returned the look. Then he spoke again, but less crossly.
“He says he hasn’t got a lot of time, he has to make another delivery today.”
“We’d better go and have a look.”
By Chapman’s watch, a high-precision instrument of which he was very proud, incorporating a compass and an atmospheric pressure gauge, and guaranteed waterproof at any depth, it took them eight minutes and thirty-six seconds to reach the lorry, though they had sight of it considerably before that, perched in lonely prominence on a downward slope of the rutted track.
Himself an experienced driver, Chapman saw at once that the man had spoken no more than the truth. The track, bad enough already, grew conspicuously worse below where the lorry had stopped. It was not only the narrowness and the rutted surface; the edges of the track were loose clay and on one side the ground fell away steeply.
The driver spoke again, addressing Chapman from rooted habit of male speaking to male in time of crisis, though by now he knew it was the Signora who understood Italian.
“He daren’t take the risk of going forward with such a heavy load. He wants to know if he can dump the wood here.”
“Here on the track?”
The Chapmans looked at each other and then at the lorry driver and for some moments, under that blue sky of early June, with birds singing nearby and the drone of a tractor faintly to be heard, the three of them seemed suspended in some impalpable net. Three strangers, Cecilia thought, forced into temporary communication by the strangeness of this stranded lorry. She felt the sun hot on her head and wished she had remembered to wear a hat. “He doesn’t want to take the wood back to the depot and unload it all again,” she said.
“Can’t he take our wood to the people he has to deliver to next?”
“It seems that the logs are cut to the wrong size for them. Harold, this is not his fault, is it? We can’t expect him to lose several hours of work because of us.”
“I suppose not. He’d better dump the wood here then.”
There was a level piece alongside the track a little higher up, wide enough to take the wood. The Chapmans saw the deck of the lorry tilt sharply up, saw their logs come down with a long, growling crash, saw the lorry draw away and tip again to clear the last of the load. In a hurry now to leave the scene, as if he had assisted in a crime, the driver shouted a promise that a bill would be sent and began to reverse away up the track. Long after the lorry had disappeared they could still hear the sound of the laboring engine. They stood there while this sound faded, looking at the lonely mound of logs standing so improbably
there on the hillside.
Silence settled around them and Cecilia thought how strange it was that she and Harold should be standing here, so glum and divided, among these ancient hills where the pleasure-loving Etruscans had grown their grapes and pressed their wine. “These were the heartlands of the Etruscans,” she said. “They made their wine and danced and had their games and celebrations all around here. You can see it in the paintings on the walls of their tombs. They were a very hedonistic—”
“Etruscans?” Harold looked at her with a sort of angry wonder. “This is no time to be nattering about the Etruscans, Cecilia. What are we going to do about these bloody logs?”
This time Cecilia felt no alarm at her husband’s swearing. She shrugged in a fashion calculated to annoy him further. “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” she said.
They returned home in silence. Once there Chapman went immediately to the phone. The sulky secretary put him through and Chapman related the latest development. “This dumping of the wood complicates the issue,” he said in a tone of accusation. “It wasn’t foreseen in the strategy you recommended. Now there is this great heap of logs up there and I am responsible for it.”
There was a short pause at the end of the line. Then he heard Mancini’s voice, oddly remote and metallic-sounding. “When the initial idea is truly sound, further developments can only enhance it. These people have played into your hands. Because of their interference in your lawful pursuits there is now a heap of logs halfway up a hillside. They have caused it to be there, not you. They will bring the logs down to you and stack them neatly in your woodshed.”
“Bring them down to us? How can they be made to do that?” These questions came from Chapman in a strangely involuntary way, not so much driven by a need for specific answers but because he was, he discovered now, reluctant to let the conversation end. There was authority in that detached, impersonal voice and Chapman felt he needed it—felt he had always needed it. The fancy came to him that Mancini’s voice was prerecorded—as if the lawyer had known in advance that he would phone, anticipated the questions he would ask and recorded the answers. “They won’t do it, they will refuse,” he said.
“No, they will not refuse. Mr. Chapman; there is a time for waiting and a time for acting. The whole secret of life lies in the management of these two times. Now the moment has come to bear down on the Checchetti, to let them know they have been proceeding illegally, that they have been wrong from the very beginning in the matter of these stakes, that their illiterate faith in outdated regulations has led them into serious error. They may not believe it at first but they will make inquiries and they will find that it is true.”
“By God, yes,” Chapman said.
“We shall tell them two things. First, that all talk of a contribution on your part to this wall of theirs must now be suspended. The possibility is still there but it becomes more remote. Second, that unless the logs are brought by them to a point specified by you and stacked there to your satisfaction within forty-eight hours you will issue a writ against them for damages. You see the beauty of it, Mr. Chapman? The only certainty they have is a negative one. If they do what we ask they may get some money or they may not. If they don’t do it, they certainly will not and moreover they will be sued.”
“By God, yes. This will teach the beggars to try their blackmailing tricks on me. All three of them will have to take part, not just the men. And I don’t want them plowing over my land in a tractor. They will have to do the last bit with wheelbarrows.”
“That is outside my province. It lies in the area of your private arrangements. As also whether you choose in the end to give them the money. Better to give it; you will have kept your word. Generosity has a value, Mr. Chapman. Not to make you less hated but to give you the upper hand.”
Chapman put down the phone and turned to Cecilia. “That man is a genius,” he said. “It will take the three of them a day of continuous labor to get that wood down and stack it. We shall see now whether that fellow was right.”
“What fellow?”
“You know, the one who came here and told us it was a question of pride, not money, but we should pay the money all the same.”
“Lorenzetti,” Cecilia said, keeping her eyes averted from the spectacle of her husband’s triumph.
“Lorenzetti, that’s right. We shall see whether it is sturdy peasant pride or the desire to get their hands on the money that wins the day. Like to take a bet?”
That afternoon Monti drove out to Tordandrea, a small village on the plain below Assisi. There, in the Church of San Bernardino, in the dimness behind the altar, there was a painting he wanted to see, a Presentation of Christ at the Temple by Andrea of Assisi. It was said—though Monti had not found certain authority for this—that Andrea had included portraits of some prominent members of the Baglioni family among the figures assisting at the scene.
Alone in the church, Monti went up close and peered at the canvas, craning his neck one way and then another in an attempt to avoid the obscuring shine of the varnish—there had been at some time a misguided attempt to restore the picture. However, the spirit of devotion that had inspired the painting had survived. There was a charged, hieratic stillness about the scene, as if intensity of awe had frozen the figures in symbolic attitudes, the hatted priest, wrinkled Simeon holding the baby, the holy parents on one side, the devout spectators on the other, bearded and robed, heads reverently inclined. They were all men, all richly dressed.
This opulence of dress, the damask and velvet, the trimmings of ermine, gave some substance to the belief that these were portraits of wealthy, powerful people. The artist might have had a patron among them; he would have wanted to show them in a flattering light. However, there was not much attempt to make a difference in the faces. All were presented in profile, narrow-eyed, somberly attentive.
It was just one collective face and this was appropriate in a way, Monti thought, if they were the Baglioni, because it was a single mask they wore here in the church, the lines of arrogance smoothed out by piety. The picture had been painted toward the close of the fifteenth century, perhaps not long before that night of the Great Betrayal, July of 1500. But it was useless to seek among these faces for killer and victim, for the beautiful, treacherous Grifonetto, for the bridegroom Astorre, whose heart had been torn out, for his brother, Simonetto, who had distributed the sweets at the wedding feast, for Giovan Paolo, chief of the clan, who had escaped the killers, fleeing over the rooftops in his nightshirt. The faces were interchangeable, as were the roles.
Monti stood before the painting for a long time, staring up until the faces seemed to run together. He did not really know why he had come, what he had expected to learn here. He had thought much about the Baglioni since Laura had left. Now it was as if these dignitaries in the temple had clambered up from some pit in which they had their daily being, crawled out and washed the bloodstains off, groomed and perfumed themselves and dressed in their most sumptuous clothes for this important ceremony, to which, as close associates of the Holy Family, they had been invited. When it was over, when the little cut had been made in the flesh of the Savior of the World and the two doves offered on the altar, when St. Simeon had asked God to let him depart in peace, the Baglioni would put on their killing clothes and descend again into the reeking pit … Monti was glad to emerge into the sunlight, the quiet square, the customary life of early evening.
On the way back he was in time to call at the post office and collect his mail, which consisted of a single letter, addressed to him in his wife’s handwriting.
He returned to his car and sat there for perhaps half an hour holding the letter in his hand. Then, very quickly, with the last of the sun on his face, he opened the envelope and took out the one sheet. He disregarded the opening and closing phrases, had eyes only for the body of the letter:
I have been wondering how you are, alone there, with only the ghosts of the Baglioni for company. But perhaps you are not alone any longer. It
seems to be a common fact of experience, and so at my age it shouldn’t surprise me, but somehow it does, to do something with conviction of rightness and after what seems reasonable thought, only to find that you needed to do it before it was possible to know whether it was reasonable or not. I am finding that it wasn’t. I hope this doesn’t sound too muddled. I should like to come down and talk things over, if you agree. Perhaps you will let me know.
“We have decided to take the contract and show it to a lawyer,” Mr. Green said. “We thought it only fair to tell you that.”
Blemish nodded. His usual softly blinking look, the misleading air of sleepiness, was quite absent now. He had the wide-eyed expression of a creature threatened. “That is your right,” he said. “But let me give you just one word of warning. Lawyers can be dodgy in this country, very dodgy indeed. It is one of the things we have found to be very different from what obtains at home. Lawyers in this country will often set out to fleece you if they humanly can.”
Mr. Green looked rather closely at his project manager’s face: it had a look of total sincerity. “The lawyer has been recommended to us by a neighbor. A fellow countryman of yours, as a matter of fact.”
“An Englishman? They can be dodgy too, highly so. I say it as shouldn’t, but they haven’t all got our standards. This neighbor may well be in receipt of financial inducements. Nothing surprises me in this country. Corruption is widespread, it has its tentacles in the most unlikely places.” Blemish gave a nervy hitch to his sharply creased navy-blue trousers and sat forward. “Now we have a really outstanding lawyer,” he said. “We always deal with him in any matters affecting our clients. He has never let us down yet. I could recommend you to him, if you like.”